The city we stopped living in

I was back in Bangkok recently. It is a city that is oddly familiar to us Indians for reasons that range from the sublime to the sleazy. It is chaotic, noisy, relentlessly alive, not unlike any Indian city we know. The traffic moves like it has a death wish; street food on every corner; ten million people are doing ten million things at once. 

But for once, I wasn’t observing the city, I was observing myself.

I was standing at a street cart near Silom, the kind I have walked past a hundred times without stopping. The woman making my pad krapow had arranged her prep bench with a quiet, unhurried precision that I can only describe as pride. Not performance. Not hygiene-theatre for tourists. Just someone who had decided, privately, that this was how her work would be done. I ate standing up on the pavement, completely at ease. We exchanged a couple of sentences on the food and the humid weather while I unsuccessfully tried to flex my Thai vocabulary outside the predictable sawasdee kha and khop khun kha. 

In the midst of that mundane urban scene, I felt something I hadn’t felt for a while. I was participating.

I was not doing the thing I usually do in Indian cities. Not scanning, calculating, or bracing. The low hum of assessment that normally runs in the background of public life had simply switched off. Is this safe? Is this clean? Is this person going to want something from me? Where is the exit? For women especially, this micro-vigilance is so constant it stops feeling like vigilance. It becomes personality.

There is so much spoken and written about the exhaustion of living in India. We blame the lack of infrastructure, the over-population, the noise, the heat. But there is another fatigue that is equally grueling, and corrosive, the fatigue of carrying a version of yourself that is permanently on alert. 

That is the thing about informal isolation, the kind we practice as a survival mechanism in Indian cities. It doesn’t feel like a choice. It accumulates so gradually, in such small daily calibrations, that you stop noticing you are doing it. You have simply become someone who does not make eye contact in lifts. Who does not chat with the Uber driver beyond logistics. Who has perfected the art of being in a dense crowd while remaining entirely sealed off from it. You put earphones in not because there is anything urgent to listen to, but because the white plastic signals a boundary: do not approach.

I have lived in Dubai for years. It is many things, relentlessly ambitious, occasionally surreal, a city that seems to be making itself up as it goes. But one of the quietest gifts of living there, is what it does to your nervous system to inhabit a place that basically works. To queue and trust that the queue will move. To move among thousands of strangers without needing to manage them. Dubai gave me back something I hadn’t realised I’d misplaced: what it feels like to be a participant in public life rather than a careful negotiator of it.

Indians are not cold people; anyone who has ever sat at an Indian family dinner knows our warmth and generosity are enormous, loud and coded into our DNA. But that warmth is strictly rationed. It is saved for the circle. Outside that circle, we become another species. Careful. Condensed. Transactional. Not unkind but closed.

Our public spaces have trained us to be this way. The infrastructure of civic trust, reliable systems, predictable norms, the quiet assurance that the rules apply to everyone equally has been thin enough for long enough that the only rational response was to build your own fortress. When you cannot trust the system, you trust no one outside your circle. The private warmth survives. The public ease does not.

This split has become so normal that we mistake it for temperament. We think we are simply “city people.” The stranger gets the managed version of us, a variable to be assessed rather than a person to be met. And because we repeat this choreography thousands of times, the defense settles into the body. The shoulders learn to stay slightly raised. The body learns that silence is safer than openness.

Plenty of people I know who have lived abroad and come back describe a grief they struggle to name. They have everything they used to miss, the family, the food, the density of belonging that India offers like nowhere else. It’s all there. And yet something is still absent. I think it is this. The ease of public life. The small daily experience of moving through a city without armour or emotional labour. 

India offers a ferocity of private belonging, but private belonging is not the same thing as public ease, and public ease, it turns out, is its own kind of nourishment. You can belong intensely to a place and still move through it with your shoulders slightly raised. You can love and be loved by a city and still not feel relaxed inside it.

This is how cities shape character. Not through grand declarations, but through repetition. If a city rewards suspicion, you become suspicious. If it rewards hurry, you become hurried. If it rewards caution, you become cautious.

So when I remember that street cart in Bangkok, I am not remembering lunch. I am remembering a temporary reprieve from an old habit of the mind and body. A moment in which I was not asking the city for permission to relax.

Maybe that is what we have lost in too many Indian cities. Not warmth. Not energy. Not life. We still have all of that.

What we have lost is the ordinary freedom to be open without feeling exposed. And until we notice how costly that loss has become, we will keep calling it normal.

END OF ARTICLE