Taking Root

I had my first ‘being alone’ moment today as I grappled with a lid to a fussy jar of pasta sauce. I scrunched up my face and even did a little dance to no avail. I danced around my tiny one bedroom-kitchen-half a hall apartment hoping that by some stroke of luck, the cap would undo itself. Out of pity if nothing else.

After ten minutes of acute hunger and fitful dancing, I gave up.

Half-heartedly, I knocked on my landlord’s door. A kindly Coorgi gentleman, he would make his tch-tch face at the sauce bottle. He’s not a fan of packaged foods. He’s clearly not a fan of how I do things. If I ever miss a parent, I usually land up there for lunch.

But the universe seemed to conspire against my will to cook—no one answered the door. I trudged back, intensely annoyed that I’d have to skip dinner. I needed another pair of hands. Dare I say it—a pair of man hands. (And then I ducked to miss the well-aimed, vitriolic feminist spittle)

This is exactly the kind of predicament my mother says would be averted if I got married. “You’d have someone to travel with,” she says, tickling my travel bone, knowing where it tickles most. The opened bottle of reedy pasta sauce would only be a bonus.

But what beyond travel plans? Can he make good bhindi? Maybe Shaadi.com should think about a bhindi box. Or one for Spanish omelettes.

Living alone is a revelation. I’ve done so little of it, that it remains an enigma to me how people have done it their entire lives. Be content for who they are, in the absence of a mirror or another person to talk to.

Sometimes it seems the fridge is trying to have a conversation with me. When all else falls silent, it hums and creaks like an old, old man. Frozen on the inside.

The silence falls like wet blanket. It gets darker quicker under the canopy of trees that makes little squares of the sky. If I listen close then I can hear the crickets, the night guard, the baby in the balcony across the road, the water falling from the slanted roof onto the pebbles. Even a guiltless fart once in a while.

I look at the little signs I’ve collected over these two months—a cut knee from trying to rush out of an auto, a dented nail from cutting the bhindi too fine, a backache from picking up clothes from all parts of the tiny house. And the bills, always the bills.

The thing about living alone is that there’s so much time to reflect on who you are, or who you’re trying to be. Not just in a pseudo-intellectual, philosophical battle with your brain, but even on an everyday level. It’s made me re-think my dependence on people, family, friends, the need to prove to myself and the world that I’m a ‘social being’. For now, I’m happy donning the new city cloak and turning invisible, unpalatable, unreceptive. I like the feeling of being dissolved.