New city, silly old me

Part One, hoping there's a two and a three.

My first impressions of Chennai were on the lines of “Ooh, I want to live here!”. As unbelievable as it may sound to some of my friends, I am not making this up. That is exactly what I told myself when I sat in a plush bus on my way to keep an interview date at a Chennai college ( the one I hoped to get into) from the railway station. It was a good city I had heard, and unlike my ‘city’, it was city: Old magnificent buildings, a formidably noisy railway station with a clock tower and metal detectors noone cared about, Large libraries, A Mc Donald’s and KFC at every stop, Statues, Consulates, the works. I was impressed. I was also impressed, though in a different way, by how chaotic and dirty the city was. As the train approached Chennai central from the outskirts, sights of garbage—spread around the tracks, filling up water ways, being waded in by fat cows and lived over in shacks by poor—greet the sleepy eyed passengers. Almost all waterways were clogged, not by garbage alone but by small shacks built on land reclaimed with garbage on the sides, the settlements slowly expanding until water could flow no longer. The poor seemed to me to be living along these veins going into the city, their settlements crowding around and choking what looked like canals, even near the plusher, ‘malled-in’ areas.

I can’t say I am fond of cities much, and Chennai was very much a city. But I didn’t care. I had always wanted to leave Kochi. That desperation, the desire to break out of my parent’s control, was what made Chennai so attractive. I wanted to leave and wanted to be free- to write and travel and to drink or smoke or have torrent affairs if I wanted to. The possibility of discovering an alien world and supplanting myself into it with ease (hopefully), maybe even discovering a thing or two about me in the process, was essential to my idea of adulthood. I wanted to shed my old self a little and take on a new shell. There had been ideas in childhood of what growing up was- fantasies that I would drastically alter myself and turn into some gregarious sexy woman all of a sudden. These were never far from my mind. Big city, new improved me!

The move to Chennai however, when it came, turned out to be as non-radical an experience as a trip to the loo. If anything, the packing was the event; making lists, stubbornly noting down things I wanted, stitching clothes, worrying about clothes, worrying about irritating roommates and hostel bathrooms. Then there were the relentless goodbyes. Some were indifferent, some left me wanting to leave all the more and some, well one to be exact, left me with sadness and optimism. When the train left for Chennai with me and the bags, friends waved from the platform; smiling wide until I could see them no more. The weather was pleasant, fellow travellers absorbed in their thoughts. I tried to remember the ones I would miss much in the months to come. Almost all were leaving Kochi one by one as I was, so it didn’t matter where I went and how far. We’d have been a phone call away( and that is a long distance I know) even if I had stayed back.

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