Me and the City

We met ten years back. I was in that phase in my life then where you think you will become a rockstar one day because you have such a troubled life. It’s a different thing though that I never really wanted to become a rockstar really. Movie direction was “more my thing”, I would say in a detached manner to those who either bothered to ask or to the lesser mortals who were dumb enough to want to be a rockstar.

Anyway, the point is, I was very young then. Naïve, I wouldn’t call myself because I was never the ‘touch me not’ kinds. I was always belonged to the ‘get on with’ club even if it resulted in multiple troubles for my dismal existence in this big wide world. And yet, there was something, some innocence still preserved, some rawness still to be polished. All of fourteen, I came to Delhi with an Alexander-ish hope of veni vedi vici. Or that’s what I thought. It was only later that I got to know that the much popular tricolon was actually spoken by Julius Caesar and not Alexander!

So I didn’t know who I was following. Speak of rocky starts!!!

It was a different world from where I had come. So much more glitzy in its common appearance, so loud in the way people held general conversation, so ostentatious in the way people spoke about themselves as movie stars and yet the city had so much heart.

So much heart. So much heart this place had .One could hate this place instantly but you were bound to fall for it eventually. I myself had this little Elizabeth-Darcy thing going for a while. And then like Elizabeth, I did give up.

“It would not do, it would not do”…just like Darcy said it.

You could fall into its arms and it would be as comforting as an old lover.

After a while, once the initial days of fervent passions were settled (with mindblowing shopping experience and street food indulgence), we fell into the mould. Me and the city. It was love flourishing on the grounds not because the city itself was so great but because I had some of my “firsts” in its lanes and by lanes (this I mean literally- we quite a hunter for shady places in those days). My first vodka shot; the first time I discovered what thongs were; the first time I casually “picked” something up from a shop without paying for it; the first time my very explicit love letter was caught and shown to my mom by an overtly  nosy relative; the first time I decided I wouldn’t believe in god anymore. When I read what I have just written it only makes me sound like a prodigal daughter or in simpler terms the kind of girl parents would want to keep their daughters away from! But it was good for me. The firsts. Of course a lot of other firsts preceded and followed these but that’s a different story.

Today as I write this, I would just like to bring to notice that neither am I dying nor am I getting married to some NRI in Canada and thus leaving the city behind. I just feel in love with it and I want to pen it down. Like every love story though, there are few glitches too. It can get too claustrophobic here sometimes with every Sharma or Chaddha auntyji laboring too hard to know a little too much about you. The city I love so much is also the rape capital of India, if not the world. But right now I would rather not get into the filthy minds of the lechers who roam the city so freely.

To sum up, I would just say that the romance continues with its share of the good bad and the ugly. ..

“iske daayein taraf bhi dil hai
iske baayein taraf bhi dil hai..

Ye sheher nahi mehfil hai…”

Too much heart. Me and the City. Too much heart.