Buzz

Surely in toil or fray under an alien sky, Confort it is to say, of no mean city am I ! Rudyard Kipling, to the city of Bombay.

And when your ears have stopped ringing, there is a buzz, The Mumbai buzz.

Perhaps that is what gives this city a unique buzz. The fact that it lives in several time zones at once. Blink and you shall miss the next flight that sores high up from and within the slums of Dharavi, overlooking the city scape. I waited to see the descent. The ascending foray into the new world was what I dreaded few years back. When I took a key decision to leave my birth city and sore into an alien darkness. I love that land now. The sipping of hot coffee and few friends that I care for and would nearly die for, a metaphor. Now when I am flung into a mid-air transition, yet again, I dread the city. I do not know what would happen and what it would take to leave it once again and sore to the land besides the lovely Mediterrian sea. All seems blurring – as the frost sweeping past this window pane that I sit by.

The true context is an emergency happening in a slow motion. Like the Helvetica font. Clear and Blur from a distant. The sea of Mumbai sees the froth laden with garbage along the Queen’s Necklace: a paradise for the joggers of Rich and Famous and a dump-yard for poor homeless souls. It can slap the socio-economic strata right across the face and say – This is Mumbai, the land of dreams – A true example of an eternal question – What is Life all about?

That’s buzz.

The flight was simple and yet tensed. I must have never imagined how the memory lanes can go awry in this manner. Like a jar of jellybeans – every single favor seems like Venus Trap: strategically designed to kill. Every single candy – delicious and addictive, lone and yet significant. I wondered what it would be. Which candy do I choose – I would be happy to see some old memories and miss the present as a distant past. I would miss the auto and bus rides back in Bangalore. I would miss the missing nightlife and the sleep-on-time phase. It all seems so weird. Seems like the week had just started. The buzzing of Mumbai locals and the rains, I wonder how the shores from here would be? How would be beautiful and hyped? Would it would be as pretty as my two homes- Mumbai and Bangalore or would it would be cold and alien? Would it be merciless and contrasted by rich and poor? Would be the rains – Never ending like Mumbai or ever drizzling like Bangalore? Would sun be humid or it would be harsh? Would Life be as pretty as those Google images or would it be blank and virginized. Life has definitely moved on, and I guess I am yet trying by best to keep up with its pace. As one city feels betrayed, I foray into another scape. Where sin is as virtuous and where the survival is as much a poor man’s bread as a rich woman’s pearl. The city of dreams that I had left three years back would slap me hard and say - It was time. Your forty days of honeymoon have started. You better made me pregnant and obliged for the next city would be a complete merciless invasion of Roman pride. It is afternoon and I am still mid-air descending down to the city where I was conceived born and brought up. The ears are still ringing with an incessant buzz and I think I have reached my home. My suitcase is still in the cargo, as I stand with nothing on but bare essentials of my survival.

Viva Mumbai. The land where nothing is impossible and everything is impossible. And soon, I would leave my city to foray into another and onto another virgin shore. I waited for twenty two years for three years of hope and now I wait for next forty days for my life of three sixty five days in Milan. Mumbai-Bangalore-Mumbai-Milan. I am on a roller coaster and the ride has just begun. Viva Mumbai – where forty days and forty nights would mix into one incessant buzz. The buzz of not just the city: But of Life. For what it is – I am yet to discover.

12:53 pm

On-flight from Bangalore to Mumbai.

(Somewhere I hear a faint sound of jazz as the flight steward announces the closure of all electronic equipments – Time to descend down)