it’s complicated

Mumbai, you are the only city that smells like home and exhaustion all at once.

You give me evenings where the sea breeze untangles my hair. You give me orange skies to stare at with an open mouth. You hand me vada pavs and artistic schezwan rolls at street corners. You surprise me with much-needed faloodas at 1 am. You let me drive on flyovers that glitter like necklaces strung across the night. You make me sit in theatres with audiences just as excited as I am. You give me creative inspiration to write for hours on end in a cafe. My memories of you are stitched into these moments – family dinners, school friends, late-night drives, Bollywood films, and the comfort of knowing that no matter how many times I leave, you are still waiting.

But why is your love never simple?

To belong to you means to be okay with so much.

To walk your roads is to be stripped bare by a thousand eyes weighing me down heavier than the humidity. To travel your streets is to feel pressed from all sides, bodies jostling, space shrinking, privacy dissolving. Your skyscrapers shimmer with ambition, but their glass windows look down on the torn tarpaulins of Dharavi—an unflinching reminder of how close wealth and poverty sleep beside each other here. You make the poor work until their spines bend, while your politicians remain busy polishing the rich. In your government hospitals, fans creak and queues stretch for hours while lives hang in the balance. You let temples and mosques and churches rise side by side, but you never talk about the cracks in the walls that divide them, sometimes unseen, and sometimes like a sharp blade.

I love you, but sometimes you feel like betrayal. You offer glamour and opportunity, but you demand air, dignity, and fairness in return – survival is always taxed.

And yet, despite everything, I keep coming back. My childhood skips into Kabutar Khana to chase pigeons. My friendships bloom over shared Tibbs Frankies and oreo milkshakes. My first dreams flickered to life under your warm theatre lights.

Mumbai, you are both comfort and ache, my inheritance and my burden. You sell dreams on billboards yet hide the cost in sweat and bone. You are the sunset I photograph a hundred times over and the shadow I avoid on crowded streets. You are the monsoon that makes some of us reach for chai and poetry, and the flood that others have to bike through to deliver groceries in ten minutes.

You are a contradiction, I fear I will never solve – sea and smoke, cinema and slum, stories and secrets. You love me like fire; warming, consuming, never safe. And I, foolishly, still write about you, still drive your bridges at night, still wait for your rain.

You are the city that teaches us how to romanticize survival. You are both the dream and the price of dreaming.