Primalsoup

My earliest memories of Bombay are stitched together with delays, derailments, and the kind of chaos that becomes funny only twenty years later.

The first time I travelled to the city, my mother, my aunt, and I boarded a train from Chennai, a simple journey, three days of sightseeing planned, my Maama waiting for us at the other end. Instead, somewhere near Guntur, our train derailed. Not dramatically, no overturned coaches, no news coverage, just the slow, grinding announcement that we would not be moving for a long, long time.

We spent twenty-five hours on that station platform, slowly running out of water, food, and enthusiasm. When we finally reached Bombay, dehydrated, cranky, and spiritually defeated, Maama, in full benevolent-uncle mode, tried to compress three days of joy into forty-eight hours.

He took us to the World Trade Centre, where I rode an escalator for the first time in my life. Naturally, the belt of my frock got sucked into the mechanism, and I burst into tears as a crowd watched with the resigned curiosity only Bombay can produce.

This city is not meant for small-town girls like me, I decided.

Of course, I came back.

*

A few years later, I was a teenager travelling with my sister on the Rajdhani Express from Delhi to Mumbai. Our journey was smooth until Virar, where the train suddenly stopped and people began jumping off the coaches, walking toward the suburbs.

Someone had desecrated an Ambedkar statue. The city was rioting.

As a privileged, insulated Savarna kid from Delhi, I had grown up saying his name without fully grasping his revolution. In Delhi, caste lived behind gates, in surnames, housing societies, and the quiet sorting that happens long before you arrive.

Bombay was different. Caste sat next to you on the train.

It surfaced in casual conversations I wasn’t meant to overhear, who could rent where, who was “adjustable,” who should keep their lunchboxes closed. It appeared in fieldwork addresses, in which neighbourhoods were mapped carefully and which ones were approached with caution. It showed up in who felt entitled to ask questions, and who was expected to answer them politely.

I didn’t have a single awakening. I had repetition. And repetition, in Bombay, is relentless.

Bombay has a way of doing that, introducing you to truths without ceremony, then moving on, unconcerned with whether you’re ready.

Hours after the riot, anxious and exhausted, we reached Mumbai Central station. Maama and my cousin had somehow navigated the chaos to pick us up. On our way home, my uncle decided we should “experience the local train properly,” and put us on a fast train headed toward Kalyan from Churchgate. I needed to get off at Thane. Everyone else was going further to Kalyan

In the crush of commuters, it seemed impossible.

But the fellow passengers said, “You girls get down first. We’ll throw your suitcases after you.”

As a Delhi girl, the idea that strangers would coordinate a luggage-ejection operation on a moving train sounded insane. Maama and my cousin nodded calmly, this was just Bombay kindness, expressed in its unique, slightly violent choreography.

And that’s exactly how it happened: we jumped off at Thane, the train began to pull away, and our suitcases came flying out behind us, flung with expert precision. Commuters waved at us like we were long-lost cousins.

Bombay is incredible, I thought, but I am absolutely never going to live here.

*

Naturally, my first job was in Bombay.

I arrived in my early twenties with one suitcase and the kind of confidence only a freshly minted graduate can possess. I lived in a 1BHK in Andheri, shared with two girls from business school. The apartment was small but solid, the kind of place where the walls held your life together while you figured everything else out.

We had a dinner dabba delivered every night, dependable, affordable, nutritionally repetitive. It was also the beginning of my long and complicated relationship with brinjal. I had been raised, like any self-respecting child from my cultural context, to regard brinjal with suspicion. Yet the dabba sent it with religious devotion. Over time, familiarity did what upbringing could not, I developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome.

*

I moved to Mumbai on June 5th. On June 12th, the monsoon arrived, not gently, not poetically, but with the ruthless punctuality of a deadline.

I had grown up watching Rangoli on Sunday mornings, Doordarshan’s dependable fare, where Amitabh Bachchan and Moushumi Chatterjee wandered through Bombay rains, singing Rimjhim gire saawan, looking pensive but dry, dampened only in ways that were flattering. This was my education in the monsoon.

So yes, I experienced it too. Just without the choreography, the lighting, or the background score.

Nothing prepares you for Mumbai monsoons the first time.
Nothing.

My employer, in its infinite wisdom, decided this was the ideal season for field training.

Day one took me to Sheesh Mahal, Bhendi Bazaar. The name sounded poetic to me, a glass palace on a street of ladies’ fingers. This, I should clarify, was not because Bhendi means ladies’ finger. It does not. This was simply my South Indian brain doing what it has always done, processing unfamiliar North Indian words through the nearest available vegetable.

Whatever passed for Google Translate at the beginning of time agreed with me.

What I found instead was a tired, dilapidated chawl that had not seen glass or royalty in decades.

I survived by clinging to the sampling instructions: skip two houses, follow the right-hand rule, smile politely.

Day two took me to Kalina, a low-lying area on a day when the city was surrendering entirely to water. Trains flooded. Streets disappeared. Patience evaporated. Nobody wanted to answer questions from someone asking, “Kya aapke toothpaste mein namak hai?”

Eventually, I learned that saying I worked for a market research company shut doors. Saying I was a student opened them. The gruffness softened. One woman invited us in and offered masala chai. I said it was chai–pakora weather. She smiled and said there would be plenty of pakoras for the next three months, by that argument.

At that point, we abandoned all sampling diktats and began to snowball. The chai lady sent us to her mother-in-law, not two houses away, but five streets down. The mother-in-law sent us to her daughter, which required crossing the holy Bombay divide from West to East within the same suburb. The daughter insisted we meet her best friend, who lived in an entirely different part of the city.

Were we following the rules of market research? No. Were we getting questionnaires filled? Also no. Mostly because nobody, it turned out, was actually using salt in their toothpaste.

Still, this strategy worked, in its own Bombay way, until we knocked on a door and found ourselves face to face with an actual professor from our alleged college. My colleague and I executed a hasty retreat, saved only by rain heavy enough to slow pursuit.

That was Bombay. It drenched you, humbled you, fed you chai, and kept moving.

*

After the fieldwork ended, life acquired a rhythm. Not calm, but survivable. I travelled from Andheri to Dadar every day, learning the choreography of the local train. Where to stand. When to move. How to be assertive without being rude.

Bombay teaches boundaries by erasing them, then expecting you to cope.

What I did not expect was who would teach me everything else.

There was my super-super boss. Tough. Exacting. The kind of person who could dismantle your entire thesis with three quiet questions. I would walk into her cabin with slides from a report I had spent countless sleepless nights on, fuelled by late-night dinners that were technically expensable to the client account. She would go through them slowly, challenging every assumption I had made.

Not in the way some managers do, scattering comments to justify their designation. She interrogated your data, your sensemaking, your conclusions. And when you are twenty-two, it can feel like she is interrogating you.

Once, I prepared a 150-slide deck for a presentation to a marketing head. She made me redo every single slide. In the moment, I felt incredibly stupid and strangely smarter at the same time. I could see, slide by slide, how each correction was making me a better researcher. Real-time progress.

Then, in the conference room at the client’s office, she stepped back. Everything said in that room was mine.

She knew when to break you and when to let you shine. With clients and people who mattered, she made sure they heard the work you had put in. She was building your reputation at a time when you did not even know that was a thing worth building.

*

And then there was my colleague, a peer, technically, though “peer” doesn’t capture it. She was my opposite: chatty, exuberant, full of plans. I was work-obsessed. She showed me it was possible to be a consummate professional and still have a life beyond the office.

After late nights at work, when my commute back home seemed impossible, she opened her home to me. Most days, someone at her place would let me in. Dinner would be laid out. Night clothes waiting. I would sleep and sometimes leave before she even woke up.

We never made a formal arrangement of it. It just became the way things were.

She introduced me to food and experiences I might never have found on my own. Swati Snacks, for instance, and a lifelong obsession with Gujarati food that began there. Even now, no matter how short my trip to Bombay, I make it a point to go and order the same two dishes: panki with chutney and Gujarati falafel. She jokes now that I’m cheating on her when I visit Swati Snacks by myself.

*

In that first stint, there was a peculiar intensity to friendships between women, forged not by shared interests but by shared survival. We borrowed clothes, shared money, memorised each other’s schedules. Someone always waited for the Reached? text.

Sisterhood in Bombay was logistical.

But it was also expansive.

There were more women than I knew how to name at the time. The friend from business school whose work life and love life ran in such perfect, disastrous parallel that we grew superstitious about it, begging each other to break the pattern before the universe noticed. My deskmate at work, whose dabba I would polish off without shame, while she smiled indulgently and laughed at all my jokes, including the truly awful ones.

There were my managers, three of them, all women, all quitting in quick succession through no fault of mine, though the timing did make me briefly suspicious of myself. They taught me how to be better at my work, how to recover from mistakes, how to take feedback without collapsing. On bad days, they pulled my cheeks, literally, when I disappeared into one of my dark moods, which was often. They did not ask me to be less. They asked me to be clearer.

And then there were the older women. At work, in neighbourhoods, in quiet corners of the city, they stepped in without announcement. They offered hot meals, rides home, advice that did not promise fairness, only navigation. They spoke about us in rooms we were not part of, advocated without credit, corrected narratives we did not even know were forming.

There were no speeches. Just a quiet insistence that we would not be alone.

They were all women I wanted to grow up to become.

*

Five years passed. I told people I didn’t plan to stay, as if saying it often enough would make it true. Then family called me back to Chennai, and the decision was made.

When I left, I realised something strange: I didn’t miss Bombay the city. I missed the women. The city had been the container, they had been the content.

For the longest time, Maama had been my Bombay. That one uncle we all have, the reason you visit, the person who makes a city feel like it has a centre. Some years ago, I lost him. The city remained, but something fundamental had shifted.

*

A decade later, I came back.

This time was different. I returned with more agency, older, more senior, no longer a twenty-two-year-old learning how to stand on a local train. My tribe was still there, though we had all grown busier. We did not abandon each other, but we also did not have to be codependent anymore.

And somewhere in this second stint, I fell in love with the city itself.

It was the freedom to be singular. Nobody in my life could be coerced to watch a Shah Rukh Khan movie, but when I insisted on watching Jab Harry Met Sejal, I did it alone, with ease. I began to eat alone at restaurants, watch movies by myself, exist without explanation. Dating in my mid-thirties felt possible here. A workplace where everyone accepted me.

When I go to Madras Cafe, the sign says we share tables. A Chennai-named place in Bombay, telling me that solitude here isn’t isolation, it’s just how things work.

The city was made for me.

*

In my second stint, my tribe only grew. And this time, I acquired my own children, young women I found myself raising the way I had once been raised.

I began to carry breakfast for my girls at work, the ones whose cooks were away, who were recovering from something, heartsick, or just homesick. When I reviewed their work, I spent time interrogating their assumptions, their data, their sensemaking.

I had become the women who raised me.

*

One night during my second stint, the city flooded again. My office was in Bandra. A few colleagues and I tried to make our way home through knee-deep water, but when we saw cars floating past us, unmoored and ridiculous, we turned back. The office, which had only ever been a place of meetings and deadlines, became a safe haven.

We sat on the floor with people we had never really spoken to before. Titles dissolved quickly. Someone ordered food. Someone else found blankets. We talked until 2 a.m., then slept wherever there was space, bodies arranged carefully around charging points and office furniture. At 6 a.m., someone walked through the room saying the trains were running again, as if announcing the return of gravity.

Years earlier, I had watched the city’s resilience from the outside and thought, this is not for me. I had admired it the way you admire endurance in others, certain it required a constitution I did not have.

That night, sitting on an office floor, damp and uncomplaining, I realised I was no longer watching. I was adapting. Adjusting. Making do without drama.

The city had got into me.

*

When I go back now, once a year, like a ritual I pretend is casual, I barely recognise the city. Bombay has always been a place where the old makes way for what comes next. I knew that. What I had not accounted for was the speed.

The small places I once hung out in are gone. In their place are places that assume a different version of you. I find myself walking past them, slightly out of sync. Buildings that once did their job quietly now want to be seen. The city feels more assured and more exacting at the same time, less interested in easing you in, more confident that you will either keep up or step aside.

Some things, mercifully, remain unchanged. Swati Snacks is still there. The menu looks the same. I still order the same two dishes, half-expecting the city to notice that I am pretending nothing has moved on.

Sometimes it feels like Bombay has outgrown me.

And yet.

Recently, I went back for a reunion with my first employer, decades later. I met the women who had raised me professionally. And they got to meet the woman I had become.

Conversations resumed mid-sentence. Decades collapsed without effort. They asked if I was eating properly. They remembered who I was before I learned how to hold myself together in public.

In their presence, the city slowed. Not physically, never that, but emotionally. The gloss fell away. I remembered that before I learned how to survive Bombay, there were women quietly making sure I did not have to do it alone.

And somewhere along the way, without ceremony, I became one of them.

To have known a love like Bombay is to have been raised, and then to raise. The city does not hold you. The women do. And then you pass it on.

And still, somehow, you belong.

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