Nothing like a housebound illness to make you feel utterly lonely, despite assurances by parents and friends.
I left Delhi in unusual circumstances. One, my then university was corroding me from the inside. Each day the workplace indignity was astounding. Two, I had dislocated my left shoulder (for the 11th time!) and the doctor had suggested surgery. Three, the surgery, it turned out, was unsuccessful. The expected recovery period was little but the body took its own sweet time. Nothing like a housebound illness to make you feel utterly lonely, despite assurances by parents and friends. My colleagues were afraid of my dark circles when I returned to work. And four, about three years before all this drama, I had the most stinging heartbreak at the hands of the most beautiful of men. So, you see, a chain of events had started long ago and it was asking me to leave. I decided on Mumbai where my family lived. Sometimes, if you fall through the net of queerness, the family catches you (mostly it is the other way around).
I moved to Mumbai. Saying that might be a stretch. I moved to Kalyan, which is a suburb of Mumbai. Colaba wallahs don’t even think Andheri is Mumbai. Andheri wallahs don’t think that Borivali is Mumbai. And no one, for good or bad reasons, thinks that Kalyan is Mumbai, except Kalyanwallahs. I am, of course, with the latter. We can play the game of who-belongs till the cows come home but my default position is usually a hooray for conurbations and for bedroom communities claiming all they want from the city! I have been in Kalyan now for about four months. Each day, I have learnt something.
Here, I move in a sea of Marathi. New words enter my world. My broker says “mi visarlo” and I learn the word for “forget”. The rickshaw guy says “kuthe” and I learn the word for “where”. My tongue does unimaginable somersaults over the Marathi consonant ळ. And I feel surprising amounts of pride when the priest at the Haji Malang dargah mistakes me for a local and proceeds to ask questions in Marathi (of course, he soon realises his mistake). But all along, I still feel both relief and joy when the barbers at my local salon use languages my ears are more attuned to, in which I hear the twang of Etawah or Auraiya, or Budaun or Bareilly. For a poet, contiguity with a new language is a boon. In Delhi, my goal was to learn all the scripts of a Delhi road sign, Nastaliq, Devanagari, Roman and Gurmukhi. I knew the middle two, and learnt, to different degrees of comfort, the first and the last, with the help of a former student and the YouTube videos of the British Sikh diaspora. Now, a new goal presents itself. The language of Arun Kolatkar. The language of Janabai. The language of Jerry Pinto. The language of Namdeo Dhasal.
And the place I hear the most languages is in the Mumbai local. I have become somewhat of a Central Line addict. From the station, a stone’s throw from my house, Shahad, I board the local train, reaching CST in 1.5 hours. Like a good provincial, I have gotten used to the time it takes to reach the beating heart of the city. The train ride itself becomes a rich, zany, joyful thing. Unlike many commuters who are rushing to and from work, my timeline for the train is more lax, mostly travelling outside peak hours. I get to try hammy and tired jokes on my Marathi friends about the sounds of the station names like Titwala, Mulund and Diva. Two nights, I have seen puppies being birthed on the platform right under my window. I have missed my train twice on the same evening when it changed platforms at the last minute at Dadar. Fearing for my left shoulder, I have let three trains pass in Ghatkopar because they were too packed. I have christened the two lion sculptures on the CST building as Tillu and Pinki. All my years of Delhi Metro training had not prepared me for the stunning jolt that the Mumbai local is.
Prior to moving, I had lived in Delhi for about 21 years (give or take a three-year London PhD). I wrote my first poems (which could be called poems) in that city. I found my first ad hoc job there at SGTB Khalsa College. I found my first permanent job there, in another of Delhi’s satellite provinces called Dadri. I was used to what jumbo conurbations can give us. Here, I experience that daily. This being on the edge of the city. This being between metropolis and mofussil. This being between old languages and new. This strange promise, one makes to oneself when one teeters on the edge of turning 40, life can still begin anew, even now, even so. Kalyan ho.
Katyal, associate professor of Literature at BITSLAW, is a writer, translator and scholar based in Mumbai. His new book of poems, The Last Time I Saw You, is out this month
