Leaving Bombay

I'm not done with #thebombayloveproject yet. But I came back home to the US in June all the same. I expected it to feel like leaving a bad lover, but it feels worse. I wanted to throw up at the airport yesterday. Cried until I couldn't breathe.

It wasn't just that I didn't know when I was coming back. It was that I had grown attached to Bombay, depended on her like a habit, craved time with her. The cool and empty tree-lined streets of the suburb I live in in Chicago were beautiful today... and disquieting.

Here are the first and last pictures I took in Bombay. Neither are technically good. But both are in the monsoon. I came to Bombay just as the monsoon was disappearing in 2008, the Arabian Sea rocky along Marine Drive, and I left just as the monsoon crept in this June 2010, forcing the phalwallas (fruitsellers) under the shelter of waterproof tarps. How can a human miss the rain this much?

right aur wrong

One thing people I interview for #thebombayloveproject keep telling me is that love is both right and wrong for this city.

One way it's right is because in Bombay any person can be anonymous, swept away by the tides of thousands. Different castes and religions get blended together.  A person can disappear if they want to, reappear with another name.

It can be wrong because in Bombay there is no privacy. Lovers have to go to Bandra Bandstand, and sit along the rocks on the beach and kiss. Prudish mammis tap their canes on the lovers backs, but there's nowhere else for them to go.

Perhaps love is right and wrong for every city, but in Bombay it feels more so.

Bombay Love Project

Here, I am, already two days late for the daily posting. But, as promised, the idea behind the #thebombayloveproject:

Bombay has changed a lot for its lovers over the past generation. Psychologist Shaifali Sandhya says marriage in India has undergone more change in the last two decades than it has in the last three thousand years.

Last generation couples lived through the country pre and post liberalization, in a time with only one TV channel and now with hundreds of dramatic serials. They lived through the austere, tighten-your-belt India and are now living the consumeristic, better-buy-your-wife-a-gold-watch one.

This generation is another animal. They’ve only seen the India who is on the world stage. They've only lived the India that is hungry for position and power and money. And they want those things themselves.

The last generation grew up in the 60s and 70s, the period of youth rebellion. If a girl wanted to love someone that she shouldn’t, of whom her parents didn't approve, she rebelled. It was fight, elope, or die.

This generation doesn't need to agitate. If a girl's parents say no, it’s beseech and appeal for your love marriage, and then beseech some more. And her parents just might say yes. Even if it’s to a man of another caste, or within the same gotra, or across continents to a man of another race.

Of course, it’s not all rosy. Hindu Muslim relationships are still do or die. Some parents don’t care if they hated chafing at the bit—they want their kids to do the same. But these are less.

There are other changes. Marriages are happening later. Joint families are becoming rapidly nuclear. There are more live-in relationships. More divorce. And more sex, sex, sex. Some of this has been mapped out, by Shaifali Sandhya in Love Will Follow, Mother Pious Lady, by Santosh Desai, Surviving Women, by Jerry Pinto. 

These tell the facts, the cold, hard trends. I want to tell the stories. 

#bombayloveproject

Good Night, and Good Luck Blog Revamp

Up until today, I used this blog merely as a space to keep all my writing for Forbes India and any freelance stories.  But now that I am working on #thebombayloveproject (explanation to come in my next post), I think the blog would better serve as a space to post findings of the project daily. It will included everything from finished stories to partly-coherent ramblings.

I'll also add links to interesting outside articles and excerpts from places like Photographic Youth Music Culture Archive, Arts and Letters Daily, India Uncut, Bartleby, The Guardian, NYT, Modern Love, and anywhere else that prints something new or beautiful. (Plus visuals from flickr, FILE, and LIFE; sounds from stereomood and pitchfork; and celluloid from TED, academic earth, and youtube.)

Mostly, though, it it will be a place to record findings of #thebombayloveproject.

To start, check out Ernest Hemingway's difficult short story on love: Hills Like White Elephants. 

Societies and firangs just don’t mix

Read it at the Hindustan Times

Mumbai, May 11, 2010

I’ve lived in two housing societies in Mumbai. And both tried to kick me out on the street. A housing society, as I had always understood, is just a residential complex with flats. And the point is, for everyone, to have access to its utilities, help keep crime at bay, make sure the mail is delivered and so on. But in Mumbai, it is so much more. Here a housing society is an association of people with similar interests. There are Muslim societies, vegetarian societies, wealthy societies where every kid goes to The Cathedral and John Connon School and so on.
In the past year-and-a-half, both the societies I’ve lived in have shared the same interest: to preserve that ever-elusive term ‘Indian culture’ in their housing complex, in any way they could. My first landlord sat me down before signing the lease and asked if I was loose, and whether I’d

Kumbh: In Search of Spirituality

Pilgrims from all over the country walk many kilometres to reach the place of the Second Royal Bath
by Elizabeth Flock | Apr 17, 2010

Read it at Forbes

When I planned my trip to Haridwar for the first bathing date in March, I felt good. I had been given a partial history of the “jar festival” by my yoga teacher (who had, years before, taken sanyasa), had a fairly decent understanding of Hindu beliefs after almost two years in India, and I would be with a Hindu friend who favoured Shiva. Nevertheless, I did have the same wide-eyed expectations that have attracted thousands of foreigners to the festival before.

It is, after all, the world’s largest pilgrimage, hosted by the world’s oldest religion. That the Ganga washes away one’s sins only added to the appeal. How could I not expect some sort of awakening?

When we arrive in Haridwar, after a harrowing bus ride, the Kumbh is in full swing. Pilgrims from all over the country have walked many kilometres to reach the place of the Second Royal Bath, and because our bus had dropped us off six kilometres away from the city centre, so must we. In front of us stride Rajasthani men with sweeping white turbans and curling moustaches; behind us South Indian maamis tread carefully, resplendent in saris despite the heat and dust; everywhere, pilgrims clothed in saffron walk with us.

When we finally find a hotel with an empty room, the owner tells us that we can’t stay. “I think one guest might change his mind and stay an extra night,” he says, standing in front of a sign that announced No Alcohol, No Non-Veg. “This is a very religious place,” he adds.

“Ah, but I am very keen to see the Kumbh with my fiancée,” I say, stressing the last word, smiling as sweetly as I could.

“Oh,” he says, clearing his throat. “Well then, madam,

Prague: City of Shadows

Dark and haunted by a bloody past, Prague is a city that can change you
by Elizabeth Flock | Apr 2, 2010

Read it at Forbes

I’m trying to tell you, the travel writers who call Prague a “fairy tale” city are wrong. Explore the enchanting streets lit by gaslight, they write. Hold your lover’s hand while you stroll across the Charles Bridge, and then off into the sunset. Or so they imply.

What’s conveniently left out is the other part of the fairy tale, the part populated by witches and gargoyles and imps. The part where older versions of the Brothers Grimm — Cinderella murders her stepmother, the Little Mermaid kills herself — ring more true.

Prague is dark, filled with grotesque reminders everywhere of its storied, bloody past. And it will teach you a lot, if you let it. I travelled in and out of Prague for six months, but even in an evening, the city can change you. It can also tear you apart.

Like it did Kafka. Prague’s bleakest fiction writer was haunted not only by his evil father, but also the