I moved from Mumbai to Delhi. I’m embarrassed by what I used to defend

I grew up believing Mumbai was it. The city. The only city, really, if you were serious about life.

Delhi was where politicians lived, where people drove too fast and talked too loud, where the air turned grey in November and everyone blamed it on farmers.

Mumbai, on the other hand, was grit and glory. It was the local train at 8 am, body pressed against body and somehow making it to work on time and feeling like you'd earned something. We wore the city’s difficulty like a badge.

Then I moved to Delhi.

The first few weeks, I was still a tourist in my own relocation. Everything felt novel – the wide roads, the slightly bewildering politeness of auto drivers who didn’t use the meter.

But now the newness has worn off. Three months later, the city has become ordinary to me – and so I’m starting to see it clearly. And what I see clearly is this: Mumbai, the city I spent years romanticising, has been failing its residents for a long time. We just never admitted that because it felt like betrayal.

Mumbai’s metro problem

Delhi’s metro is a civic achievement. I say this as someone who has spent years riding Mumbai’s local trains and convincing myself that the chaos was character. The Delhi Metro covers over 390 km across 12 lines. It is air-conditioned, mostly on time and it connects the city in a way that actually makes sense – airport to city centre, suburb to business district, neighbourhood to neighbourhood. It was planned by people who seemed to have actually thought about how a city moves.

Mumbai’s metro, by comparison, is an ignominious apology. Lines have been under construction for so long that they have become part of the landscape – like the potholes.

The city is being ripped open by half-built flyovers and roads narrowed for years that the resulting network, when it finally arrives, still won’t do what Delhi’s does.

Mumbai still functions primarily on a suburban rail system, designed in the colonial era, which system is now so overcrowded that commuters die on it every year – at least 26,500 in the past decade. These deaths are filed away as the cost of living in a big city. Delhi built a modern metro that could reorder urban life while Mumbai is still arguing about it.

The best momos

Something I unexpectedly felt strongly about are the momos. I know how that sounds. But stay with me.

In Delhi, specifically in the pockets of the city where the North East Indian diaspora has made its home such as Humayunpur in Safdarjung, Munirka and Laxmi Nagar, one can eat momos that would embarrass most restaurants in India. These are street momos, served out of a battered aluminium steamer with a chutney so red and fierce it makes your eyes water, for Rs 40.

Mumbai has momos and many things. But Mumbai does not have the kind of food network that comes from a multigenerational migrant community from the North East that has kept its cuisine intact and made it part of the city’s fabric.

The North Eastern Indian presence in Delhi (and Bengaluru) is large and culturally alive, giving these cities food but also music, textiles and a different way of being young in a metro.

Mumbai, for all its claims to cosmopolitanism, has never really made space for this community. Walk through Andheri or Kurla and ask where the Manipuri restaurants are, where the Naga kitchen is, or where the people from Arunachal have settled and built something. The city that calls itself India’s melting pot has some notable absences.

Delhi’s food diversity is the result of waves of migration – Partition, economic movement and students from every state who brought their food and stayed.

One can eat their way across the subcontinent in Delhi. Chandni Chowk and Jama Masjid alone merit a dissertation on food culture. The Parathewala Gali, the kachori, the nihari that has been slow-cooking since before my parents were born. All of this food is also incredibly affordable, requiring just hunger and the willingness to stand at a stall.

Green spaces

Delhi, against all expectations, is a green city. Not in an environmental sense – the AQI in winter is a public health emergency – but green in the literal, visual sense: trees, parks, wide pavements with actual shade.

In Lodhi Garden, people run in the mornings, have lunch, sit under the trees and read. Sanjay Van is a forest inside the city limits. I live right next to Jahanpanah City Forest near Greater Kailash II, another green patch in the city. The national capital’s green cover has been planned and is also maintained.

Mumbai is being choked by pollution and the erasure of any open space the city has left. The Aarey Colony in Sanjay Gandhi National Park is the most visible example: a green lung in the middle of the city that the government decided to replace with a metro car shed. Citizens’ protests were disregarded and the trees chopped down.

Every maidan, every hill, every inch of coastline is eyed by builders calculative the lucrative floor space index. Mumbai’s open spaces are replaced by towering complexes with names such as Shanti Garden or Nature’s Bliss.

Mumbaikars have fought these battles and mostly lost. The city’s builder lobby is a visible political force that has shaped the skyline, the traffic and the quality of daily life for decades.

In Delhi, walking through a neighbourhood with actual trees on the pavements and parks where children play after school, one feels a sense of grief for these absences in Mumbai.

‘The Spirit of Mumbai’

The “Spirit of Mumbai” – that idea that the city’s residents are uniquely resilient, pulling themselves up after annual monsoon floods, terrorist attacks and impossible commutes – is real. But it has also been weaponised to to lower the threshold of what Mumbaikars are willing to demand from their city and their government.

When the city floods every year and people die, resilience is bandied about. When a building collapses or there is a fire in a slum, there is talk of the city’s indomitable character. The “spirit” becomes a reason not to fix anything, because fixing things will imply that something was broken and the narrative requires that Mumbai is always, fundamentally, okay.

Delhi has its own problems, severe ones: the air quality (Mumbai’s isn’t great either), the safety concerns for women, the infrastructure that frays at its edges. Delhi is no utopia.

But I spent years being proud of a city I was not looking at clearly. The pride was real, but it was costing me the ability to see what was happening. Now, from the outside, I can see it: Mumbai is a city of extraordinary people being let down by corrupt governance and we have been too in love with the mythology to say so plainly.

I miss Mumbai every now and then. But missing a city and pretending it’s working are different things. I’ve stopped pretending.

Vaibhav Wankhede is a creative marketer and a writer.