Monsoon Flavors

As I prepared to leave Mumbai, my home of two years, I took on a sort of emotional packing to piece together the smells and places and misery I should commit to memory – and those I could discard.

I knew it was the food – the dripping, crunchy mixes of yogurt and ghee – that would leave me hardest. To celebrate the city’s street food, I dragged my new boyfriend and old friends through the precarious side streets that snake perpendicular to Mumbai’s main roads and house the best bites. I acted calm, or maybe I didn’t, but I felt an urgency and a dread that if this was the end then I had to, had to, find and devour every jalebi I could.

The monsoon came early in 2013, and while it annoyed me then, I now think it fitting that those final food-flights were carried out under constant threat of storm. Not rain, but the calamitous, thrashing outbursts that define the Mumbai monsoon. We leave this world as we enter it, as they say – in this case, soaked and cursing.

On the last outing, the sky opened upon us somewhere between Chor and Bhindi Bazaars, and we huddled under the useless awning of a bike repair shop. Mumbai’s infrastructure is never prepared for the year’s first storms, and we whined and jumped about, trying to avoid the puddles as they bloomed into flood. Heaving piles of trash were fast consumed by the grey water and started to catch at our ankles.

We were all in it – shopkeepers, motorcyclists, skinny kids in polyester frocks, and eaters – ungracefully welcoming the monsoon as we always did. Yelling at the rain and the city and each other, we found strength in the shared cacophony of street and scream. I CANNOT WAIT TO LEAVE THIS PLACE!

But I wasn’t relieved. Not at all, not even a little bit. As I shook my fist at the sky, I was just barely holding back tears. I wondered then, how did I ever get here, to this place of belonging? Because for all of the ways I hated Mumbai, it was home. Not only the city – but those specific moments of chaos where your life collided so sharply with others’, the fervor of that urban monstrosity, the utter exhaustion that had made me question at first if I would survive two years – it all sustained me. It gave me the life I wanted.

The storm stopped as suddenly as it had began, and everyone muted themselves accordingly. Forgetting my rage, I dug into the paper bag I was clutching, bringing a warm jalebi to my lips. I grinned as its thick syrup coated my fingers, making everything sweet to the taste.