A definitive guide to loneliness

and what to do when this guide is not enough

It’s the onset of the season of no decisions in Delhi. Too hot for outdoors, too sunny for faraway, too late for tea, too early for roohafza. June is a long way off and there are no summer vacations in sight. It’s only April after all. The Capital’s cotton kurtas are out, whites and sky blues have taken over the Metro lines even as the shades of spring flowers fall apart with dwindling leaves…

By how much I talk about the weather and wind in these posts, I have considered calling this newsletter “Season’s Greetings”. We will see if this idea stays put till the next issue is out.

It has been more than six months since I wrote for Khwaabghar, and I have received kind reminders from friends and Substack automated emails, saying as much. The weather has changed twice since then in Delhi. I am not sure if I have a good enough reason for this delay anymore, procrastination doesn’t seem to cut it. There is a larger story at work here, one that we will get to at some point. Till then, I am going to write about something I think a lot about these days, something I shouldn’t be thinking about at all as an extrovert, newly married Punjabi woman, with a loving family and host of friends, who also happens to run a community library. Today, I am going to write about loneliness.

Feelings are temporary residences

Badi mumma now sleeps with the light on all night because she is scared of falling while walking up to the toilet or taking a sip of water. Because her room is bright during the day, she switches on the light only to sleep… It’s funny how we can line up all our arrows to point towards our fear, all in the hope of avoiding them. Like kabbadi, walk towards it, keep teasing it, until you’re sure you’re only going to touch and go, making a dash for safety.

I do not remember why I remember this oddity, or when I started thinking about her fear as a mirror to my own, a discomfort dripping into another life, another story, and freezing into a routine. As I navigate my identities as a married feminist woman, my brain is a landmine of questions and answers that wouldn’t come. I do the creative task of inventing affirmations, reading up on patriarchy, breathing the 4-7-8 pattern, getting lost in routines…only to come back to the wiggling of fingertips around the questions, until they squeeze the answers from within them. Badi mumma sits inside the fear cocoon with crossed legs, accepting what began as a coping mechanism, as a state of being, never catching a dark room’s sleep on the days she probably wouldn’t fall. And I have made discomfort and loneliness my temporary home, jumping in a circle of thoughts, turning this way and that to find the perfect posture that doesn’t leave a sprain in the morning. These are not resident feelings anymore, these are residences of feeling that we have retreated into, organising our interactions per maps of familiarity. 

A few weeks ago, my iPhone didn’t accept my Face ID. That has never happened before, unless for some unexplained reason, I turn away the moment of trying to unlock it, or am wearing a charcoal face mask for blackheads. The turmeric and besan cleanser it accommodates for and unlocks promptly with a smirk. The inconvenience of entering the passcode over and over was nothing. It was the unsettling feeling of absolute change, a change that Apple couldn’t account for, a shift in what I looked like, who I was, what I was becoming. For a mind prone to overthinking, this was gold. I talked to myself, trying to reason iPhone’s indifference as impersonal and technical. Like badi mumma’s tubelight, I whispered to myself little reminders of what it means to be me, to have my own story and meaning amidst the noise, avoiding the fall. Even after my phone unlocked after a long minute, the unhelpful chatter flowed on until it was hard for me to trace when affirmations became alarms, and my own free fall went unnoticed.

Loneliness is a densely populated town

Unhelpful chatter. Loneliness gives you a lot of that. But loneliness is not an empty feeling devoid of people, places, and motivation. It is an active sense of the parts of you that no one shares, and the ones you wouldn’t share anyway. Loneliness is expansive, a forest of endless possibilities. A trek with a group. A good night’s rest when you wanted to stay up. A meal of four people where you know none of them. An absence of common memories on the dining table, an absence of a common history. It is different night and day routines while living in the same house, mismatched meal times. It is a walk up the hills with three strangers, where you would like some water and one of them has it. It is period pain when you would like some help going to sleep, having tea in the bed, crying. But you wouldn’t ask. Loneliness is rajma chawal you cook for yourself, that don’t taste like home, because you wouldn’t ask anyone to join you. Loneliness is full of people and thought, it is not empty. It fills you up, and once you learn to live with it, it is quite enough. 

A part of this loneliness is just pure and simple adulthood- the first time you are alone, really alone. There is no school and college routine, no timelines, no real deliverables, no pressing need to do anything, really. You must wake up and take a call if this day is worth the effort. You get to decide for yourself if you are cold and hungry, and then find ways of feeding yourself and holding a blanket over your ankle. No one is watching you shiver, or hearing the sounds of your belly. Your parents are far away and despite all their efforts, you have grown up. And now, you must find love in yourself too, somewhere where it stays unchanged and doubles up every now and then, like almond soaked overnight in water.

And then there is the other kind of loneliness, the one that comes with a departure of words. Where language leaves you, and you find yourself without expression. When your iPhone refuses to recognise your face, and your brain helps you melt away in a spiral of your own making. I have felt this sense of displacement a few times, all of them when I left ‘home’.  

Home is the usual crying corner

Home, second home, ghar wali feeling, mera wala pillow, my side of the bed: all words for a certain order of things which our brains and bodies have gotten used to- a pattern of bedsheets, rickshaw stops, steel plates, and that slightly crooked mirror that our emotions recognise. We have all played games as kids that had a ‘house’ in some form, a safe zone from which you could not be eliminated unless you moved. You always moved.

I have left ‘home’ a few times in my life. Moving cities, moving houses, travelling, studying away from home, getting married. On all of these occasions, I have cried through extended periods of discomfort and loneliness, not showing my tears, not asking for help, not learning my lessons. At the end of these painfully long periods, I have always found new homes, wood panelled in a new sense of who I was, and who I could be. An added layer of me, when I was so sure I was complete.

This does not mean that the structures and systems which dragged me away do not anger me. I am furious at how class structures dictate a sense of home, how colonial and global power legacies privilege one education over another, and don’t even get me started on patriarchy. What I am learning to accept though (and I’m not there yet), is that you must always look for a new balance, a way of adding pretty pillow covers to halfway houses, until a semblance of ‘home’ comes along. 

I am guilty of not following my advice on this on most days. I take big emotions and wrap them up in that particular taste of rajma, at the root of which is a homesickness so crushing, it kills my appetite. The appropriate distance between the sofa and the table becomes the whole of my unhappiness. But I have better days as well. Days on which I write and keep myself company- turns out affirmations do not sound like alarms on paper. Days on which I can find an expression for loneliness, and organise a Khwaabghar meetup. On some days, I am able to find home in myself, and sleep in the dark. On other days, well, I just switch on the light.

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What’s happening at Khwaabghar?

Khwaabghar has been buzzing with activity since its reopening in January 2023. We are open on all Tuesdays and Fridays, and have a bustling calendar of events for the weekends. As of April 2023, we also have a monthly Gender Circle, where we will meet and talk about a different theme every month! Keep following us on Instagram to get more updates. If you tend to miss updates on Instagram, please feel free to share your email address with me here, and I will add you to our mailing list.

Thank you for reading!