Belonging

.....in progress

Image Credit: Priyanka Sacheti

I am a Bangalore girl through and through. I was born here. Yaaa? and Ayeo are a part of my English vocabulary. I speak Kannada and Tamil. I rode Pushpak Bus #176 from starting to ending depot to see my grandparents. I met my best friend traveling from RT Nagar to Hesaraghatta for college. I did my first 100 km ride here - from Bannerghatta to Nandi Hills.

Nearly everything important in my life has happened within the boundaries of this city. My first job. My first love and the ones that followed. I fell for a Bengali boy while eating ice cream in Koramangala, healed my first heartbreak at a music concert in palace grounds. Bangalore was privy to a series of my first-dates, followed by heart-breaks. And one day, on the drive back from Devanahalli with a nice boy, at Silk Board, I deleted the Tinder app. Married him a few years later in a nice place off Kanakapura Road.

I saw the city grow too. I skipped college on 20th Oct 2011 to ride the first Namma Metro from Byappanahalli to MG Road - the ticket line snaking to Brigade road. Thathas at SLVs made room for startup founders. Now they all wait for their single idli-vada sambaar-dip. Somewhere along the way, Bangalore became ours. Empire, Meghana and Corner House were destinations. Now they come home. Bangalore is becoming Bengaluru.

Bangalore gave me friendship, language, family, lots of first love(s!). Bengaluru gave me stability, independence and humility. The city expanded, so did I. This city’s growth is my growth.

And yet, after all this, it sometimes feels like I don’t belong.

Strike that. I don’t let myself belong.

Belonging to Bangalore/Bengaluru today would mean belonging to its trees and the traffic. It's weather, it’s potholes. It’s hustle, it’s chaos. It would mean belonging to imperfection.

How do you belong to something that is changing? Something not ideal, but real? Something work in progress? How do you belong to an imperfection?

Maybe this is not about loving Bangalore/Bengaluru. Maybe this is about me. The city doesn’t need to transform into something else to belong. Maybe neither do I. We both deserve belonging.

So do you.

This flash essay is part of a collaborative, constrained-writing challenge undertaken by some members of the Bangalore Substack Writers Group. Each of us examined the concept of ‘BANGALORE’ through our unique perspective, distilled into roughly 500 words. Here are the links to other essays by fellow writers:

OTHER ESSAYS IN THIS SERIES:

• Looking Down over Bengaluru by Vaibhav Gupta, Thorough and Unkempt

• Blossom Book House, Bangalore by Rahul Singh, Mehfil

• A Walk, A Pause by Mihir Chate, Mihir Chate

• Bookless in Bangalore by Vikram Chandrashekar Vikram’s Substack

• Bangalore: A personal lore by Siddhesh Raut, Shana, Ded Shana

• Bangalore,once by Avinash Shenoy, Off the walls

• My love story with Bengaluru by Rakhi Anil

• Bangalore Down the lane of History by Aryan Kavan Gowda, Wonderings of a Wanderer

• Nagar Life by Nidhishree Venugopal,General in her Labyrinth

• The Street Teaches You by Karthik, Reading This World

• The Wild Heart of Bangalore by Devayani Khare, Geosophy

• A Love Letter to Bangalore by Priyanka Sacheti, A Home for Homeless Thoughts

• Movie Dates, Bangalore and Them by Amit Charles, AC Notes

• Between Cities by Richa Vadini Singh, Here’s What I Think

• A Haven? Awake in Bangalore, by Lavina G, The Nexus Terrain

• My love affair with blue skies by Sailee Rane, Sunny climate stormy climate

• A City That Builds Belonging by Sathish Seshadri, Strategy & Sustainability

• There and Back Again by Ayush, Ayush's Substack