And when it rains, the rooftop is even nicer. Maybe it’s not so much the reality as it is that madeleine-moment flowing out of the smell of fresh wet soil in the perfectly manicured rooftop garden. Thank God for neighbours who care about such aesthetic trivialities. They create a fragrant bubble, a patch of denial, or at least they try. All around though, are constructions – towering edifices straight from hell. They are constructions that deconstruct, which in this case is to say undo or tear apart – your peace of mind, your sense of serenity. Sooner or later the noise or the bad air will snap you out of your temporary tranquillity and remind you that you are in Dhaka – here it is, your city in all its glory.
Here it really is. Here’s your city, which you can see if you have a good enough vantage point, and your rooftop is as good as any other. Gaze upon it with eyes too tired for tears. Here’s your city of buildings and buildings and buildings and people and people and people. It is futile to make sense of the crowds or try to understand them as composed of discrete, singular human beings with lives and dreams and frustrations. The crowd approaches like an amorphous agglomeration – a terrifying nonsensical blob. Here, there are more people than you can handle. Here also, lives loneliness.
How can so many souls, crammed in without rhyme or reason, be so lonely? But of course they can, even a schoolchild knows that lonely and alone are two different things, not even synonyms. One is a cold hard matter of fact, something quite measurable with coffee spoons, like friend list counts, intrusive DMs, or the number of humans breathing your immediate air. If those counts are high, it is hard to argue that you are alone. But lonely? That one is deeper, going beyond your surrounding air, beyond what you feel in your skin or lungs, beyond your bones, deep into your soul. The feeling of loneliness is a feeling of existential dread. It can make others in the same room feel a million miles away, it can make your morning coffee lose its taste, it can make the smell of fresh soil in your rooftop garden disappear, so you may wonder if you have caught some bug. Loneliness in that way can be like that cold shiver that comes over you after staying out in the rain for too long – even the simplest of this city’s pleasures has a sharp edge.
The Japanese call them hikikomori – those private creatures who have withdrawn from day to day life. Here’s Tokyo, a city as busy as it gets, driven by ambition, the weight of history, the promise of the future, and a culture of hard work that leaves the whole world in the dust. But what happens when it all gets a little too much? Some withdraw, and stop seeing their fellow human as friends. Tokyo – the most crowded of cities … Tokyo – the loneliest of cities. Here’s a skyline full of little dots of light, each dot representing an apartment. How many of them are filled with lonely hearts, passing the time in solitary hobbies, with AI partners, or in simple solitude? Perhaps one could just walk up to another, and say – hi, I’m lonely. But perhaps we have lost the ability to respond to such vulnerability. In the race for success, we have lost our most primal language of connection.
And here’s Dhaka … we call it home, but sometimes it feels like a stranger. It’s as far from Tokyo as can be – this is not a global powerhouse, and the roads here are no gold standard for discipline. We are chaotic, loud, disorganised. Our families are big, our neighbours are nosy, and our bosses text us at all hours of the night. But we too are lonely. In ways perhaps we cannot always speak about, and then when after a dark night of searching within ourselves we finally do grasp the elusive language that describes our isolation, there is no one to listen.
And sometimes it doesn’t rain, but you still go up to that rooftop, because where else is there to go. From up there, you can see out into the city, out onto all those dots of light, and wonder what thoughts and dreams and unanswered prayers are out there. Hegel said a soul must encounter another soul to realise its consciousness – we are what we are through the eye of the other. But you don’t feel unrealised exactly, and your consciousness is robust. Still, there is within loneliness something of a sense of being – what’s the word – parched?
You look up at the polluted sky, in the dim glow of twilight. And you wish it would rain a little.