Sleepless in சென்னை

I stand in that strange kitchen by myself in the dark...it’s past midnight and everyone’s asleep in their beds. 

The city lies open before me, a million lights blinking and fluttering, reflecting,

above silent lakes where listless men still dream of seeking their fortunes in this city of opportunity;

in the company high-rises where men who found their fortune sit and wish they hadn’t, as they sit and rub the conquering sleep from their dreamless eyes;

above all the people I saw in the local-trains daily, holding on to the steel rails in day-old sweat smelling clothes, old shoes with soles rubbed down – all the people who were now resting their aching feet in the hundreds of monotonous block-shaped houses they called home. There are no fancy swoops and swirls of rain-stained slated roofs to be found here, that's for sure.

Like sardines in a tin, my mother would say. 

Dada says he used to be one of those sardines, back in the day, when he was one of those listless young men seeking his fortune himself.

I wonder if he would agree that he had finally found it – I wonder if he would say it would've been better to lie on the floor of a cheap guest house with the rats and cockroaches for company than to be the man in the sleepless high-rise today.  

I wonder if he would look at us and say he had won at all. 

But they were all sleeping now, the husbands shifting and scratching in their sleep, wives rumbling snoring, kids on their phones in the dark texting other kids in other snoring dark houses, subtle subterfuge, the risky rendezvous with something mysterious to me, something mysteriously forbidden to us dark companions of the sun, the something that made all of this all the more alluring. 

Somewhere my friend who lives alone in a little cheap rented apartment on the outskirts of the city turns on his side in a flattened mattress on the floor so the wires of his charging cable would keep him connected to the world all night long – connected to anyone who’s willing to talk so he doesn't feel the suffocating weight of his isolation crush him down and choke his breath. One day he would take off without a trace and I'd never hear from him, I'd cry for days without knowing why.

Somewhere in the midst of all this blinding light – way down under one of these lights –  another friend pushes a broken earphone deeper into his long-suffering ears to hear his love’s voice fly through the invisible wires in the sky all the way to his little bunk in the lesser part of town– she’s a medical student in another city in another state, they’ve broken up ten times in the last month. He says he doesn’t care, but she’s the only one he’ll ever marry. 

Above this city, above all its hundreds of hundred-watt smiles and paatis on the bus who tell you to “paathu po maa” after meeting you thirty seconds ago, above my friends somewhere lying asleep in our little apartment bedroom, without me today, they seem so far away today…Above this city where lovers talk on the phone all night and never sleep, where the lights seem to be put on just for them tonight...

Above this city of love, of loving, loving loving love, so chock-full of love, choking bleeding love, love so pervasive you can't stop it from seeping into your crevices without invitation... 

I’m in her strange kitchen on the seventh floor, watching the lights go by, so in love with this city, and suddenly I'm fighting the urge to cry.