Andheri Mornings Pt. 1
I'd washed up in Bombay by early March 2020, two weeks before the world shut down.
Auroville had been a maze of insights and questions that remained undigested and unanswered. Granted, I'd spent most moments with Anuj on the periphery drinking, smoking, writing, riding motorbikes, and meeting travellers as they passed through his hostel, but I'd experienced enough of Auroville and Aurovillians to form the somewhat vague impression that it was a cult.
Small-scale communism, among beautiful contributions to the planet, only proved that Marx's dream can only be functionally realised within societies with less than five thousand people. Once that threshold is reached, the fallibility of the human psyche corrupts the possibility of hierarchy-less structures.
Life in Auroville was a vortex.
It was a timeless, dreamy, sirenic existence that I witnessed at least one young Parisian guy freefall into following an "introductory" night at their magnificent eco-hut in the jungle.
While the fantasy of giving myself over to a smiley band of long-haired, scantily-clad exquisite women communally living and growing vegetables in the jungles of Southern India would have fulfilled a deep and enduring dreamscape, whatever was going on there, I lost interest the moment I discovered their deification of a dead French lady they affectionately called "Mother." I gained a little more interest when I heard rumours of wild, dionysian, orgiastic ceremonies, but no prospective initiatory orgy on earth could have held me there once those chants started.
I left the building like a man on fire.
From Auroville, I'd hitched a decaying bus to Chennai, where I spent the afternoon aimlessly wandering and then wound up alone (save for two barmen) in a strangely dark "British Pub." After the difficulty procuring booze in Tamil Nadu, seeing the Union Jack draped across the shopfront was, for once, a relief. Craving solitude over the previous weeks, I felt curiously lonely drinking a pint on fake Chesterfield couches surrounded by Churchill quotes.
I spent the night at the airport, drinking coffee and manically writing under the white cafeteria lights. If India was another universe, Auroville was another dimension and one I'd been engulfed by for months. Chennai airport was my first encounter with reality and mandated masks. The indignant shock and novelty of putting on a medical mask after gallivanting around the subcontinent so freely was a poignant moment. I sat at the tables between Subway and a Biriyani shop, contemplating the world I'd emerged back into.
The orange, South Indian sun rose through the windows as I sat there sleepless and dishevelled, head buzzing. The previously deserted gate was filling with passengers, and it was some time before I was even aware that I was marinating in people and obtusely large carry-on bags, the hallmark of all Indian airports. My thoughts of all that had transpired and the feverish desire to commit them to paper had consumed me.
We'd exchanged several prolonged glances across two rows of Indian families before a tall, voluptuous woman with long, dark hair boldly approached me. She slunk seductively into the seat on my right, removing her mask and introducing herself as Inbal, a 40-year-old Israeli biochemist.
It was around 7:30 am, and the coffee was wearing off. I looked like I'd fallen off the back of a truck leaving a recycled linen factory. Her willingness to approach me was pleasantly surprising. With a curious mix of sweat, espresso breath, and lavish applications of duty-free airport cologne, I figured I wasn't exactly magnetic.
Within minutes, she'd divulged that her rocky relationship had unexpectedly ended the day before their last-attempt-to-fix-the-relationship week-long all-inclusive retreat in the Andaman Islands.
In her words, she hadn't fucked in months, was crazy horny, single, and now had a free ticket and a half-empty bed by the water for a week. There'd be fruits, massages, mornings working, and then the rest of the days were ours to get to know each other. Helen Keller would have sensed the frenzied sexual electricity.
Mumbai had been a whim, an excuse to make tracks after things got freaky in Auroville, but I had been genuinely excited to get lost in its streets. Sitting and writing with my coffee at the French Bakery each morning, I had increasingly felt a deep intuition that I needed to be in Bombay. But all of that evaporated on hearing her proposal.
We spent the next hour furiously trying to change my flight, buy a flight, and beg the entire Indian pantheon for a boon, both increasingly high on the hedonistic visualisations we'd concocted of our next week together.
I ran around the airport like a man who'd lost his children, and my desperate attempts to find wifi and approach anyone in a uniform were met with a mix of suspicion and pity.
As her boarding approached, I pleaded with the gate staff to allow me to buy a ticket, citing a range of pathetically contrived fallacies about what was on the other side of that flight.
Eventually, after being stopped by military police from leaving the security point to re-enter the airport and buy a new ticket, I relented, submitting to Providence's strange tickle. We exchanged numbers and agreements to recreate our "Andamans" in Tel Aviv in a few months. I hugged her goodbye, watching her board, knowing that in some parallel universe, I was en route to a tropical fiesta of flesh and desire.
*
The rickshaw reached my Bombay digs in the early afternoon—a typically Indian guesthouse, packed to the rafters, nightmarishly loud, and dirt cheap. I dumped my bag and left, preferring the humid, polluted streets covered in colossal jumbles of telecom cables to a room filled with twenty-something-year-old Indian men watching YouTube videos and loudly Facetiming relatives.
I'd washed up in Bombay by early March, two weeks before the world shut down.
