The City Swallowed My Best Years and I Said Thanks
It took my sleep and savings, and paid me back in becoming.
I moved to Mumbai with two suitcases and a plan to stay eighteen months. The city kept me for eleven years... most of my savings, and whatever it is in a spine that lets you sleep past six.
I was twenty-two. My first address was a paying guest room in Andheri East that I shared with two other girls and a water heater that worked on alternate days, as if it too had a commute. My salary was eighteen thousand rupees a month. My rent was nine. I did that math on the back of a train ticket during my first week and laughed out loud, and the woman next to me on the local did not even look up, because a girl laughing at arithmetic on the 8:12 fast is not news in this city. Nothing about you is news in this city. It took me years to understand what a gift that is.
Let me list the charges first, because they were real.
The city took my sleep. Two hours and ten minutes each way, Andheri to Nariman Point, a decade of my life spent inside a moving crowd, learning to fold a newspaper into eighths and my elbows into nothing. It took my grandmother's last week, because the leave was not approved and the tickets were forty percent of my salary, and by the time I stood in our courtyard in Kanpur they had already taken down the wedding photo she liked to argue with.
It took a man named Arjun, who lived in Thane, which does not sound like a reason a love ends, but anyone who has done Andheri to Thane on a Sunday knows it is a long-distance relationship with extra steps.
We surrendered somewhere in year two, both of us too tired to fight for it, and the city did not apologize, because the city does not do apologies. It does consequences.
It took my savings the way the sea takes a sandcastle.
Politely. Completely.
People ask me if I have a love hate relationship with the city, and I understand why they ask, but the phrase has never fit. Hate is too organized... Love is too soft. What I had was closer to what you have with a demanding teacher whose class you cannot drop.
The city never promised to be kind. It promised to be honest, and it kept that promise every single day for eleven years.
Because here is the other side of the ledger, the side I only learned to read later.
In my third monsoon, the tracks flooded and I walked from Lower Parel to Andheri with about four thousand strangers, water to our shins, and a man selling vada pav gave them away free until his stock ran out, shouting, “Aaj sab VIP hai!” Today everyone is a VIP. I have eaten at weddings that cost more than his shop and remembered none of those meals. I remember that one.
In my fourth year, I read my poems out loud for the first time in my life, in the basement of a Bandra cafe that held nineteen people and smelled of damp and espresso. My hands shook so badly the paper rattled. Nobody I was related to was in that room, and that was precisely why my voice worked.
Anonymity is the city's strange mercy: nobody is watching, so you can finally be seen. A friend later sent me an essay on why safe poems lose, and I recognized myself in every line, because until that basement I had been writing safe poems and living a safe poem, and the city had been waiting, arms crossed, for me to stop.
In my sixth year, I learned that family is also a thing you can assemble from parts. A roommate who sat with me in the corridor of Cooper Hospital through a dengue night. An editor who fought for my byline like it was her own. A fruit seller near Four Bungalows who kept the good mangoes under the cart for me and asked about my mother by name. None of them were mine by blood. All of them were mine by repetition, which in a city is the stronger claim.
And somewhere in there, without a ceremony, the city finished its actual work: it introduced me to myself.
The girl with two suitcases could not ask for a raise, could not eat alone in a restaurant, could not say the sentence “I am a writer” without laughing first to soften it. The woman who left could do all three before breakfast. I did not become someone new in Mumbai. I became someone specific. Those are different things, and only one of them is worth eleven years.
Last March, I left.
A quieter job in a quieter city, a flat with a balcony, rent that does not require a support group. Everyone expects this to be the sad part of the story.
Here is the turn: it was not sad, and that was the strangest part. On my last evening I went to Marine Drive, prepared to cry... honestly a little excited to cry... and instead I sat on the warm parapet with a cutting chai and watched the streetlights come on down the curve of the bay, that necklace they promise you in every film. The city did not notice I was leaving. Fourteen million people were busy becoming themselves, exactly as I had been. There was no farewell because there had never been a contract, only an arrangement: everything you can carry, in exchange for everything you cannot keep.
I said thanks anyway... Out loud, like a fool, to the tetrapods and the tide. A jogger glanced at me and kept going, which was the most Mumbai blessing available.
These days I live slowly, and I am learning what a new beginning costs when it is chosen rather than survived. But most of what I write still comes from those eleven swallowed years. I keep going back to them the way your tongue goes back to a healed tooth, checking, marveling. I wrote a whole cycle of poems about the 8:12 fast and posted the first one late at night, terrified, and strangers replied with their own trains, their own cities, their own arithmetic on the backs of tickets. That is when I understood that memory is not storage. It is compounding interest on everything a place ever charged you.
My niece is twenty-two now. Last month she called me, giddy and terrified, to say she had a job offer in Mumbai, eighteen months, just to try it, and did I think she should go.
I looked out at my quiet balcony, my reasonable rent, my eight hours of sleep.
“Go,” I said. “Take two suitcases. Leave room.”
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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