Back in Bombay

My first night back in the Big Stinky Bombay City. And I'm a happy man. How'd that happen? When I moved here from New York, I remember sitting in the plane as it touched down and thinking that I was being exiled from paradise, cast down into Pandaemonium. I stood next to all the people in baggage reclaim crowd like a weeping seraph amongst the other Fallen. What had I done that was terrible enough to deliver me this fate? I carried a fear in my gut that was heavier than all the bags being dumped on the carousel. How would I be able to walk out the airport with this weight?

I knew no one in the city. Every sound it made frightened me. Every smell that came, came to me with a violence my nose was unprepared for. The Sun beat down on me like a judge's hammer, counting out the years I was being imprisoned for. And I wanted to be an actor. A choice of profession that seemed right only to my inflated sense of my own magnificence. How naive and cock-sure could I have been to think that I could make it when so many other equally worthy or more, smashed their dreams to dust upon these raging streets?

I didn't sleep properly for a week. Every night I would paint fantasies upon the ceiling, only to see them all burn. Every night I would lay awake, unable to take a deep breath, like something stood on my chest, right below my ribs. This city told me nothing, it only glared and screamed. It gave me nothing, it only took my dreams and knotted them in the small of my back. Every gaze seemed dismissive, contemptuous, or at the very mildest, gauging. No one looked with softness and serenity. No one bothered to smile truly. Everybody had an angle, and ace up their sleeves, and a big knife behind their back.

It's hard to find love in a city where it's considered a weakness. Hard to find softness in a jungle full of predators. Where does one go to stand in the light, when even the Sun seems a tainted tyrant?

You go within, that's where you go. You dive deep into the heart of you. You find a pool of Serenity you didn't know you even had, in the quiet spaces between your dreams and your tears, fed by neither but sweeter than both. You go within to see the light, you go within to be quilted in shadow against the cold dark.

It is here, in this city of obsessions and despair, and ambition and lust, and hunger, that I found my quiet places waiting for me. It is here, in Bombay, that I learned that I was equal to the task. I may never like Bombay for all it's filth and cracked roads and indifferent officials, and awful weather, and an unwelcoming sea, but for making me a man, finally, I will always love it.

Now I sleep like a baby and laugh like a child. I am what I was looking for, all this lonely while.