Your Twenties: Home Was The City
Mumbai is a city of contradictions. It smells of sea salt and fish markets. It is impossibly crowded and strangely intimate. It can be the warmest city you’ll ever live in and the rudest place you’ll encounter before 9 a.m. on a Monday.
Whether you were born here or arrived with two suitcases and a job offer, Mumbai can come on strong. You either fall in love with it or you tolerate it. There is very little middle ground. The humidity, the monsoons, the local trains, the noise and the chaos are either part of its charm or part of the reason you want to escape. But for the people who fall in love with Mumbai, there is no going back.
Twenty-three-year-old me loved the city with all its chinks and had plans every Wednesday through Saturday, regardless of whether I needed to be at work at 9 a.m. the next morning.
Sundays were for bed rotting and recovering from poor decisions. Mondays and Tuesdays were simply the wait until Wednesday arrived and life could begin again.
Whether it was Poison, late-night rolls at Mini Punjab or some random plan that sounded like a good idea at the time, I was rarely at home. Home was a pitstop between endless plans, bad decisions and whatever version of adulthood I was attempting that week.
Most of us didn’t invest in our homes because home didn’t really mean much at that age. We’d rather spend money on a night out than a place we were barely spending time in. The softness of a mattress, the smell of a scented candle, fabric conditioner, a throw on the couch or expensive mugs would have been a joke. You were more likely to have sore ankles from high heels than an Epsom salt foot soak waiting at home.
A cancelled plan felt like the sky was falling. Staying home on a Saturday night felt suspiciously close to a personal crisis.
Why would anyone stay home when the entire city was waiting outside?
Home was the city.
When Home Started Competing With Mumbai
Somewhere in our thirties, things started to shift.
While entering a new decade is dramatic, when it comes to our home, not so much. We didn’t suddenly stop going out, start focusing on skin care or start lecturing younger peers about the importance of eating clean. Mumbai was still Mumbai. Now we started looking forward to discovering new restaurants, loved places that weren’t blasting music till ear drums tore and developed a taste for cold brews or rancid machine coffees.
Outside chaos was still fun, but not all the time. The parties were still happening, but now they were more likely to be at someone’s home than at a bar. We still loved being out in the world, but also loved a no bra evening alone at home with a gin and tonic.
Perhaps the biggest shift was that we finally had the means to build a home instead of simply treating it like a bed and breakfast.
What was once cocktails, an uncomfortable but high-fashion look and hunting for a 2 a.m. bite slowly found its way elsewhere—into better mattresses. Scented candles. Fancier pans. The occasional overpriced wall art. Things twenty-three-year-old us would have mocked relentlessly.
Home started receiving attention because, for the first time, we were actually spending time there willingly and not because we were down with a flu.
You would return from a long day and appreciate the comfort of your couch. You’d rather host friends instead of meeting them Bora Bora. You’d discover the joy of cooking for yourself and eating that meal while watching something random on an OTT platform. Not because you had become boring, but because staying home no longer felt like a catastrophic miss out.
Home was the city. But now home had become worth coming back to.
When Home Became My Favourite Place In Mumbai
The funny thing about your forties is that nobody warns you that you’d choose home over being any place else.
Mumbai is still exciting. But now you’re more likely to tell your friends “Yaar, ab ghar aa gayi hu, ab I can’t step out again.” That comes from knowing that having to go out again is only going to take you out of your comfort zone that is no longer acceptable.
Somewhere between the parties, promotions, the rent payments, the heartbreaks and the Blinkit deliveries, home quietly changed again.
The expensive mattress that twenty-three-year-old you would have laughed at is now an investment in your back health. Slow brewing that morning coffee matters. The throw that was meant to be aesthetic is now an adult version of a blanky. And the ridiculously expensive candle is now the smell of home. Not because you’ve become boring, but because you’ve finally started seeing your home as the place you are unapologetically yourself.
The forty-year-old me shares a strange relationship with the city. I’d pick sitting and enjoying the salty sea breeze at the Promenade followed by a cold shower at home late on a Friday night over the noisy bars filled with twenty-year-olds. Twenty-three-year-old me would have considered this a complete waste of a Friday night. But believe it or not, it is a luxury.
Perhaps when we started exploring the city as 20-year-olds, we didn’t realise our hunt would bring us back home. We spend decades trying to build a life in Mumbai and somewhere along the way we accidentally build a home too.
The city is still extraordinary.
But these days, my favourite place in Mumbai just happens to be my own corner of the window.
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