Mumbai, the city of dreams. A city of toil and sweat and rain. It is a strange paradox of hope and hopelessness, of beauty and despair, of love and hate. A city you will hate when you enter, and love when you leave. I’ve spent most of my life in this city travelling in the locals and the BEST buses and all kinds of public transports.
The City taught me to take care of myself at the age of 12! I travelled by the local trains to my school every day and came back home by the BEST buses. Just like a typical Indian mother, the only concern my mom had was weather I had a healthy lunch or not. She always used to pack the chapattis in those aluminium freshwrapp foil so that they remain fresh until my lunch time. But my memories if the freshwrapp foil are quite different. Although the intended purpose of those foils was something else, I mainly used it to play cricket during the lunch time using a notebook as a bat and the foil role crunched into a ball. We also tried to make cut-outs out of it to make cute origami stuff to impress the girls around us. I precisely remember a crafts project where we had to make an elephant model and we were short of some clay dough. We quickly gather the foils from our tiffin boxes, made roles out of them and joined them using toothpicks to make an elephant. Our project also won 2nd prize for that competition.
Introspecting on these childhood memories, I realise two things. One definitely being how stupid I was but the second one is that how a simple aluminium foil, contributed so much to my childhood.
Made with tender loving care, served with freshwrapp!