Sounds and lights have ruined us. People are not what we see and hear. They are whole, rounded, ambiguous, contradictory and any number of other adjectives that your average author could think of. They rarely possess the kind of stark dichotomy promoted by Batman or Friends, even if many of them try and consciously imitate it. In this city the people hit you with their break and make you feel like a child standing in the sea during a particularly stormy high tide. You fight their currents throughout your day. Their force tempts you into lying or maybe even falling back. But not as if you’re on a holiday on some pleasant beach, but like the contorted crow you saw, dead of electrocution on your whizz home in the train from your 9 to 5. But that’s Bombay. And you fight back against it, hurtling on.
Eventually you grow older, and you realize that you’ve been sucked into deeper water, and this time there is no one there to carry you back to shore in the comfort of their arms. Or maybe you’re just too big to be picked up anyway. You go deeper, and now the salt is in your mouth. You feel the adrenaline pump as you realize how perilously close it is to entering your nostrils and burning you away at the back of your head as it floods in. You think of all those lines about seamen who out of desperation and thirst drank seawater and went mad, and then the horrid thought hits you, just as the bottom of your head screams from the liquid rushing in: Madness is not in the drinking of seawater; madness is not in drowning yourself. True madness is the standing in the shallows as the tide wraps itself around your knees, pulling you in but pushing you over, and yet there you stay, firm in your naive resolve against the might of the water, the very same water that conquered Mumbai herself.
I have drowned now. But I am happiest in this alive.
With apologies to The Smashing Pumpkins,
Wittywanker
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1 comment:
*glub glub* ?
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