Gray and Not-So Gray, Afterall

A friend from another city pinged me to say he’s relocating to Mumbai. With exuberance I declared that this was a great move because Mumbai is the best city in the world. He sent me a few smileys, and groaned about the traffic. I still maintained that Mumbai is a world city, and he would love it. That was until this morning, when I left my house to go meet some friends in Bandra for breakfast and, well, work actually. It was raining mercilessly, the trains were packed, and I was carrying my laptop on my now-healing back. There was no way that this could have been a great ride for me, specially since I was 30 minutes late. The occasional lie-in when you tell yourself that you’ll sleep for “just 15 minutes more”, you know. Everything about this excursion wasn’t looking very good – I also had to go back to office where a mountain of work awaited me.

As the auto pulled itself over the Bandra reclamation, a gray breeze rushed towards me and it dissolved into the sea – oh the mighty Arabian Sea! The waters tossed with vigour and the sky descended to meet the water. Time slowed down and the gray made the world full of possibilities that arrive with abundance such as rain. While I went through the lanes of a washed Bandra smelling of Earth, swathes of trees and of brick-and-wood old houses, I thought of everything that my school used to be. There were bakeries opened, the crucifix nestled in unlikely places, and lanes that were easily out of your English Literature text book. That’s when I thought again, and made a note to bring my friend to Bandra for breakfast, to this city that is indeed, the best in the world.

I had a glorious day into which I stumbled and tumbled and had the most delicious Hot Chocolate since the one I had at Kitab Khana, Fort. It lazed on my tongue and had my insides singing. And yes, the table mat that was placed on the wooden table before the Hot Chocolate arrived was more of a picture your fellow diner had sketched while you waited for the food. You know that man whose fingers are a little hard, and his hair falls on his forehead and his smile reminds you of the first boy you ever crushed on? Him. He drew, you ate, the water trickled down on the lush green leaves, and every crack in your heart was filled with gold. You were your own masterpiece – your own kintsugi.

It took me a couple of hours to get from home to Bandra and back to work. I lost a lot of precious time too, which I had set aside to write a post for the “re-launch” of my blog now that my friend R has helped re-build it. But one must allow the stumbling to happen when it does, and therefore this piece to mark the onset of the redesign of amarllyis, and its coming back from a place where it was destroyed. (If you find some pictures missing, that’s because R couldn’t find them on Web archives.)

Today is an important day, one that I will not forget for sometime, but eventually will. That’s why I stamp it in here on my blog. Today I reclaimed my city, my love for food, the wondrous sea, and the multitude of friends. It’s a good day to be born, and reborn.

Here’s one for the good times. May they roll like the thunder. May the gray dissolve in us like the sea. And yet, merry, may we all be.