Chennai is not a city that believes in silence.
It begins early. The milkman arrives with his cans, the newspaper lands at the gate, a vegetable vendor announces his presence as though he has been appointed the official broadcaster of the neighbourhood, and somewhere, inevitably, a pressure cooker whistles with the confidence of a morning alarm.
By eight, the traffic has joined in.
There are horns, auto-rickshaws, scooters, school vans, conversations across balconies and the occasional person calling out to someone who is standing perfectly close enough to hear.
We complain about the noise, of course.
We also seem to miss it when it disappears.
I began noticing this when I would return home to an empty flat.
I would unlock the door, put my bag down and, almost without thinking, reach for the switch.
Not the light switch.
The television. The radio. My phone. A podcast. Music. Anything.
The room had barely registered that I had arrived, and I was already filling it.
At first, I thought it was simply habit. Chennai had trained me well. We grow up with sound. There is always something happening somewhere. A neighbour is calling a child home. Someone is bargaining with a fruit seller. A devotional song is drifting out of a nearby house. An auto driver is conducting a spirited negotiation with a passenger. Two people are having a conversation across the road which, whether we like it or not, has become part of our evening entertainment.
Silence, by comparison, can feel strangely suspicious.
But slowly I began to wonder whether I was actually looking for noise.
Or whether I was avoiding what I might hear without it.
There is a particular kind of quiet in Chennai in the early evening.
The city is still busy, but the day seems to loosen its collar a little. The sunlight softens. Someone waters the plants on a balcony. Children are called home for dinner. A scooter pulls into a gate. The smell of sambar travels down the street, often arriving at your house before the person who cooked it has any idea that it has escaped.
And for a few minutes, there is space.
I did not always know what to do with it.
I would put on a podcast while making tea. Music while cooking. Something playing in the background while answering messages. Even the shower acquired its own soundtrack.
Apparently, I was living with the terrifying possibility that I might hear my own thoughts.
The funny thing is that we often imagine loneliness as something dramatic. We picture somebody sitting alone on a park bench, looking sadly into the distance.
Real loneliness is usually much less theatrical.
Sometimes it is simply coming home and wishing there were somebody to tell about the ridiculous thing that happened that afternoon.
Sometimes it is making tea for one.
Sometimes it is seeing something funny and reaching for your phone before remembering that there is nobody particular to send it to.
And sometimes it is just the sudden awareness that the house is very quiet.
I began to wonder whether loneliness was always something to be chased away.
Perhaps sometimes it was simply trying to tell me that I missed somebody.
That thought changed small things.
When I felt the familiar urge to distract myself, I began noticing it instead.
If I wanted company, perhaps I could ask for it.
So I started sending the message I had been postponing.
“Are you free for coffee?”
Quite often, people were.
I started accepting invitations instead of saying, “Some other day.”
I began going out for a meal even when there was perfectly good food at home, because something is comforting about eating in a place where other people are also eating.
Chennai is particularly good at this.
You can sit in a small restaurant with a plate of idlis in front of you and feel strangely less alone without speaking to anybody.
There is the clatter of steel tumblers, the scrape of chairs, the waiter calling out an order, the elderly gentleman at the next table explaining something to someone who clearly did not ask, and a child negotiating for one more spoonful of ice cream.
Nobody knows you.
Yet somehow, you are among people.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts of Chennai.
We are not particularly good at leaving people alone.
Sometimes that is precisely what another person needs.
There is always somebody who will say, “Come home.”
There is always an aunt who will ask whether you have eaten, regardless of whether you have just finished a full meal.
There is always somebody who believes coffee is an acceptable solution to almost every emotional crisis.
They may actually have a point.
The city has a way of putting people within reach of one another.
You can walk into a friend’s house without an elaborate invitation. You can stop at a neighbourhood shop and end up discussing somebody’s daughter, somebody else’s new car and the weather, all before buying the one thing you came for.
A park bench becomes a meeting place.
A tea shop becomes a confessional.
A temple queue becomes a social gathering.
Even standing outside the house in the evening can turn into a conversation.
These little encounters matter.
Because being surrounded by people is not quite the same as being connected to them.
Chennai can be crowded enough to make you feel anonymous and intimate enough to make you feel known — sometimes within the same ten minutes.
That is perhaps why the city’s noise can be misleading.
There can be horns outside and silence inside.
There can be hundreds of people around you and nobody you particularly want to talk to.
And there can be an empty room in which you suddenly realise how much you have been avoiding your own need for company.
I still put podcasts on in the shower.
Old habits deserve some respect.
But I no longer feel compelled to fill every space.
Sometimes I let the room be quiet.
Sometimes I sit with my coffee without reaching for my phone.
Sometimes I walk outside simply because I want to see people.
And, rather unexpectedly, I began noticing more.
The neighbour sitting on the veranda waiting for her daughter.
The security guard who knows exactly which residents are away before the residents have informed one another.
The old man who takes the same evening walk every day.
The children playing cricket in the street until somebody’s mother appears at the gate and announces, with impressive authority, that dinner has been ready for the last twenty minutes.
I had spent so much time trying to keep the silence away that I had forgotten to notice what was happening around me.
Perhaps I had never really needed more noise.
I needed more connection.
And perhaps Chennai had been telling me this all along.
For all its horns, hawkers, temple bells, kitchen whistles, traffic and conversations conducted at a volume intended for three streets rather than one, this is a city built around people.
The sounds are simply the evidence.
These days, when I come home to an empty flat, I still notice the silence.
But I do not rush to switch it off.
Sometimes I make coffee.
Sometimes I call a friend.
Sometimes I simply sit for a while and listen.
And then, more often than not, Chennai does what Chennai does best.
Somebody calls from the street.
Somebody drops in.
Somebody asks whether I have eaten.
And if all else fails, there is always coffee.
Perhaps that is what I have learnt.
Silence is not always loneliness, and noise is not always company.
Sometimes, between the horns and the silence, what we are really looking for is simply another human voice.
In Chennai, fortunately, we have never been short of those.
And perhaps that is what I had been missing. Not another podcast, another television programme or one more piece of background noise — but the ordinary comfort of another human voice.
A friend saying, “Are you free?”
A neighbour asking, “Have you eaten?”
Someone calling from the gate, “Come, have coffee.”
Chennai, after all, has never been particularly good at letting people stay lonely for too long.
And perhaps that is one of its quietest gifts.
Sometimes we do not need to fill the silence.
We only need to listen closely enough to realise what it is asking for.