Assam to Bombay to Bangalore.

Around nine years ago, when the country was still recovering from the Monkey Man incident and their beloved Shah Rukh was starting to bare all in front of cameras, I was on my way from the Far East of the country to the very West End. 

It was nine years ago that I had been on the first flight of my life, from the humble, almost rural childhood in Assam to the glossy billboard-studded city of Bombay and I remember it like it was just yesterday.

When you pick up a child who has grown up stealing bougainvilleas from the crazy lady next door and place her in a crowded Frankie shop with just enough space to breathe down someone's neck, the laws of nature conspire to give you the same result every single time- That of the child undergoing a silent shock of awe and fear.

That child was me and that time was mine.

I don't remember my first two years in the city. Maybe they have been lost in that haze when I was still getting used to the winding lanes and the sheer number of people that stood around me at any given point in time. They have dissipated into that corner in my memory, just like the Parsi colonies in the city, hidden away by the haze of the Oak trees.

The years that came after, though have remained so intact.

That smell.

That of Sea mixing with that of Raspberry Dollies and the cologne of the elite South Bombay men.

The smell of the Suburbs with their Biryaani joints and the huge Granite Market. Somewhere the distant wind carries the Carbonate to enter the fragrance of the meat to create the most revered Biryaani in Bombay.

The smell of hot fried snacks on a hot summer day and the pungent odour radiated out of a brick wall that has been just urinated on, mixing with the faint drowsy breeze of the Supari and plastic tyres being burnt on the footpath speak Bombay.

Even in the vaguest of memories, that strange smell does not seem to leave my mind.

There is a part of me that doesn't wish to be revived so as to still continue to be in love with the city.

Those days of back-breaking travelling on the local trains and then having to bear the sweating ladies clambering on top of you, while you get to keep half a butt on a seat, regretting having taken a seat at all.

Those days that the entire city faces together.

The floods, the bombs, the bullets, the rapes, the riots, the Bandhs, the Marathons, the protests, the campaigns, the politics.

When even the bus driver and you connect somehow, without even saying it. Both scared stiff of the threat looming ahead and throats tingling with the fleeting adventure.

In these ten years, I have learnt no Marathi and I still haven't figured out the way out of Lokhandwala Complex.

I haven't yet tried the Misal Pav and the Khus-Khus Gola.

I haven't brought myself to love the Bombay weather. Yet.

Places like Colaba Causeway and Vashi still remain unexplored.

And yet, I get angry when people compare Bombay to any other city and I get jealous when friends talk about their shopping trips to Hill Road.

I feel a certain pain when a bomb is dropped on the city, as though a part of my own family has been attacked despite being quite insensitive about the issue of terrorism.

I find a comfort in those anonymous rainy days with the mud entering my converse and baking against the sole of my foot.

I may have shifted my fancies to another city named Bangalore, due to it's better food, music and ofcourse, freedom and yet each time I feel a lacking, I run back to the faint, familiar sounds and smells of Bombay, remembering both;

The child who stole bougainvilleas from her neighbor and the one sat the cheap Frankie joint with just enough room to breath.