Feeling Lonely in Chennai When You're Not From Here

You are standing at the bus stop on Anna Salai at 7pm and the traffic is a living thing, a beast made of auto-rickshaws and MTC buses and motorcycles carrying families of four, and the air smells of exhaust and jasmine because a woman selling malli poo is sitting three feet away with her basket of white flowers strung on thread, and you are aware, suddenly and completely, that you know nobody here. Not the woman with the flowers. Not the man in the ironed shirt waiting for the same bus. Not the chai seller across the road whose face you have memorised from seeing it every evening for three months but whose name you have never learned. Chennai is full of people and you are among them the way a coin is among other coins in a jar, present, touching, and entirely separate.

The language

You moved here for work, from Lucknow or Patna or Jaipur or somewhere that spoke your language, and the first thing Chennai taught you is that belonging begins with sound. Tamil is everywhere. It is on the shop signs you cannot read, in the conversations at the next table that you cannot follow, in the jokes your colleagues share at lunch that lose their shape in translation. They are kind, your colleagues. They switch to English when you are present, and the switching is generous but it is also a reminder, every single time, that you are the reason the language changed, that the natural flow of the room bends to accommodate you, and accommodation is not the same as inclusion, though it looks similar from the outside. You smile and nod and eat your sambar rice and the rice is different from the rice at home, thinner, longer, and even the rice is a small unfamiliarity, another thread in the fabric of not-quite-belonging that wraps around your days in this city where the Bay of Bengal is close enough to taste in the air but home is a two-hour flight and a lifetime of context away.

The weekends

Saturday mornings are the hardest. The office gives structure. It gives you a place to be and people to be near, even if the nearness is professional rather than personal. But Saturday has no structure. Saturday is an open field and you are standing in it with nothing planned and nobody expecting you anywhere. You have been to Marina Beach. You have walked along the shore and watched the families and the couples and the children building sand forts and the old men standing knee-deep in the waves like they are having a private conversation with the sea. You have eaten sundal from a paper cone and the sundal was good and the evening was warm and the sunset turned the water into something that belonged in a painting and you were completely, thoroughly, architecturally alone in the middle of all of it. You went back to your PG room and sat on the bed and the bed is narrow and the room is small and the walls are painted a blue that was probably meant to be calming but has instead become the colour of your isolation, so that now, whenever you see that particular shade of blue, anywhere, you feel a small contraction in your chest that you have stopped trying to explain.

The city that does not owe you anything

Chennai is not cruel. You want to be clear about that. Nobody has been unkind. The auto drivers are not more dishonest than auto drivers anywhere else. The landlord is reasonable. The food is extraordinary once you learn to navigate the heat and the coconut and the particular genius of filter coffee served in a steel tumbler and davara. The city is beautiful in ways you did not expect, the Kapaleeshwarar temple at dusk, the crumbling colonial buildings of George Town, the unexpected green of the Theosophical Society gardens where banyan trees grow so large they seem to be holding up the sky. You like Chennai. You may even love it, in time. But liking a city and belonging to it are different things, and the distance between them is measured not in months of residence but in the number of people who would notice if you did not come home one evening, and that number, right now, as you sit on your narrow bed in your blue room in a PG in T. Nagar, is zero, and zero is a number that is difficult to sit with on a Saturday night when the city outside your window is alive and loud and full of people who have somewhere to be and someone to be there with.