Delhi is a paradox. It is a patchwork of diversity, the threads holding together the patches coming loose and their edges blurring into each other. It is a place that teaches and it is a place that breaks. It is a place that shelters people who are sanctuaries and people who are as hollow as dying trees. It is a place that gives so much and a place that takes away the valuable.
We live in a past of our own making, a present uncontrollable, and a future insurmountable. In Delhi, these bleed into each other until the vagaries of the past weather the stone of the present and the future moans under the weight of inexactness. It is a place where the past, the present and the future hold hands in a circle at the centre of which I sit with folded knees. I struggle in this continuum, as unfathomable as the grey waves of the seas, trying to find a pocket of solace untarnished by the blood of time. I don’t understand this city. I don’t understand its bloodthirsty weather that loves to toy with extremes. I don’t understand people who carry rage in their screwed fists and flippancy in their curving lips. I don’t understand myself when I breathe its air, my heart mimicking the pounding pulse of this forever-awake city.
This city has taken the meaning of home away from me and turned it into an unrecognisable caricature of itself. I don’t know what home means anymore. When I went to Gujarat for Diwali last year, the fluttering excitement of going back home did not make itself evident. It was as if I was going back to a place I recognised only through the stories others told me of it, my own memories standing at a remove. It wasn’t until I landed in Gujarat that I could say that the unsettling lack of feeling had dissipated a little. It was like accidentally chewing on a clove that my mom puts in the tadka for dals. In the first few bites, you don’t even realise you have chewed on something other than dal and rice, but, as soon as the realisation hits, you wait in numbness for a few seconds, and the harsh flavour of the clove bursts on your tongue, leaving you gasping. Landing in Gujarat was the same. The flavour of the realisation that I was back home was so strong that my tongue burnt with the taste of it. With this realisation, however, also came the taste of fear. The fear that Delhi has the strength to overpower the bucolic existence of my past and my memories with its unflinching pace and crush them under its weight until I remember to do nothing but run in order to survive the race that is life in this city.
But, ultimately, it is Delhi that gives me a reprieve from its own cruelty. It is Delhi which gives the scars left by its own brutality an ointment to heal. Delhi has taught me what real friendship is, it has taught me how to love. It has given me people who hold within themselves the blue-green power to help me face what is broken, if not the power to fix it. They help me up when I fall and hold me up when I climb high. They don’t call me by my real name, they call me “Aashi”, the nickname my family calls me. I don’t remember when “Astha” turned to “Aashi” or when friendship turned into family. It was as if we were patients suffering the same ailment, put together in a single hospital room, the pangs of our pain yearning for a companion, none of us realising when we decided to find strength in each other, to hold hands and find shelter from the city in each other’s palms. I have found homes made of flesh and bones, the rhythm of their hearts beating life into me.
This city is a tug of war. It is a tug of war between the memories of the home I left behind, a home that doesn’t know me anymore, a home that I am a stranger to and the present of a home that is seeing me grow, a home that is seeing me stumble through life, a home made up of people who keep me closer to myself. Delhi may have made home take on a different meaning, but it was definitely not a bad one, and it took me some time to realise why I didn’t like this change in meaning. Bricks can stay, but people go away. Homes that have hearts seldom stay in one place. So, Delhi’s meaning of home will keep on changing and transforming itself with the hearts of the homes it houses, and home, for me, will keep on shifting shape and the tug of war between the past and the present will not end.
Not only has this city given me people I call home, but it has also given me my first taste of freedom. It has taught me to learn the meaning of myself as I stand unfettered under its polluted, oil-pastel sky, my skin painted the colour of my dreams. But, just like the truth behind my thoughts don’t provide me answers to the mystery of myself, freedom also comes at a cost. Freedom, in Delhi, becomes a responsibility capable of crushing me under the weight of unexplored possibilities.
It almost seems like every good thing about Delhi carries a consequence as if happiness is a snow-capped mountain I must carry out a back-breaking climb for, and once I reach the summit, the heights turn out to be too frightening to allow me to stay. This paradox of a city is what causes hurt, and it is also what protects me from it. It keeps me bewildered at the centre of it, a prisoner in its maze of traffic-choked roads and sky-high buildings. All I can do to survive is keep myself from getting lost in its clockwork of creating pain and taking it away, of giving me happiness and scaring me away from it.