I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about the “unromantic-ness” of this city. The traffic, the heat, absolute disregard for personal space, and cacophony- but the truth is, it’s teeming with poetry.

In the mornings, the city wakes up unevenly, like a sleepy child tugged out of a dream. Lights peter on before the sun itself has risen. The ring of the milkman’s bicycle on local roads is juxtaposed with the rumbling of trucks early morning on highways.
Brake lights glow like embers in the hearth, blowing out soft diesel breath that fogs up in the cold. The highway is a metal river of vehicles operating in a synchronous choreography.

Then the sun is roused, tugged into the early morning sky like the yolk of a cracked egg. Autorickshaws cutting through traffic at impossible angles while defying physics, bikes carrying four people at a time and balancing boxes like circus performers, and the unmistakable honking of cars.

None of it is beautiful in a traditional sense.
But the way cars skirt around each other, wobbling and shuffling through broken roads, following a rhythm only city streets understand- all of it is poetry.

Glass panes of skyscrapers catch the sunrise and reflect it onto bonnet after bonnet that passes by. Above all this chaos, crows connect the city’s stuttering sentences like punctuation marks.

And red lights- the enemy of Indian citizens. Cars at red lights don’t simply wait; they fidget. Engines shaking like restless knees and inching forward in tiny, guilty inches (or, of course, the classic- that one vehicle allergic to the idea of red lights, hurtling through the ebb of traffic like its life depends on it).

This city has a pulse. It is a living, breathing medley of a thousand heartbeats and colourful gaalis.

This city writes poems in exhaust fumes.

Yours truly,
Divi

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Credits for cover image: @notmalikap on Pinterest