I can say it now of course, with much emphasis and unmistakable glee. In bold lettering, even.
In my three plus years in Delhi, I lived in Central Market. Not near, or parallel to. Inside. In the heart.
Well, almost heart. If your geometry isn't perfect.
Not "near Def Col market" or "opposite Moolchand bridge" but In. The. Crazy. Crowded. Market.
Up 54 stairs, in a colony, with a lovely lovely Sindhi landlord on the ground floor, with little Sardarni children playing badminton in the floodlit park every evening, with a crushed balcony view on to tangled wires and scruffy barsatis and direct views of my maid going to other houses first instead of ours, with Uncleji's store a phone call away downstairs, with aloo being fried in the winters outside on an open cart, and bhutta in the summer, right next to Bata that symbol of middle-class, pre-liberalisation, Mummy-Pleeeease India and opposite 'W', that symbol of... well, everything else.
It's nice to say it, because it reminds me that I've come from somewhere which had grit and gumption, where people bumped into each other without apologising a million times, which had real smells and where everybody made conversation as if their lives depended on it.
But it's the oldest, most jaded thing in the world to romanticise your past. It is. I have not forgotten scampering through the empty lane of the market at night, urging A to run, run, run because the smell of urine and vegetables and sweat was so overwhelming. Or being reduced to tears when hundreds of tiny red ants poured out of my laptop's console. Or noticing that the inimical AshaD had been cooking for us with spices that had rotted. How can I miss the "grit" when I took six months -in bed- to recover from my last encounter with it.
And yet I miss that atleast I knew it was grit. London is hard to put your finger on. Sure it's nice, sure I love it because well, it's "multicultural", there's so much "opportunity" and, my favourite so far, because what do you say in reply: "what's not to love".
But every city evokes a certain something, is a series of powerful associations. Or should be, if you're to live there. Yet Bangalore never has been. Which is why I can't live there. Zero evocation. And London? What's it about? Sure there are many different kinds of people and um, great music and art. I love the Tate Modern, I love the South Bank, but... I think I'm looking for its grit. It's intransient right now and I want to stop the flow of everydayLondonlife till I find something I can grasp. Make sense?
