#Scurf188: The City That Got Away

Thoughts I had during a recent trip to this city for which I was probably not desperate enough all those years ago

We all have that person who got away, and we look at their absence from our lives wondering if they were the ones who could’ve made it all better. Memories pop in and out. Status of the mind altered. Times that used to be. In pop-culture there’s many such famed couples that were too good to be true. There’s an entire genre of movies, novels, short stories that has spawned from this genre of longing and anticipation. But there’s something more to be said here. Something about the places that we think could’ve added layers and meaning and texture to our lives.

The cities that got away.

A collage of memories from the city that could've been

A city that never was meant to be, and yet held that shimmering promise from a distance. A city that could’ve moulded me, changed me, made me another, maybe better person. The city is Bombay, where from I write this dispatch.

Now this is a city that has been chronically over-appreciated, over-documented and over-represented as a harbringer of dreams, maker of lives and crusher of spirits. As I write this little dirge, I feel like a troubadour of the inner life of a modern woman thinking back in all of life’s complexity. Living in Bombay, we all know too well, isn’t easy, even when all of us are leavened with wit. But this one visit to the city in the middle of the monsoons when it is in its treachrous best form — and pow!!! Right to the solar plexus.

As I peer out of my cab window, looking at the scary highrises crowding on the ever so narrow lanes, I ask myself questions that I didn’t know I had. I don't know the answers but this city makes the lack of knowing a little easier to take. You know that kind of loosening of something within, when something clicks.

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As a creative-type from a north India growing up there were years that I went on dreaming about making the city my actual city of dreams. From as long as back I can remember I’ve always wanted to have to be a writer and for a brief period even dallied into the thought of being an actor. In India, if any harboured those dreams 30 years ago, in 2024 or in another 30+ years, then the city for them to be in had to be Mumbai.

There was going to be no two thoughts about it.

But as life progressed, salaries, safe working spaces and so many other things kept coming in the way. A prospective editor at a prominent newspaper told me in 2015-16, “We’ll never be able to pay you sufficiently for you to have a decent standard of life in this city. If you had relatives in the city and could stay with them without having to pay rent, we could’ve considered.”

I mean, nine years later now that I think of it, I surely dodged a couple bullets there. The paper folded in the coming few years and we especially all know nothing good can come from staying with family to save on rent.

Further back, I had a chance to travel with a prominent mainstream filmmaker’s unit to Sri Lanka to work as a script supervisor. I was freshly out of law school and still fairly dependent on a nod from my parents before taking up anything. My father just shook his head and politely requested me to not think of “that industry”. Crying, I then remember recoiling to the thought of getting to go there some other time. Just the promise of that thought in all its halting, yearning, bittersweet, exhilarating, terrifying, stumbling, hilarious glory, was made things better for me at the time.

The most recent missed connection between me and the city was just before covid when a prominent film festival from the city offered me a full-time position to join them as a festival coordinator, writer, the works. I applied for the position, went through the rigmarole of interviews, conversations, water testing back and forth for days and was eagerly waiting to hear from the employers on the offer. I watched days turn into cliched weeks and before I knew a month had galloped by and not a word from the festival organisers.

Even through the mist of the years that have intervened so far, I am able to distinctly recall how I yearned for that email to land in my inbox. It was an especially hot May that year when from the bedroom of my rented Panchsheel duplex, I wrote a hurried, cloying, sweet email to the person with whom I was in touch. After a couple of hours of fervent refreshing, waiting for the offer to just show up out of nowhere when I finally did receive an email from them, it was a two-line curt but sweet something like: “We tried reaching you a couple of times over the last 2-3 weeks on the phone but didn’t hear from you. We even sent you an email but didn’t see your reply, so we decided to go ahead with another candidate.”

Another chance gone by but even before I could begin to lament over the loss, I had started going out with this guy I sort of met at my workplace, Mint, and was contemplating moving in with him. I chased after the feeling of complete and utter satisfaction, love and pure companionship I felt with him. Before long, we had moved in and seven years later here we are married and whatnot! So that story obviously turned out to have a sweet, sublime new turn.

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I still joke with M how had it not been for me being totally smitten with him, I’d have packed my bags and moved to Bombay back then in a grey, blind rage and made a complete fool of myself. Come to think of it, I had I moved in to Bombay all those years ago, be it after law school, or journalism school or from Delhi, in all circumstances I can for some reason not foresee anything good to have come out of that.

I’d have been conned by bad workplaces that wouldn’t pay well, boyfriends who weren’t half as sincere and would probably have lost my love for the movie world, and by extension, the writing world. The hustle culture the city is steeped in now, from writing for films, to online series, to god knows the plethora of writer’s kitchens that seemed to have proliferated in the city in the span of the last three years alone will give skyrocketing anxieties to just about anyone.

More than everything else what I feel I would’ve felt the biggest loss of would’ve been my genuine and still childlike love and adoration for films and for literature. I now know that I am looking at it strictly from the lens of a chance missed and a chance missed for the best, and maybe it could not have been this bad, after all. But, that’s how we cope right and we all do know how this city, especially this industry is capable of turning almost any nether dream into a statistic. A la Sona Mishra from the immensely condescending and narrowly conceptualized Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance.

Perhaps some turns are for the good after all and not all the ones who get away are missed chances. Maybe there’s water to succor from the waters of explored, chartered, well-trodded places. Harmonies that haunt me like friendly ghosts.

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Writing these substacks over the last few years has unexpectedly brought me closer to other readers, writers and walkers. If reading this dredges up resonant memories or stirs up a wonderful pot of emotions within you, I’d love if you left a comment, or shared this with a reader friend!

Anandi is a writer based in Delhi.

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