Love, Fate & the Choices we make !!!

A trip was made to my hometown - Mumbai. The first thing I noticed about Mumbai, on that lovely February evening, was the smell of the different air. I could smell it before I saw or heard anything of what was happening on the other side of the airport terminal. I was excited and delighted by it, in that first Mumbai minute, escaped from work and back to my home town, but I didn't and couldn't recognise it. I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It's the smell of gods, demons, empires, and civilisations in resurrection and decay. It's the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the Island City, and the blood-metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches, and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers. I could call it the worst good smell in the world. But now i realise this that whenever I return to Mumbai, now, it's my first sense of the city-that smell, above all things-that welcomes me and tells me I've come home.

The next thing I noticed was the heat. I stood in the check-in baggage queue, not five minutes from the conditioned air of the plane, and my clothes clung to sudden sweat. My heart thumped under the command of the new climate. Each breath was an angry little victory. I came to know that it never stops, the jungle sweat, because the heat that makes it, night and day, is a wet heat. The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Mumbai, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave.

I made a choice a few years ago & the price i paid for this choice was to bid adieu to this urban hyper active roller coaster land of Mumbai. Now when i reflect back, i weigh once again the gravity of my choice to the sacrifices i made. But then, i still have a long time to live & most of the world to see before i can learn what needs to be known about love, fate & the choices we make.

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The thoughts & subject matter in this post are not exclusively my own. While i did experience what i wrote above, a well known author has helped me put my thoughts to words on paper ( or should i say a web page :-)). I hold him in the highest regard for this guidance.