Five Things About Mumbai

Five unusual things about Mumbai:

1. The city never sleeps. You will always find a teenage couple who sneaked out at the middle of the night or a drunk on desi daru uncle singing seventies songs just like the lingering thoughts in your lethargic mind.

2. The Noise is a home. As much as you miss the quite of your hometown, you will know that silence is very loud once you hear the perfect harmony of the traffic, dabbawalas, gayatri mantra, salat al-fajr, the carols, the fisherwomen, the locals, the roadside vendors and the people merging into each other. Making us alive.

3. It is a city where the rich and the poor live on the same side of the shore, fighting for their land on the soil filled sea. Finally they coexist, just like your demons and your sanity, struggling in a 1bhk.

4. Undiscovered stories are narrated. Try sitting on the Marine Drive late at night, hanging your legs towards the road, absorbing the almost peaceful city. Spot a bhelwala and ask him where is he from while buying a bhel. The story flows. It flows like it has waited for years to someone give it just a push. Like it was piling up in his heart with all the blood and arteries refusing to flow through his veins. And mind, the story always ends with a "Ye toh ek maya nagri hai" because indeed it is.

5. No one is FROM Mumbai but OF Mumbai. This city is a wrinkly, old woman sitting on her door, making friends with every passerby and taking in every homeless. People forget their roots when they get a new garden to blossom into and then they are stuck here, in a chaos of heart and brain where the heart refuses to leave this magical city and the mind aches for the lost home. But no matter who wins, either the person stays in Mumbai or Mumbai stays in the person.