Which City Are You From?

We are at our go-to restaurant to grab a quick bite, if you can call two sabzis, one dal, two starters, three desserts, and fifty-seven naans a quick bite. I try to bite them quickly, but it still takes me an hour. As I am finishing my quick bite, my wife, who for some reason has become a gym freak, is staring down my soul, thinking if I have any shame left. “Chew slowly,” she says, but I can’t hear her because I have started stuffing naans into my earholes by then. You can’t expect me to eat all of this with just one mouth-hole. My ears have been trained to support my mouth. Anyway, she is getting bored, so she starts chatting with the waiters. “Where are you from?” she asks. Invariably, one of them turns out to be from the Bengal region, and their conversation switches to Bangla as if it is illegal for two Bengalis to speak in any other language. Tagore might get offended. I can still hear them talking through my eyes. Everything is still okay until the waiter asks her where she is from, and my wife begins recounting her entire childhood spent in different cities. As she lists each one, I mentally list every time she has shared this exact list with strangers.

“Just tell them the city you lived in the most so we can all live in peace,” I have tried to reason with her. “But that would be a lie,” she says. And of course, she cannot lie. She is under an invisible oath at all times. The oath to annoy me forever.

It is 11:30 pm, and my chief AD has just announced pack-up. I do not have the strength to thank anyone, so I quietly exit the set and take a long breath inside my vanity van. A two-minute singular breath, followed by an equally long exhale. An elongated sigh. Stretched to the extremes. Like a long dadaji fart echoing in the void. We have been shooting since six in the morning. I try to think of why I am still doing this. The smell of nihilism lingers in the vanity. I go outside. The crew is relaxing, possibly thinking the same. No one does it for the love of the game. No one does anything for the love of the game.

A new intern, not more than 25 years old, is still hanging around. Full of energy. As if he does not have back issues. Or life issues. “Where are you from?” he asks. “Delhi,” I reply. End of conversation, I thought. “But didn’t you used to live in Mumbai?” “Yes.” End of conversation, I thought. “And now you live in Bangalore?” “Yes, that’s correct.” End of conversation, I thought. He then goes on to tell me about the cities he has lived in. I am thinking of my wife because at this point, she would have taken over, and the intern would have had to make an “urgent” call if he didn’t want a midnight lesson on Indian geography. I am not great at small talk. Or medium-paced talk. Or any kind of talk. Especially the kind where people discuss their past lives, where they were born, whether there were pregnancy complications, how the nurse reacted to their ugly face, and so on. The people around me, however, are great at this. So I have never bothered trying. They take over, and all I have to do is small-listen to their small talk before I quietly exit into my own small subconscious thoughts.

The only small talk I can do is when I write. That is when no one can stop me from talking because it becomes a one-way conversation into nothingness. Probably just how people feel when they talk to me. My wife tells the waiter about how she was born in Guwahati, did some schooling in Kolkata, then did some more in Lucknow, then more in Delhi, then Mumbai, and then Bangalore. And every time, after this long monologue, she concludes that she is from everywhere. By this time, the waiter has been fired for standing at one table for too long. The other diners have died of hunger. The police are evacuating their bodies. The manager has hung himself from the jhoomar.

Being from everywhere also means being from nowhere. I was born, brought up, schooled, and colleged in Delhi. It is a small city in the northern part of India, in case you have not heard of it. What a nice joke that I should have skipped writing, but here we are. How cool am I? Can someone shoot me? Until a couple of years ago, I was perfectly okay with saying "Delhi" in response to the famously boring question, “Which city are you from?” But in recent months, I have realised and mathematically calculated that I have lived more years outside Delhi than in it. So technically, the answer should be something else. This sent me spiralling. Is there a correct answer to this question at all?

When you are a child (and by child, I mean anyone who does not earn their own money, even if you are 28 and doing your Master’s), you change cities based on your parents’ will. You have little to no say in it. You blindly trust that what they are doing is good for them, and therefore, good for you. You are in one city till sixth standard, another till twelfth, then college somewhere else if your parents allow it. Everything revolves around their lives, even though growing up, we are told everything revolves around ours. Nothing is further from the truth. And rightly so. When you are in college, hanging out with your friends in spiked hair and embroidered jeans, the city your parents currently live in becomes your city. That is what you tell people. A few years later, when you start changing cities for work, you start listing every city you've lived in, hoping people will find your story interesting enough to like you. Instead, they tell you the same thing with two extra cities, and now you both resent each other and want to leave the party. By the time you hit your thirties, you start asking the question yourself. Which city do I belong to? For most people, the answer is the current one. You have a home there. You are not living out of suitcases like those animal bachelors. You get panic attacks when someone mentions moving. You live with your partner, possibly married now. You are emotionally invested in a plant and its future and your best friend is the friend who visits your place without asking you to reciprocate.

So, the city you live in is, unofficially, on its way to becoming the city you are from. In casual conversations, at least. But I feel the city you belong to is the one that changed you. It does not matter if you stayed there for only two years. But while you were there, did you learn a skill that shaped your career? Did you find joy in solitude and realise you were enough? Did you meet someone who became closer than family? If yes, then that is your city.

Because sometimes, a city doesn’t just house you, it redefines you. It quietly watches while you fall apart and slowly find your way back. It gives you your people, your rhythm, your silence, your purpose. It becomes the backdrop to the version of you that finally made sense. The city that changed you may not be the longest chapter, but it is the one that turned the page. It’s like that song you remember in a 3 hour long shitty movie. And maybe, that is the answer to “Where are you from?”. This city. The city that made a difference.