Solo Mode

📍Manali, Himachal Pradesh, India (Issue 190)

It’s a little hilly in the Himalayas!

When I arrive in a new city, I hope to find ‘my people’ immediately. Like a spoilt child, I never want to wait. Yet it takes me time to settle in, to drop anchor and arrange the cushions and get comfortable. The interim is an isolated agony, full of doubts, during which I confront the great paradox of letting go of what I want to, subsequently, get everything I need.

Entering Mumbai, I ferried from the south, across the Dharamtar Anchorage on the fringe of the Arabian Sea, up to the Gateway Of India. Fifty vast container ships loomed at the anchorage, each lonesome and floating listlessly—an inauspicious welcome. The heat, I needn’t remind you, was my daily burden. After riding sixteen overcrowded kilometres through the city, I dropped my bicycle and bags in a guesthouse and wandered amid the congestion.

I wanted pals. But where were they? You'd think everywhere in a city of nearly 22 million people. True, friendly faces surrounded me, but I couldn’t, for some reason, convert them into actual friends. Couched on a bench in an art exhibition, I would catch an eye, but it would disappear into the next-door gallery. A potential friend and I would share a bottle of table water in a cafe, but they were busy or I was not cool enough; nothing came of it. I would bob from the north to the south of West Bandra, then from the east to the sea, browsing book shops, drinking street chai, sucking the white flesh from coconut husks, attempting — desperately — to open to the world.

Yet, I was unable to make friends. I wanted it too all much; I was forcing it.

The self-doubting starts after twenty minutes of isolation and lasts until one awakens from the self-obsessed stupor. Like a cloud, it arrives: Am I a total loser? Is there something wrong with me? Perhaps I’m not going to the right places; maybe I’m closed-up or uptight and self-limiting. Like a waterfall, these thoughts come crashing down. And like those container ships, I drifted as an island, a seeker, envious of happy groups in cafes or couples holding hands. At my lowest, I even downloaded Bumble BFF — and matched with… nobody. Without my bicycle, I was (I reflected) less interesting, either invisible or, at best, translucent. Without lycra, nobody recognised me as an alien; I felt imperceptible, like somebody in the shadow cabinet.

A day, or was it a decade, had floated by. Exhausted by my futile efforts, I decided to go into Solo Mode.

Solo Mode is when you live for yourself without the thirst for social confirmation, neglecting the crying need for friendship and doing whatever the hell you want. I stopped caring if I’d meet people or not. I carried those ‘fuck-off’ vibes only the very secure, supermodels, or traders with cardboard boxes leaving office buildings during a financial crisis, can authentically maintain. ‘Talk to me if you dare,’ said my face and body, ‘because I’m in Solo Mode.’

Still, I was smiling. I appreciated the mega-city and the sunset as I watched the street kids play with plastic rifles or the dogs bark at pedestrians. My expression was brighter and pure because I no longer smiled to make friends. My new smile was for me. I continued visiting art galleries but left when I discovered they were trash. I loitered less often. I spoke to strangers when I had questions, not because I wanted a buddy. I spent more time reading and less time worrying.

And here’s the funny thing.

As I walked around Mumbai, stepping over trash and avoiding potholes twelve feet deep, I noticed that the air — polluted as it was — had changed. A certain leaden mist had lifted. Despite Solo Mode, I quite naturally, organically and accidentally, began to meet new friends. A beautiful cafe owner obsessed with South Indian food, a delightful artist-cum-gallery-owner who dreams of making great art accessible to all, an elegant writer about to move to Germany, a passionate education entrepreneur, a documentary filmmaker, and so on.

But where were they before? If not invisible, then unreachable to the needy. All stowed away and shrewdly hiding when I wanted to reach them!

When we let go of what we want, we — somehow, and I don’t know how — can have it all.