The City Forgets My Name

A serene early morning in India as the sun sets over the curving train tracks, casting a warm glow on a passing train.

“They watch all my stories, even drop me the occasional emoji in response but never really call or text to ask how I am doing.”

This plaintive refrain is a staple in my therapy conversations. 

My copy of Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City has seen me down more Vietnamese iced coffee than any of my dating app matches. Recently as my plane readied for descent through the bedspread of fog over Mumbai, I was reminded of Laing’s description of cities as blocks of cells. I could spot the already crowded highways amidst a plethora of tarp-veiled buildings. My brain steered my ears towards the sounds rising from the snarl of traffic thousands of kilometres below me. The implausible vastness of the city was only matched by my acute familiarity of its structure and rhythms. 

Laing muses about “the uneasy combination of separation and exposure”.

We are dangling from an haphazard, spindly powerline like hypnotised birds too anesthetized to recognize the change in weather around us.

Here shared consumption mimics connection, proximity parades as intimacy. 

A stray dog rests comfortably under a cart in an Indian street, finding a moment of shade and respite.

The Crowded Solitude of (Indian) Cities - 

In the recent protests against displacement of Indian stray dogs to unknown shelters in Delhi, the most common line of criticism against this thoughtless declaration was one where so many animal welfare activists, feeders and caretakers insisted that these domesticated street animals were the last line of unconditional affection in our cities. While some labelled them a menace or even an epidemic, a significant percentage of the population consider them guardians of their shadows in a fragile kinship that has no equivalence in human terms. I don’t know if this is too exaggerated a sentiment but I do know that in my early 20s when life was particularly turbulent, I would sometimes step out of my house at midnight and walk up to a row of benches outside a temple near my home in Mumbai. Of course, it is the safety this affords that even allowed me this independence. A group of stray dogs and cats lived as the temple’s wards. They had no questions for me. They didn’t need small talk or summaries. Their tail wag always matching the silent metronome of my mind. In a city where life is one highway collision or railway platform collapse from being permanently extinguished, little pockets of belonging wrapped around genuine affection seems to be the dominion of these four legged creatures. 

As I watch a Sheru or a Bhuri take shelter from pouring rains under a makeshift tea stall with construction worker close to where I live now, I wonder if Mumbai’s touted “spirit” sometimes is like a bottle of bootlegged liquor languishing in the back of the cabinet, uncorked only to drown the guilt and trauma of  preventable traumas. In Indian metros density is coded as closeness. You can stare right into the neighbour’s kitchen where the aunty in her gamcha-wrapped hair is frying onions or her younger son is serenading his college crush on the barely-there window sill. Everything is visible to a microscopic depth up close despite the bird’s eye opacity of this metropolis. We can see each other but we don’t know each other. Rather, we are encouraged to not know each other. 

In “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”, Erving Goffman wrote - 

The expressive coherence that is required in performances points out a crucial discrepancy between our all-too-human selves and our socialized selves. As human beings we are presumably creatures of variable impulse with moods and energies that change from one moment to the next. As characters put on for an audience, however, we must not be subjects to ups or downs. A certain bureaucratization of the spirit is expected so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogenous performance at every appointed time.

A city free of stray dogs. A park free of benches where the homeless can occasionally rest. An apartment complex free of a certain religion or food preference. A university free of certain caste names. A boardroom free of questions. A path free of its processes. Strange freedoms, these. A perfectly homogeneous performance where you stand in queues outside malls, hospitals and banks alike. They slither like patient anacondas unfurling their length ever so slowly, ready to devour anyone who catches their eye. The same performance that crashes against your phonescreen as you watch throngs swaying like jelly blobs trying to get into a local train or a bus. The exhaustion of just staying alive in these cities is so expansive that we don’t have the time or the energy to stay connected. 

Going back to the The Lonely City, Olivia Laing delved into the quotidian collapses towards loneliness. 

 Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others.

Our interiority is rarely if ever accessible to us wholly. In 1955, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingraham created a psychological model for self awareness called “Johari’s Window” which classifies or rather separates personal characteristics and traits into four quadrants: Open Area (known to self and others), Blind Area (known to others, unknown to self), Hidden Area (known to self, unknown to others), and Unknown Area (unknown to both). This is considered to be the grand theory of human resource competence.

In order to share or exchange our stories, to feel comfortable building small libraries of vulnerabilities, all the four areas are integral to our psyche. 

The last one, in particular, is the necessary zone of ignorance that fuels inspection. An essential paradox. A collective mirror that reflects back to us the collage of a self we slowly piece together through experiences. And the cost of experience sometimes is low level frustration. You can root out all the possible avenues of frustration in your life in a blind chase to "heal" but it will also take away your element of play, struggle, comprehend and evolve.

Perhaps that's why we are all struggling with degrees of procrastination - procrastination preserves the myth of potential as opposed to the freedom to start. Without space for slow contemplation, where the occasional gripes of frustration colour our desire to emerge, the corners where boredom nudges itself to a nap and wakes up with a tiny sapling of curiosity; we are likely to circle content as a noun rather than an adjective. 

An Indian flower seller is sitting and making garlands while surrounded by a variety of flowers

The Masked Self

In our culture, relationships are secondary to roles. In cities, belonging is less a feeling than a role—our masks stitched with caste, class, and cultivated ease. We learn early that the price of entry is performance, and the mask becomes second nature until we cannot tell where it ends and we begin. Some of us are wearing these masks like surgeons, others like clowns. And yet some others like thieves and welders. For some it is protection, for others it is confusion. But no one is fully exempt from having it stuck to our identity. Yet this very rehearsal of self, meant to bring us closer, breeds a strange estrangement: everyone applauding, no one touching. Urban loneliness, then, is not the absence of company but that of contact; we are lonelier in crowded rooms than in empty streets.

These masks are not deceptions, but survival gear, rehearsed so thoroughly that the seam between the self and the performance disappears. The irony is cruel: what was meant to bring us closer instead deepens the distance. Like the Japanese concept of honne and tatemae—the private truth and the public façade—urban India too trains its citizens to curate selves that are palatable to hierarchy. The applause comes easily, recognition rarely does. And so urban loneliness is not the absence of people, but the exhaustion of being perpetually visible while never being known.

Lifestyle influencers’ envy-embedded nails on skincare product jars make the only sound in an otherwise silent home. Revenge procrastination keeps us awake as we flagrantly ship the latest It couple or fly out hearts for immaculate one-person brunches while being ghosted by another Hinge date and making another bowl of ramen at 2 am. We feel burdened to live through others because the grief and the anxiety repressed within our own is too heavy to bear. No obvious harm in occasionally living in a fantasy of others but when Netflix’s CEO claims that his only real competition is sleep, shouldn’t it give us pause in how the Freeze State has become the universal normal?

We catch ourselves bowing to the false flags of discipline and the late capitalism version of stoicism from podcast posterboys who frequently sit alone in a snazzy studio while acting like they are in conversation with someone other than an empty couch. The Get Ready With Me (GRWM) videos populating our Insta feeds have one thing in common - they sell the aesthetic of perfect aloneness. Pristine lifelessness. A note trapped in a vacuum. Beautiful only in its potential never in its realization. Abject isolation is sold as “healing”. A state of dissociation lauded as peaceful. Numbness almost satirizing calm. 

“When did we disown kajal?” - screams a friend over facetime as we both laugh at our misadventures in creating the ideal smokey eye from when we were 18. She is petrified of the clean girl aesthetic because in her own words - god, my face looks like a varnished potato. We are both 40 now. We have lived through these artful and amateur performances of belonging. Socially, culturally, psychologically. We understand that each generation has its own fashion trajectories. We do wonder if we could’ve survived the heightened perfectionism of this era even though, in all fairness, we did enter our adolescence when tabloids had no problem labelling pop stars “obese” for merely eating a dollop of ice cream publicly. Some of our rock idols did succumb to depression in the most brutal way possible.  

Maybe this invasion of isolation has been lurking for a while. 

A young man in Mumbai’s advertising world swaps his mother tongue for English so slick it feels like borrowed skin; a queer woman in Bangalore keeps her hand from lingering too long on her partner’s in a café. A Dalit student on their first day at the medical college they nearly broke their back to get in, speaks softly and rarely so as to not to draw attention. These are vignettes of un-belonging; oblique ways in which we are encouraged to be invisible in favour of a homogeneity that merely tolerates us. 

Mumbai's Juhu beach during the sunset. The beach has a few families, especially children running around.

The Disappearing Commons

There is a Japanese (yes, again!) folktale that I think about often.

A poor man rescues an injured crane. Soon after, a mysterious woman appears at his door, and they marry. To support them, she secretly weaves magnificent cloth from her own feathers, but begs him never to watch her work. Over time, his curiosity (or greed, in some versions) overcomes him—he spies on her and discovers her true identity as the crane he once saved. Exposed, she can no longer remain in human form and flies away, leaving him with riches that cannot console his loneliness.

Across the digital and existential highways that promise to lead us to a social media utopia ​​we are all the crane woman. We show up at each other’s doors disguised, weaving gossamer versions of ourselves juxtaposed against the latest ring lights —a curated self story adjusted to suit the listener. Like the crane wife, we give of ourselves in secret, pulling feathers from our very skin to make belonging possible. But when others pry—demanding authenticity on their terms, or consuming us as endless performance—the mask fragments. The city applauds the brilliance of our branded clothes, yet rarely holds the trembling body beneath it. And so we fly back into the loneliness of our private selves where our feelings have shorn their feathers. Our bones too heavy with tiredness for any more flights.

In an interview, my favourite wandering chef Anthony Bourdain claimed -

“To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.”

Belonging refuses to compress itself into a tidy photo carousel, just as daguerreotypes—those alluring relics of a vanished period—can only offer a sliver of a world already gone. Its truth in longform lives elsewhere: in the turn of phrase in a poem, the heft of books, the brushstrokes of paintings, the recipes whispered across generations. Belonging hovers just out of frame, a whole wingspan higher than anything that can be neatly displayed.

Half my lineage is Romani. In order to ask which Roma group do you come from, the phrase is—

"Kaski san?"

Direct Translation: "Whose are you?"

Who claims you and yours. Who claims you as their own. 

I think that is the black pit of our shared ennui and exhaustion, the doubt that foams around this question when we sit by ourselves.