Nothing is Forever
by Khushi Mohunta
My city and I share a parasitic relationship.
My city and I grew up together. It raised me when it was still a town, small enough to recognize its own footsteps. Back then, the red light wasn’t a pause, but a meeting place. You stop, and the uncle next to you turns out to be your neighbour, voilà! The woman crossing the road not only seems familiar but turns out to be the teacher for whom you had a test the next day. My city and I shared an intimacy of connections, and that intimacy makes my city a part of me—a town.
The town fed me familiarity. Every lane recognized me, if not vice versa. Now the town is full, and I am emptied by it. The roads are wider; there are many roads, and I use Google Maps now. The city has been mapped spatially, but smudged in my semiotics. The red light is just a red light. No one looks up. No one waits long enough to be known. The town had sound then; it has noise now.
It takes space first. What were once stretches of marshy fields and uncultivated land became buildings over a semester. It takes time. I was practising the art of balance — clutch and brake — on the flyover yesterday. Commutes stretch; home to the gym was a five-minute ride, a seven- minute drive before. Now, it is a seven-minute ride, a fifteen-minute drive. It takes memory too, asking me to relearn directions in a place that I once knew by heart. It demands that I learn the shortcuts.
And yet, I cannot call it cruel. It has given me endurance. It has taught me how to shrink without disappearing. How to carry my childhood inside me like contraband. How to love a place even as it feeds on the very intimacy it once offered.
This is why I call it parasitic. Not because it destroys, but because it survives. I am the host. What it takes keeps it alive; what remains keeps me going. Over time, the exchange has become indistinguishable from need.
We share a bloodstream now.
Detachment would be fatal.
Khushi Mohunta is an Indian author, poet, and editor. She is pursuing a Master’s in English at Shiv Nadar University. She is the author of Waist Number 42. Khushi has worked professionally in trade publishing in editorial roles with Penguin Random House India and HarperCollins India, contributing to both fiction and non-fiction titles as a copy editor. Her poetry has appeared in Madras Courier and Poems India. Khushi received the Bronze Award in The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition 2021 by The Royal Commonwealth Society, London.