Walking the city
Have you ever walked your city? The way you walk your beloved home from your super excited yet super nervous first date?
I have.
I have walked her through the lanes of neck-aching skyscrapers… that often burdened us with its formality and pretensions… it made us wear shoes that hurt and clothes that sounded ‘elite’.. and what was more…that it forbade us from holding hands..
We ran through those lanes, as fast as we could and soon…we were far from it..
At a temple we’d arrived…that my city told me was older than her… and knew more secret passages and dark alleys than she did…
I didn’t like it when she spoke of her past…. her tone always revealed regret… as if she rued what had become of her now. It was a frightening thought…to imagine that she hated the journey that had brought us together….
Outside the temple , resting on a ragged mat…I saw her wisdom in the shape of an old old man…and I dare didn’t wake it.
“Some other time,” she said.
And dragged me away from there..
Was my city scared of him?
Was he one of her ‘victims’?..
The ones she’d told me about when we were in the alleys of tiny crooked houses that smelled like a heap of garbage set to fire… people there lived in make-shift tents and un-pukka walls that often collapsed like a house of cards…they ate their own kind of food…unsuitable for a stranger…and sang songs of courage on the nights they couldn’t sleep because there was water everywhere…
They all were her victims she said.
It was beyond me how my beautiful city could have been cruel to them…
“You don’t get to decide the part you play in someone else’s story,” she said.
I told her I didn’t understand and she told me that I would when I’d grow up and leave her. I always retorted that I wasn’t going anywhere… to which she gave a resounding laugh… like a child mocking an adult for having said something stupid…
From the temple…we came to a beach I’d walked with her on endless occasions of happy, sad, whimsy and peace.
Looking at the waves colliding together…we both wondered about our futures… about whether we both would eventually land on the same shore…
I looked at her..
I loved her colors..
Her vibrancy…the sounds she made…the thousand ways she smelled…each different from the other…the way my darkness confided in hers…the way she lit up on a full moon’s night… the way she made an orphan feel at home..
How Could I ever leave her?…
…..
10 years later…I now realize that I’d been a fool of my own naïveté…and she had been right all along…
I left her. For my dreams. For my career. To create a life where I belonged…
Did I betray her or did she knew it from the beginning?
Have I made her a victim or has she chosen to be one…
I’ll never know…
’Cause you don’t get to decide the part you play in someone else’s story…
…..
Now I have a new city…with newer lanes and lesser memories….and I am yet to walk with her…
