Hello Reader,
It feels good to slide into your inbox again. It’s been a while and I’ve missed you. The newsletter is back and you can expect to find my weekly musings in your inbox again.
I thought I’ll kickstart TJL 2.0 with a deeply personal piece about home, belonging and my search for what these words mean.
‘Describe yourself in a few words’.Â
I hate when people and apps ask me this. Long hours spent pondering this question have proved futile and I’ve eventually come to the conclusion that a couple of hundred characters aren’t enough to capture personality. Either that or I’m just an incredibly boring person.Â
Peel away the fluff and my self description comes down to some iteration of ‘ A 23 year-old writer from Bangalore’. It’s taken me a while to get there but I can finally call myself a writer without being plagued by imposter syndrome. I haven’t shrugged it off completely but its effect has dulled. In recent times, this fear of pretension has actually hopped over to the ‘from Bangalore’ part of the description.Â
My connection with Bangalore has been on the wane. It’s an unsettling feeling; why didn’t the place I call home feel the way it once did?Â
When I addressed this with my therapist after my most recent visit to the city in September, she put forward a radical idea - I had outgrown the city. It was an uncomfortable truth and it stung. I refused to accept it yet couldn’t get it out of my head.Â
It had been six years since I’d lived in Bangalore. When I left for college in the US, my parents shifted to London. So, I found myself in a weird position of having spent my entire childhood in Bangalore but no part of my adult life there.Â
No one talks about how painful it is to outgrow a place. And it hurts more when the place is so closely linked to your identity. Interestingly, this outgrowing of and identity attachment occurred simultaneously for me with Bangalore.Â
Studying abroad was a sharp learning curve catalysed by an exposure to perspectives and people so different from the ones I’d grown up with. This immersion into a new culture was accompanied by a growing awareness of my own. It’s the oldest cliche in the world - you only appreciate something once it’s gone. And only after leaving Bangalore did I begin to really appreciate the city.Â
There were only a handful of people from Bangalore in my college, so I felt like I represented the city. Until I reached the US, I hadn’t realised the pride I felt at telling people where I was from. I began to identify with Bangalore as people started to identify Bangalore with me. I began to discover what belonging means.Â
I woke up to the ways in which the city had brushed its strokes on me. How an inclination towards pubs over clubs, an appreciation for Rock, a laid-back attitude towards life, poor Hindi diction weren’t down to quirks of personality.Â
I wore Bangalore on my sleeve. I’d make it a point to use the local slang around friends and wouldn’t miss a chance to talk up the city. But, this outward affliction was being nurtured by insecurity. I didn’t take well to my parents shifting to London. In the fear that I’d have to let go of Bangalore, I clung on to it with desperation.Â
College was a period of intense change. Internal and external. So in those first couple of years, returning to Bangalore during semester breaks was always an intensely grounding experience. I guess returning to your roots always is. I remember the one winter break in 2018 in particular, when I visited the city after a year long gap. I’d never spent that long away from Bangalore before and those three weeks in the city felt humbling. It gave me a chance to see how far I’d come. And more importantly, where I’d gone astray. On the night I was flying out of the city, I sat at my departure gate and journaled for almost an hour. It was a note titled ‘Bangalore Learnings’.Â
My relatives would often remark on how I’d make it a point to visit at least once a year. How I’d always go back to stroll my old stomping grounds. How I held the city so close to my heart. But, it wasn’t that straightforward.Â
The city housed my childhood and I was petrified of letting it go. If I lost this most primal of connections, who even was I? Who would I become? A part of the reason for coming back to the city was to safeguard what I already had.Â
Bangalore was a want, but also a need. And eventually, it became neither.Â
Going back used to feel like time travelling. I would seamlessly float into this bubble of nostalgia - a blur of Sukh Sagar breakfasts, Koramangala bars, Church Street bookstores and endless pitchers of beer. But over time, this nostalgia bubble became suffocating. I felt stuck in Bangalore. I’d juiced my childhood to a point of saturation and it had nothing to give back anymore. Had I romanticised the city to such an extent that without my rose tinted glasses it felt ordinary?Â
I was going to all the same places I used to but felt no stirring of belonging. Something felt off. I didn’t know why but I could tell how. It was the small things - landing at Kempegowda Airport no longer felt like the homecoming it once used to, JNC Road and Blossoms began to feel stale and I no longer journaled before leaving the city. Once exhilarating, Bangalore now felt exhausting.Â
That last point is important. I’d try and soak up as much of the city as I could in the few weeks I was there. On an average day, I’d leave home after breakfast and return post midnight. As my childhood home had been rented out, I’d stay with my grandparents who lived on the complete other end of the city from my friends. As a result, most of my time in Bangalore was spent in cabs and autos.Â
I’d push my social battery to its absolute limits when I was in the city and these Uber rides were essentially the only time I got to recharge. And it was in one such cab ride in the winter of 2019, as I hauled myself from one part of the city to another, I realized for the first time how unnatural all of this was.Â
My life in Bangalore wasn’t like this when I lived here. I didn’t meet friends with such alarming levels of frequency. I wasn’t this social; I’d rarely spend 12 hours away from home, hopping from one scene to another. Why was I ‘binging’ the city?Â
My visits to the city felt like highlights packages of my past life. The days spent doing absolutely nothing, an important aspect of home, had been carefully omitted. The mundanity was missing.Â
Mundane doesn’t come from friends. It comes from acquaintances. The security guard who’d hold the school bus for me when I was late, the apartment friend with whom my friendship didn’t move beyond the football court, my mom’s theatre troupe, my friends’ parents who felt like my own - these were relationships that weren’t an active part of my life but they were important. Their absence was why something felt off in Bangalore.Â
Once I noticed this unnaturalness of my visits, it became glaring. I began to feel like a visitor to the museum of my past life. Plans, places and people that were once sparked by spontaneity, now felt so curated. With each visit to the city, these feelings strengthened.Â
It’s when I realised I’d have to let a part of Bangalore go. Because no matter how often I visited, there are things I just won’t be able to recapture. Denial would only further the wedge.Â
I remember chatting with my college friend Aboli a couple of months ago, when she was telling me about the visit of a school friend she hadn’t met in a while. She spoke of how they couldn’t pick up where they’d left off. How they’d both changed and once she accepted that, she warmed to it. ‘It was like getting to know a new person. I want to see who you are now’.Â
The parallels couldn’t have been clearer.Â
When people ask where I’m from, I still say Bangalore. But I hope they don’t ask where I belong. I’m still figuring that one out.Â
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