Mumbai

Give me any place, any city, town or village to live in for a couple of months, ideally a year, and I will inevitably fall in love with it. This is, however, far from being a romantic habit, for love means the vicinity of hatred and the exposure to pain just as much as it has the potential to create ecstasy and attraction.

Over the last couple of months Mumbai had hurt me and drained my energy like few other places before. Yet I cannot deny to be in love with it. It’s the only valid explanation for that peculiar gloominess I felt when parting with this city.

It is not the constant heat and haze that created this notion, not the horrendous traffic nor the highly questionable hygiene. It is every emotion triggered by these and many more characteristics of a hard-headed metropolis of which the world has probably only seen few alike. But that’s not all.

There are too many people in this city, everybody says so. However, it is these people that in the end make Mumbai a place worthy of your love. They are its biggest treasure admits all the dirt, smells and pollution and they had held me there with their own love and care for a much longer time than I had ever anticipated.

I will probably never stay in Mumbai for that long again, at least I hope I won’t. But they, the people who have been my friends, partners, lovers and family during the last months, and who now know that I am talking about them, will make me want to come back time and time again.

To that city I have fallen in love with.