Popagandhi

I was born in a city, yes — people like us never think of ourselves that way. The city is the world. Perhaps it is: the city connects us to other cities, which collectively are ‘The World’ (though we never think of them as ‘just other cities’). I have never had to go to another place in order to board a plane or see a doctor. In three and a half years of active, engaged travel it has occurred to me I am the precise opposite of a country bumpkin. A city pumpkin? Awkward outside my element, awkward in not-cities.

The chaos of cities nourished me; thriving in anonymity afforded by urban life, spoiled by access to whatever I wish to have at any time of the day and night, growing up in a city that tries too hard and that never lets her people stop trying, has tired me from the start but how do you stop?

Like this.

You go to live in a town that would be nondescript but for its talent for attracting rain. Its shopping centre is not a mall but what you might call a slightly large provisions store. The market is open once a week, with none of the logic we city pumpkins have decided must exist: no operating hours Mon to Fri 11am to 9pm, closed Sat Sun and PH. But if the market is open on Monday this week, then it will be on Tuesday the next, and Wednesday after. You wake up to the sun rising over Bangladesh, sip tea in a garden after The Boy pulls a pail of water they heated over a charcoal stove into your bathroom. You go to work, and the sun sets over the Jaintia hills on your long drive back from the coal mine. You sit in a tea house drinking sha dut trying to understand the attraction of betel nuts learning the finer points of Khasi grammar and pronunciation. You drive from Sohra (the hills) to Shella (the plains) and your driver stops every five minutes speaking a different language in a different village, and all your pretensions towards tribal languages come crashing down. A rumble in the distance. Rain falls upon Sohra. In Shillong Lou Majaw sings paeans to Bob Dylan. This is not a city: you feel irretrievably lost.

Like that.

This is the city: you want to be irretrievably lost. You board a bus alone on a lark at five in the morning. A boy hopelessly peels lychees for you and would probably hold a bag for you to spit seeds into, if you asked. You do not understand the logic of the not-city, but layouts of small towns are the same, and conversations at the backs of songthaews are the same. Toothless tribal men with beautiful children ask the same questions. khun pai nai krap? Good question. Where am I going? You want to say mai roo! but the idea is preposterous. Having come this far — having been three centimetres from Burma a few minutes ago — you should at least have an idea. You want to be lost but you cannot. You talk about things you have seen, places you have come from, places you will go to next. Before you finish: pai chedi sam ong laew ko ja pai reung rehm (the three pagodas pass where you stared longingly into Burma, the hotel where you will witness a beautiful sunset over the Vajiralongkorn lake), three raps on the vehicle and the toothless men go home to their villages, waving and sending you their chok dees. Children playing, sights of swings and tricycle tracks, smells of homecooked food wafting through their paperthin walls always make you sad; they remind you this is not your world. What is your business here? You think of home. What you said earlier about where you’re going home to — krungthaeyp, of course — doesn’t feel like a lie. The city is your home, you love the king, your people (the Teochews) run the country, and your Thai is now good enough. But this is the not-city: therefore not your home, but you are getting used to the idea.

Home in the city; my city, or what pretends and tries to be. I have forgotten crowds, lines, and the logic of crowds and lines and peak hour traffic. I have forgotten that people push and a person cannot hope to read a book in a 6.30pm train past the business district. I have unconsciously started to hate the city, setting the wheels into motion in a process I cannot and will not undo. I now fear the order of cities more than before, and fear the routine of cities above all. The predictability of traffic, bad mornings and jobs you hate. If you fear order and routine you cannot love this city. Like Saleem Sinai I can smell: home used to smell of my bed my lover my airport my home my city. These days my city smells of nothing, and my nose wanders off to a hill station in the Himalayas, hoping my body will soon follow, and reminisces for the smell of Bombay at midnight, when a big city becomes something else altogether: magic.