Prompt: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

Bangalore, after all these years. My life has taken a full circle. No, it is more like the figure 8, the yin-and-yang sign.

My early childhood was in Bangalore, the Bangalore of the late seventies and early eighties, garden city, Cubbon Park and Lal Bagh, Anglo Indian neighbours, rum-balls and plum cakes and apple pies, Mrs. D’Mello my 2nd grade teacher, and 33310, our phone number. This was followed by years of trailing my itinerant father across Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Delhi as he rose in his career.

I returned to Bangalore for my first job, the Bangalore of the late 90’s, when the IT Boom was just getting started. I had money and freedom for the first time, a potent combination. The fifteen thousand Rupees I was earning each month made me feel like a king. This was the Bangalore of Pecos and Purple Haze, of Cornerhouse for ice-creams, of Coffee House for cutlets and scrambled eggs, and Koshy’s where I tasted meat for the first time. It was a Bangalore in which I learnt to ride a motorbike and spent many hours weaving through the city streets late at night and early mornings, just enjoying the cool wind on my face, and the fast depleting green cover. This was the Bangalore in which I fell in love, where I wooed the woman I would marry, where my heart swelled and sang and sighed, and where it was finally stolen.

However, my father’s itinerant genes wouldn’t leave me to love at peace. We moved, Hyderabad, Seattle, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Hyderabad. Hyderabad vied for my affections, and while I was fond of her, she would never have my heart. She was a friend, the one I returned to each time I needed to land on my feet, and the one I would leave each time to discover more of myself.

And so, after 18 years I’m back in Bangalore. She’s a changed city, a whore with warts and wrinkles, trafficked and tired, polluted and pale. But the last week has been a dream, hanging out with an old lover who’s cool kisses still kindle the fires of passion, an old man feeling young and restless and hopeful for the future, driving in my car through the city streets late at night and early mornings, the windows rolled-down, Grateful Dead playing loud, and a smile on my face…