the very first time i pulled my taxi window down and let in the sounds, an excitable jock on a radio station screeched in tandem, "mumbai majhi ladki" - i love my mumbai. that with the smell of salt, fish, diesel, sweat, incense and shivaji knows what else, rising up in little swirls in each of your nostrils, is the biggest welcome you can expect to soul city, sin city or whatever you make of it. this is home. to me. and yet not too long ago, i turned my back on it. because one night i saw a brown sugar shooter. with a lemon ink scrawl on her forehead. 'long dead' it spelt when you held her up to a flame.



the romance began the moment i stuck my fingers out of a seventh floor window grille, sentimental old coffee mug in the other hand, trying to catch the first drops of another monsoon some years back. it was perfect. i was out of work. had a hardback nestled between what was then a lean tummy and pulled up legs. there was rain. and there was nothing to do. i think i sighed even. clueless, unprepared for the annual deluge. but then it came. clothes turned to fungus. sentimental coffee mug turned to fungus. cigarettes turned to fungus. but before i gave up on the city itself, i rediscovered cable television. and then i proceeded to graduate from couch potato to couch. but somewhere along the way, on one of the many colaba escapades or crusades if you are the alliterophile, i think i fell in love with an entire city. and by some miracle of the lesser gods, beedies don't turn to fungus.



mumbai by night, no matter how much you've been told, deserves to be seen, to be smelt, to be heard, to be felt. a city groping around madly for the self-destruct button doesn't give a damn about sleep. it's insomnia paradise. it's paradise for most part. but you need to be the optimistic and generally cheerful sort to soak in a 3am traffic jam for all its serendipity. more importantly you need to make your peace. with the sound of little wheels constantly whirring in the earth below. for this is a city on the move. blink and you've missed the war.



but above all mumbai is pavement town. if you're born on a pavement, grow up drinking desi daroo on the pavement, lose your leg in an accident a little off the pavement, sell drugs and sex on the pavement, get arrested on the pavement, return to the pavement, sell magazines this time around on the pavement, before you discover drugs and sex sell more on the pavement, marry on the pavement, make love on the pavement, build a home on the pavement, build a temple on the pavement, chew and spit paan on the pavement and then die on the pavement from too much paan chewing, then you can be sure you're a true blue mumbaikar. and i met such royalty. he said 'call me babu. yahan har tarah ke naazare dekne ko milte hain. kuch acche. kuch burre.'



bhau ka dakka, mazgaon. i love the way marathi teases you. bhau ka dhakka. so there i was, tyring to roll my coordinates all over my tongue, on a focused mission to acquire a dagguerotype descendant (which i did and promise to show off) and i was making small talk with pavement royalty - babu, while the guy who took me there was rolling his eyeballs all over and almost pleading his inability to sell me that damn piece of rusting junk for anything lesser than eight grand. i couldn't even guffaw. sometimes when you're swamped with the smell of human excreta, the jokes arent funny anymore. and a little kid strolled by babu's wheelchair turned peddlar mandir cum makeshift home. and almost on second thoughts the rascal turned around and slapped babu behind his neck. before flying off with victory whoops, a silly smile and a sillier still hoppity trot. aghast and every last moral fibre in me screamed of the injustice that had just been perpetrated on the handicapped. babu screamed too. sweet thoughts of fucking the kid's sister and then tearing her gut out. and then he laughed. it boomed through the docks. probably rippled a wave too.



but soul doesnt stop at the pavement. soul is made up by the 29,000 people that cram into every square kilometer of mumbai. soul is in vada pav. soul is in the local train schedule announcement mourning another fast local's delay by 30 seconds. soul is in the million cab drivers. soul is in the stories that make mumbai. of bombay duck, of the harebrained land filling schemes, of the shivaji statue that rumouredly gallops through town once every decade and of the taj mahal hotel. architect w.a. stevens jumped to his own death from the tower of the hotel he'd meticulously plotted on paper, the moment he discovered his dimwitted indian counterparts actually built the hotel with its back facing the sea. god bless the stevens soul.



the taj mahal hotel interestingly preceded the gateway by atleast 20 years. so you can quite imagine the odd sailor's first glimpse of mumbai back in the day. the backside of a hotel. but not just any hotel. this one, even at that time, housed its own power plant, chemist shop, electric fans, power laundry and played host to saturday night balls, operas, army bands and the odd suicide.



mumbai always wears a watch. and if you aren't, you probably just missed your last chance at a million bucks and living one of those classic dreams - mumbai ishtyle. incidentally i hate dream merchants. especially the kind that sells soap with clever words.



and i also met this cat. yet unnamed. one year old. you could probably tell how much that adds up to in cat years by cracking some esoteric egyptian heiroglyphic. i really couldn't care less. except that i desparately wanted to name him mustafa. after an old friend. though the owner wouldn't hear of it. the cat itself is a slightly strange sort as far as cats go. skittlish, if that is a word. nervous even. and horny as hell. a week before i got there, somebody caught the cay humping a t-shirt. yeow. meow.



irony, i've come to realise with lessening awe, is integral to mumbai. if frail underfed kids push giant wheels around at the risk of life and limb on juhu beach while fat slobs tied in, in plastic bucket seats, yell in adrenaline madness, then it also is perfectly normal that a blind beggar at andheri's local station should use the economic times to muffle his harmonium. it also is no surprise that while it's perfectly okay to indulge in prostitution, sell drugs, beat little children into pulp and a life as a beggar, shoot a few black bucks and kill your brother, it is a heinous crime to click photographs at a local station. oh hell no. that deserves an arrest.



music drives mumbai. from auto drivers to the swankest most hardnosed club, everybody's playing himesh reshammiya today. some ugly kid wonder who churned out 38 consecutive hits. apparently that's a record. and they're calling it the himesh flu. the poultry farmers aren't laughing. i found my niche too, in your average flute seller, driving old goldie tunes through bamboo sticks. i was half tempted to get him to try an anderson tune. but i settled instead for...aa chalke tujhe, main leke chaloon, ek aise gagan ke tale.



but how impassionate can you possibly be, when you see sprawled out in the middle of the road in front of you, a bonafide geriatric tyring to sell a few imitation silver anklets. i tried reasoning with her. the middle of the road was no place for a woman like her. she asked me to buy an anklet. i said i couldnt possibly wear them. she said 'girlfriend ko kareed ke de' and smiled a toothless grin. little pearly drops welled in me.



the city is most certainly bad news for the single and the lovelorn. around every corner, they're at it. the bees do it. the birds do it. and in bandstand they're doing it on every rock. they even have a special umbrella for couples making out on bandstand. with a non-collapsible frame, which means your umbrella won't ever buckle backwards in the face of a stiff breeze and compromise you and your beau. the bandstand chatri they call it.



mumbai rests on its contradictions. if you have a beggar, then a mercedes is pulling up around the corner. if you have vada pav guaranteed to set your tongue on fire, then you also have kokam sharbat. if you have a beautiful hill, then you have an ugly monstrosity spewing smoke in the foreground. yeh hai mumbai meri jaan.



i spent a little over six months in mumbai. and i dare say i saw more of the city than people have over a lifetime. one afternoon i squeezed into a second class compartment on the central line. and as the train weaved right through the middle of a kitchen, i knew then with shocking clarity, that I'd actually stared into the dark soul of an entire city. it was my peepal tree right there - the 1.55 Panvel CST fast local. late by 30 seconds. i knew i couldnt take it anymore. the next morning i was in queue for a first class pass. that afternoon i discovered that in first class, people don't chop vegetables, they play poker. The cell phones are smaller. The sex clinic ads plastered on the second class walls are replaced by equally tacky posters promising cholestrol remedies. but they still curse. and sweat smells the same anywhere you go. i knew then i needed out. when you choose to live in a city like mumbai you will your soul away to something infinitely bigger. and i simply wasn't ready yet. and hopefully, will never be.