Bombay. Bambai. Mumbai.

Coming from a town where everyone I knew had a bungalow, how the world looked from a seventeenth floor apartment was fascinating, if not enchanting. I sit at this huge French window and look at Bombay, its streetlights, its yellow and black Padmini Premiere taxis, rivers of molten lava of the bumper-to-bumper traffic and the sea beyond. You’d be lucky if you could spot a single star in that sky. Yet, the zillion skyscrapers twinkle, celebrating something known only to Bombay.

Aamchi Mumbai. Maximum city. City that never sleeps. City of dreams. Tinsel town. Too many epithets, too much hype for the big apple of India. I never, not for once, felt new or lost here. Even when I had just come, it felt like I’d always been here. Maybe that’s what Bombay is all about. There is no space but there’s place for everyone. The page three millionaire is here and so are the urchins. The queen of high fashion has her Bombay and the famous dabba-wallahs have theirs. The rich dad’s girl holds on to her Gucci shades and listens to her iPod while the lower middle class Maharashtrian clerk shoves and pushes to grab a seat on the train so that she can cut vegetables on her way back home after a long work day. The Shiv Sena has its Bombay and the stoned-out-of-their-wits firangs have theirs.

At one glance from my window, I can see the hutments in the little slum below, the 7-star hotel a little away, the queen’s necklace a little farther, Porsches on Marine Drive and the fishing boats on the sea. And none seem to disturb the harmony. The warm damp sea breeze carries the perfect song. And just then my reverie is broken as a Borivali fast local screams its deafening whistle on the rails below.

That’s Bombay for you.