Stuck In Island City

Trapped in Mumbai’s flamboyance and endless verbal torrents of thousands of humans, I often feel like a disgruntled loner in a colony of chattering, gluttonous, complaining zebras stuck amid shades of light and shadow. We all are so far from our souls that existence is irrelevant.

If crossing the Arabian Sea is an exercise in insignificance, thinking about financial markets since early morning is in equal parts chaotic and a colossal mind game. The sea is inconceivably enormous, but, it is also infinitesimal. I, the lone inhabitant of my body and life, am inescapably large to myself, but also, ridiculously, and inconceivably small. In Mumbai, my sense of scale oscillates wildly. 


The voyage feels more like a function of time than space. There is the clamour of the people, the noise of railway engines, the churned-up fan of wake, the roll of the swell and forward motion becomes almost impossible. I am always at the centre of the disc, beneath the apex of the dome. A never-ending reel of upbeat synthetic music reverberates as temperature, wind speed, barometric pressure, swell height, along with a map of the ocean, position us as a dot at the end of a green line stretching back to the ocean.

When I am along the journey, and the guru makes his announcement that I am very, very far from my hometown Kolkata; tossing and turning in a vortex. I watch a swarm of bees heading north, their wings popping up and down with a businesslike clip, the only signs of life I’d seen all day except for a pigeon cheeping its confusion under one of the lifeboats.

I too seem to have become one of those ‘modernists’ not willing to bloom in attractive ways. In addition, I accept I am a confused person in a tacky getup. It has the odd effect of making me feel, at first, as if the months away had never happened. Living in Mumbai, is not very different from floating in one place. As if, there is nothing to do at the bottom of the gateway, but hop on to a cab and get on with it.

Meghna Maiti