we have made it to our final stop: bombay!

i’m sure i have said it before, but in case you didn’t know — bombay is the city of my childhood dreams. when we would visit india growing up, we would fly in and out through bombay and the city always fascinated me. i couldn’t get enough of the sounds and the smells and the traffic and the people, and even as a kid with very little concept of the larger world around me i could always tell it was a special place and that i would live there one day.

a small aside here to share one of my favorite quotes about bombay, courtesy of the opening pages of shantaram:

the first thing i noticed about bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air. i could smell it before i saw or heard anything of india, even as i walked along the umbilical corridor that connected the plane to the airport. i was excited and delighted by it, in that first bombay minute, escaped from prison and new to the wide world, but i didn’t and couldn’t recognize it. i know now that it’s the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it’s the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. it’s the smell of gods, demons, empires, and civilisations in resurrection and decay. it’s the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the island city, and the blood-metal smell of machines. it smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. it smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage. it smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches, and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers. karla once called it the worst good smell in the world, and she was right, of course, in that way she had of being right about things. but whenever i return to bombay, now, it’s my first sense of the city-that smell, above all things-that welcomes me and tells me i’ve come home.

and i followed through on my word, living in bombay for 6 months from 2012-2013 as i completed my capstone project for grad school. it was total chaos in the best possible way, and even though i stayed in 3 different places and i was flat broke by the time i left and my cousin and i shared a tiny mattress for 4.5 of those months i also wouldn’t trade a single second of it. bangalore will always be home, but there is something magical about bombay that will always draw me back.

for this year’s trip it worked out that sarah and i flew in and out through bombay which made it our final stop, and we were both thrilled at closing out the journey with four days in the island city. and while we packed a lot into those four days they never felt rushed or untenable, always allowing for time to relax and chat and enjoy our surroundings.

there was the requisite visit to my beloved toto’s, of course, and there was also a quick pit stop at cafe mondegar for an afternoon refreshment. beyond that everything else was new for me, which was a lot of fun — a thali lunch at fish curry rice; a drive on the new coastal road; snacks at kala ghoda cafe; a morning spent cheering for the mumbai marathon participants [including milind mama and ankita]; lunch at dadar social [my first time at this location and it was nice to see my favorite social breakfast still on the menu]; delicious late-night pizzas from tertulia; a lovely take on a thali at folk; ice cream at taj ice cream, the oldest ice cream shop in all of bombay; shopping at bhavya ramesh and suvāsā and artisans; getting a proper studio tour at g.a.s; and visiting chor bazaar with vinod uncle. and there was my traditional final night dinner of butter chicken and roomali roti from zaffran.

apart from all the stuff, there was also lots of time with lots of lovely people. priyanka and deboo of course, two of my favorite people and my eventual host parents when i finally move back to bombay one day, but also deboo’s parents and his grandmum and his aunt. his cousins anandi and angad. my dear friend ashutosh who i can always count on to show up to toto’s if he’s in town. each of them is so much fun to be around and i always feel smarter after spending time with them and come away with the best book and movie and television recommendations.

i halfheartedly joked in the above paragraph about moving back to bombay, but honestly in the next few years / decades i very well might. it’s absolute chaos, and yet being there calms and centers me. it’s been like that since i was a child, and at 41 nothing has changed. bombay lived up to and surpassed my childhood dreams, and i look forward to the day i can spend extended time there once again.

and with that, we have reached the end of our journey. but not the end of the recap posts — you won’t get off that easy! there’s some stuff knocking around my brain that didn’t fit into these recaps but that i would still like to share, so look for those in the next few weeks.

until then, thank you as always for journeying along with me.

xx