Neverland

The wheels stop fighting the runway. The nose lifts. Mumbai tilts into the window like a plate someone has cleared away.

There is a song in my ears as it happens. It comes off a shared playlist that my daughter and I keep. The one she updates far more often than she tells me, which is how I have quietly appointed myself its student. I listen to it to learn what she is listening to. It is the closest I get, some weeks, to reading her mind.

Today it has handed me a young woman singing about a lost boy and a place called Neverland. I did not choose it. She did, without knowing she had. The lyrics evoke something in me that I cannot accurately name. 

There was a time when I was alone
Nowhere to go and no place to call home
My only friend was the man in the moon
And even sometimes he would go away too

Take-offs are the good part of flying. Landings are only a relief, and relief always comes with a bill. The moment the wheels touch down, the present is handed back to you in full. The noise. The queues. The messages you have been pretending not to see. A take-off does the opposite. For a few minutes it lifts all of that off you and holds it away.

I have lived in this city for a long while now. I know it from the inside. Or so I think. From the ground, Mumbai traffic is not a road network. It is a contact sport with a few lane markings for decoration. A man on a scooter carries a fridge. A taxi treats three lanes as a polite suggestion. Nobody indicates. Indicating is for people who have given up.

The aircraft climbs. And the city does something strange. It behaves.

Away From Reality

Then one night, as I closed my eyes
I saw a shadow flying high
He came to me with the sweetest smile
Told me he wanted to talk for awhile
He said, “Peter Pan. That’s what they call me
I promise that you’ll never be lonely”

And ever since that day
I am a lost boy from Neverland
Usually hanging out with Peter Pan
And when we’re bored we play in the woods
Always on the run from Captain Hook
“Run, run, lost boy”, they say to me
“Away from all of reality”

From above, the roads I have cursed for two decades turn into a neat grid. Clean lines. Honest right angles. Streets that turn off calmly, as if they had never once held me at a signal for what felt like a small ice age. From up here, the chaos looks like a rumour. And the contradictions, which the ground hides, are suddenly laid out flat.

A metro line announced, half built, then quietly left alone. A grand mall where one handbag costs more than most people below will earn in a lifetime, and where, I am told, people fly in from Chandigarh just to shop.

The smooth walkways of Nariman Point, photographed at sunset. A footpath in Bhandup that is now only rubble, holding the faint memory that it was once a footpath.

Marathis, Gujaratis, Kannadigas, Tamils, and every other community you can name. I begin that list knowing I will never finish it. That is the only honest way to start a list about Mumbai.

He sprinkled me in pixie dust
And told me to believe
Believe in him and believe in me
Together we will fly away in a cloud of green
To your beautiful destiny

As we soared above the town
That never loved me
I realized I finally had a family
Soon enough we reached Neverland
Peacefully my feet hit the sand

Down there, give or take, is the population of Australia. A whole country of people, folded into a strip of land between a creek, the sea and land thereof. And from this height they melt into one thing. The towers and the tin roofs. The handbag and the rubble. One grey-brown weave, breathing under a thin haze, no longer arguing with itself.

The song knows this feeling. A boy flying away from a town that never quite made room for him, and feeling, for once, light. I am a grown man with a window seat and a boarding pass, and I seem to understand the boy completely.

Then the clouds come. A fresh patch of white wraps around the glass, and the city dissolves into it.

The Landing They Never Sing About

On the way back, a few days later, I am filled with a strange combination of a melancholic mood and restless energy.

So I do something small on the way down. I play the same song again, on purpose, to see how it sounds as the wheels came back to earth.

A song about a lost boy from Neverland, playing at the exact moment I am landing. The joke is not lost on me. The song is still pleading to fly away from all of reality, still promising a home that never touches the ground. And below it, getting closer by the second, is reality itself, wet and enormous and entirely real.

“Run, run, lost boy”,
they say to me
“Away from all of reality”
Neverland is home
to lost boys like me
And lost boys like me are free

The plane comes down through the monsoon. No white clouds now. Only grey, wet sky, and the city waiting under it. Vashi shows up first, across the water. The rolling hills of Powai. The mangroves of Vikhroli. Ghatkopar. My part of all this, rising up to meet me while a song in my ears asks me what really is home.

And the rain has turned the roofs blue. In the monsoon, every roof that might leak gets a blue plastic sheet pulled over it and weighed down against the water. From the air, half the city has gone blue. Thousands of blue squares, each one a household keeping the wet out. This city argues about everything. In the rains, it turns out, it agrees on the colour blue.

On one hillside, the houses are climbing. One stacked above the other, edging up the slope, a little higher each year. From up here it looks like an Everest climb in slow motion. A long line of people who set out years ago, carrying their homes uphill, and have not stopped since.

Then comes Saki Naka.

If you have stood at that junction, you know it is many things. Calm has never been one of them. It is heat and horns and a long argument between everyone and everyone else. I dread it. And yet, coming down into it this time, with a song about never landing still playing in my ears, the racket did not feel like a burden. It feels like a welcome. The city clearing its throat to say I was home.

For once, Saki Naka brings peace. The song wanted Neverland. I got Mumbai instead.

And I think of the girl who put the song there in the first place, somewhere below me in this wet blue city, and how a song about a lost boy finding a family had reached me at the exact moment the ground came back.

She had not planned that. Neither had I. But it is the kind of thing you notice, coming down.

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A small note, since you are reading this here. This is the first post on a made-over version of this site. The third time in more than twenty-odd years that I have pulled it apart and put it back together.

It is not finished, this new version. It has a few glitches, a broken edge here and there, a footpath or two that is currently rubble. I will fix them slowly. Mumbai has taught me that much. Nothing here is ever quite finished. You refurbish, you jostle with strangers in a lift, you get some work done.

Maybe that is what all of it is. The city. This site. Me. Lost boys who never fully land, always being made over, always taking off again.

Never land, perhaps. And still, somehow, home.

“Lost Boy” by Ruth B, off a playlist my daughter keeps. It has not left my head in days. Go find it. It is worth your four minutes.