Mumbai Muse

                                                               

The glitz ,glamour ,antique British architecture ,steaming hot vada pavs and pav bhajis ,chats and the super cool Bollywood. You guessed it right! I am talking about Mumbai, the city of unlimited possibilities and dreams. A friend of mine told me, “it is a city with different faces, keep your eyes wide open, for you never know when this city might change your life”. Yes! I did keep my eyes wide open and it did change the way I looked at life.

On a rainy, sulky Monday morning, I set out with my huge baggage and heap of luggage toward the lokmanya tilak terminus to catch the netravati express back home. The cold wave of relief that crossed my heart as I saw the train stationed on the first platform was inexplicably relieving. I reflected back to that crazy evening of 17^th June 2013 when I ran the length of platform and managed to make my way into the almost moving train. The dreams that I carried in my eyes then were so heavy that my luggage seemed lighter. Now that I was leaving Mumbai , I do not regret that my dreams did not come true. Though I did not gain what everybody said I will once I set foot in Mumbai,I feel rich and content as I had learnt lessons for life, I had seen life of struggles and only struggles, I had seen people laughing through their tearful eyes, I made some friends for life, got mesmerized but the humility of a city that housed the richest of the rich people, at the uncertainty of the next second of your life, how life changed for many in the wink of an eye.

I looked at Mumbai in awe like a kid peeps into an ice cream factory through a keyhole, but only to realize that it stinks when you make ice cream!

They call it the ‘city of dreams’. Yes it indeed was! For many lived only to chase their dreams, while others went through years of toil just to live the life they dreamed of. While I saw live examples of contrasting lives playing their parts in front of my eyes, I struggled to relate to any of those lives. They were so distant and strange.

 There were the ‘small people with big dreams’, whose life clinged on to the local trains. It was like their blood stream. They eat, sleep, dream, live and make friends here. They trust its service to no extends(sometimes more than their wives! as a dabbawala puts it). Though they were always in hurry, they never pushed past anyone, made sure they never hurt anyone on their way, never hesitated in smiling back at you. Though they claim to be working for a better life tomorrow, the truth is, they are so comfortably settled and content in the small life that they live that they have stopped aspiring for more. They started finding happiness and victory in the small challenges that life faced them with. On the other hand, there was this whole society of ultra rich people, who are so fortunate that they never had to see the face of a local train, forget boarding one!(don’t get me wrong..i am not talking about Amitabh Bachan or Ambani..i know they had to struggle and pave their own path to success,I am referring to the born rich people like star kids ,people who inherited family business and the wives of rich people..you can make your own guesses now).They never had to worry about the vegetable prices shooting up like crazy during ramzan season,they never had to worry about roofs that leaked in monsoons,they did not have to deal with any sort of insecurities that comes as a part of being a ‘mumbaikar’ in truest sense. I took it as a mission to find at least one family that lived the kind of life I lived with my family back home. We were neither rich nor poor, we never struggled for survival but we did not live flamboyant lives. We were the typical middle class family with hell lot of ethics, values and pinch of narrow mindedness. And duh! Who was I kidding!..Like somebody had rightly put it, here, the rich got richer and poor got poorer. There existed nothing called a middle class!

Every other day Mumbai shouted out to me ‘you do not belong here’. I had no answer to the ‘why’ I kept asking myself time and again. All I knew is that I had not found my muse in the city of dreams yet!.Hence, exploring the city for its various possibilities was taken up as the next mission. And I started pondering the numerous gullies to realize that they lacked uniqueness. All of those gullies look identical to each other. It was so damn easy to lose your way! Next destination happened the slightly upside market area called lokhandwala, a shopping hub, where the ‘rich kids’ chill out!This place also failed to amuse me because it lacked character. Moving on to Hill road and linking road in Bandra ,they called it hub for ladies fashion(cheap fashion I mean!).Now my hopes rest solely on marine drive(I have heard people talking very high of the ‘Queen’s necklace’..let’s see!) and colaba(my aunt told she once happened to spot some movie stars there! sounds exciting..doesn’t it?).So I hit marine drive and though the sight of thousand lights lined up in a semicircle to make it look like a queen’s necklace did mesmerize me, it failed to give me what I so badly wanted and what I expected from a beach or seaside, which is ‘peace’. The same hassle and clatters of a city continued there. No wonder why ‘marine drive’ is recognized as ‘distinctively Mumbai’. And there comes my love ’collaba causeway’the 10 minute drive in a taxi like a ‘memsahib’ from Victoria terminus to the street shopping paradise ‘colaba causeway’ was one thing that came even remotely close the Mumbai of my imagination. The beautiful British architectural buildings lining the road, and horse chariots taking people on a ride around marine drive and nariman point made my day!.The feminine instincts in me could not resist the awesomely fabulous array of fancy items that lay ahead of me.I grabbed as many as I could and in the process I realized that when somebody calls Mumbai ‘the city of dreams, he rightly meant it that you dream of something and you will get it on half the price you will ever guess in colaba!.And yeah! ,my aunt was not bluffing when she said she figured movie stars. There was this restaurant called leopold café around the corner inside which, all you find is beautiful people. They are all so tamed ,maintained and pretty that you fall in love with each of them instantly and obviously couple of them were the ‘rich kids’ who  already made it big in movie and yet another set of ‘rich kids’ who will be seen on the silver screen anytime now. My eyes and heart could not contain the curiosity of having found a place about which I could go on for hours to my friends. There was something about this place that amused me. In short, I found my muse in Mumbai(or so I can boast) around colaba , but Like any other middleclass south Indian girl, I lacked the guts to live in the bubble and pretend to be what I can never be. I told myself that my journey to Mumbai was not just to find my muse, but to make me realize what makes life! I took home with me the greatest lessons for life that Mumbai whispered into my ears with love. The lesson being that no matter what, LIFE MUST GO ON and no matter how independent you try to be and fly high, at the end of the day, humans are mutual beings, there is always a string attached to our tailbones that drag us back to our roots. Somebody rightly told me that nobody goes empty handed from this city. Hats off to the city that welcomes with open hands a million people who land here every day, with dreams to make it big in life and I cheers to those smiling random faces, ready with hands extended to pull you up the ladder. I will come back to you, Mumbai! for nobody can get enough of you!..