Freedom, and The City

"Every time I have felt alone in the city, I’ve used the privilege of freedom to take myself to the city. And every time, the city has taken care of me."

(Pedestrians, Kemp's Corner, Bombay, Maharashtra, 1989 by Raghubir Singh. One of my favourite Bombay photographs.)

I just got myself some chocolate ice-cream.

If this were the lede of a news story, a newspaper editor would probably politely ask after my narcissist tendencies. (Or if I was lactose-intolerant and that’s why an ice-cream is an achievement.) Since I am neither, let me rephrase why I think this particular jaunt is worthy of a newsletter in itself.

I just got myself some chocolate ice-cream at eleven in the night. By walking some distance from where I live. Alone. Because I wanted to.

It’s been more than three weeks since I moved to Mumbai. And all through the excitement, and the homesickness of being in a new city, I’ve been thinking about what freedom means for a woman in a city – especially in India. I’ve thought of this while I waited for Google Maps to refresh in a lane in Bandra; lost but not too worried. I’ve thought about it while signing my name on a paper that declared me the owner of a brand-new gas connection. (A first, hence.) And definitely tonight, on the walk back, with most of my energies focused on eating an ice-cream before it melts, and little else. (I didn’t need Google Maps on the way back, I am not that directionally challenged, thank you very much.)

Freedom for a woman then, I’ve concluded in a half-baked thesis, is the space to be a person in a city. A person, first. And a woman (or whichever gender identity you identify as) later. Of course, it goes without saying that this freedom, like most freedoms in the world is premised on privilege and financial independence. But within the admittedly niche experience of being a working woman in a city, it is this freedom of being uniquely carefree that I’m experiencing.

A freedom where you can take yourself – your mood, your daydreams, your anxieties – to a city and find yourself taking solace in the chaos of what confronts you. When you can actually accommodate yourself in a city – rather than being in fear of it. Freedom is, as many feminists far smarter than me have argued, the freedom to loiter. To be at leisure in a city. To meet it, on your terms.

Over the last few days, I’ve relished this particular brand of freedom acutely. Don’t get me wrong – moving to a new city has been rough, just like I assume it always has been for anyone who has ever moved in the history of humanity. (Odysseus knows what’s up; though maybe he could have dialed down the drama a bit.)

But, every time I have felt alone in the city, I’ve used the privilege of freedom to take myself to the city. And every time, the city has taken care of me. So, here, in no particular order, a list of both new freedoms, and a thank you note to this city for allowing me to be a person in it. Apart from a record-making gesture of sorts (and maybe an indulgence of my narcissist tendencies?), I hope that this serves as a reminder to anyone who needs it of the beauty of looking out. And if no one reads this newsletter – which seeing how erratic I am in sending it, fair – I hope that this serves as a reminder to me when I need it.

• First night in a new, empty home. A mattress on the floor. Silence above. A celebration of music and dance for Ambedkar Jayanti below. A reminder on what community can feel like.

• A day spent frustratingly repairing things that keep breaking down. A feeling of isolation. A long walk. A board put by a Church committee asking for donations for an upcoming celebration. A reminder to ask for help.

• Mind-numbing traffic that doesn’t move. A billboard asking you to be kind to your mind.

• A rant about not having home-cooked food. A colleague who brings you khichdi the next day.

• Longing for familiar landscapes. A sudden realization of unfamiliar sounds, sights, and smells. An auto that feels like it’s going nowhere. A sudden jolt, and the traffic clears a little. You see a glowing red sunset. You’re not religious at all, but in that moment, you chuckle and maybe you are. A reminder to always look up.  

• You’re lost looking for a café. You find your way, and meet an old school friend. She tells you of how the city changed her. You feel both envious, and a little bit more at ease. You ask her if she wants to go with you to say hello to the sea. She says, “yes, why not.” You both giggle as you pass Mannat. (Hi, SRK.)

This is not an exhaustive list. Indeed, the city and its people have been kinder to me than I anticipated. (But then again, I am from Delhi. Just kidding, miss you, you stupid-hard-to-love-and-hard-to-leave city.) Maybe in a few weeks, I will stop feeling the newness of this freedom. Take it for granted, like many of my Bombay friends do. (“Of course you can get things at 11pm, you wrote a whole-ass thing about it?!”)

But, maybe that’s the thing with freedom. It can permeate to who you are quickly — before you know it, it is as omnipresent as the air you breathe. (Until of course, it’s taken away...) As I write this, I realise that the feeling of familiar acceptance of this freedom is something that I am looking forward to.

Especially if it involves a nightly routine of chocolate ice-cream.

Links of The Week

• I’ve always been fascinated with ageing. I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by some truly brilliant elderly women who live up to the “age is just a number” motto, so ageing is not something I am scared of. But I do find it interesting to see how society’s attitude to women changes as they age — especially when they age out of notions of desirability. It is why this piece titled “I’m 72. So What?” by Catherine Texier makes for delicious reading.
  
  I have obviously now reached, and perhaps even passed, the nebulous old age I had imagined and dreaded on that Central Park knoll years ago. And here I am, facing the couple of decades I might still have ahead of me (my mother passed away at 85, my father lived until 92, and my maternal grandparents until 92 and 97). It still hasn’t occurred to me to pack up my bags to “grow old in France.” Instead, I am dating online, and just finished a new novel. “You’re in denial,” Chloé said. “Who’s going to take care of you when you’re old? How are you going to climb up the stairs?”
  

• Judi Dench can rule my life, I love everything about her. Here she is giving advice to her 30-year-old self. I have taken copious notes.

  
  “Lots and lots of things scare me; but you just get on with it. Fright can transform into petrol. I get stage fright all the time; the more I act, the more I feel it. But you just have to use it to your advantage. Just like grief [Dench’s husband, actor Michael Williams died in 2001 from lung cancer], fear engenders a huge amount of energy and you have to make it work for the better, otherwise you’d crumble.”
  

• The Alipore Posts’s Dear Jasmine series is the kind of thoughtful advice columns we need. Its latest edition on letting go of old loves, and taking a chance on yourself particularly makes for essential reading.

  
  “Life is not a grading test. The idea that anything has to last forever in order to have value is robbing us humans of our capacity to enjoy our lives. I asked you to think about the Earth right at the beginning because our Earth is tangible proof of the fact that a season doesn’t have to last a lifetime for it to be valuable to our planet and to us. Do you ever want the monsoons to last all year long, or the summer to never fade? Our lives mirror the universe, and as long as we live paying tender attention to the present, we don’t have to focus on making delight last forever. We only have to enjoy it.”
  

• I don’t know how to feel about this Wired piece called “Bodies Are Canceled. Thanks, Instagram” except it made me feel very old, and also quite young, if that makes sense. It also made me want to delete my Instagram account.

  
  “ How we look—at ourselves and others—and its often-negative consequences remain more a matter of hair-trigger emotions than of rational thought. Once you’ve learned to see your body as an object, “you can’t turn that off,” says Renee Engeln, a psychology professor at Northwestern University and the founder of its Body & Media Lab. “You can only walk away.” The best tactic, then, is a little more extreme than anything formally proposed before: Stop creating and consuming images of bodies. Cancel corporeality. Find ways to perceive, and be perceived, less.”

That’s it from me this week! If you have any tips, hard-won lessons, thoughts about moving to a new city, please hit “Reply.” If you have any reccomendations for plays in Bombay I can’t miss, also hit “Reply.”

That’s it from me this week. I will write again soon. (No, really, I will.)