Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart
I was lying on my bed idly thinking about stuff that didn’t matter, while humming a song by the Fun. — “why am I the one always packing up my stuff”. I’ve recently moved to Lucknow and just to let you know I have moved so much in the past 6 years, one might feel that I must be accustomed to change. Only if it were that simple. Where are you from? — people ask me. I don’t know. On some days I am from Bombay, some days Delhi and some days Hyderabad. Some days I am a nowhere man going nowhere. Like Jack Kerouac once wrote — “because he had no place, he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars.” I’m a nowhere man sitting in my nowhere land.
I won’t say I like travelling because I am already a travelling salesman selling nothing. Like a nomad, I find a home only to leave it. Again and again. So now when people come to me talking about how beautiful and romantic their cities are — I pass it off as naivety. They simply know what they have seen their entire lives. They know nothing!
I sometimes wonder if it’s better to live by the sea or by the mountains. Or in a city or by the countryside. “If you don't like the sea, and don’t care for the mountains, and don’t like the big city either” — Michel from Godard’s Breathless jibes at the camera — and us — while driving, “then go hang yourself”. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath while talking to her friend says “Remember how you asked me where I like to live best, the country or the city? And I said I wanted to live in the country and in the city both?” Her friend calls her a neurotic. To which Sylvia says — “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell.” So I guess that makes me a neurotic and I should probably hang myself.
But if I were to choose, I would choose the sea over the mountains and city over the country. I like the sea more than the mountains. And look at the work we put in to get to the sea. Clothes for swimming, spare clothes to change into after bathing in sand, lotion, mats, towels, foldable chairs, juices, snacks, sand in private parts for the next six hours. We sometimes have to take a flight or a train to get there, fight the traffic, find parking, bear the sight of men who don’t realize that briefs don’t qualify for swimwear; all of this just to get to the waves. And the ironic thing is the sea doesn’t even want us there. We think it is coming towards us but in reality it is trying to get us away, asking us to have our cathartic moment elsewhere. In films characters have their cathartic moments by the sea. Indian beaches present themselves with fifty more problems that by the end of it catharsis would be the last thing on our minds. I try to mimic the calmness and the profoundness of nature, the sea, the mountains. To be one with nature and silence is not something that comes naturally to me. And it pisses me off that I am missing something that other people are getting.
But with city spaces and people, we share a common consciousness — that of haste. Every single thing I have ever done in my life has been the outcome of haste. Like a Jungian archetype I inherited it from the earliest city ancestors. We sip our coffees hurriedly, sandwiches are half-eaten, cigarette butts are covered with tenacious lipstick marks, books half-read, cold dinners waiting to be eaten, lukewarm love. We hurry away in the fear of losing it. And yet we love our cities. I love Bombay. I love Delhi. I love Hyderabad. It’s almost as innocent as childhood romance.
Well what comes to your mind when you think of the city you’ve lived your whole life in? Buildings, roads, clouds, the sun, the rain, the people, dogs and cats, potholes, the smell of cigarette smoke in the rain, sunsets and sunrises, crispy autumn leaves, golden hours, love, heartbreak, the exhaustion, the anger, the angst, the catharsis and everything that follows. I’m sure you don’t love your city for its state of art transportation system or for the six lane highways.
Perhaps a lot of people like me are privileged enough to love their cities. I won’t be writing about a city romantically if I were sweating like a pig or if I were knee deep in water. And perhaps that is why city writers like Mayank Austen don’t sit well with me. The gaze is pitiful, often garbed as empathetic, overly romanticized and separates itself from the subject it is capturing. I guess our art should be indicative of our privilege. And if we are extremely privileged we are better off as observers than saviors. So much of romantic poetry is written about spring. “In March I’ll be rested, caught up and human,” says Sylvia. In March I am drenched, punched down and dehydrated.
Moving is always tough. It isn’t pretty. It isn’t comfortable. It mostly hurts and even breaks your heart. I hated it when I had to move from Bombay to Noida. I hated it when I moved from Noida to Hyderabad. And now I am in Lucknow and soon I’ll be moving to Bangalore for work. Writing about it in retrospect provides me with some semblance of gratitude. All of this has changed me — for better or worse. It left a mark on my memory, my consciousness, my heart and perhaps my soul if there’s still one left inside of me.
“But no matter how you get there or where you end up, human beings have this miraculous gift of making that place their home” — Creed, The Office.
It’s an act of creating comfort spaces for us I guess. To find that place in this entropy which calms us just by existing as it is. It doesn’t have to be clean or organized or aesthetically pleasing for god’s sake. It just has to be you. After a hard day’s work, I walk up to my favorite spot on the street near my house to smoke a cigarette. That first puff gently shakes me, tells me it’s gonna be alright. From there I walk to the park, sit on a bench and gulp down a bottle of orange juice. I rest. I take a short walk and I am back in my apartment. Now sitting in a different city trying to feel at home again, I wonder at how I’ve always managed to do this. Like an animal looking for a home I tell myself again — this must be the place.
