Outside of being an anagram of my least favorite South Indian dish, Dilly is an alternate way to spell the city that I have come tumbling into, as fate would have it, two weeks after I had found a brand new cozy apartment overlooking a lake in the middle of (the Northern part of) Mumbai City.
Some people adore the place they come from; the games played at twilight till the ball wasn't visible anymore, the net-less, boundary-less, time-less badminton matches on the traffic-less road, the effortless victory in short-put and long jump tournaments conducted by the society at 4:00 in the morning all become colourful fragments of a wistful memoir for them.
Indeed, such was life for me at 4-M (the Bungalow in Trivandrum my sister and I grew up in), where we had the road to ourselves, and were shielded by the coconut trees, the mango tree and the jack fruit tree.
My earliest best-friends are from Trivandrum, girls I wrote Enid Blyton-inspired, extremely original novels with (about kids on an adventure by themselves in a castle with a dog; write to me if you want a copy). I'm sharing with you here, the journal entry from exactly fifteen years ago, to give you an idea of the wistful memoir that I talked of earlier. This happens to be the day I met one of the afore-mentioned best-friends.
September 13 1998, Trivandrum
There is this new girl in school who thinks she is Lata Mangeshkar. She was also showing off that one of her cutting teeth fell off. She conducted a ceremony to tie her tooth with thread and bury it in the mud. I have teeth falling off every week, with no scene being created. We spoke for the first time in the afternoon, during the finals of the singing competition. She got first prize. I got consolation prize. I will not sing the Titanic song next time.
Years later, when she qualified for the finals of a national level singing competition to be conducted in a different city, we were best friends and she wouldn't travel without me in the choir. I haven't really found where my true talent lies, but I have, over performing on stage through the merit of my persuasion or my friend's coercion, at various instances starting from The Patriotic Song presented to the Governor of Kerala to the Miss Chennai Times contest while at college, concluded where it certainly does not.
I have digressed. I began this narration by saying that some people adore the place they come from. For me, however, it has always been the people that stick out and the place just happens to be a floating, fleeting (alliteration intended) background in my picturesque memory.
When I was asked if I would move to the Country's capital, I packed my bags (forgot my furniture) and left. Almost all the time I have been in Dilly, (it's been over a month), I have been working. There are few things in the world as refreshing to the mind and as enriching to the spirit of the ambitious as the sense of pure, unadulterated work-time; yet, I find myself looking up from my laptop between the endless hours of pouring over well diagrams with a flickering hope of chancing upon a kindred spirit like the toothless friend I met this day fifteen years ago.
*dil·ly
[dil-ee] Show IPA
noun, plural dil·lies. Informal.
something or someone regarded as remarkable, unusual, etc.
