My Bengaluru Boogie

Mental scribbles: my relationship with the city and non-city #1

Lost again. Where was I? Where am I? Mud road. Stopped car. Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, the drum in my temple – these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.

– Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A family chronicle

I do not like my city, although city is the only home I have ever known. It takes effort to like; loving comes easier to me. I use the possessive my because I create it, and take space in it just as much as the next person (Everyone and everything is the system; I am the system). I am discovering ways to refine my emotions into tangible mediums of deliberation. To express the malaise I have felt riding a two wheeler and having existential crises whilst waiting at traffic signals, is harder than I anticipated.

It’s a complicated relationship. It’s a dance. We mirror each other, the self organizing entities that we are. We breathe, not like the trees and plants that give way for our bodies to grow, but like unsuspecting creators of things beyond our comprehension, breathing in life and breathing out loss. Rivers run through us both, pounding against our embankments, flooding and feeding us. Flooding and feeding, we expand and contract, we grow; our fringes blurring against the vastness of our feeders. The city seeps into the unassuming lands beyond, taking it’s time, like me with my watercolors. I mix grey and green to get a vague taupe, the colour of wild mushrooms on soil losing itself to ever increasing concrete; soft flesh against a hard shell. Bone and skin, steel and brick; we’re the same within and without. Then the question inevitably is whether it is my own projections of lived experiences, love, insecurities and apathies that I don’t like plastered on the roads and floating across polluted skies.

‘When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city? / Do you huddle close together because you love each other?” / What will you answer?’

– T.S. Eliot

I seek hidden territories that draw from and eject the norms of urbanity, these spaces of duality, trivial yet significant. They leave behind a smell, a taste, a peculiar manifestation of movement. These sensorial notes are my navigators, without whom I could never delight in chasing the clouds through small conservancies on a cycle struggling to move over potholed lanes. The more I look beyond the streets to the sky, the more I smell the rain on the earth. They speak the same language of life, albeit with different accents. The words roll differently, to different tunes but the lyrics are the same.

Over the past year, I have learned to move to this urban song, groove under these dizzying lights with a fluidity I can only attribute to my surroundings. Bodies moving inside buildings, on buses and bikes. I am one amongst those bodies boogieing to this boisterous rhyme.

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