You’re squeezed into a share auto and hurtling down Gariahat road.. but it isn’t until you’ve almost reached Gol Park circle that you realize you’ve been so lost in your thoughts that you’ve forgotten to alight at your midway stop. Or you may have been so completely plugged into your music on the local commute that you just missed your regular Lower Parel station hop-off. Or maybe, while riding your bike and mulling over an existential query, you don’t register that you’ve turned towards Camp instead of taking Holkar bridge to reach FC road. Else, you were so busy chatting on your everyday phone call that you’ve come out of the wrong exit from CP metro station. Or you forget to tell (nay, beg) anna to take that U-turn on Chamiers road to your office, until it’s too late and you’ve reached the next signal..by which time he’s cursing about petrol price hike woes/metro work diversion woes/getting-grief-from-cops woes/life-in-general-is-a-bitch woes/YOU-are-a-bitch-for-not-telling-him-about-the-U-turn-in-advance woes… (Insert an *enna koduma saar idhu* here)
It’s called slipping into a routine. But any one of the above is enough to jolt you right back. Ironically, you are not ‘lost’ when any of this happens. It just means you’ve allowed the place to grow on you. So much so that it’s managed to become a part of what gets classified and filed under ‘the familiar’ in your life. Contrast this with the first few weeks of settling into a new place. The focus always seems to be on how not to get lost. So you stay alert through every auto/train/taxi/metro ride, trying to memorize the sequence of train station stops, names of streets, important landmarks, count every left or right turn that you have to take so that you don’t get ‘lost’. Cut to now. When you’re comfortable enough to indulge yourself a break from that constant phase of alertness. To let your mind wander. It’s that reassuring feeling of knowing that despite the minor detours, you’ll somehow find a way back to your original destination, no sweat.
Then, if you give it some more time and stay a while, every place will begin to weave a distinctive story in your head. Each jaunt is special and will hold tremendous unique meaning because building these memories is all that you have of this place. You slowly start fleshing out a list of favourite places now and recall others where something striking happened.
It’s what makes the memory of the Lake in Cal ripple through clearly when you summon it. You woke up early one day to soak it in.. oh and remember that time when you had golguppa’s from that place nearby? A commercial sex worker in Bowbazaar recognizes you from the project meeting last week and calls out to you by name. You smile and stop by to exchange a handshake, a greeting in Bengali and ask her how she’s doing.
Then, there’s that other time when you clutched a newspaper clipping and followed the directions to that shop in Old Delhi with a friend, just to discover what in the name of god a glass of doodh jalebi was. That huddled walk back from IHC on a cold foggy winter night, discussing and dissecting that really interesting talk you just attended. The first time you went to Big Chill with a happy bunch. That late night car almost-accident another bunch of you scraped out of.
Oh, what about that time when you reached Pop Tate’s so late on an IPL finals night and still had so much fun amidst the shared disappointment when Mumbai didn’t win. You still have a fleeting happy thought of her at every IPL finals game. Then there’s that time when you sat down with a colleague, exhausted, on a footpath outside Arthur Road jail after the full day drama of the Kasab verdict. Or shared the thrill of beating the tide and making it out in time, from your maiden visit to Hajji Ali.
Of course, there’s no way you can forget that epic impromptu overnight road trip you three made and what it symbolized. Or how another one travelled an hour to the city from North Madras every Wednesday, just cause that’s the only day you get an off. Then you suddenly ponder on how much they all mean to you when each goes to great lengths to find out if you’re okay and one of them bursts into your room in the middle of the afternoon, worried sick, that one time when you stupidly decided to drop off the radar unannounced. You have all these moments.. that might seem absurd.. in-comprehensible to anyone else but you.
Then slowly, if you give it more time, the place begins to become a part of you. You don’t realize how much you’ve started to think of a place as your own until you defend its shortcomings to ‘outsiders’. Two-three weeks ago, wiping sweat off his brow in the middle of the relentless katri afternoon heat, visiting dad asks me for the 100th time HOW I even work here. “Oh, it’s not that bad.. wait, let me get you something from Fruit Shop On Greams Road to cool off.” Yes, I may moan about it to friends.. but I wanted others to take back memories of only those bits that I love. It’s what makes me drag a bleary-eyed shwester at the crack of dawn to “catch the sunrise at my favourite beach here.” With a “Trust me, you DON’T want to miss this,” as an attached hallowed effect.
Then slowly and steadily, routine has a habit of dragging behind it that heavy word, monotony. Which is when we start craving for change again. Have you ever felt torn at the seams between detesting routine and resisting change, both at the same time?
But every once in a while, change creeps up silently from behind and manages to find a comfortable spot inside you when you weren’t looking. My closest friend mails me a Hindi song link with a postscript scribbled at the end that reads—‘So that you get out of the whole aiyoo zone’. Another tells me I speak with a slight-a south Indian twang now. But I think whoever said every adulteration dilutes, has got it all wrong. Yes, I may have unconsciously imbibed new words, mannerisms, music and embraced them as part of the lilting vocabulary that surrounds me here, but really, how can you not? Not allow the place and every person to permeate through your every fibre that is. Plus I’m yet to find a suitably awesome alternative to the word mokkai or wait, I meant dubakur. (Sorry D, you’ll have to hear those for a long time now) Also, there are these other little things.. like I hadn’t realized up until then how and when the tamil music on my playlist had steadily grown over time. Even if you don’t understand each and every word of every song, you learn to feel it deeply, just the same. True, there’s a chance that some might still trigger erinnerungen that might threaten to pick at a few raw spots, but you learn to skip over those as well. Just as you learn to go back and sit calmly at that same table in the same favourite green coffee shop and sip the same drink. This time, in the more stimulating company of V Gogh’s letters, peering through your hazy rings in the air.
Maybe you never truly fall in love with a place till you’re at a point where you’re torn between feeling absolute delight as well as pure loathe about it in equal measure. But well, isn’t that true about people as well?
One year is a long time. But then, even a few months are. You can change a lot in all that time. Or you remain the same. Unyielding. Incorrigible. Unmoved. I’d like to believe most allow for some change though. And if you’re lucky, each of these people, these places, etch a different vivid motif on you. Not all the outlines might look like those you set out to design.. But nevertheless, all of them chip at you and succeed in adding another piece to the complex jigsaw that you are.. right up to this very moment. So then tell me now, next is what?
But we pick up the scent as we wander about and il y a du bon en tout mouvement*
*there is some good in every movement
-Jules Breton / Van Gogh
my indelible ink 