Mumbai 2009 – Vatsap?

Let me tell you something. It feels great to sit in Leopold and sip beer after you have read Shantaram. When I sat there a few days back with Sikka and talked about how cruelty meant different things to different people, I knew I was Lin and I wished she were Karla. Just like Karla would have done, she had dragged along a friend of hers, who – if you ask me, got more bored than he deserved to.

I was in Mumbai from Friday to Tuesday because my parents planned to be there in the same period. Subbu has taken up a job in Mumbai. Since Sweety was free for the time being, she came over too. Subbu is my bhai and Sweety my behen. So you see, this trip to Mumbai after ages wasn’t just about my fantasies of being Lin – it was also about being together with both my siblings and ma & papa after a really long time – after three years I guess. Rarer than that, it was about watching a movie together with them and actually liking it at the end of it (Avatar).

The trip was also about many more things. It was about showing up at Robo’s Malad flat in the very first night of the trip and finishing can after can of Fosters and discussing how fucked up a place Mumbai was, especially when one wanted to go running in the mornings.

It was about standing with Til at the Vile Parle station and creating and recording music on the platform, bang in the middle of all the chaos. I sometime wonder why Til doesn’t care to meet any of our common friends in Mumbai – like Tota, Maina or Sadhu. I would never know.

This trip was about swimming in and shagging under the clam waters of the clean Kashid beach. Kashid beach is about hundred and fifty kilometers away from Mumbai and if you live in the metro, you should definitely escape there some time. I escaped to this lovely clean beach with my family and my uncle and aunt and my two baby cousins. I still remember what chachi told us while we were returning back to Mumbai on the rented Scorpio. She asked us all to find a solution for an old woman who had two daughters – one who sold rain-coats and the other who sold sun-screen lotions. The old woman’s problem was that every time it was cloudy and raining, she felt sad for the daughter who sold sun-screens and every time it was too sunny and bright out there, she felt sad for the other daughter who sold rain-coats. Was there a solution to the old woman’s worries? It took me some time, but I finally cracked the right answer.

This trip was about driving Subbu’s ek laakh ki bike from Thane to Kandivali. It was about finally paying a visit to Tota & Maina in their flat and annoying everyone with band-baaza-giri with Maina’s synthesizer and feeling pretty much at home. Sadhu had come over at their place as well. When Sadhu noticed Tota trying to match on his mouthorgan, what I was creating from the synth, he told Maina – ‘when I had seen these two guys for the first time, that’s what they had been doing – gaana bazaana’. For an instant, it felt like I was back to Sarayu – my first hostel in IIT – where I had met Tota for the first time. And in an instant, I realized why some relationships can never end.

This trip was about running into an insti junior when I went to board my bus for Ahmedabad and telling him how life was a constant fight irrespective of what decisions you made in life and how I loved my life irrespective of whatever fight there was in it.

And oh by the way, the solution to the old woman’s worries was to think about the daughter who sold rain-coats when it rained and to think about the daughter who sold sun-screens when it was sunny.

Some pictures clicked during this trip (other than the current header):