and such is love...

Started reading Suketu Mehta's Maximum City - Bombay Lost and Found, last night. IN the first 100 pages the author has summed 21 years of my existence. In trying to adjust to the Bambaiyya lifestyle..after living in NY for 20 odd years, the author with great panache and humour describes the ordeals of living in the city. A city that one can only grow to love by living it not just living in it. Everything that seems an adjustment to an outsider is a part of who I am today and I hold on to memories of it for dear life. The pollution. Clogged drains making it impossible to walk in the monsoons, the bipolar distribution of wealth, the middle class, the snobs and the reverse snobs. The incessant ringing of the door bell, the haggling with the sabziwaala for every rupee that doesnt really mean much other than "I will only pay what I think is right.. try ripping someone else off". A neighbour whose kitchen pipes leak making your walls damp.. people peering into your home from every given window, lack of privacy, Bollywood, mafia, actors turned politicians and vice versa. How I love it all.

Love is such a strange emotion. It makes the most despicable qualities in one endearing in another. Loving a place one has grown up in is like your first love. All flaws are adjusted to. You bicker, you complain, you fight, you threaten to leave, but you never do. And when you do, the fragrance of the attachment always lingers on.

On a tangent, once you love someone, how easy it is to forgive them their flaws. Forgive them that annoying slurping habit, that paunch you hate in everyone else, the horrible shoes, unreturned calls, even a forgotten birthday present. :-). All these are endearing. But its wishful thinking. I am just optimistic today. If it was that easy.. wouldnt love always last forever and tide over everything else ? What happens when you part ways... where does all that love go ?