Delhi, again

Written 4 years ago. A stray comment by Suvina led one thing to another and soon I stumbled upon this picture she clicked a long time ago. And anyway, I'm in the mood for posting old things.

dilli, by Suvina Singal (click to ENHANCE!)

…

Delhi. The smell of the city oscillates between the sweetly-salty stench of old sweat and tired deodorant.

Delhi. Delhi is a gauche black puppy tumbling all over your feet in eager gratitude for loving him by not removing your feet.

Delhi. Delhi is an undiscriminating, egalitarian sweat-moustache.

Delhi. Delhi is a beaming blind man.

Delhi. Delhi is a glaring car horn punctuated by suggestions of incest.

Delhi. Delhi is a plate of too-hot-to-eat semi-solid sodium-yellow noodles.

Delhi. Every personal landmark is fading as the car speeds faster. The speeding minute is unforgiving. Soon it shall be time to say goodbye, and make promises to return. Soon it shall be time to leave, and soon these people and these faces and these memory-ridden places shall exist only as ideas in my head and shall eventually be buried under an avalanche of new ones. For the moment, though, all it gleams like a shard of reflective silver inside me. All of it.

All the times you almost cried to me but stopped because we hadn't known each other for long enough, all the plays we saw and laughed at and sometimes gushingly admired, all the times I tried to stop you from leaving for home – maybe because some panic-struck instinct of mine wanted to hold on to you for 'just half an hour more', all the happysad train/bus journeys to and from Chandigarh, all the hours before exams spent in planning our post-exam hours, all the Metro conversations, all the classroom conversations, all the conversations on the back page of my under-utilized Microeconomics notebook, all the Irfan's conversations, all the paper-chit conversations, all the conversations, all the times I was too scared to talk to you, all the times we walked, all the times we walked, all the times we walked, all the time the sight of you used to liven me up, all the times at your house, all the stolen moments spent reading poetry and talking about Life and Everything underneath the metal awning of a dilapidated bus stop while we schemed to get you to stay out longer than your 7/8/9 pm curfew, all the times I wrote about you but didn’t tell you, all the times I had lunch at your house, all the times I stayed over for the night, all the times we had 5 rupees ki orange bar ice cream, all the times I talked to you at 2 am about going off and living in the forest, all the times you drove us around Delhi in your outrageouslyparrotgreen car, all the times I tried to get you to come to the Ridge with me, all the times we went cycling around North Campus, all the times I tried to force you to dance and we ended up getting stuck in orbit around each other, all the times I came to your house to study about ‘Monopolies in the Market’ and ended up watching Star Wars, all the times we Skyped till socially-unacceptable hours, all the nicknames, all the times we played basketball and you were the only girl on the team and I was stupidly, sexist-ly, making sure you didn't get hurt, all the times you told me how much you loved him, all the times I didn’t tell you how much I loved her, all the times we drank, all the times we didn’t, all the times we lost our dignity to Honey Singh, all those hours in the sun-drenched Front lawns, while we sat and talked and thought…

Everything rises up in me like steel-tinged bile, and makes my throat ache. It's all come to an end. Everything. Have I started loving you and all of it so much that ripping it apart shall wound me irreparably? Somehow, all this did not seem so loaded with sepia love through the clear glasses of the present. So why does it now burn like a bolus of flame inside me?

Nostalgia has no remedy, except in forgetting.

Delhi and I, we were just beginning to make friends with each other.

…

It's funny. 4 years on, it doesn't hurt any more. I'd still love to see your face though.