Mourning a City

Mourning a city may feel like the following.

1. It may smell like the candy aroma of the butter chai near Jama Masjid. The warm, cozy corner where the fair man in white kurta sits on top of a table, vending chai in a machine that looks so unfamiliar.

2. Or it may sound like the metro announcement that buzzes in your head when you lie on your couch at home. "This station is Moolchand. Doors will open on the left".

3. The hundred thousand gullies of the city of Jamia, that crisscross each other like an intricate, undecipherable map. The crowd that remains in constant motion across the lanes of Batla, scented with the aroma of food- DJ Shafiq's famous tikka, the soft tandoori rotis served with love in Bilal, the Muradabadi Biriyani served across the street, you pick. The tombstones in Jamia's big graveyard, like which, I've etched the remembrance of our love that bloomed in this part of the city.

4. The sound of azaan at Jama Masjid, which strangely remains the city's most crowded place yet its most calming.

5. Shajahanabad's rustic old buildings. The taste of the langar at Gurudwara Sisganj. The walk through chandni chowk that takes you to ghalib's home in ballimaran, as poetic as it still could be. Food in the lanes of jama masjid. Our one tired search for kashmiri kahwa that landed us at kashmir's salted tea, sipping which seemed an impossible task.

6. The roofless old masjid at Firoz Shah Kotla, studded with tiny archways, in which sits prayer rugs, beads, the quran and an imam who scrolls through his phone, disrupting the old worldliness of the place. The jinns who live beneath the masjid who receive letters after letters from concerned devotees every day.

7. The rickshaws that line up like an adornment on the streets outside my college.

8. The chill of the city in early January, and the weight of the layers of clothing against your frail body. The birds that flock the yamuna from a land so far in the winter and return purposefully every year, in the hope of coming back.If only I were as lucky as the seagulls of Yamuna, I could have afforded to not mourn. Yet, here I am, helpless.