Mice on the Subway Tracks

Occasionally, I think of my emotions as different characters in the movie of my life.

Happiness is a woman dancing on a beach. The sky is a sunny-side-up egg yolk, bursting with so much yellow that you need to squint. In the movie of my life, the character who plays Happiness has an unapologetic mop of hair, much like Merida’s flaming curls in the film, Brave.

Her dance is no frou-frou ballet number either. Happiness plods around shambolically, reminiscent of when Sean Paul released the song, Temperature, in the early 2000’s, and everyone danced into daybreak. We were twenty, the nightclub floors were sticky, and the air clung to us in doughnut spirals. (Except if these doughnuts featured in a Krispy Kreme glass display, they would be labelled, stale beer and cigarettes). Everyone was pouring sweat, the music was too loud, and nobody, just nobody, gave a rat’s behind.

Sadness, on the other hand, is a character straight out of a film noir. She is clad in a capacious trench coat, perhaps to mask her multiple whorls of inner turmoil. The film just switched from technicolor to black and white. Cupping hot coffee in her hands, she weeps silently. Before shifting frames, the last shot is one where she is silhouetted against the moonlit sky, the buffeting waves an allegory for those around the world nursing anguished hearts.

And then there is loneliness.

Loneliness is a woman too (yes, they are all women- it is my movie after all. The patriarchal uncles from my previous post can grouse all they want).

Loneliness is the neighbour you love to spy on. You are in a Hitchcock film, perhaps the Rear Window, and Loneliness is clearly harbouring a secret. She typically features in the frame as an extra on the production set. Sometimes, she idles in the background on a park bench, reading a book, while the camera is focused on the two lead characters embroiled in an arbitrary love drama. He is lugubriously declaring his love for her, and she is walking away in a huff. They are both blonde.

Loneliness just looks on, purses her lips, and flips to the next page.

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (Source: https://www.edwardhopper.net/nighthawks.jsp)

I am currently reading Olivia Laing’s, The Lonely City. Like most readers, I have that sneaky habit of perusing the first few pages of a book before whittling down my purchases in a bookstore- just to know if I am hooked from the first page.

Spoiler alert: I was hooked.

When I turned twenty-three, I had already moved countries four times, both to study and work. Many years and many moves later, I can still recall that feeling of placing my feet on maiden soil. As someone whose roots lie in South Asia and West Asia, I would land in say, a New York or a London, and feel a gentle hush fall over me. There were no rickshaw drivers roaring at each other on Delhi streets, their faces ruddy and streaming in the 40-degree heat. Nor were there gregarious young men in football jerseys, barbecuing mishkak by a Muscat beach, the smell of grilled meat making your mouth water.

Even the noisiest streets were shrouded in somewhat of a hush.

Photograph from The Lonely City, by Olivia Laing, Page 2

Laing’s meditations on loneliness commence with her move to New York. She moves for love, only to be unceremoniously jilted, and a fog of isolation descends. She describes what it feels like to be “islanded amid a crowd,” that strange phenomenon which occurs in colossal cities. Like mice on the subway tracks, people scamper everywhere, pouring into offices, buying groceries, sometimes brushing past you: but alone you remain, a starched white bedsheet of isolation draped over your shoulders.

In a later chapter, Laing observes:                              

“In 1975, the social scientist Robert Weiss edited a seminal study, Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation. He too opened by acknowledging the subject’s neglect, noting wryly that loneliness is more often commented on by songwriters than social scientists… loneliness inhibits empathy because it induces in its wake a kind of self-protective amnesia, so that when a person is no longer lonely, they struggle to remember what the condition is like.”

I have been chewing over her words ever since. Both, as a migrant several times over (albeit from a relatively privileged, salaried category than low-wage migrants), and as a migration researcher: have I not repeatedly borne witness to loneliness?

Aside from shunting the world into turmoil, the COVID-19 pandemic elucidated the woeful failures of global systems. A vast group of people we failed, repeatedly, were migrants of various types. Low-wage migrants were by far hit the worst. In my own work, I came across migrants who were unable to go back home, owing to stringent movement and flight restrictions. Then there were so many others, dealing with staggering losses of income, since they were unable to go back to work.

Labour rights organisations documented it all. Their sheaves upon sheaves of reports observe low-wage migrants being subjected to “wage theft,” and going unpaid for months. Or, workers even being “denied food allowance” and subjected to surveillance by employers, with their phones confiscated in labour camps. It is crap to go hungry on any given day, but it must be even worse when the world around you has a large COVID-shaped rent through its heart. Some reports even noted how suicides amongst workers spiked at this time.

Yet, after all that, I wonder if we are any the wiser.

While reading The Lonely City, I have been thinking about whether loneliness comes from within, or can be an artefact of systems that are deliberately exclusionary. If low-wage migrants had been placed on subsidized flights home to brave the pandemic with their families, would there have been lesser suicides? Is loneliness just a passing chapter in the experience of human existence? Or can it be multi-faceted, with some types of loneliness being foisted upon us by exclusionary systems, which valorize the affluent at the expense of everyone else?

My thoughts stray to the migrants I have often seen sitting in roundabouts at the weekends in some Gulf countries, pieces of white cloth protecting their heads from the baking heat. With a dearth of public transport, limited access to green public spaces, and no economic wherewithal for even marginal indulgences, drinking Pepsi at the roundabout was the only affordable leisure-time option. This inaccessibility, of course, pervades cities around the world, and in a different guise, extends to a homeless person shivering on a wintry sidewalk in East Harlem.

Perhaps loneliness, then, occurs across a spectrum, with the feeling stemming from our internal lives on some occasions, and on others, being foisted upon us by our environments. Just like everyone else, the low-wage migrant workers to whom I have spoken over the years have their own highs and lows. Maybe these are the things a news article or report won’t tell you: how lonely someone feels; how he misses his wife and calls her on IMO late every weekend, because that’s all the data he can afford.

This is my favourite poem by Rumi, a reminder to us all that it is okay for emotions to go up and down:

The first time I visited the US was when I was moving there, in 2016. I remember standing in the doorway of my new room, with naked white walls and warm wooden flooring.

It was to be my room for the next two years.

I sat down on my mattress, the only thing in the bare room, and mapped out everything I would need. To feel more like home, the first poster that I blu-tacked to the walls was a cheap print of Edward Hopper’s NightHawks.

I thought nothing of it at the time. The painting had always stirred within me a sense of quiet, which I loved. But reading The Lonely City makes me wonder if what Hopper also captures, at least for some admirers, is a sense of loneliness.

And maybe that’s okay, if this loneliness comes from one’s own internal well of things. Perhaps it is okay to feel lonely sometimes, especially when it comes from inside. But perhaps it is also not okay when a person feels more lonely because he is poorer and hence has less access to a public park or sidewalk.

Whether rich or poor, in the end we are all just mice scurrying somewhere, seeking out good lives: and our cities and environments should remember that.