This story began when a meek 22-year-old girl got off a train at the Bandra Terminus on a rainy August morning. Her worn-out suitcase held more dreams than clothes, her eyes tried to find a possible end to the sea of people but failed. She didn’t have a job or a place to stay yet but survival stress was for later, that day she was busy trying to wrap her head around how close the city was to the ocean. Was it a city, was it a shore, she would never know. She looked at life with a lens of child-like excitement, one that she probably lost somewhere down the road.
As years pass by, I realise how profound the journey has been. During the last six years, I’ve lost my way in life a million times, only to find it in the million little things that make the mundane, ruthless Bombay life as extraordinary as they show in the movies — the faint murmur of waves, the rhythmic chugging of a local train, the cacophony of Monday morning traffic, a piping hot bhajiya pav with extra chutney, the matchbox 1RKs that hold more love than sprawling 3BHKs, the legendary and equally trying Mumbai monsoons, the sheer madness of Ganpati Visarjan, a stolen kiss at Marine Drive.
Safe to say that with every passing day, I flip through the pages of this chapter of my life that’s called ‘Bombay’ and silently wish that this is where it all ends one day.