Living Alone in Hyderabad at 23 and Eating Every Meal by Yourself
You've gotten good at cooking for one. You've optimized loneliness into a system, and there's something quietly sad about how good you've become at it.
Hyderabad's IT corridor employs over 1.5 million people. A significant number of them moved here from somewhere else, alone, carrying a suitcase and an offer letter and the assumption that the loneliness would be temporary. You were one of them. Twenty-three, fresh out of college, the offer letter still warm from the printer, the suitcase packed with clothes your mother ironed and the confidence of a person who has not yet learned that a city can hold you without knowing you.
Your flat is in Gachibowli. One BHK. The kitchen has a stove you use to boil water and heat dal from a packet. The bedroom has a mattress on the floor because the bed frame hasn't arrived and after three months you have stopped checking the delivery status. The mattress is fine. Everything is fine. Fine is the word you have learned to apply to everything the way you apply hand sanitiser, automatically, without thought, a reflex against contamination, the contamination here being the truth, which is that you eat every meal alone and the eating alone has stopped being a circumstance and has become a condition, a permanent feature of your days, like the Hyderabad heat, always present, sometimes bearable, never comfortable.
Who do you eat with?
Nobody. The question surfaces at 8pm, every evening, when the office empties and the colleagues who are from Hyderabad go home to their families and the colleagues who have friends go to dinner with their friends and you go to your one BHK in Gachibowli and open the door and the door opens to silence and the silence has the particular density of a room that has been empty all day, accumulating stillness the way a jar accumulates dust.
You order biryani. Paradise or Bawarchi or whichever Swiggy recommends tonight. The biryani arrives in a bag. You eat it on the mattress. The mattress on the floor. The floor of a flat in a city of ten million. The biryani is extraordinary, Hyderabad's gift to the world, flavour so precise it borders on sacred. And you eat it alone, crosslegged, watching something on your laptop, and the juxtaposition of the extraordinary food and the ordinary loneliness creates a dissonance you have stopped noticing the way you have stopped noticing the heat.
Is this what they meant? Is this what the placement cell and the parents and the relatives meant when they said "Hyderabad mein bahut scope hai"? The scope is real. The salary is real. The career trajectory is upward and visible and everything the engineering degree promised. But the brochure did not mention this part. The part where you sit on a mattress on a floor in a city that shines with opportunity and eat the best biryani in the country and cannot name a single person in this city who would notice if you did not show up tomorrow.
Sunday. IKEA in Hitec City. You went because the flat needs a bookshelf and because IKEA on a Sunday is a place where a person can walk among objects and families and couples assembling furniture and feel, for ninety minutes, like a participant in domestic life rather than an observer of it. You bought the bookshelf. You bought meatballs. You assembled the bookshelf that evening, alone, following the wordless instructions, and the assembling was meditative, and the finished bookshelf stood against the wall, empty, waiting for books you would buy eventually, and the emptiness of the bookshelf felt personal in a way you could not defend rationally but felt in your chest with the clarity of a struck bell.
Hussain Sagar at sunset. You went once. The lake held the dying light like a memory holds a face, imprecisely, beautifully. Families lined the promenade. A child dropped an ice cream and wailed and the wailing was the loudest thing in the world for three seconds and then it stopped and the evening continued. You stood at the railing and watched the water and the water watched you back and neither of you said anything and the not-saying was comfortable in the way that only solitude among strangers can be, a loneliness diluted by proximity but not cured by it.
Do you ever wonder if there is someone in this city, right now, on another mattress on another floor in another one BHK, eating biryani alone and feeling the same dissonance? And if there were a way to talk to that person, not forever, not as a project, just tonight, just to confirm that the loneliness is real and shared and survivable, would that be enough?