Some cities have been associated with them in a certain period of time, and you have always frequented them, until you are labeled as a lover of that city, or as the Indians say “Pompeii Walla” and the reasons are many, and suddenly your situation is cut off, and you turn to different destinations far and near, but those cities The one with semi-permanent residence comes from time to time, but you do not intend to travel to her, and so the years pass, and if you discover that the distance is more than twenty years or more, you return to her to restore your memories of vitality, and what is left of them in you, and in your memory, are many. those cities; Madrid, for example, London, Istanbul, Pompeii, so suddenly it will be the new visit in order to come back.. to remember, especially when you come to a city between its farewell yesterday, and its meeting today, twenty-five years have passed, the new meeting is difficult, and it pulls you to the bottom of its old memories, and obliges you to its forced silence. So, it becomes a hermit bored of everything except peace and quiet, and dialogue with the soul.. This is how “Bombie” I have known since the late seventies, and for ten years and more consecutively, and here is “Mumbai” that I do not know, everything changed even its name, but as soon as Your first steps begin on its new paths. The first travels lead you to places of joy and beautiful encounters. Here, you tasted “Haydar Badi Biryani” whose flavor and smell are still in the nose, and its taste is still in the throat, in that very old restaurant. I first met that The soft soft bread “Ramali Roti”, which you found only in that city bustling with everything, and in that restaurant “Delhi Darbar” that was very old, you remember with sadness that poor neighborhood to the point of bone pain “Santa Cruz”, when late dawn forced you to receive your morning With a cup of tea with milk, a mixture of saffron, and a little water, “Chai Dude..Bani Kumti”, and the participation of simple people remained The pleasure of their breakfast is in a copper plate that you carry in your hands on a hard concrete bench. The footsteps extend towards “Mumbai”, which ate the features of “Pompeii”, but it does not make you enjoy your present time, its past time is the one that prevails in the head, looking for slippery places that I kept following, selecting Your shining shoes have places that haven’t yet been flooded, how much I wretched that lame right leg, or how I wretched it, pushing your overweight corpse into lairs chanting Qawwali at night, spinning, and santora music, and the rhythm of temples, and partridge dancing, and those maidservants of time past exuded with female perspiration And some of their cheap perfume, tinged with the smell of childish “talcum powder”, and you remember certain names, “Nitu, Rika, Raki, Lakshmi, Sima”, you who you thought had disappeared with time, and you forgot your life scattered between the corners of the world and its four destinations, why did you attend Now, in the first hours of “Mumbai” that you enter into a phase that you did not tell him? How many years are, and sometimes how short! Do you think that those fresh faces are old that day? How is she in her new age? What is the hardest Anthalaat life when attacking you at once! Why do people here age so quickly, and their features change to the point of vanishing and nothingness?! Oh.. how old that driver is, and how many problems he has with life! How many faces steadfast in the face of life, and in the face of the job! She does not want to get off except in a work suit, until the doorman of the old hotel “the Sheikh” combed the whiteness of his beard, and those high shoulders drooped a little, and seemed shorter now, and only the Indian merchants are still by their commercial nature, profiting, and old in their shops with the wet smell of linen, which gives it That loyal fan in its lazy rotation The misery of wet lint… And tomorrow we continue
#cities #absent #love #absent