Melancholia

I have been walking the wet streets of London for over a day now. I know and understand very little about this city. It quirkiness and autonomy are evident. But specifically, I am taken by the levels of the tube that exist at the lowest interstices of the London Underground. There are escalators everywhere that take you down to the lowest levels. I am afraid of looking down from the great height as the escalator moves swiftly past mutiple levels, so I found the palatable method of looking at my shoes steadfastly as the journey to inferno progressed. This put me somewhat at ease in the midst of the great descent. Descent into the great gloom of level minus 7 at Whitechapel station has been the dominant motif of my visit. I walk around for hours trying to find a bookstore, inevitably reading the gmap instructions wrong. I pass east African eating joints, melancholic mosques, some fully wrapped up children being shepherded by school teachers across busy roads. I was here in the summer of 2023 but it was a busier, more eventful trip then. I don’t have a memory of walking the streets of London lost and aimless.

In this wet city, mist, cloud and cigarette smoke spell out a light melancholia. Its sadness is not hidden. It does not pretend to be happy. In the midst of consistently light rain, people carry big, cumbersome umbrellas. They wear odd colours - a lot of black and moss green. Big, ugly shoes. The average Londoner is not fashionable in the way we might think New Yorkers are. But there is an autonomy to those ugly shoes. There is an autonomy to this city. There is a fierceness in the rain and the umbrellas urban routine that the triumphalism of American cities like New York and Chicago cannot match.

In the Namma Bengaluru metro, where I only know of two lines - purple and green, I am a citizen of the purple line. In the London Underground, diverse worlds intersect in most mysterious ways. The totality of the tube map on the walls is far from possible to wrap one’s head around. I have dinner with a friend around Bloomsbury of Virgnia Woolf fame. My friend points out the cliche of a large board declaring the existence of this actual, famous Bloomsbury. A bit loud, a bit obvious. Like the Punjabis of Delhi, I say, in a mean-spirited way. We laugh.

[Lost in a wet city. Copyright: Atreyee Majumder, 2025.]