Guwahati..

My life has been a tapestry of threads, woven with the ochre, blue and yellow of Guwahati, a city that changed me in irreversible ways. I recall with remarkable clarity all the moments when I came to know it, fell in love with it, lost myself in it, and eventually emerged from the experience a new person.

The madness of Guwahati’s streets and street markets overwhelmed and disoriented me. In a stranger land, it seized me, left me adrift. But I was drawn in, caught in paradox, my feet stuck in its clayey mud.

My ‘Urban Mantra’, in the heart of Guwahati, a town where bars and restaurants are far from sparsely scattered. Inside, at a dimly lit street tucked away from city life, the ambience throbbed with friends laughing hysterically over drinks shared, and the high-pitched crescendos and slow beats of live bands. It’s easy to see how the ‘night life’ had the potential to mend lives.

The throbbing sights and sounds of Guwahati, the music pulsating to the rhythm of my heart, would become the soundtrack for this chapter of life: each heartbeat echoing the lows and the highs of my tale, the indie gigs in niche cafés to the hard-hitting, thumping at the city’s bars and pubs.

But, it also revolved around a steady, searching self-examination of an emotional outcrop that grew in the dissonance of Guwahati’s narrow lane ways and café counters, as I lived alongside comics and endured a barrage of jokes as both an ‘item’ and the subject of jokes. At times, the stage of stand-up comedy fortified the comic performer’s confidence within me. On other occasions, it helped me gain the courage to confront and embrace the contradictions of my own vulnerabilities.

These were the most seismic years of my life, beginning in 2015 and ending in 2018, anodyne as they sound: years when I experienced some of my happiest and most painful moments, where I was transformed in ways unimaginable until it actually happened. Love. Loss. Guwahati. And many years later, a Guwahatian woman who would change the momentum of my life.

She was the muse who made me write, who made me write with the promise to write better, to write more, to write with such urgency that my writing drew not only from my mind but from the bedsheets, the pillows, the curtains but mostly from the mornings and midnights and that strange lull that happens on bright afternoons. Her encouragement made me write better. Her love provided light on dark nights; everything that one experiences when living in Guwahati, especially if one lives there for a long time, lands in one place after another, and the roads converge at the point of her memory, at the point of her laughter in my hallucinations.

But it wasn’t just the places, the people: it was the soul-marrow of family that held me still. My cousins, my fellow devils, the people who glued me to this earth with their blood and tears, guarding me from the miseries of the broken heart and drunken binges, doing everything needed to rise me to my feet when I stumbled, or holding me tight for the storm to pass. I heard their laughter.

For as hectic as the city seems at times, the little I have of Guwahati that is left in me, I miss most profoundly the old friendships at Urban Mantra. The city held many promises and almost fulfilled them all, but that’s really the lesson Guwahati taught me: that there are no promises but that we project our relationships on things and places. Not really the cities, but our cities. The pastimes in public squares, the picnics along riverbanks , but each relationship, full of its bounty and also its hurts and heartbreaks, worth remembering, if not for the facts, then for the stories it helps us tell about ourselves.
Guwahati will forever remain as a sacred patch in my quilt, a city that opened itself to me and helped me to thrive, loved my vulnerabilities, made me feel at home. And one day, when I can, I will find myself back, embrace myself in its warm folds again.