A Changing, Growing Mumbaikar in a Changing, Growing Mumbai

It's been more than two years since I was last actively and regularly traveling around Mumbai. I had taken for granted how tolerant the city makes you to crowds, how you get used to walking, how chaos is dampened by its everydayness. In my short visits in the past few months I had begun to notice that regular bus journeys, catching connecting trains, and daily routines of walking against traffic and crowds had started being perceived as "inconveniences". Where two years ago my face would have been just another "Mumbaikar" face - completely emotionless and calm (but not from peace, from the same everydayness of chaos) - it was now qualified by a subtle irritation, an annoyance that conveyed unfamiliarity with the moving canvas of the city.

It feels funny processing this alarming realisation that perhaps, my lived mental-muscle-memory of the city is slowly fading away. It's no joke that Mumbai changes and grows parallel to the number of faces and stories it carries, and nothing can throw it in your face than a small break from living in the city.

It's truly amazing, however, that with this I also realise that absolutely nothing has changed in the way I inhale the well-known "charm" of Mumbai. My eyes feast on its dreaminess, on the contrasting stories at every turn and junction, on the messages written between 60-storeyed residential skyscrapers and vast scrublands of tin-roofed homes, the same way I did as a 19-year-old arts student traveling on the local train everyday.

I'm going to leave this city again, very soon, and I have tears in my eyes thinking of all of its Mumbai-ness (a word I use while hesitating to write 'beauty'). An accusatory mental voice warns me of superficial romanticism, but there must be something indescribably unique and overwhelming in this experience of "being" in the city - together with the physical lived experience and the mental process of distancing oneself from it - that gives me all the emotional proximity I need to it.

Mumbai has changed shape since I started writing this thought-dump. In my mind, attachment and distance continue to tug at a single thread of belonging. But here's to Mumbai - in the many ways it exists - and to the Mumbaikar in me, in the many ways she can be one. :)

I thought the Mumbai-ness in me was not unlike the Gateway, the representative unchanging essence of the city. I now realise it was always more like the sky and sea in its backdrop, ever-changing but without which the monument perhaps wouldn't be so wonderful to look at. :)