Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
There are only two great
adventures in life – Love and Travel (everything else is just detail for the
in-between greys). Both can ruin you for life, leaving you completely
ill-equipped to carry on with life-as-usual, after. And both can cause immense
(even permanent) dislocation (physical, temporal and any which way you choose
to view life). Having said that, both are irresistible in their own ways and
once bitten, you kind of want to stay quarantined for life.
So this one is about travel and
moving… and the inability to stay put – sometimes out of choice and sometimes
out of circumstance (as this latest move has been for me). We don’t always plan
life. Life plans us and lets us believe otherwise!
After much kicking, screaming,
crying, and straining at the leash, I dragged myself (much against my will)
back to the motherland from the pearl of the Orient (Shanghai) – slave to the
wage, that I am. The job moved me right back to where it had moved me out once,
3 years back. Anyway, I have learned enough about life to stop resisting and
accept whatever happens with grace. It’s called ‘embracing the change’ and
letting Life flow through you and in you, and surrendering to the higher wisdom. Well, at least I am trying!
Besides, only in hindsight can
one tell if your choices or the ones you are forced to make, are going to turn
out to be sub-optimal for you. 20-20 they call hindsight. Yes, well… I ask you, what effin’ good is hindsight
anyway?? Not unless you can time-travel back and forth, innit? Why don’t we ever know while we
are RIGHT in the middle of the experience and the moment that this moment here
will never come back or that it was the best we could ever have had in our
lives? Why does it have to be in hindsight? I hate hindsight. For all the hype
of it.
So here I am - back to Bangalore
and much has changed since.
My two closest girlfriends have upped
and left the city – dream-weaving their way to their destinies. I don’t know
anyone at my workplace, never having worked here before, and all the
familiarity I have with the city is Maddie’s erstwhile impossibly adorable
studio apartment at Indiranagar on monsoon-drenched Sunday afternoons, and our
Sunday brunch hangout at Herbs & Spices on 100 Feet road.
That being said, I am determined
NOT to mope and wallow in misery at having been forced to leave a whole life
behind back in Shanghai. Cycle of life… and it’ll turn right back full cycle
again soon enough, one hopes – all I have to do, then, is keep pedaling, right?
So the settling in is hard. I
won’t pretend otherwise. The first thing that strikes you, is how hot and how
bright the sun really is, back here! And all the noise on the street and the
dust flying around from unpaved sidewalks. Then you also notice the absolute
kindness of total strangers …
But realities take time to sink
in. Especially where your coordinates go for a right royal toss out the window
and the entire night-time skyline changes contours right in front of your eyes
in under 24 hours. Longitudinally speaking, of course.
No more the Shanghai bling for me,
no ‘Hello Kitty’ merchandise, nor the glittering Bund skyline and fake plastic
smiles at fake plastic parties in nightclub-bars around town, nor the crazy,
drunken dancing at Bar Rouge or Hollywood. Pretty pointless, that – after
you’ve had your initial heady fill of it, or the occasional drunken night out.
One doesn’t miss all that, one never misses the high-point madness of the
initial euphoria of a new city.
What I do miss though – is the
rhythm and sounds of simple everyday living.
My 393 Wukang Lu home. In its
entirety, every nook and cranny of it, every creaking shiny black floorboard in it.
The quaint, tree-lined, charming
Wukang Lu boulevard in the French Concession. The impossibly expensive but
impossibly good French bakery opposite my apartment. Ferguson Lane and its
restaurants diagonally opposite home. The smiling, friendly staff at Coffee Tree. All of Wukang-Anfu Lu and its boutique cafes and stores.
Stopping by at Farine’s and the vegetable vendor on the way home from work and
the usual routine of picking up DVDs, a bottle of wine, fresh bread and
vegetables for a dinner-movie night on a random week-night. Friday afternoons
ambling around the French concession or a quiet meal at wood-enclosed Puro or
homey Hungry Lung’s.
Making copious amounts of mulled
wine from not-so-good wine. Baker & Spice’s olive sourdough bread with
olive oil and vinegar, with a goat cheese salad on the side, and a couple
glasses of wine for dinner on nights when I was too lazy to cook, and all by
myself.
The weekly trips to Frank Provost
and how good they made me feel (look, too, I guess – nothing like freshly
washed salon-dried hair for the weekend)
The Saturday fresh produce, and
designer market at Jiashan on Shaanxi Lu twice a month, with its kitsch art stores, Thai and Vietnamese cafes, and bistro sit-outs.
Sometimes just the plain visual pleasure of watching cramped stores stacking everything from old books and records, to little wooden chairs hung up on walls, amidst tables with leafy pots served up for lunch! Very organic.
These are the things one misses.
The pitter-patter of rain on the
brick roof of my upstairs sun-room on a rainy day – watching the rain, staring
at Audrey Hepburn’s kitschy art poster, trying to read, and day-dreaming.
The warm sunshine on my feet on a
cold winter’s day, while sitting upstairs reading
Watching the snow fall on winter
nights and feeling lonesome and together all at once.
Sweaty, sexy summer days of much
skin and bare shoulders and backyard barbecue parties
All four seasons…
Above
all, one misses the human touch. Always and only the human touch. The people
one will never leave behind, even as cities slip like sand through one’s hands.
The easy laughter of friends, bad
jokes, companionship, much wine (good and bad), some Mary Jane to smoke up on
particularly adventurous occasions, evenings spent talking about nothing and
everything. And all the love, beyond any measure – it’s the love that words
will do a poor job of trying to capture…
In the famous words of Elizabeth
Bishop and the One Art –
“The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a
continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster…”
(even though it feels like one,
right now).
Bangalore’d I have been.
