Requiem for the City of my Dreams

Requiem for the City of my Dreams

This time, returning to Bangalore, I felt an unfamiliar estrangement. The city that once held such charm seemed to turn its face away. The weather I had always loved—the cool breeze, the soft air—was gone. In its place were heat, humidity, and a heaviness that pressed against me. Even the luxury of a five-star hotel could not shield me. Two sleepless nights passed as I kept rising to the window, searching for something familiar—some echo of the city I once carried in my heart. But nothing answered back.

The window became my only witness—framing a city that no longer seemed mine.

Later, on a solitary cab ride through familiar lanes, I found myself speaking aloud without realizing it: “This was where that darshini once stood,” “I remember when this bridge was built,” “Here was a pub,” “There used to be a restaurant,” “Sala, this was the theater where I watched Raja Hindustani.”

And those were moments that warmed me. In those familiar roads, the air carried echoes of youth. The old houses still stood with quiet dignity. These fragments glowed like faint embers of a fire I thought had long died. Yet the larger city—its sprawl, its speed, its strangeness—seemed to resist me.

Outside, the lights shimmered like distant stars—blurred, unreachable—as though the city had dissolved into an impressionist painting: beautiful, but impossible to touch. Behind the glass I felt suspended—part of the city, and yet excluded from it—an exile staring at home through a veil.

Perhaps I was simply in the wrong part of town—or perhaps it was something deeper. I had expected Bangalore to embrace me as it once did, forgetting that time changes not only cities, but those who return to them. Acceptance, I realized, is never static. I had accepted Bangalore in memory, but Bangalore—changed, restless—had no obligation to accept me back.

In that gap between expectation and reality lies the loneliness, the exile, the quiet grief of knowing that the city of one’s youth does not wait for one’s return. Its streets hold our memories, but they do not stand still for them.

In the end, it was like standing at a window on a rainy night—watching the city’s lights glow and blur, beautiful yet unreachable—a reminder that what we long for often survives only as a reflection beyond the glass.