Contradictions:

The city is a remarkable sight from high up in a plane. Tall buildings sprouting in various directions….and the rest of the area filled with slums. Not an inch spared….it seemed that more people lived in the slums than in proper buildings. In a city so expensive, just how do they manage to survive?

Travelling within the city, I was amazed to find that most buildings were as ancient as life itself….blackened walls, peeling paint, tiled roof, wooden stairs, age-old lifts…..the resemblance to Calcutta old city is just amazing (except for the caged windows here). What I absolutely love is the big sprawling Parsi bunglows on the way to Fort and tiny pretty houses in and around Bandra. For just how long these links to a comfortable past will survive, is a question I do not want to answer.

I also found that there are these perfect little villages right within the city with lush greenery and fields around. Some so isolated that people refuse to travel after nightfall from that area.

I hate the ugliness of the city during the day-time but I love the dream-like sparkling city of the night.

In a city where everybody is rushing, in a tearing hurry….where there is only one chance that you get……its strange how the dream-like ‘another chance’ by roger sanchez, late one night with friends and zipping through another glittering road seemed to hold the very essence of my life here.

Homecoming?

I was standing on my balcony late in the night looking down at the vacant plot where my dearest car had stood for the past few years. I felt that slight nip in the cool breeze. It might have just been my imagination but I wanted badly to feel that welcome nip in the air. The afternoons already had mellowed feel to it, with a definite promise of the coming winter.

I love this season….autumn in Delhi. For me it defines my faith in life. Bright yet melancholic, happiness without a reason, anticipation of greater times, heart-soaring music, happy flowers, sparkling snow-peaks, ever lasting friendships, long coffee meetings, deep forever love.

I went around town looking for all these things or rather its impressions in the city’s many nooks and crannies. A sparkling laughter in a bylane, an eternal wait on the steps of a shop, lies to home from a phone booth, a secret lunch break from office, the hurried walk from the parking lot to get to the party, the long dreamy drives back home, ice-creams on a rainy day, crying under a neem tree. I never realises that so many memories lay all over the city for me to pick up again and remember.

I felt the city tug at my heart. I had tears…..yes, I was yet another of them who used the city and never called it my own.

And yes, I am going to miss badly the Autumn in the city.

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Lately any kind of closed space makes me claustrophobic. That is, apart from my office and home. Pubs, coffee houses, other friend’s home….I feel as if the walls are closing in on me and then my heart starts to beat faster urging me to run. Good old music infact adds onto it. It reminds me of a past….the good and the bad, the expectations, the story in those eyes, the micro world that I had created for myself and lived in for so many years. I want to run away…I have been running away for so long….way away into the mountains to pitch all my unanswered questions again and again. Maybe that’s why I am here….the sea stops me….no more running away….the vast world is just out there. All mine and yet different. I can blow away all my questions….out in the sea….to be answered at its own unhurried pace.