The Loneliness of a New City is Bittersweet: A Love Letter from London to Mumbai

By Neha Solanki

Prep Time: 25 minutes                                                                 Cooking Time: 35 minutes

Ingredients:

Bitter gourd

Onions

Fennel seeds

Spices

Ginger-garlic paste

Oils

1.     Peel the green pearls off the bitter gourd. Slit them gently. Lather them with salt.

Loneliness has a distinct flavour to it – bittersweet. You grow uneasy on a winter night. The extraction for coffee ran a smidge longer than it should have to result in a pungent espresso. Loneliness creeps up on your legs, slowly and twists like vines while you listen to your podcast and wait for the next train to Epping during peak hours.

You take a turgid sip of espresso martini. The mouth hesitates at its irksome nature but settles gently into it. In a swarm of people, the bitter jangles your thoughts. Swishes and swirls them gently around while you loosen up at a Simmons on a Saturday night.

Bitter: always unanticipated. Coffee, chocolate, rosemary, lemon rinds, wine. Once we were wild, we were told about poison. We urge it forward. Adapt. Now, enjoy it.

Sweet: granular, powdered, brown, slow like honey or molasses. Once when we were wild, sugar intoxicated us, the first narcotic we craved and languished in.

(Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler)

Olivia Laing, in The Lonely City, writes, ‘loneliness is by no means a wholly worthless experience’. It fashions itself as a symptom of inhabitation. However, bitterness like loneliness is tough to draw out. You either savour or inhabit or you try to get rid of it.

V told me to fix the bitterness from cucumbers, you must slice off a part of the end and draw circles on it with the piece. I never understood the science behind it, and still do not. When V first came down to Mumbai, it was the first time I met him after speaking to him on the internet for about a year. He had never been to Mumbai but that would be his home for the next few months.

For the longest time, my own relationship with my city was skewed. I never thought of the dilemma that is Bombay. It was always given away, borrowed. Once given away in a hefty dowry for Catherine of Braganza, I slowly see it erode and its fabric weaken, from another corner of the world, equally disruptive. I realise the city remains in the corner of my mind, like a rust-laden pinbox from Colaba.

In an old interview at NYU, Salman Rushdie speaks about the history of Bombay. Rushdie, who now lives in New York and once dwelled in London, occasionally visits Bombay. When asked if he misses Bombay, he says, ‘What I miss is the city that is not there anymore […] It’s the city that does not exist. It’s the city that used to exist.’ And it is so, rightfully. A fictional fantasy, Bombay belongs to no one and everyone.

2.     Salt the scrapings and leave them on for half an hour. Wash them in running water to get rid of excess salt and bitterness.

The scenic gateway and the waves crashing against it had always been there and I was convinced that if it had been there for eighteen years of my life, it would remain so for another eighteen. I saw it in passing always, through the car windows when it was barricaded and two pot-bellied police officers stood at the entrance. My being remained oblivious and at the same time attached to the waves, the heavy bricks that made the magnanimous Gateway of India, and the funnily shaped rocks on the marine drive.

 V flew down in the first week of June, I cannot recall correctly. June had a peculiar way of revealing itself in Mumbai skylines, in twenty different purple and blue ways. He had asked me if I could show him around – possibly the only time I had the chance to look at Mumbai from an unfamiliar pair of eyes. From the eyes of a stranger, of a new lover who would grow closer to you over time. His white linen shirt fell dramatically on him.

I had not revealed the location and the commute of my visit to my parents; they believed the Mumbai Locals (which were the equivalent of London Tubes) was no dignified way to travel. Travel does not particularly move me, perhaps this translates into my love life as well. Hotel beds make me uneasy, the softness of the mattress disgusts my spine. I like knowing I am going to be there for a while, which I think particularly stops me from pursuing any wanderlust-ridden adventures. One-day adventures for me please, thank you.

Mumbai Locals were thrilling. They never waited for you – no one does. You must hold on to your bags with all your might. They dictate your time and day. At Khar, after a twenty-minute commute, I stepped down or rather was pushed off. The secrecy and the unknown were the thrills of it all. Of course, there were times when I had gotten off the wrong platforms. Thankfully, it never got worse.

With a new lover, the city was sweeter and kinder. It didn’t look ragged and jaded. Bandra was quaint and populous, churches and markets towered above us. Elco Market, its delightful street food and the tangy sunsets, constructed a moment in time for V and me. Vicariously enough to be a stranger, I could not bargain with the vendor who sold a souvenir for twice its price. I didn’t insist on it, for the leisure of being a tourist also had to be bittersweet. Through his eyes, it helped me to gain a little bit more appreciation for Mumbai. Through him, the city I lived in all my life looked like it had my name on it. The night before my flight, I got out of the car and stood at Apollo Bandar, counted the ships dangling in the sea and felt a sharp pang.

3.     To make the stuffing, saute the onions, ginger-garlic, fennel seeds and scrapings. Add turmeric powder, coriander powder, salt and dry mango powder/amchur.

In September, our love found its new form as friends for distance forced us apart. London felt lonelier. To invoke Laing once again, ‘Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place: a city in itself. And when one inhabits a city, even a city as rigorously and logically constructed as Manhattan, one starts by getting lost’. Without a lover to call this city mine I was alone in a visible manner. On days I felt I wore it on my coats. I found that the city had its own drink, from fancy Aperols to the ‘wakes you up and then f*cks you up’ espresso martinis to the bolder pornstars. I meant martinis.

4.     Once cooked, let it sit to cool. Then stuff the mix in the hollowed-out bitter gourd and fry.

One of the strangest things I have ever found myself gazing at is the grout at tube stations. The one at Goodge Street particularly entices me. Green, black and cream tiles are all laid next to each other. If I can magically stuff my existence in those crevices, I might as well say I inherently belong to the city. I wonder if the tiles ever move from their place, just like the commuters who stand in a disciplined file on an elevator.

I learnt the hard way that you must stand on the right if you have the luxury of ticking needles not nudging you to the next destination. A friend suggested that if you want to cry and have no one look at you while you weep disgustingly, Tower Bridge is an apt setting. An extramundane incision in time, I put the remedy to use. I did that. To make myself cry, I walked across from London Bridge to Tower Bridge, often confused for one another. To see my grief unfurl, I took the Jubilee line. loneliness will eventually wash off. It slowly wears itself down over time, through kindled familiarity. If you are fortunate.

Laing talks about this familiarity: ‘Over time, you begin to develop a mental map, a collection of favoured destinations and preferred routes: a labyrinth no other person could ever precisely duplicate or reproduce.’ My labyrinth was purely incidental. Lubaina Himid’s exhibition in Tate Modern had been there for a while. I had been to the museum before but my reliance on technology had failed me. I returned around 6pm having missed the show.

Around the second time, I remembered to take the shortest exit from Southwark, with some recollection of all the shops I had seen on my path before without peeking at the google map – Prince William Henry Pub, absurdly pink mailbox, and Leon. To have the realisation, that this familiarity had played itself out was astounding. It was saccharine yet unpleasant. It was bittersweet.

Note: Fennel Seeds or Onion can add sweetness to the stuffed bitter gourd.