Savouring Solitude

After joining a virtual reading group, I went to an in-person, silent-reading group meeting where we sat in a park in the evening and read our chosen books in silence for an hour. I have been silently committing to reducing the time I spend in front of digital devices and trying to find ease, a suffused quiet inside the lobes of my brain. As I say in my affirmations, I want a peace to go to. Reading long, laborious books is my way of seeking this surrender, this soliloquy. I seek the suspension of time and not the measurement of it. Currently, I am reading three books at a time, which might not be the best way to read, but in the last few days, I have read through enough pages for my body to acknowledge that it can feel itself breathe, slow measured breaths rising and falling, rising and falling.

Post the silent reading session, I went to the local shop, which sells momos for a half-plate of fried chicken momos. I am proselytised from steamed to fried momos in a way that was almost instantaneous the day I ventured out to experiment with the momo culture in my city. I enjoy partaking in the street food culture as a solo eater. In fact, I seek it out. Eating alone is a form of meditation and a time for self-care. I love taking pictures of my plate when I am eating solo, and I reflexively thank the universe for the meal I am eating. So much so that partaking in street food alone cuts open for me an unexplored sub-culture of mingling, savouring, and flaneur.

On one such venture of solo-eating, I walked around my neighbourhood trying to find the perfect street food for that particular cloudy evening. I walked past the sugarcane juice seller, the Chinese bhel stand (what is the simultaneous festivity and melancholy of that dish?), piping hot vada pavs being made on a foldable table parked on the footpath, and an abundance of pani puri stalls. I was witnessing the hard work of people that cloaks hope, and the conversations of friends and family that dons momentary sparkle. The air around street food shops is electric, as if a celebration is underway, as if the time from 4 pm – 8pm is allotted for a specific revelry, every single day without it ever becoming cloying.

On another night, while returning home way past dinner, I grabbed a vada pav from a station stall. Still warm, it made me deeply aware of why we need fast street food in this city. I’ve yet to witness this kind of speed-eating in smaller, slower cities where the journey back home isn’t that long, where time isn’t scant, where there is the luxury of passing time and not being bored within minutes. In my city, we don’t have the these luxuries afforded to us. Now, street food culture is something I go and seek and observe before partaking. It belongs to the evening and doesn’t exist through the day. It is a travelling circus — here at its appointed time and gone when the show is over — and everyone comes to watch, smile, and revel in it one bite at a time.

Spending time alone — whether it is by reading books or eating out alone — is a form of slowing down, of stepping outside my own life and observing the world around me. It has been a way of reclaiming my time way before reclaiming time was a thing in modern society, much like the way people have done this for years, and reflected on the world, while being a part of it but not participating for those brief moments. The sign of our times points towards the slow misremembering of our lives. Are we the performative act or a memory recounted by time? If it won’t mean much later, does it mean much now? When will we have the time to remember the way our days went by? These are the things I think about when I slow down and I am alone. And occasionally, I eat street food alongside.

Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

Chiang, Ted. Exhalation (Picador Collection) (p. 57). (Function). Kindle Edition.