For once, it was not Woody Allen who wrote my template for a city even though his urban scapes have imbued every other city I lived in with his curious charm. So what if my cities were thousands of miles away from the black and white Manhattan montage unfolding to George Gershwin's music? Despite loving my favourite neurotic American director's quirky tribute to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast in his Midnight in Paris, my inspiration for the city was a pastiche of books I had read, films I had watched and stories I had heard. From some of the most romantic moments in cinema captured in the lights of the Eiffel Tower's glitter and the chiaroscuro shades of the gas lamps lining the streets of this magical city of lights to the artists, writers and poets living in their consumptive freezing garrets in vertiginous old buildings producing some of their greatest masterpieces in the midst of squalor and poverty. From the bohemian cabarets of Boulevard de Clichy to the colourful parties and balls of Montmartre, Paris has occupied a pivotal point in my introduction to the world of art and culture.
Ever since I could remember, as an idealistic teen, an ambitious 20-year-old, a bit more worldly 30-year-old, every trip I ever planned whether as an imaginary itinerary or as a near-possibility — featured Paris. Time and again I would return to my worn-out globe, give it a spin and make it force stop on that same old dot circled with a red felt pen— Paris.
After all these years obfuscated by mundane matters and the daily business of life, when I finally did make this trip in the late summer of 2013, I was a bundle of nerves. Just like meeting a virtual love interest for the first time in the real world, I fretted whether my imagination had just built up this massive fantasy city unable to match anything that actually existed. And sure enough, it was a more frayed, edgy, dusty and older version of the imagined city pieced together from celluloid and poetic representations — and yet, it was more perfect than anything I had ever dreamed up. While I could write reams about Paris... it is Woody Allen again who has the perfect context for the city for Paris at midnight is when it is the most beautiful. It is the bewitching hour when the city draws you into herself and holds you in her thrall forever.
Like many others who have come before me, I too discovered and fell in love with the city by night Walking the banks of the Seine, with a view of the flying buttresses and the jaw-dropping magnificence that is the Notre Dame Cathedral, crossing the iconic green facade of the marvellously quaint and characterful Shakespeare & Co bookshop, walking cobbled streets of the artsy and fashionable 3rd and 4th Arrondissement, stopping at the first cafe that was yet to down its shutters and downing glasses of its cheapest house red to the sounds of a city not yet asleep and not yet awake.
Paris turned me into a wide-eyed girl, looking for the familiar indices of my growing up years as I read copiously and found the world in the pages of the books. I imagined yesteryear movie stars doing a little hop down these ancient avenues, bathed in the same neon lights reflecting off the restaurant signs that coloured my face...
It was the city that Remy, a tiny rat in the film Ratatouille, stared at from a rooftop window and felt the desire to overreach himself and his humble origins. It made you forget you were watching an animated film... all that filled your heart at that moment in time was the vast city and its myriad twinkling lights.
Paris by night allowed me to belong even if for those fleeting moments. My temporary home was truly mine and I was a Parisian till morning dawned and the harsh light of day stripped me of that illusion and left me a behatted tourist with a map, queuing up in lines to visit the nth museum and art gallery.
(First published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 23 April, 2015)
