Having taken many trips to India with my family previously, I considered myself well-versed in the typical struggles of adjustment. These included, but were not limited to, mosquito bites, tummy troubles, and excessive sweating in the heat. It never occurred to me that the absence of my family this time around, coupled with a fellowship placement in a completely new and unfamiliar city, would mean that loneliness would join my list of adjustment struggles. I would have to start from scratch, finding friends and building relationships in a new city, through a language barrier, and for the first time ever as a fresh college grad, without being immersed in an environment where I wasn’t constantly surrounded by hundreds of other people my age.
I didn’t really feel the absence of human presence around me until after I had fully settled into Mysuru life. Once I had found my apartment, set up my kitchen, figured out where to dispose of my trash, and gotten myself a WiFi connection, I felt this strange emptiness — despite my apartment being fuller than ever. Suddenly, I wasn’t leaving work to frantically hop through neighborhoods in search of housing, or to catch up on six million messages from the other Fellows; I was leaving work to come back to my apartment and sit in solitude, Netflix and YouTube my only companions. I had heard that Mysuru was a quiet city, but I found myself wondering whether it should really be this quiet after 5 pm. I needed friends, and I needed them fast.
The thing about making friends is that when you’re desperate, lonely, and existentially bored, the definition and scope of what a friend is expands quite rapidly. I began searching for grounds for friendship in every interaction I had with everyone, regardless of whether we spoke the same language, were the same age, or were even the same species.
My first targets were my colleagues at my host organization. I was a bit cowed by them at first, given that they were all rather much more qualified than me professionally, and at first, I wasn’t sure we had enough in common to bond. Our conversations seemed to be restricted to how my apartment hunt/settling-in process was going, and I wasn’t sure how to move forward from there. I found the perfect opportunity following the US presidential election – an offhand comment from one of my colleagues led us to discover that we both followed the news closely, and shared many of the same opinions! What followed were countless hours (while we were supposed to be working) of discussions about politics initially, but eventually, about almost anything. Prompted by this office-place bonding, my colleagues and I began to go on coffee runs, plan dinners, and have movie nights together. We jointly mothered a plant for the office (it has since passed on, unfortunately), and I’ve become the official catsitter for one of my colleagues! Despite being different ages, at different stages in life, and of different professional backgrounds, I consider them among my closest friends now.
Admittedly, my colleagues weren’t necessarily unlikely friends — but there are so many others in Mysuru whom I have come to call friends that I couldn’t have anticipated. The owner of a small coffee shop near my apartment, who loves to experiment and hosts coffee tastings every so often; the gang of children in my neighborhood who love to play cricket after dark (I was invited once, but following my abysmal performance, have since been relegated to a mere spectator); a group of college students I met at a party who have since adopted me as an honorary student; and several non-human friends as well, including Mohini the cow, who frequents my neighborhood and often appears at my building gate hoping for a banana, and Abhimanyu the cat, who tries to break into my apartment at every opportunity.
While these might seem like fragile connections, the strength of these relationships was proven by the amount of grief I experienced upon my departure from Mysuru. Situational friendships aren’t always lasting or profound, but I was lucky enough to experience an anomaly—and now I know that I will always have a home in Mysuru to return to.
