Sucks In The City: An Uncomfortable Transition Rehoming in Bangalore

As I sit in a local bus, a majestic giant wading through the obnoxious, notorious traffic of Bangalore, on my way back from my debut office trip, I catch a glimpse of an orange sky and the sun dipping below the horizon through pollution-stained glass of the bus and framed by decrepit pillars of an unfinished metro line and the sea of vehicles in front, not over the serene waters of a river turning black from emerald. The hundreds of horns blaring and motors revving up forming an intolerable cacophony even inside the glass-insulated bus to my ears accustomed to the Aartis and chatter of the 'shanti people' is glaring. And as I come back home and take Peanut up to the terrace for a break in an open space, the contrast deals a final blow. The soothing and glistening waterline of the meandering Ganga with a twinkling village-town against the looming Himalayas on the other side has been replaced with a hotchpotch skyline made up of houses, bungalows, malls, buildings, IT parks, chai bandis, and everything in between, everything but trees.

To say that life has changed in less than a week would be an understatement.

And it's not just the physical landscape that's gone from serene, natural and green into a chaotic concrete grey mess, but something deeper.

Life seems to have come a full circle in ways that's part dramatic, part tragedic. Two years ago, I'd left this city against the backdrop of a career burnout and the lingering grief of the loss of my beloved Cookie (my 13 year-old best friend/pet.) I'd packed up my possessions in 2 bags, Airbnb-ed out my apartment as it was, and M, Honey and Peanut and I had bundled ourselves in the first class compartment of the Karnataka Express to cover a 2100km and 40 hour train journey to Delhi, on our way to Rishikesh.

The plan, even though half-baked and naïve, was simple - sign up for a 3-week yoga course, try to heal, and come back to the base with a new vigour for life and begin a new chapter both personally and hopefully professionally. But of course life had other plans as it always does.

The yoga course did happen, but Honey left us too within three weeks of moving to Rishikesh, all plans to return to Bangalore abandoned seeing no point in coming home to a place where the memories of H&C would haunt and hurt every corner, and the motivation for another job grew fainter. (To earn for what?) And so, without warning or plan, a nomadic life came into its own. Mondays meant nothing, life was luxuriously slow and calm and exciting at once, almost seemingly meaningless at times but nice. While it included long stints in places like Haridwar, Jaipur and even 2500 meters up in a tiny village in Dharamshala, it's Rishikesh which formed a recurring theme in the last two years. I have covered that aspect of my life extensively here so I wouldn't repeat it, but over a course of three separate stints, the last one being the longest and the most eventful, Rishikesh ended up being the home I never had or even knew I wanted.

In Rishikesh, a strange but welcome feeling of content replaced unsaid unfulfillment, boredom was a thing of the past, emptiness made way for overstimulation, and before I knew it, I found myself "enjoying life" again.

New friends, reconnection with nature, more importantly with myself was a welcome change from my 9-5 groomed life in a metro city. Everything they say about the place is right, I'd hit upon a source of energy and inspiration that had little to do with my career.

But every good thing must come to an end, or at least a pause. As I reluctantly accepted a job offer back in the city recently which required me being in office a couple of times a week, I've had to pack my life into a few bags yet again. With a heavy heart, I said my goodbyes to Rishikesh as my friend's Scooty whizzed past the all too familiar narrow, sloping lanes, the cafes, the yoga schools, and the named street dogs onwards to a cab ride to Delhi and a two-day train journey back to Bangalore - similar to the one I'd taken to get to Rishikesh just about a couple of years ago. Except this time, I was alone with Peanut, not with Honey and another person. I wasn't running away from something into the unknown, but rather dragging myself back towards the very life I'd tried to escape, all too familiar.

What wasn't helping was that I didn't have a home to go back to in a city that's been home for over two decades. My beloved house had finally been rented out after two years of dilly-dallying about it thinking "what if when I come back"? And just when I did, it'd become someone else's to love. More doom and gloom -- as the train chugged closer to Bangalore, a few hours away, I got news that the rented house I was gonna move into - after being rejected from a couple already - wasn't eventually going to happen courtesy Peanut. I wasn't surprised in the least - it's happened so many times now that I actually don't expect to be able to rent houses easily. Because of course a small, harmless, friendly dog with a disposition better than a convent-educated child was going to be the biggest issue while people with habits worse than a hostel bachelor or characters more dubious than a Dubai gangster are welcomed with a red carpet.

A friend (bless her) offered her place as a last minute refuge for Peanut and me, but as I tried to comfort my travel-worn body and troubled mind at her place, I realised I wasn't really as welcome there as I thought i'd be. Reality check #2. Friendships in big cities ain't as organic and pure as in the smaller towns. Calendars need to match, plans need to be more streamlined than a Fortune100's annual meeting, and even though everyone's hustling towards a better lifestyle including owning an ever bigger house, most people value their personal space too much to let you in on it -- for too long anyway. So it was, within a couple of days I found myself in an Airbnb -- a compact apartment -- in a locality that I hadn't ever stepped into despite almost two decades in the city! I could well be in an altogether another city.

Cut to the first day at office. As my BBMP bus -- yes I took the bus, and not a cab for the entirety of my 27km ride to the office, partly because I'm still struggling with the idea of paying over $10 for a ride within the same city in India, and partly because I didn't want to deal with the endless coordination and the infamous tantrums of the Uber driver -- snaked past all that traffic, I was reminded of why exactly I'd begun to resent the city life. Its noise, its chaos, its ramshackle infrastructure, and yet its first world prices. (My Gpay has seen more transactions in the last few days than I have trees.)

After three hours (!!!) consisting of two cab and a bus ride, I finally reached the office - a typical modern tech park in an IT city except this one wasn't all angles and glass but rather an asymmetrical stone (award winning as I'd later learn) building with balconies lined up with colourful flowering plants all along their open sides, taking the edge off the serious hardware work that went on inside, and lending the building an earthy, less soulless vibe. Little glimmers in a sucky day.

I checked in as a guest, with a stick-on paper badge on my shoulder, reminiscent of all my times as a visitor to the Google office eons ago after I'd left the company. Once inside the office, began the drone-y rut of formalities -- A temporary ID card hung around my neck, swiping it through to enter the inner sanctum of the office, trying to navigate the good ol' corporate red tape for basics like an employee ID card, a work laptop, and of course doing the buffet lunch in exchange of a 'Sodexo pass' -- the trappings of the Indian corporate life had reared their head again and how overtly so. Once I got my office laptop - an unwieldy Windows machine, like a relic from a previous life, words like "PDUs", "SPOCs" and daily standups immediately started vying to integrate themselves into my daily lexicon replacing aartis, kirtans, ghats, and in the most poetic ironies, Asana the work app swapped the real (yoga) asanas after which it's named.

To say I'm not grateful to have a job in a big brand and have my place under the sun again, especially IN THIS ECONOMY would be remiss of me. But the pointlessness of the whole thing - including all the vapid jargon plastered across the walls of the office that means precious little - wasn't lost on me. Why's everyone "so excited" about everything in the corporate world? Ain't most people just putting on a facade to eventually get their salaries, build their personal fortunes, and go back to their families, children, dogs, Netflix and/or PS3s? Why couldn't this job be remote like so many others -- what about it needed being in an office when work happened on a computer and meetings over a Zoom with colleagues scattered all around the world? But more importantly, why couldn't I be independent enough to call the shots on how I wanted to earn and live my life instead of being a slave to whoever offered me a paycheque...yet again? Am I a...sellout?

Peanut is not helping - she looks like I've done her dirty. Showed her the good life to cruelly extricate her from it for apparently no gains for her. (She doesn't know her Pedigree food and vet visits mandate a sacrifice at the altar of the corporate gods for me.)

I can sense the confusion and distress within her - Is this her new life - cooped up in an apartment with view of a defunct factory for a view from the grilled balcony? Will she ever go back and run amok on the white sand beaches of Rishikesh with her friends Lalu, Pogo, Cheeku and Devi again? Will she ever squat around on the chairs of a cafe like Harry's and sniff around suspicious newcomers as though she owned the place? Will her average days here involve hiking hours to unexplored forests and river banks, human and animal best friends in tow?

And so amidst all the trying to find my feet back in the city I once so fondly loved, grappling with a corporate life yet again after shying away from it for years, trying to manage Peanut in an apartment, and battling existential dread, I find myself tired, annoyed and maybe even lonely. I know I should be thankful -- at least on paper, I seem to have it all together. And yet, all of this feels like struggle. A never ending solo hustle for what? A life in a box. But also comfortingly (and wistfully) it feels like it's only a pause -- like a brief stint of productivity in between an unintentional but life-long commitment to the slow, nomadic and a rather unstructured, unhinged life. I can't stop thinking about the last few months and what I've left behind in Rishikesh. All I want to do is go back, labour over my tiny apartment in Rishikesh, linger over my morning chai gazing at the lower Himalayas from the terrace, grow some herbs in the tiny balcony, do that beach cleanup I'd forever been thinking about, and jump into the calming embrace of the Ganga. Just like I did for months and it never got old. Oh I've been 'Rishikesh-ed' hard!

Maybe Peanut doesn't know it yet, but I know she will. And I will. Money is the necessary evil and in an ideal world I'd have the best of both. Earn like in a corporate job while enjoying my chais and company of interesting strangers while ensconced in the tranquility of nature, but just like Yoga mandates, balance is everything. There's no ideal life. I know life in Rishikesh or any other place in nature, idyllic as it was, came with a caveat -- that of sometimes, no often feeling self indulgent, drifting away in comfort, company, and cafes. When someone asked 'So what do you do", mentally uttering "I have earned enough to FIRE!" (Financial Independence Retire Early) wasn't exactly the flex I'd hoped it would be and "still figuring out" was the best I could put together. More than the lack of a running income, it was the feeling of stagnating, not having a purpose in the everyday life, and wasting away productive, Arthritis-free years of life in 'chilling' and feeling rather guilty for not hating life . (Such is the conditioning.)

At the end of the day, one craves structure and stability -- a feeling I know many travelers and travel-minded boho souls I know also feel, no matter how different their individual circumstances. After all, if I hadn't lived this exact life of a laptop-wielding, Linkedin-surfing 'corporate type' for nearly half my life now, would I have been in the position to create and savour the kind of life I did in the last two years?

So it is that then. I'll treat myself to my slow life in Rishikesh or wherever else in the world, again, when i feel I've earned it enough, again. For now, I'll order myself a coffee from Zepto cafe, delivered to my doorstep in 10 minutes while I try to wrap my head around the Project Management tool of choice for this new entity that owns me now, and try to convince Peanut that a leashed walk in this gated society complex is not so bad after all. My new ID card and her collar are now the physical manifestations of our lives for now.

👇 This will have to wait.