September's warmth was on my skin, in the air that I breathed, mixed with the odour of freshly cut grass. A long, beautiful day was closing up, I walked, my bicycle for company and the night's omnipresence too. It was in one of those moments, simply like that, when in a moment's pause, I stayed still, blending into the still night, that I felt myself falling in love.
This city has been home for a while. I had a normal relationship with it. We were like acquaintances who run past each other occasionally, stop for a hello and a quick chat, and then move on until a chance encounter puts us together near the stair case again. Like I‘d chat with a neighbor Or an occasional colleague. No conscious efforts from either direction to invest anymore than that in each other. Not because the other isn't interesting. Only that the thought never occurred.
It had and is treating me well. The first time I had a place for myself, doors that would open with keys in my purse, trash that would remain until I took them out, plants that would die if I were depressed, wine bottles that awaited me to burst into life. I existed here without thinking much about it. It was a good place, and that was all, just like the person near the stair. Each day dawned and ended here, and I spent them engrossed in my life, until yesterday, late in the evening.
The last time I felt attached to a place it was a mad Indian city that had swallowed me into itself yet Sometimes made me aware that it isn’t mine. Mine in the sense that I wasn’t a daughter of the city, merely a visitor, Or an explorer, a learner, still curious. I had yearned to be more than that, Yearned for the impossible, To be unborn and take birth there, As one amongst the dense crowd of children That the city birthed and nurtured.
This new love is worse - makes me jealous of that previous self Who could atleast belong to a certain layer Into the city of her dreams. Now here I am, a total foreigner, I live in and have fallen in love With a city that I knew not existed Until I was twenty-one ! One that I hadn’t spotted on the world map, One that I had never used in a game of Name-Place-Animal-Thing, One that I had never seen in my dreams, One that I didn’t hear from the dreams of my friends.
One of life’s miracles - how I ended up here This corner of the world to be precise, It’s not an obvious choice like New York or London, or Bangalore or Mumbai. I know the basic answer to why I am here. But deep down, I still do wonder, how, How on earth is it that I live here? What is a girl from eleven degree north Of the equator doing at fifty two degrees? What is the thread that connects these two?
Maybe there needs no explanation, It is as pure and as raw as the fact that, I belong to the earth you are but a piece of it.
Alleys 
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