Inner City Dysphoria Blues

I.

I call upon those three. I call upon the fully formed, the wiser than all and the one whose growth spurt has jolted her into unexpected young adulthood. Delhi, Bombay and Guwahati (not quite in that order), it takes time to unlearn your alleyways because living with the affection for three cities is maddening. You do not know which one to call upon for which nostalgic task or emotional upheaval. Sentiments are forever tugging at an experience; a memory of the life lived in reference to the one being repeated. Now and again you call on them altogether at once resulting in a confusion that is embarrassing and even jarring. It is then that you come to the realization — if cities are replacing each other in these memories that once existed as living flesh, it must also signify the certainty of co-opting one version of the self for another. The outcome is a kind of dysphoria. Lately I reference three occurrences, sometimes even four to cite a moment in the present with a preceding one of interest in the past. Coding my own self in several layers of episodes, I am a capsule of the person at different phases of bodily encroachment in space.

II.

I regret not having taken more walks, not having gone around more, not having wasted my youth a little more! Here, the heart of the city begins with water. Pin code 001, my father’s haunted first apartment that he never paid rent for, the college he went to — now more than a century old, the first pharmacy in the city, the breeziest homes and the shore of my final fantasies.

Frequenting the ghats in summer, I do not need a companion. I glide my fingers over whaled ships and the watch towers built along the banks. This is the cove of my favourite place. Earlier, one came here to spot dolphins. Now they say the dolphins have gone extinct after the river started housing more garbage. The city drain flows into it and I watch the output. So much filth enters these waters yet the width and depth of my river — is it endless, is it truly an abyss? What will I find at the bottom? Umananda sits in the middle, a small river island named after the temple on it. I lay my gaze upon this small green turtle day after day; I bring a date here and we gaze at it together but it is a mistake to share this river with anyone but my father who, before me, taught me this gaze.

I should’ve taken the walk; I should’ve taken the bus and asked the price and names of fish. I should’ve stopped where I had seen the rows of fishermen squatting, selling their wares under candle light. And I should have strayed! I should’ve learnt to haggle, taken lone walks on the Brahmaputra’s banks, felt the blackness of unknown depths come up to my finger tips, felt the enchantment of the distantly setting sun on a ferry, felt my soul fidget to tear out of my body, leave the corporeal form and merge with fish-plastic-vegetable rot-shampoo bottles-eggshells. Should’ve memorized each and every strange sight because all this time I have been trying to own a visual that is simply not mine; a landscape that I had rented, where I was and always will be a guest.

III.

Who do I tell that so much of this city comes from within me, and so much desolation, and even work in progress lies inside me, and I am the gravel and the cement that is sometimes cruelly, and otherwise lovingly, made into the city further on. All images of water are mine and mine alone — this river stands solemn, a lonely witness to the wounds I create and cover, mother goddess of my body and purifying agent for us all but mine, mine nonetheless. I am the river and the river flows through cuts effortlessly and it will do what you wish it to — which is to say, the river asks you to trust it, to trust the carnage within it, the flow of bodies inside its intestines- it is all a play, a mirage, a dare. The river claims us because it can but it leaves us because it must, only then does the irony of life come full circle — the river plays a merciless joke. It watches us drown ourselves with no help from her.

I am obsessed; I believe the river is my mother! My mother is so fluid and she tastes of chlorine and/or salt and on my head, her blessings are the silt of her banks and no matter how deep I dive into her guts, I find no solid floor, the bottomlessness of her womb is the reminder that mothers never abandon their children but children forget. But I have been faithful; even in my dreams I am your daughter and I bring no guests who understand not how we work. In wishing and asking for my mother, I ask for no father. What we have is enough, where I am cradled gently for the rest of eternity — it is only mother and me and the subterfuge that we seek in one another but I am powerless, without my mother I have no current. Without me, my mother has no oars with which to be fed.

IV.

Once in Bombay, I awoke with a fever and asked my roommate to switch on the ceiling fan. It had become unbearably hot. I asked her for this this over and over while she stood in a corner of the room, frozen in the middle of doing something, blinking. Repeating myself a fourth time I realized I was speaking to her in Assamese and it was a task then, after so many years in comfortable, passable Hindi, to switch to the latter and tell her the requisite four-worded translation. She heard me then. This incident immediately jolted me back to another when I was perhaps seven years old and I believe I had been with fever for a span of twenty days. In this memory I am eating soup with breadsticks and watching TV while my parents sit discussing their friends. I ask for the remote. They look at me and ask what was it that I wanted again? I repeat myself twice, thrice but they simple stare, blank as if I were asking for something that was an impossible invention. I realize then, asking for the remote again that I had misspoken my vocabulary, replaced remote with the word “John”, a word that meant nothing to me at that point. And my mother asks me again, was it bread I wanted? I shake my head and sit there grappling with what had just happened, afraid for the state of my mind, thinking madness has come early only for me.

V.

This cold will break my bones. Winter seeps into my skull and my teeth chatter in acknowledgement — Yes, you are profound. You are not a poor man’s rumour. You are here inside the throb of my throat. Delhi is hostile once again.

VI.

In Bombay, had I lost the ability to love — anything at all, but most importantly, the love that one can have for a city, had she rendered me loveless? Had I given away my quota to the first and only city of my life, Delhi? Delhi became a deeper, richer connection because I had loved and lost and loved again in a city that threatened at every point to break my very identity if something were to tarnish that memory of it which I had rigidly guarded from being desecrated by others. I lay scattered in glimpses of myself in age and space and perhaps nothing could subtract this truth. What made a city lovable? Why was I unable to think of Bombay in those same colours? In this life I am alien to myself not because I don’t love it, but because I do not hate it either. Quite simply put, Bombay incited no emotion unless I was conscious of the temporariness of my visit. And ever since I had gotten enrolled in a long programme at an Institute in the city, that temporariness had lost its quivering threat. In Delhi I thrived knowing nothing could shake my place from within her lap that I had claimed through more losses and victories than in Guwahati.

Bombay drew a sharp intake of breath and a longing for the multitude of spaces I had built in nostalgia, in the past, and I could tell myself — here is a city that can be loved only by the promise of its leave-taking. I do not mean to be hurtful to you, dear Bombay. Yet if you were a person, you would be so large and so taken by the care-giving responsibilities you met out to your people that outsiders who didn’t take to your charm would be free to not derive any sentiment from you. As in, if I were to announce that I was leaving, you would brush me off, not even look in my direction and continue with the millennium of tasks that was already present in your books. Whereas Delhi would play my emotions, sway me with, what people call “nakhra”. Like a scorned lover, Delhi will tell me that go, if you must, if you never loved me and I would be cajoled into staying, into comforting her, into pleasing her and gracing her charms again. I would be a kept woman, but I would not be the only one being treated so. In many rooms and many worlds, several others would be having their moment with the dramatics of her wiles. While Bombay mourns only the losses of those who die in her lap, Delhi kept her mourners consistently faithful cities away.

VII.

(i)

I stand here, on the rocks overlooking the sea. I am not amused by the soft rolling waves, the giant, gentle splashes of water or the comfort of lone boats dancing unanchored over the waves. Nothing about the sea seems poetic, and by extension, nor do the people who try and find meaning in it. All I see is this vast possibility of immersion and blocked ear canals. If I were to drown, it is the city that would bear the weight of my name and thus become unforgivable.

(ii)

I walk out of yet another railway station, but this one is amongst the pretty ones. I rest my case and my grudges for a while. My friend is here, and I feel safe. It must be this one emotion — safety — that makes all the difference in leaving me to scan the city with affection or deride it with loathe.

(iii)

“Its been a while since I landed in Delhi and didn’t feel like dying immediately.”

“Oh, that is how I feel towards Bombay every second of every day.”

(iv)

I did not expect to love anything, not even food in this city. So what has been growing palpably between us, over the last two months where I cannot sleep without satisfying myself with the image of you and I, taking on this very city together is puzzling, to say the least. This must be advanced friendship 101, except it isn’t and the butterflies in my stomach are enough to distract me from those other routinized doses of despair.

(v)

I look up and cannot even see the sky — the trees here run a mile up and block that which I miss the most, that which I have always missed even in Delhi. I go searching for a piece of sky to memorize and find only traffic.

(vi)

Bombay feels like the physical embodiment of the last whimpers of a dying vehicle, because that is the image I conjure even when I am away. The air here greets me with the stench of rotten fish. The ride from the airport to where I live is a scan through the many levels on the stench spectrum. I also pass through slums, many of them and even there where I live. I must walk through the living quarters of many rats, snakes and pigs. I find this daily task to never become less cumbersome, or less fraught with panic.

(vii)

My last day before going home, I sneak off because I have finally found an Asian place that serves roast garlic and burnt peanuts as complimentary condiments. I don’t attend to the calls from my only two friends and instead, after my meal, I go off in search of alcohol. I look up at the sky and in it seems to be brewing a storm. I imagine the inside of a tea-cup to look like this, swirling with grey and ink-blue.

(viii)

At Marine Drive, it rains on us almost always. I do not go there often, and find that the quality of conversation differs depending on whether you’re on a mountain or whether you’re at sea. Days later, I open my Instagram to find a tagged picture. It is of me and an ex-batchmate and I seem to be giving him my blessing mid-laughter, holding onto an upturned umbrella with one hand and the rain that is falling on us is slanted.

(ix)

I cannot stand to be here, so I leave the city and go off to Pune. It is the most surreal trip, I’m with my friend and I feel safe again. Her friend is here too, and he drives us wherever we want to go in his car. We pass through many tunnels and through every tunnel, I make the same wish — it is the wish for a different city. We leave Pune behind us and my wish has nothing to do with geography.

(x)

You break my heart because I see you with another girl and you disappear almost every night now, once at 11 pm, then at 2 am, then at 4 am and after I leave the university premises, perhaps you see her at 6. So I start leaving early from campus. I leave before 11 and instead of missing my presence, you get used to it. What I thought would be a rise in the demand for my company turns out to be an underwhelming outcome; you simply stop seeking me out because you seek her. Bombay meant having you, now it means also to have lost you.

(xi)

I am not someone who seeks meaning in the sea, but it is the city pushing me to find solitude in the face of nothing that can be derived from this unexpected experience. I have no choice but to own it, so I think of agency. I am learning a routine, and my comforts travel in the form of coffee pouches, notebooks, poems, pomegranates, page-markers. Every day my backpack is filled with the items I need for running away.

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