On Bangalore

11 April 2021

Reading Olivia Liang’s “The Lonely City” recently transported me back to New York — its stark glass skyscrapers, its deep estrangement punctured by moments of humanity (a deli owner’s smile as he rings up your usual, a group of sidewalk artists on the cobbled streets of East Village). The City of Dreams, this glistening center of the world, often crystallised what it meant to be lonely amongst millions — to inhabit that “uneasy combination of separation and exposure” revealed by the tiny window cells reaching hundreds of stories from ground to sky.

Liang’s writing seamlessly straddles the personal and historical; she is interrogating her own loneliness, as a woman in her mid-30s vexed by love and this game of life, with its ever-changing and ever-obscure rules. Throughout this interrogation, she turns to an archival history of New York’s art and artists — focusing on outcasts who have drawn upon loneliness as a motif, or whose identity was so antithetical to the Tribe that their very existence touched upon estrangement and solitude. Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol are two of her well-known subjects — while David Wojnarowciz and Henry Darger — lesser-known, but powerful stories of activism, silence and life on the margins.

“The Lonely City” brought back those college years in New York, the first city I ever lived in. For most people, there is a kind of anxious instability to those years, as we grasp for anchors and identity, finally released from the rigidity of schoolroom rules to the pervasive ambiguity of the wider world. Those years shaped me, and New York did as well, with its fast pace and endless hunger, with its core survivalism that required everyone to earn their right to the city itself.

I had romantic notions when I first arrived in New York: to canvas the city, my first city, to build memories on every block of that island. 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-town girl, discovering the entire kaleidoscope of the world.

In that sense, Bangalore is only the second city that I have ever truly inhabited. It is now almost 4 years since I first arrived, taking that interminably long taxi ride from Kempagowda Airport. While finding my bearings, I stayed in an Airbnb on Lavelle Road for a week, which by some strange coincidence was located in the same building where I now live (after many temporary residences in between). Unlikely symmetries like this are the mystic riddles of cities, tiny patterns criss-crossing an ever-expanding canvas.

Almost fours years later, 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 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, where in springtime the trumpet blossoms cover the windowsills like a pink sleeve.

Why does Bangalore feel so different from New York? 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 a 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. Neighbourhoods, 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 New York — 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 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. A loneliness of privilege that 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.