I had romantic notions when I first traveled to Bangkok: to canvas the
city, my first international city, to build memories on every block of
that land. In many ways, I succeeded — we walked, we wrote, we danced, we
stole, we spoke, we bled and we lived — in so many known and unknown
corners. In places where we were both welcome and unwelcome. A small boy
back then, discovering the entire kaleidoscope of the world.
In that sense, Bangalore is only the city that I have ever truly inhabited. Unlikely symmetries like this are the mystic riddles of cities, tiny patterns crisscrossing an ever-expanding canvas.
Almost many years, I do not profess to know Bangalore as a city, not yet.
But I have done my fair share of canvassing, and have found those few
places that are my own personal oases.
Early-morning walks by Ulsoor, Sankey, or Jakkur lake, the unmoving water
reflecting the sky. Dosas and chai at Airlines, its massive Banyan tree
seemingly immortal. Those afternoon picnics at Cubbon, surrounded by
families, kids on Yulu bikes, joggers. The tiny back lanes of DJ Halli,
where the shopkeepers nod and a small gaggle of children scream with glee
each Saturday I walk to the volunteer center. A terrace in Koramangala
fourth block, one of many temporary houses, wherein springtime the
trumpet blossoms cover the windowsills like a pink sleeve.
*
Why does Bangalore feel so different from Bangkok? Why have I grown
content here, peaceful even, in a way I never figured in the City of
Dreams? Why does loneliness feel so different across the two places? Was
it simply that I had grown out of my adolescent extremism and angst, or
was it some difference between the cities themselves? My intuition is that
it is a bit of both.
For one, Bangalore is a horizontal city — sprawl in all directions. The
result of highly inefficient and unplanned infrastructure to be sure, but
the lack of those glassy, vertical skyscrapers so characteristic of
hyper-modern cities is also refreshing. There is no vertigo in Bangalore,
that “anonymous surveillance” where you can namelessly watch and be
watched, where human routines are endlessly mediated and miniaturized by
tiny glass windows on all sides.
From my terrace, I can only see one house, one window, occupied by a
family I know by name. Sometimes, we shout to one another — warnings about
monkeys, quick exchanges about the day. These small rituals can root you
to a place, give identity to your compatriots in the city — they are small
intimacies that matter.
There is also a balance in Bangalore between community and openness,
between consistency and change, between the old guard and the underdogs.
Local folks still identify with their communities, joint families, tribes
— yet balance it with an openness (or at the very least — resignation) to
outsiders. The city has retained its localism to a good extent (the old
eateries, theatres, parks) while amassing new “cosmopolitan” spaces for
its burgeoning population and wealth. Neighborhoods, while still divided
by class and community, always feature some diversity — there are no fully
walled gardens, no “city within a city” where all undesirables are pushed
to the perimeter or fringe.
This fusion, and the (relatively strong) upward mobility of a tech
ecosystem, has given Bangalore this social “je ne sais quois” that I loved
about Bangkok — where it mattered far less where you were from, but who
you are to become.
And finally, the friendships — families that we are not born with, but
make and discover along the uneven path. I love the level of familiarity
(in other words, the lack of formality), how close friends show up to the
house (“was just in the neighborhood!”) without warning, to have tea or a
doobie. How there’s that unspoken loyalty that can be built with effort —
whereas I could never be certain of this in the hyper-individualism of New
York, where people often disappeared into their lives after some time, the
signal patchy then suddenly, all too soon — lost.
*
My loneliness in Bangalore is self-imposed, but gentle, something that
can be easily dispelled with a walk or a call to the few friends that have
helped me build a home here. Yet there are also new dimensions that I have
never experienced before the loneliness of privilege, and of language. The
inability to bridge the former without the latter.
In New York, I was one of the millions of survivors with nothing to lose
— I had waited tables, lived in a 70 square foot room amongst Chinatown’s
illegal immigrants, felt as comfortable there as I did at the Opera House,
or some Michelin-starred restaurant.
In Bangalore, I am like a spectator in the city, seeing but never able to
fully partake, wanting to break out of a comfortable cocoon but sheepishly
mute, unable to express myself. The loneliness of privilege is unfamiliar
to me. But not an unbreakable one by any means.
After all, the love story between me and this city has only just
begun.
