Pune Weekend Loneliness: Everyone Went Home Except You
Friday evening, the office empties out fast. By Saturday morning, half your building has gone home. You're one of the ones who stayed.
Saturday morning, 10am, and I'm standing in my kitchen in Kothrud making tea I don't really want because making tea is something to do and doing something is better than sitting on the bed and staring at the wall, which is what I did for the first forty minutes after waking up. Outside, the street sounds like Pune always sounds on a weekend morning: a pressure cooker from the flat below, someone's mother yelling, a bike that needs a new silencer. Normal sounds. Living sounds. Sounds that belong to other people's Saturdays, full of plans and people and the kind of lazy chaos that happens when a family exists inside the same four walls. My four walls have me. Just me. And the tea.
The geography of it
Pune is a city that empties on weekends. Not entirely, not literally, but in the specific way that matters to someone who moved here for work and knows nobody outside the office. My colleagues are from Pune. They go home. Home meaning their parents' house in Kothrud or Deccan or Pimpri, where lunch is ready and the living room has people in it and the afternoon stretches out in the comfortable, aimless way that only happens when you're surrounded by people who don't need a reason to be around you. I am not from Pune. My home is in Indore, six hours by bus, too far for a weekend, just close enough for the missing to feel specific. So while my colleagues go home, I stay. In my flat. In Kothrud. With the tea.
The analogy I keep thinking of is a train platform after the train has left. That's what Pune feels like on a Saturday. Everyone has boarded something, gone somewhere, and I'm standing on the platform listening to the announcement of the next departure and the next departure is Monday, which is two days away, and two days is a strange amount of time when you have no one to spend it with. Too short to plan a trip. Too long to sleep through. The exact duration that forces you to sit with yourself, and sitting with yourself is only enjoyable when it's a choice, and this is not a choice, this is an arithmetic problem where the number of people available on a Saturday in Pune who want to spend time with me equals zero, and zero is a number I have gotten used to but not comfortable with.
What I do
I walk. Pune is a good city for walking, I'll give it that. FC Road on a Saturday afternoon has enough people to create the illusion of company without requiring any actual interaction. I walk past the book shops and the coffee places and the students who sit on the pavement wall eating vada pav and laughing, and the laughter reaches me like warmth from a fire I'm not sitting close enough to. I buy coffee somewhere. I sit with the coffee. I watch. The watching is its own activity now, a Saturday hobby I did not choose but have become skilled at, the art of being near people without being with them, of absorbing the ambient humanness of a crowded street as a substitute for the specific humanness of a friend who knows your name and chooses your company.
Sunday is worse
By Sunday the walking has lost its novelty and the coffee has lost its comfort and the flat has become a container that I rattle around in like a single coin in a large box. I clean. I watch something. I cook, maybe, if the cooking feels more like an activity and less like a chore, which depends on the Sunday and on the weight of the quiet, which varies. Some Sundays the quiet is gentle, almost pleasant, a solitude I can sit inside without distress. Other Sundays the quiet is a presence, a fourth wall that has fallen away to reveal the audience, which is no one, watching a play I am performing for an empty theatre. On those Sundays I go to bed early because bed is the only destination that makes sense when you have nowhere to be and no one expecting you anywhere and the gap between Friday evening and Monday morning has become a country you cross alone, without a map, arriving on the other side intact but tired in a way that has nothing to do with the body and everything to do with the particular exhaustion of being a person who moved to a city for a job and got the job and lost everything else.