It is how life brings it all rushing back when one day you are there and the next day you are not.When a scent wafts past me, a subtle whiff as familiar as it is fleeting, someone seems to be calling my name. I have no perception whatsoever of the person facing me, but a tsunami of sense and memory swells all around me: touch, sound, face, glass, laughter. Then, just as it began, it stops. Something I had almost forgotten about was played for a split second before me. And gone. It was a stumble, a slip, a heartbeat. Or was it a…? And was the result, at that particular moment, the other way around? Or perhaps, and this is the most profound, wasn’t it the other way around?

Next there are the songs; those old school tunes that still hook me, that come on the radio out of nowhere, when I least expect them, and trigger reflex memories of days of long ago. Sometimes notes from some song take me back decades to a time I cannot believe existed: a time when, somehow, being was actually more certain than becoming, and joy was never something you had to earn. Like music, memory is a touchstone for retrieving and living in the past, bringing yesterday into our moment in such a way that it feels tangibly present. But the truth is, all songs have stories.

Much of the time I reside in the place I call Nostalgia, a vague world between the here and now and whenever it was. I frequently wander the byways of my thought, down the mental roads and lanes and streets of my many and various dreams. I reach into the boxes of my heart, sift through the drips and drops inside my head hoping, more or less incoherently, to find the person I’m looking for. I search the corridors of my psyche, where each room and each hall has its tale, its face, its feeling, its former world, as I struggle to find that one who’s no longer there.

It is an elusive search to fill in a piece of a jigsaw puzzle whose picture I will never see in its entirety. The hook and its disconnected balance create a permanent wound, a societal, emotional cavity that could be filled only once with the optimism and hope of coming together as ‘we’ but has been shattered into a million pieces, some lost forever. That permanent wound will never heal, not over time, nor with the distractions that life offers. When I try to fill the void, to make it whole again, I inevitably try to satisfy it with a piece that does not fit.

However, the void isn’t just a place of pain; it is an active engine. The void propels me, drives me, makes me who I am. I am what I remember, what I have loved and lost: I am a product of my memories, the joyful ones that draw a smile to my face and the sad ones that formed my scars. The void is the testament of my capacity to love and to care, an affirmation of of the connections that touched me so deeply that their absence remains a living part of who I am.

It is this truth about the way that, even in our need to reconcile that troubling past, the dance is with the self as you are now, that I am happier to accept. If the human act of friendship is in part about filling an emptiness like the one that gaped inside me, the void itself is evidence of how full was another part of my life: in love given and received, and how deep were the connections. It would be easier if the hole could be healed. But that is not the way of things. So the emptiness of love unreturned leaves my life as rich and nuanced as if handled differently.
The void has no face It just walks softly beside me, a shadowy escort. Its presence never dissipates.

I take them with me into the present, where they guide, inspire, and sometimes comfort me, because they tell me that in grief there is beauty, and in nothingness there is still something. And I still keep living, a mosaic of before and after, paved with stones carved from the echoes of my nostalgia. I embrace the void, not as lack, but as being that makes me who I am; the silent, unsounded spaces into which my life leaks, to give it its depth, and its meaning, making me a living monument to what memory and love can make us.

As an only child I was used to solitude, and it wasn’t just a state but a friend. I was happy playing alone as a child: books were a portal. Prose was a doorway that woke up something in me; as I looked to the pages first in the morning and sought them out again at dusk, and when I wanted to be left alone. Books had no beginning or end, literal or metaphoric, and as I write, to this day I see no reason why a novel should conform to that drive or need. In fact, I believe that it doesn’t and shouldn’t. So, I could easily have felt lonely as a child but instead, in my solitude, a deep fondness for my own company grew in me, and books were a great friend to have in the early years: a guarantee of company, a warm welcome with every venture into reading.

When I was little, my imagination became my most trusted friend while others safely socialised at playgrounds. When I missed school trips or birthday parties, reading was my best companion. With every passing page, I emptied the shelves of the bookcases and grew a new friend. Often, I yearned to be inside the pages with Pip in Great Expectations or in Wonderland with Alice, just to zone out from the reality of school bullies and awkward moments. They were not simply paper characters but my personal heart buddies; soul mates who taught me about resilience, empathy and the human psyche.

This childhood experience, in which solitude was often my constant companion, settled into my soul and made me adept at sweetly flourishing, rather than being annoyed or bored, in a quiet mood. It gave me a loving tolerance for anguish and solitude, so that, even when I was a child, I did not long to be with others, I was content to notice how fun it was for the stories that I thought up to roam free in my mind. Loving the company of my own self has never been easy for children to find, but for me it had always come in handy.

I started to realise that, as I got into my late 20s and then 30s, my set of older friends was thinning out as they moved away, as the set of new people entered an absorbing period of life and responsibilities, and as the roll-call of social events began to decrease. As a teenager, I had cultivated a liking for solitude, and so I felt comfortable with this adjustment as ‘friendship’ receded from my adult vocabulary. It began to feel like an almost natural reversion, because I still cared about reading, music and writing, and so, in this reduced version of adulthood, I tried to resume the activities I had pursued in my teens.

My home today is my comfort; my cats, Alladin and Dora, go with me everywhere, and the noise of two cats purring is a balm for the soul; the books on my shelves are there because of the happy hours I have spent reading them; and the music of Lennon and the poetry of words which is sound-track of my life.

I have found companions in several figures: Charles Dickens for his story-telling grace; John Lennon for his acute pain, bold spontaneity and honest sensibility; Karl Marx for the impetus of his critical clamour and for his political imagination; Tagore for the grace of his poetry and the prose which still makes me feel like as if I am just a mere mortal who isn’t alone, that there is so much more to celebrate and so much more to lose.
And with the years, my sense of solitude has fine-tuned as well. Like all decisions, there is a light and dark side to choosing to live alone. When you are young, solitude is circumstance: you do not have much choice but the urge to engage and be seen becomes less acute, more a matter of spasm than necessity. I have never felt the tug and pull between being seen and being alone, between feeling I needed to kick up dust in the street to prove my worth or nestle in for hours at the page. I no longer believe my sense of self is tied to social interactions with others. Now I simply do not feel as if I need to be seen, to justify my existence by fluttering from occasion to opportunity. I get a deeper satisfaction from solitude, from reading, from watching a documentary, from thinking, and often playing and cuddling up with my furry roommates.
Most days are so loud, I have a hunger for it to be quiet. I want to spend the night alone, recapturing not only the ritual of privacy but also the special joy of having my own inner address. My home is comfortable, and familiar, like my own skin. Here, with my cats, my books and my favourite music, I do not have to say anything. I can be my own entire company. This is far from the desolation of loneliness; it is the site of pleasure and solitary creativity.

In this refuge I am free to be myself, to be the person I have always been; the books and characters I have loved are my friends, and the stories of my life play out through their tales, the music that has been with me all along takes me home to the place where I once was and the time when I lived through it, and the thoughts of Marx and Hegel and Tagore chart a pathway to a new understanding of the world.

When I welcomed solitude into my life, I realized that loneliness is not feeling alone, but feeling with the most profound part of your inner self, be part of that what really is important to your existence, and to see the joy of life in your solitude. And, so my friendship with solitude continues, without giving up: I owe myself that I stay like me.
Solitude is now a gift: the wise silence I need in order to understand others. Solitude is something to be thanked for: without it, I would struggle to live as though I had no greater anchor than the world out there, wouldn’t I? Solitude is a home — where I now keep my books and my cats, blast my music, and remember that in order to be happy with what you have around you, you must first be happy with what you have within. In this place of silence, my happiness is both permanent and profound.

During the few precious moments between the mania to which I am subjected by the frenzy of city life, my thoughts lead me to the moment, once sacrosanct and self-evident, when to live was to enjoy immensely the simplest of things. That is to say, in the long ago and far away of a childhood spent in a small town. An atavistic stroll nowadays to the yesteryears, the simpler times: Childhood in the small town was all joy. Today, it is big trouble and satiety of goods.

My small town had a debonair that belongs to cities. Is that familiar? Decoration, fascination, presumption and fascination; all the benefits and glamour of city life were denied to my small town. Life managed to be a bit slower there.Small town experiences were valuable because you lived in the moment. There were no blank screens, no friends liking or commenting on your pictures, no political turmoil and very little to be sad about. Memories crop up. Crushed by the dust, we experimented with the spinning roundabout, falling on lush greens, laughing with every muscle in our small bodies willing to stretch wide so that we could call it a day.

Walking in the rain was another thing I loved. I remember the smell of damp earth and the touch of drizzle on my skin. It wasn’t about running under cover to avoid getting soaked, but to accept it, dance in it, to feel, and be, and stay human under the sky. I used to set out for these walks with my worries and pains; I returned free from them, much calmer.

I would read on weekends: my parents encouraged it. Those reading sessions were not just entertainment; they were my forays into horizons outside my own.The books my mother chose for me featured stories that were important, enriching, and sometimes profound. From a very young age, they taught the virtue of empathy, the power of kindness, and the magnificence of human connections.Those reading sessions were not just entertainment; they were my forays into horizons outside my own. I went there for hours and came back enriched.

Those were the days when life did not revolve around the latest gadgets or the latest fashion. People did not visit each other with prior notice, but dropped by without any notice and the two families shared food and celebrated the festivities together. People took care of each other, not for some gain, but because they genuinely were interested in each other, which is the situation these days, missing.

And now many years later, my life in the city has quite the opposite formula: it is a constant allure of adrenalin and stimulation. It is the rat race, the pursuit of success, the endless zone of consumer buying and engagement. Everything is at a three-hour tempo. It wears on me, mentally speaking. It’s psyche growing constantly weary, body working overtime. Small blessings in the city are not shared, quiet moments with God forgotten. It’s a world that says success means more not less, more buying not less values, a first-world country in the fast lane.

Convenience is trumpeted for such a place, but there is so much I miss from growing up in a small town. The friendships in the city are shallow, many of them formed, at least in part, on the basis of networking necessity. I miss the uncowboyed option of dropping around to a friend’s place without having to make a date weeks in advance and I absolutely miss the spur-of-the-moment, impromptu get-togethers of my childhood.

Living in the city tires me out mentally. There is too much noise here, figuratively speaking. I can no longer find any inner peace. My head is busy with the noise all the time. I have to respond to something, I can hardly introspect anymore. Time reminds me over and over of the brevity of life, and or even that I am on the verge of another encounter with my loved ones. City life is so rushed. It has almost no moments of stillness.

I wish I could escape this frenzy, at least part of the time. I long to return to a life in which events, not things, have meaning, a coffee with a friend, times when you didn’t have to work at happiness just to feel mentally healthy and stress-free. I want to go back to a time when people were fuel for your soul, when you didn’t have to play at intimacy, but genuinely shared feelings.
The bright lights of the city hide a dark side, a feeling that there has to be more: more success, more money, more stuff, and never feeling like there is enough. It is hard to break out of, and I am definitely not alone.
But hope stays with me. Hope that someday I’ll come back to the basics, one day I will pack my backpack again and leave this city. I will go to that little town again, pluck an old book from that dusty shelf and read it like when I was there that day, when I was 10. I will walk in the rain and not be afraid of getting wet, play games in the playground with my friends and laugh until it hurts.

I will return to the pleasure of encounters between people, being with; I will pay attention to things that are small but vital, and I shall escape from the rat-race for material stuff, the constant accumulation of things. That is my dream. That is the voice which brings me through the bustle of cities.

Until then, perhaps I will seek out sanctuary in the cracks, carve out moments of time for reading, or walks in the rain, encounters that are real, special. And maybe, just maybe, I will manage to transport at least a whiff of small-town serenity into the city.

For the time being I will keep the memories, and hold on to the desire that someday, I will return there. To the simple life. To the life full of joviality, indulgence and love, where the weight of my head is not as heavy. And when I feel that hope knock on the door, I will bring out my childhood memories. I will dig into my bamboo hut to escape the blazing sun light, and lie in my groove to keep warm and feel remote. I will still the dust-swept night wind with cupped hands over my mouth. I will listen to the crickets, relish the water, and appreciate the impermanence of things.

I knew from childhood, I always knew quite simply that there was something awry with me; as if everyone else glided effortlessly through life on a frothy cloud of buoyant emotional buoyancy while I dangled precariously on the edge of the cliff. My first conscious recollections of anxiety are similarly immediate: damp hands that drenched my pages of scribbled homework, a pounding heart that made it difficult to inhale, a sinister pit of dread that I could not shake. It wasn’t episodic and it wasn’t occasional. It was constant; it coloured my childhood and it set in motion the drama of the years to follow into adulthood.

In class, my heart would pound and my breath would quicken as I tried to follow what the teacher was saying. When I couldn’t stop the dreaded heart-pounding, I would shift my focus to my teacher’s face as she talked. Just as I started to pay attention to what she was saying, the ominous surge would hit again. And, if that happened, anxiety would rear its ugly head. If the teacher called on me, the mere thought of speaking in front of the class would provoke mind-spinning anxiety filled with what-ifs and worst-case scenarios.
My parents, aware of my issues, took me to various professionals and although it produced results, it was never really the solution. Instead, for me, anxiety was something that was always lingering there, ready to jump on me at any given moment. And, the fact that I am naturally an extremely sensitive person, whose moods and energies I feel from the people around me loosely, doesn’t help matters. I felt other people’s misery, other people’s sadness.

Now that I was out of school and into the working world, the way that my anxiety manifested, the way it affected me, has changed. I believe that there is more at stake.
I carry with me a heavier burden of pressure and expectation, a rougher set of tongs with which to forge the anxious metal that wound around my thoughts. When the phone rings or a message beeps, there is that bout of anxiety again. When my hands start to tremble while filling out a form, that is anxiety. When my supervisor walks up to my cubicle, bringing with him a series of projects I am clearly unequipped to handle, that is anxiety. It is as if all the tiny particles of my anxious being, any of which may have started to break my heart even a moment before, now coalesces into a monstrous juggernaut of fears and anxieties. The size of my anxiety no longer matters, only the chance that it will spin out of control.

To have a heartbreak is to live through a disorienting and, in an immaterial sense, a large-scale event. So much wire has been wound around my heart. And without even knowing it, it has settled under my skin, becoming all-encompassing, filling my mind, degrading the quality of my life. The anxiety isn’t just a mental illness, it is a physical one. I work myself into the ground, but how can I sleep when I am still ruminating over everything I have to do and everything that has gone wrong during the day? Social interactions have become landmines. Extroverted small-talk strike me like a hot coal to the foot.
Heartbreak and grief, be it the daily devastations of living or the life-changing horror of losing someone, only reinforces the terrible sense of something being wrong, like my hand on something dangerous or something that will erupt in flames at any moment.

I have built defences to distract from the zillion thoughts relentlessly rattling around my brain. I read, to lose myself in other people’s stories. I play with the cats, cuddle them, as their purrs soothe my nerves. I take refuge in their simple joys and unthinking affection. The rhythmic roll of their purrs blankets what chaos my dog-chewed brain can dish, the regularity of their needs anchoring and comforting a mind otherwise pulled every which way.

But, however much you might try to quell it, the fear never quite disappears: there’s always this feeling that something’s going to go wrong. A dark cloud hovers over every situation, blotting out the happy days. Being on a permanent alert to attack has given me an anxious state of being, one I have learnt to function with but is a far cry from living.

Now, being able to live just means being able to get through each day, even as it happens in the middle of a fight with anxiety, finding the small victories, finding the calm, finding it even if it is only for five minutes. It means learning to accept that anxiety is me, and then learning to tame it, learning to live with myself, learning to fight. It means remaining in treatment, it means staying on medication and being open to using whatever tools come to mind as quickly as they do to create better coping skills, just because you are doing it one small step at a time doesn’t mean you don’t win at the end of the day as long as you are reaching.

Perhaps the most important thing I have learnt is that it is essential to be kind to myself: noticing the times when I feel guilty or ashamed for not doing more, and trying to remind myself that trying my best is good enough. Anxiety can make even the smallest things seem monumental, and returning power back to myself by being kind and showing gratitude just for the doing, gives me the upper hand sometimes. It makes me better able to tame the beast.

The ups and downs aren’t over yet. There are good days and bad, lightness and dark, and the thing that keeps me going is that I believe that things can get better. Maybe not tomorrow or next week but eventually, with practice, in time, the terror will relent enough for me to carve out a life that doesn’t leave me paralysed by fear. I cling to that. It is balancing on the tightrope, when you can no longer cry and no longer tremble, seeking out solid ground, grasping onto the flowers you plant and tend, the experiences that lift you from the terror because sometimes, when you have an anxiety disorder, you will never be free of it, you will just find the rope steadying among the flowers.

Perhaps by telling my story, I can help other people see that the anxiety struggle is real. It is a struggle, not a war, and it is ok to admit it. And if you, too, feel screwy in the head sometimes, you are not alone. This is us, and we will get along just fine.

The maze of feeling, in which the heart is the map and the mind cannot read it precisely but can’t stop trying, that is where my journey of moving on is crafted out of: trying and failing and trying again and failing again. Therapy, however, is still a battleground, with the maps of the past still salvaged from rubble, still held in my dry palm, because each time I go to therapy, each pill, extra pill, each counselling session, is still a storm that seems to have no end in sight.

The city, the frame within which the phantasmagorical dreams and the murmurs of commitment played themselves out, has long since become the screen upon which the memories of that life continually appear. The urban geography seems to be animated by the composites of every panorama and every olfactory sensation that I have encountered in the city, and was once an integral part of.

But, the feeling died an early death, leaving pieces of broken dreams and remnants of what could have been, even as I am unable to let go and my heart remains shrouded by an aura of what was.
Heartbreak, it deprives the body of its dreams, forges the soul: of steel; galvanising, labouring and sculpting a fortress, not desiring, but capable of weathering storms; and it has. I stand testament to that iron produced in the caldron of desire.

But, there is also a crack in all of this bravado. It is what lies underneath the resilience. It is the chink in the armour that not even my impressive armoury against the pain could possibly eclipse. I have been fighting for a long time.  I have won many battles. But occasionally, the armour fails and the pain pours through.

The streets, where I once walked beside someone, make up a melancholy cartography of those days: when we turned a corner, when we met at an intersection, or walked beside one another silently contemplating love or death, released from the everyday routine and temptations. There are the ghosts of the past that refuse to remain as ghosts.

Once, love was like a light blazing out of the darkness of my dank little heart, or so I thought, when death was a mere parenthesis between the full stops of love. Time, however, has proven responsive to situations, cruel in its verdicts, and pragmatic in what it decides to destroy.
And, so my work goes on digging through the remains of decades past, pursuing that faint light that shines on some horizon, hoping to find, in the patient, hopeful stretch of my days, some trace of that which still lives within.
But, in the midst of the darkness, from time to time, the clouds break, and my heart softens into unexpected pulses of joy and laughter. Such moments of respite are imbued with the purest forms of healing, those halcyon moments of acceptance, forgiveness and loving kindness that evolve gradually over time.

Each therapy session is not just a warzone, but a laboratory of self: a space in which to lay out my scars, where I might learn to heal seriously. Each pill is swallowed not to drown in oblivion but to prove I am not weak; and so I muster the grit to carry on.
Therapy sessions go from being the place I end up when there is no longer any hope, to becoming life rafts of counsel: beacons of light, wisdom of experience and empathy of shared experience, in a time of great need. When someone listens, it makes the pain a little less painful, and the sorrow a little less burden.

But, maybe the deepest revelation is this: to move on is not to forget; it is not an act of erasure but an act of integration, of weaving, a bringing together of past and present, pain and joy, loss and growth, of the memories that once threatened to drown me now shining like stars, a gentle light: the love I once knew, the strength I now have.

Heartbreak might be only one thread in my life’s tapestry, but heartbreak treads a pathway through this tapestry, it has left its imprint upon it, upon the very fabric that makes up my life. But, it is not the biggest thread, it is not my destiny’s end. Because, heartbreak brings with it its own promise: that the beautiful alone will come afterwards, love will come afterwards.
Thus, for what it is worth, to the extent that I continue to walk this path and the path keeps going, I walk. I walk through heartbreak and through healing. I walk from the rubble of what once was. And when what is no more exists, there is always an opportunity for the once and future. I hold space for that, for the seed of the deep knowing that grows back into the earth and is tended to as something new again. I hold space for the pain. It’s bitter at times, sharp at others. I sit fully with it and recognise that I am not okay.

The pain is not going anywhere and that is hard for me to sit with. I hold space for when the pain makes me feel lonely and mistreated. I hold space for when the pain puts prickly life in my path and reminds me of slicing blades and jagged edges. I hold space for when the pain causes me to question existence and navigate fears. And, in all of that I try to walk in my body, with my limbs, through discomfort and in-between. I rest for a while and then I get back up. I keep walking because, at the end of the tunnel, there is light. I keep walking because I have done this before and have been fine. I keep walking because I am not alone.

And in the night, when the world sleeps, and the stars speak their secrets to the moon, when no other heartbeat is heard except that of mine, I feel the sound of my own heart, the beating of my resilience, the song of hope. In the dark there is always light, and in despair there is always love, and though the pain will beat like a heart in the wounds, and I will shed my tears, I will not be broken. Somehow, I will withstand. Resilience will burn like a fire in the soul, lighting my way through the darkness.

In my solitude, as I am forced to face this gaping wound that was once an expedition, as I tread far away from the city’s lights, where I once envisioned my home, where I might have stayed quiet, there is a journey that is as far from conventional as one can be, where over the years of being vagabond and of changing jobs, I have found my growth amidst the flitting of fading dreams.

I have learned to gather up my whole self and give it to others. I have swung between falling in love and falling out of love because learning to love is like studying the contours of your heart with every new relationship. But somewhere between the romance of love’s moment and the fantasy of expectations, somewhere between the ecstasy of holding hands and the ache of staring at empty sleeping spaces I miss the person I was years ago, before I had to afford anybody the courtesy of my regard. I miss that person who was courageous enough to love.

Once I imagined a life tied to a particular city, reliant on a scene forever in flux, full of openings and evenings, and serendipitous encounters, and vibrant works and ruminations to absorb. But over time, so did my preferences, shifting towards a life that offered a more natural, freed from the churning cacophony of the city.

I pared away shrinking pieces of myself with every step I took, shedding many layers of what society expected, what I felt obligated to provide until very little of who I was was left: that inner kernel of core identity. I had to drop many expectations until I was left with my true self.

Yet, in the loneliness, sometimes the whispers of doubt and insecurity would begin to creep in and I would feel the suffocating embrace of fear that would make me question if I was even alright. Almost as intense as the high would be the low, and although there would be a definite adrenaline rush that came along with this state, it was also a constant reminder of impermanence and instability. One day I would be up, and the next would be just as low. At that point, if I didn’t cry out of sheer loneliness, I would cry from boredom. There was nothing to look forward to.

However, at times in the solitude, the pause and the suspense, doubts and fears tiptoed out of the closet, and the insecurities whispered me away from the protective embrace of my cat before they came pouring in powerful and choking streams. The absence of steady footing became my companion, and there was certainly nothing steady about me. My cat purred some more. Patient, he made purring a habit.
He’s been my companion since the pandemic, bringing me back to the ‘now’ with his calm. My routine involves him, and a job that pays the bills. I feel anchored in this life.

Yet within this new regularity, there is a tension: a yearning for the company of friends that exists alongside a hankering for solitude. It is a fine line, a duet, between our need to engage with others and the need to reflect and to be still.

I have created a holy haven where I am accepted for who I am, where I am alone with myself, not treated like a madman, and I am OK. It is an inner sanctuary, a safe space from the here and now reality of bossiness and thunderstorms.
My books have been my only constant companions amid so much solitude. And being in such a little disrupted world they couldn’t get any smaller, they could only get bigger and bigger, so now when I want to speak another language, I speak literature. My books have become worlds inside my own world; they are my window to the world out there.

And, as a classic old-school rock tune blasts from the Tv, and I begin to innocently sing along, nostalgic and excited, while youthful memories start to toss and tumble throughout my mind, watching while visions of the past burst forth into lovely rhythmic tones and expressions, I am reminded once again of the awesome power of music and how, given the right medium to broadcast it, of all things we can own or experience, music is simultaneously the very best of the past and the ritziest treasure chest of the future.
And as I listen to the ageing rockers play old songs from their generation, I enjoy reliving my youth through the nostalgia of music, because soon enough I will be returning home. Each note gives me the sense, whether real or admired in my mind, that I can rejoin the glory of my youth.

Perhaps, I began this long retreat from the bustling limitations of the city not to seek peace without, but rather in the quiet places I learned to carve out for myself. And, as I burrow further down the long road I am travelling, I take some comfort in the thought that in whatever I am chained the longest, there’s still a space where I can stand with my head up, unchained and free; a space I had to construct myself from old songs and encumbrances.

As an only child, I grew up in companionship with books. When there was no one else to tell secrets to, or seek adventure with, the pages became my friends, confidants and unlimited worlds in which to dream. I devoured one book: chapter after chapter building up my concerning collection, wading deeper and deeper into that enchanting, endless stream that is literature, each chapter turned was a step deeper into the enchanting world of literature, where imagination knew no bounds.

Even though I was never really alone at any stage in my life, still, in my early daydreams and later reading life, I felt an intimacy with my books that brought a bittersweet feeling of companionship on a long and often lonely journey. In the absence of brothers and sisters with whom I could share secrets and experiences, this was some consolation, moving book by book to more consoling fabulas mundi.

However, often life has other plans. I arrived in Guwahati to embark on my professional life, only to trade the silence in my childhood home for the clamour of my extended family. And most importantly, my cousins. The world took on more colour with family love. As a slow undertow, my book was turning more and more pages ; more and more bonds were forming.

At first daunting, it was the first time that I had lived so close to my relatives, the loud laughter of my cousins was soon counterbalanced by the garden of daily life where I no longer imagined ‘friendship’ as outside the trenches of kin.

I remember dinner in the evening up at the kitchen table: energetic argument and mirth, talking and eating and arguing politics and philosophy, even frivolities, even the lunch we had just finished; the latest news, the pros and cons of a book we had just read and was being discussed. I remember that, for me, the best life was: life in conversation. I believed, and still, to some degree, do: in aesthetic experience, in the possibility of the human adventure, the possibility of ourselves.
Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, my cousins were my relatives, supportive and friendly, but also part of me, listening to my mischiefs and my grievances: they had my back, from sharing my miseries, to programming their shoulders and ears with my grumbles. Amidst the chaos of daily life, these moments became anchors of stability and joy.

However, it was during the darkest phases of my life that the true strength of our bond shone brightest. When depression threatened to engulf me, my cousins stood by my side, offering unwavering support and companionship. They accompanied me to therapy sessions, made sure I took care of myself, and provided a shoulder to lean on when the weight of the world felt too heavy to bear alone. Their kind, never-withdrawing attention was a beacon on a hillside when I was in danger of being swallowed into the landscape; their love was the light that got me through realness.

Yet, there were moments of exuberance and delight. I remember how we would lie in the sun-soaked verandah on Sunday afternoons, sometimes for hours, sharing tales and staking our hopes, looking up at the boundless sky. And when the sun disappeared, we would leave to roam the beatific streets, finding our little havens of enjoyment.

My favourite memory is of evenings spent at the cafe, sipping sweet smelling coffee and listening to loud conversation mixed with bursts of laughter. We discussed everything from the latest movies to our plans and dreams over hot cups and crumbs of cake, and I had never felt so happy, so relaxed, among a group of my own: my own tribe, my people.

And still, half a decade along, and even though we are far, far away, my cousins are the ones I feel the closest affinity to, the ones I had the best experiences with, and the times of my life with.

Since then, I have attempted to let each of these cousins know how much I appreciate the role they have played in shaping my life; how they are not just a cousin to me but are a best friend, a confidante, someone I can lean on; the part that each has played in me, the space they have stepped into; the being that we have co-created; the friend, the confidante, the keeper of my grief, my joy, my secrets, for everything.

And even though we all must spread our wings and fly, I am content knowing that the love we shared will never fade, for wherever you might go, the link between us will always bind us together bound to your happiness forever.
Until then, I carry it with me, it’s warm pulse a rhythmic, timely reminder of the beating heart that blazes through every page of how I live.

It was a place at the centre of clamour, at the core of noise where the clamour and noise of everything else disappeared, a place we might call a space; a space we shared with our love of literature, a place of thought and intellectual interaction. This was our place of commonality ; our space where we were together in our love of literature.

Side by side, I was launched into a literary realm ; a world of flight and discovery thanks to the woman who was my companion, my muse. With her, I embarked on a series of imaginary journeys to distant places. It was not simply a question of rendezvous, a meet up; but of a displacement, as I literally found myself stranded in the narratives of an infinite number of works.

Her piercing insight felt like a kind of signalling; what came down to me from her were not just the characters that she dissected or the various meanings she extracted from a complex plot, but fires. Her eyes would widen as she spoke of a particularly devastating passage or the terrible grace of a scene. They spewed with the fervour and ardour of literary passion.

I remember the pauses, the preparatory untying and retying of her hair, that little exhalation before a new book was revealed. We read, together, the authors now canonised: the structure of their stories, the development of intent and emotion of their fictional characters, the rhymes, the repetitions.

I found in her a friend who mirrored myself: who loved literature as much as I, who thirsted to interrogate it, and with whom I created a world that was and is our own sanctuary from the cacophony of the world, where the discussion of books and the arts are the antidote to anxious minds.

Our evening meetups over a drink became my counselling sessions, respites from the draining swirl of daily affairs. In her company, she became my island, my refuge from the rush of the city outdoors. The thickly populated avenues of the metro now serve as bitter markers of her absence, of the stillness she brought into my life.

But now, as I read book after book, it is with a clear sense of purpose, to add so much to our next night’s discussion, hoping there will always be enough material for me to talk about, wanting to read as long as possible, until finally I can lay my head down next to hers, exhausted, and let the world around us disappear into darkness.

I am in awe of her, and of course, grateful beyond words at the chance to hear her expound on a novel I adored, and more than a little reliant on our occasional harmony. I look forward to the next such meeting already, taking some little comfort in the thought that they will continue, in her world as in mine, resetting the world, fuelling our intellects and imaginations, long after this one is gone.

Life isn’t a smooth ride but sometimes it is easy to forget what can befall you, especially when you haven’t felt vulnerable before. For me, it was the onset of depression after experiencing a heartbreak that sent me spiraling into a dark abyss. Little did I know that beneath the surface, my struggles with anxiety disorder had been quietly simmering, waiting for the right trigger to resurface. Although my anxiety disorder had remained unnoticed by me and all those around me since my teens, I found it bubbling up to the surface immediately after that emotional disaster, fueling my depression.

Looking back, I can trace the roots of my anxiety back to my childhood days. Growing up, my family often dismissed my anxiousness as normal jitters or simply labelled me as inattentive. It wasn’t until later in life, after seeking therapy, that I realized the extent of my anxiety and how it had shaped my experiences and interactions with the world around me.

I was a very anxious child and teenager, but I believe I encountered lots of kind people who heard the word ‘anxiety’ and assumed something milder. What I would feel was a wave jangling through my entire body, a hyper-vigilance prick by prick next to the need to lie still, heart racing and mind running. I was putting on a show of getting through each moment while on the inside I had been zapped, my head caught in a bright white flash, almost dazed, my neurones swarming with what I imagined was ticks or tremors, what was probably a bit like nerve gas. I didn’t always have a migraine, but the headache was the signature symptom of my condition.

The cracks didn’t start to widen until my late 20s: 27 was when I re-opened the cracks I had spent years in papier-mâchèing shut, when I dragged up the panic and a general anxiety that I had put down to childhood nerves.

My heartbreak was like a trigger, plunging me into depths of loss, hopelessness and desire to escape the pain I now knew. I turned to alcohol as an easy temporary means to shut off my feelings. However, being cognitively impaired through intoxication and with low esteem, I, instead, brought on a cascade of negative consequences.

I reached a stage where I almost perished before seeking help. Therapy became the rope I needed to hold on to: my saving grace. I learnt how to work on and with myself, using the tools my caring therapist had taught me. She helped me find my way through the fog, transforming the confusion of my emotions into understandable words that I could, finally, put a name to. I would come to understand myself better, identify the root causes of my mental health struggles, and develop more self-compassion and compassion for others as well.

Therapy has made me self-aware. Having been diagnosed with ADHD, I had been on the road to self-realisation and recovery; though it took some time, with its fair share of twists and turns, before I felt slightly restored. Thanks to a core group of friends, and my therapist, I gradually pulled myself out of the depths of what felt like overall descent.

One of the most profound insights I achieved, during the time, was that our deepest struggles, our bravest and momentous moments of falling to pieces, even though they will never be defended as a virtue or sought as a good: these are the times that shape us, the formative crucible in which we are forged. Yes, I would never wish my pilgrimage through darkness on anyone. But the great gifts it brings are the lessons it hammers into our souls and selves, and the plural it creates of what otherwise seems a singular and unified self. Those are the good days, the days on which I accept that I will be living with PTSD every day, and that any minimal trigger will bring me back into the well. Other days I am considerably stronger, better able to cope.

And, though I still battle trust issues, I have learned to live with them, better than I ever thought I could, drawing on the incredible reserve of strength I never knew deep within myself. I have let go of past and future, and have come to trust in the present, knowing somehow that whatever happens, it will be fine.

It has been a bumpy ride to where I am now both in therapy and my journey to wholeness and to myself. It has been a great struggle, but it could not have been otherwise. My demons had to be fought with valour, and they knew it. If I felt low and conquered before, and if my experience of moving forward had been characterized by one false start after the other, I have also become, to put it simply, better and stronger than I have ever been. The path to where I am going may only be a winding cadence of decreasing forks, but it does lead someplace worthwhile. I now know beyond a shadow of a doubt where I stand, who I am and what I hold dear. For better or worse, that is more than I can say I knew before. And for that, I am eternally grateful.

My life has been a tapestry of threads, woven with the ochre, blue and yellow of Guwahati, a city that changed me in irreversible ways. I recall with remarkable clarity all the moments when I came to know it, fell in love with it, lost myself in it, and eventually emerged from the experience a new person.

The madness of Guwahati’s streets and street markets overwhelmed and disoriented me. In a stranger land, it seized me, left me adrift. But I was drawn in, caught in paradox, my feet stuck in its clayey mud.

My ‘Urban Mantra’, in the heart of Guwahati, a town where bars and restaurants are far from sparsely scattered. Inside, at a dimly lit street tucked away from city life, the ambience throbbed with friends laughing hysterically over drinks shared, and the high-pitched crescendos and slow beats of live bands. It’s easy to see how the ‘night life’ had the potential to mend lives.

The throbbing sights and sounds of Guwahati, the music pulsating to the rhythm of my heart, would become the soundtrack for this chapter of life: each heartbeat echoing the lows and the highs of my tale, the indie gigs in niche cafés to the hard-hitting, thumping at the city’s bars and pubs.

But, it also revolved around a steady, searching self-examination of an emotional outcrop that grew in the dissonance of Guwahati’s narrow lane ways and café counters, as I lived alongside comics and endured a barrage of jokes as both an ‘item’ and the subject of jokes. At times, the stage of stand-up comedy fortified the comic performer’s confidence within me. On other occasions, it helped me gain the courage to confront and embrace the contradictions of my own vulnerabilities.

These were the most seismic years of my life, beginning in 2015 and ending in 2018, anodyne as they sound: years when I experienced some of my happiest and most painful moments, where I was transformed in ways unimaginable until it actually happened. Love. Loss. Guwahati. And many years later, a Guwahatian woman who would change the momentum of my life.

She was the muse who made me write, who made me write with the promise to write better, to write more, to write with such urgency that my writing drew not only from my mind but from the bedsheets, the pillows, the curtains but mostly from the mornings and midnights and that strange lull that happens on bright afternoons. Her encouragement made me write better. Her love provided light on dark nights; everything that one experiences when living in Guwahati, especially if one lives there for a long time, lands in one place after another, and the roads converge at the point of her memory, at the point of her laughter in my hallucinations.

But it wasn’t just the places, the people: it was the soul-marrow of family that held me still. My cousins, my fellow devils, the people who glued me to this earth with their blood and tears, guarding me from the miseries of the broken heart and drunken binges, doing everything needed to rise me to my feet when I stumbled, or holding me tight for the storm to pass. I heard their laughter.

For as hectic as the city seems at times, the little I have of Guwahati that is left in me, I miss most profoundly the old friendships at Urban Mantra. The city held many promises and almost fulfilled them all, but that’s really the lesson Guwahati taught me: that there are no promises but that we project our relationships on things and places. Not really the cities, but our cities. The pastimes in public squares, the picnics along riverbanks , but each relationship, full of its bounty and also its hurts and heartbreaks, worth remembering, if not for the facts, then for the stories it helps us tell about ourselves.
Guwahati will forever remain as a sacred patch in my quilt, a city that opened itself to me and helped me to thrive, loved my vulnerabilities, made me feel at home. And one day, when I can, I will find myself back, embrace myself in its warm folds again.