Diksha Basu: On trading lives, New York for Mumbai

I scattered some belongings at various friends’ homes, took a car full of things up to my parents’ house in Ithaca and packed a bright red Samsonite suitcase with my essentials.

It was an easy life to wrap up. I’d only been living in NYC for two years and I didn’t have many loose ends.

While I loved NYC, I also experienced an urban isolation that was sometimes paralysing.

Rachael, my best friend since I was nine, and I sat at the Union Square Café one perfect spring morning and chatted over cups of coffee.

Like me, Rachael felt as though she ought to love NYC more than she did.

We realized that what made NYC great was the people. The people who had traveled the world, seen and done outrageous things, had wild foreign love affairs, and lived to tell their tales.

We, however, were part of the more boring group of New Yorkers -- the ones who moved there straight after undergrad with dull jobs at banks and advertising agencies.

Two months after this depressing conversation in Union Square, Rachael was on a flight to Spain and I was on a flight to India. 

My plan was to travel a bit in South India and then spend the summer in Mumbai -- the city my mother came from, the city that everyone was talking about, the city that was home to Bollywood.

I landed in New Delhi on a hot summer’s night and thought I had made a massive mistake.

It was sticky, humid, smelly and aggressive and regret flooded my body.

Even though I had come back to India twice every year, I felt a surge of panic this time. For some reason, even though I had a return ticket in hand for September, something told me I was here for longer.

Fortunately, that something was right. Fortunately, I didn’t turn around and run back into the sterile airport and back to the United States.

I spent a few nights in New Delhi, then made my way down to Kerala, met some college friends and traveled for a few weeks.

Then, finally, exhausted and happy, my red suitcase and I made our way to Bombay. Mumbai. I knew literally nobody in Bombay. A friend of a friend in NYC e-introduced me to a journalist from Scotland who lived in Bandra West and had a spare room.

As my taxi pulled onto Turner Road, Eicher map in hand, I felt strangely at home.

When the old taxi driver slowly carried my luggage all the way up to the apartment instead of mumbling at me to hurry up, I knew that Bombay was something special.

That very first day in Bandra, I fell in love with it. It was an India I never knew existed. Bandra was like a little secret that a small group of world discoverers shared.

Over the next month, I made friends of all races from all over the world. I discovered Bollywood. I drank wine by the waterfront with a Kashmiri friend. I ate paani puri at Elco Market. I rode all over Bombay on the back of another friend’s motorbike. I smoked endless hookahs on Carter Road. I helped rescue a crow that got caught in a tree on Varoda Road. I bought fresh fish in Chimbai village. I went to a Goan wedding in St. Stanislaus High School. I celebrity-spotted at Olive. I had coffee at the Bagel Shop. I met sleazy film producers. I laughed and I cried. And, when September rolled around, I cancelled my return ticket to NYC.

I didn’t postpone it, I cancelled it.

And thank God I did because soon after, I fell in love with a blue-eyed, blond-haired man. Not exactly a demographic I had expected to find here.

Now, suddenly, it’s 2011.

I’ve been back to NYC to visit but I’ve made Bombay my muse and my home.

I’ve discovered writing and I’ve written. About Bombay, about Bollywood, about Bandra.

I’ve started turning my writing into a career. I managed to snag a book deal and an acceptance to a Master’s Program in Creative Writing.

Which means that now, four years later, it’s time for me to finally make that return trip to New York City in earnest.

I’ve had to pull out my red suitcase and figure out a way to pack my essentials into it again.

This time the task is much harder. Somewhere along the way, my heart settled into Bombay.

Bombay is a crazy city. Hectic, stressful, exhausting but it’s brilliant.

I’ve never felt the urban isolation in Bombay. Every day is too much of a beautiful struggle in this city to ever feel truly lonely.

Bombay embraced me and I embraced it right back. From the taxi driver who helped me on my first day to the Movie Junction rental shop owner who allows me to owe him several hundred rupees at a time, I’ve made some unparalleled human connections with people whose names I’ll never know.  

I have a surplus of the outrageous stories I once envied.

This time, again, I have a return ticket booked. I suppose there’s always the chance I’ll cancel it but somehow I doubt it.

This time I think I’ll discover that I have space in my heart for two great loves -- New York City and Bombay.

And, to make sure, I think I’ll leave my red suitcase behind.

Elco Market, Elco Arcade, 46 Hill Road, Bandra (W); +91 (0)22 65877171
Olive Bar & Kitchen, 14 Union Park, Khar (W); +91 (0)22 26058228
Bagel Shop, 30, Anand Villa, Pali Mala Road, Bandra (W); +91 (0)22 2605 0178
Movie Junction, Shahina Bldg., Near Pali Market, Bandra (W); +91(0)22 26443322
The beautiful spot where I smoked hookahs on Carter Road sadly no longer exists. But the Carter Road promenade continues to be one of my favorite spots in the city.