THE ART OF UNFAMILIAR ROOMS IN A NOISY CITY

 A city with a royal past and restless present—palaces that still remember crowns, streets that forget faces too quickly.

 I arrived here 7 moons and 3 rains back,like a sentence unfinished, carrying myself in a bag that still smells like the place I left behind.

A new city of voice and noise.
The walls here do not remember me yet. They stand like strangers pretending not to stare. My hostel room is small—smaller than the thoughts that refuse to sit still. The fan above me keeps circling like a tired prayer, as if it forgot what it was asked to cool.
I lie beneath it anyway. 
There is a loneliness here that does not announce itself. It simply arrives, sits beside me, and behaves like it has always belonged. Outside, life is loud in unfamiliar languages. Inside, I learn the shape of my own silence again.
The bulb light is my room is blank in that specific way new places are—polite, uninterested, waiting to decide what kind of person I will become here...


And then—
Aaj Bazar Mein…

It begins like something being opened carefully, like an old wound deciding not to close today.
I listen.
Not with my ears first—but with the part of me that still remembers places I have never been. The song spills into this room, this rented corner of becoming, and suddenly I am not fully here anymore.
I am elsewhere.
I am everywhere I have ever been alone.
The fan keeps turning. The noise outside keeps living. But inside me, something slows down—like a hand touching glass from the other side.
I think of all the versions of me that have existed in borrowed rooms. All the nights I have tried to fit my name into unfamiliar ceilings. All the times I have learned that belonging is not a place—it is a moment that forgets to leave.
The song continues.
And I realize—
I do not know if I am listening to it…
or if it is listening to me.
There is a softness in that confusion.
A gentleness in being unclaimed.
I think of markets I have never walked through, 

of streets that feel like they belong to other people’s stories.

 I think of how cities absorb strangers without promising anything in return. 

They do not love you. They simply allow you to exist until you learn how to disappear properly inside them.
And I realize something strange—
this city is not asking me to belong.
It is only asking me to witness it....


The way rain collects on tiles without permission.
The way evening light falls on hostel corridors like it has nowhere else to go.
The way loneliness here is not sharp—
just spread out.
Like ink in water.


I sit near the window which opens to mouth of a yellow bleak building.  
I let the night take my thoughts without translation.

And somewhere between the music and the moving air, I understand:
I am not lost in Thiruvananthapuram.
I am being rewritten by it.
Quietly.
Without ceremony.
Without asking if I agree.


And the manjadi maram outside my hostel is waiting for rain,i think.

May be me too..

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