Siddharth Kumar

It’s already 6 a.m. Another of many sleepless nights that have quietly dissolved into early mornings. The city doesn’t care much for my insomnia. Motorcycles tear through the stillness with practised impatience, cars follow with muted indifference, and together they drown out the crows and pigeons trying to make their way into the cauldron of noise. Somewhere between night and day, the sun hasn’t risen yet, but the reddish tint has already begun to leak into everything, walls, trees, my thoughts, adding weight to a gloom that was already swelling.

I get up and step out to walk the less crowded street again. I know this route too well now. My feet don’t need instructions. However, every few metres, memory interrupts movement. That stall where I grabbed a quick bite before rushing to work. That small eatery where conversations stretched longer than meals. Maybe places don’t forget us like people do, because they cannot physically move. They just stand there, unchanged, holding versions of us we’ve already outgrown.

I pause near the chai outlet, the one I never went to for their average chai but to sit and be invisible. Some days, I sat scrolling my phone endlessly, trying to distract myself. Other days, I came here after something heavy, pretending that routine could lighten the weight I was feeling.

It’s been a year since I’ve been in Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram, for purists). A year is long enough for a city to stop being new, but not long enough to become home. This is a city that teaches you how slow life can be when it has nowhere urgent to go. Everything here runs like well-rehearsed clockwork.

The city wakes up early to sunrises that bring light to every despairing soul. Shops open when they’re supposed to and shut without guilt. Offices don’t make you stay till 9 p.m., chasing some abstract idea of growth that will materialise. There is discipline and structure, but not the cruelty that cities generally have. Sunsets feel like permission to stop trying for the day.

There’s so much to do if you’re willing to move at the city’s pace, cultural programmes tucked into auditoriums, literary events where people listen earnestly, and historical remnants that refuse to be flashy. And then there’s the sea, constantly present, reminding you that vastness doesn’t only mean calm and serenity, but unknown depths and danger as well.

Among all this, there’s an ubiquitous truth that nothing radically new is ever going to happen here. There’s no feeling that something is about to break open. The city knows what it is and is quite comfortable in it. It doesn’t want to become Bangalore or Mumbai, and definitely not Gurgaon. For someone from another part of the country, it can start to feel like being stuck in a vacation town forever, pleasant and scenic, but ultimately static.

You explore every place worth exploring. You attend enough cultural and literary events that you can. You watch countless sunrises and sunsets by the beach until they stop feeling profound and become scheduled. You try most of the local cuisine, pick up bits of the language, and learn when to nod and when to stay silent. Slowly, you even start to feel at home in the place.

But then what?

Do I want to live here forever? On paper, it makes sense. The weather is bearable, the sky is blue, and the air is clean enough that it doesn’t make you choke while breathing. Streets are functional, basic civic sense exists without being enforced vigorously, and the food is comforting. Life here doesn’t constantly ask you to prove yourself.

I keep asking myself whether I belong here or whether I’ve just adapted well. Will this city ever stop feeling like a long pause between chapters? I always wanted to be a faceless person in a rooster-coop apartment in a metropolis. I didn’t want to be seen. Maybe then nobody could peek inside what I am feeling or who I am. Trivandrum doesn’t demand much from me, and maybe that’s the problem. In its calm, my own restlessness feels louder, forcing me to face myself.

I find myself wanting to get out of Trivandrum badly. It’s a place that has been kind to me. But kindness alone doesn’t mean compatibility. Some cities are meant to heal you, and then you pack your stuff and move on to make the next place your temporary home.

And maybe that’s what Trivandrum has been all along, a beautifully written chapter. Slow, reflective, necessary, but not the end of the story. Trivandrum made me realise that just because a place works, it doesn’t mean it works for you. Cities have a specific time in your life when they attract you and make you feel wanted, then you outgrow them and feel like an overstayed guest. Years later, you go there to relive some memories, but you can’t live there.

How much of what I wrote is actually about Trivandrum, I have no clue.