My home was not so noisy in all the months that I have lived here. Am still amazed at how anything moving made the little guy watch in rapt attention and enjoy it, while stillness around bored him like crazy. I even joked about it with his mother, my co-sister and my name-sake (yeah, we share the same name - quite a treat on the ears when the two of us are at the same spot and someone calls either of us by name). I told her the baby is gone on me -- who loves to travel and go places, meet people, read stories realtime...
That's what made me fall in love with Mumbai the first time I travelled around. Fascination. Fear. Its huge roads and highways. Its sheer size and magnitude. Early Jan 2004, I visited Mumbai to attend two events. One of them was the World Social Forum that this city hosted. My friend, then a student at Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, had even fixed up a guest room for me so I could move in once my first event was over.
It meant, a ride from Bandra's Mount Mary (close to Shah Rukh Khan's bungalow) to Goregaon. For the die-hard Bangalore-bred that I was, I had no clue what distance in Mumbai meant. I had to skip a quick visit to Band Stand and hire an auto-rickshaw from there.
The ride through Western Express Highway left me baffled. Huge. Really Huge. Mumbai. Its size. Its people everywhere - in the towers, in the shanties, in those hutments along the highway.What makes this city stand by itself and not collapse under its own weight - weight of its teeming millions. Weight of its forever moving heads that pop out of locals, buses, cars, just about anywhere! The whole ride from Bandra to Goregaon's Film City Road cost me only about Rs 120 - a world of difference by Bangalore standards.
The auto-driver was surely lost for words when I made him drive into the IGIDR campus. `Yeh to jungal hai memsaab,' he said. It did not prompt him to overcharge me. Wow! What a delight! A Bangalore auto-driver would have looted me by now!
A quick trip to Shirdi and back scared me out completely. Those swarming crowds at Sion, outside Bandra and practically everywhere during the peak hour - no room between any two heads. Still those thousands (I would say thousands though they would have been hundreds in a minute) would move constantly. Mechanically. As if going nowhere.
Those images surely frightened a visitor from another planet (me), but the campus where my friend studied and lived, was a breather. I remember the view of these Goregaon hills from the students' hostel there. How refreshing to see hills in a city of concrete and dust! How I wish I had a home here! Nestled in this very green stretch! But hey, who knows, with sharks out there to grab every bit of land available, this green stretch could be lost soon.
I was not all that wrong, much to my own distress.
When my fiance' broke the news to me last year that he had found a home for us to move in post-wedding, my first query was: where? `Gokuldham', he replied. Eeks! He read out the address to me later and lo! Geographically my would-be home was very much behind the IGIDR campus! And in those very hills that I saw, loved and wished for a home at!
Still, a gap of four years did its work on my fading memory. I forgot that the stretch between Goregaon station and Western Express Highway was actually a big one, and so was the distance between the highway and home. At least half an hour by bus and not less then 10-15 minutes by other modes. By Mumbai standards, we live in the interiors.
I was happy I moved into a new home, even newly built and hardly a couple of years old. But the hills sure had been mauled at, with all the concrete and asphalt. Those guilt-pangs continue. It is better they do.
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