Advice to a boy lonely in college

One day, one of these lockdown days, you’ll come back to your hostel room in downtown Montreal, switch on the lights, and look down upon the evening lights of Sherbrooke Avenue far below — and you’ll suddenly feel utter loneliness.

It won’t go away. You’ll feel a gnawing hollow space inside you, almost like an ache. You’ll wish you were back home where winter is a warm season, where everyone is familiar and friendly, where you know the lanes and bylanes, and where your friends are a walk and a holler away. You’ll long for your childhood, you’ll ache for the past to come back.

I heard it yesterday in your voice and your words when we skyped. “I know this is what I wished for,” you said. “I wanted to leave home. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to be in McGill University, in this world. But now my wishes have come true, it’s nothing like the pictures. I love my university, and am proud to study here, but living here is nothing like I imagined.”

The truth is, at this very moment there are a couple of hundred thousand young men and women like you, sitting in their room, and thinking nearly the same thoughts. Their dreams came true, but they don’t like their new life.

They just want to go home.

I’m writing to tell you a simple truth: you’ll want to go home the rest of your life. I’m 63 and I still want to go home. Home is a simpler time, a better place, where you knew everyone and everyone knew you, where you could be yourself and feel safe. Someone else took care of things. Most important, home was that predictable place where there were no mysteries. You always knew what would happen next. Every time, all the time. Never a surprise.

But you can never go home again.

Everything is unfamiliar — and nothing like the home you left behind.

You and I both left home when we were around 18 years of age, but there were differences. In your case, your father — the guy writing this — flew all the way to Montreal with you to settle you in. Back in 1969, I didn’t dare tell my father I had decided to stay on in Delhi while my family moved to Bombay. It wasn’t even about college or study. I’d discovered a cooperative of journalists I loved and who loved me right back, and finding out how much writing thrilled me.

I joined Delhi University more as a strategy for pleasing my father. I said yes to any old course in any old college that would have me — and it turned out to be economics at Shri Ram College. Forty seven years later, you chose the same subject at McGill. Only you picked it because you liked economics.

At the railway station, just when the whistle blew, I stepped off the train. The last my parents saw of the boy they had raised was me on the railway platform waving goodbye to them. The next time my father and I met, I was not a boy any more.

My father, furious at my insubordination, cut me off without a penny. I had to find ways to earn and pay my own way through college. I used to earn about 400 rupees a month from interviews for the evening newspapers with newbie artists on display at Delhi’s art galleries. This covered tuition, books, transport, food, all that a young student needed. Fifty rupees paid the rent for a room on a terrace in a government housing colony. Another fifty covered dinner evening at a seedy restaurant called Grovers.

The terrace room where I stayed was rectangular, almost the same shape and size as yours, but with one big difference: you have complete temperature control. One ‘wall’ of my room was made up loosely nailed wooden planks. In the winter, ice-cold wind whistled in through the cracks, and in Delhi’s searing summer, hot wind and sand would whoosh in.

But it was my home away from home. As yours is.

In the evening, after dinner, I would walk back home from Grovers Restaurant. And then the loneliness would start.

Till you reach college, you do not know what it is like not to have a mother always anticipating your daily needs. But that disappears overnight, with almost no time to prepare.

You come home and no one’s been thinking of your dinner.

You raid the fridge but all you find is what you put in there. No magic elves are stocking it up any more with fruit juice and cheesecake for a late night snack.

You sleep late, but there’s no one to wake you up to alert you that you’ll miss class.

You wake up feeling feverish and ill — but there’s no one to tell.

I used to think that my loneliness was worse than yours, because you can log in to your Skype or Facetime, and a moment later, you’re talking to your sister, your mother or me, in living color, as though we were in your room with you.

All I had was a pen and paper. I had to write a letter, and send it by mail. They would get it three days later if no weekend intervened and I would hear back from them any time in the next two or three weeks. A person can get a disease and pass away in that time.

Surely I was lonelier than you?

But two days ago, you told me you were skyping home less these days because seeing your family and childhood home on a screen only makes your loneliness ten times worse by reminding you in living color of everything that you won’t have for two years.

So maybe I did have the better of it. Maybe that’s the lesson here.

Maybe this is what it feels like to be a baby bird that has been pushed off the branch by mama and papa, because now it’s time to fly.

Let me prepare you for what’s coming up. Because loneliness comes like an illness, with its own symptoms and aches and pains. Here’s what will happen.

First, you will feel depressed. I saw it on your face when we skyped last week. Your world will lose color, and you will yearn to just be on a plane back home. A part of the reason for that is that it’s November in Montreal, and it’s dark from 5 and everything is grey and gloomy. It won’t help to know that you probably won’t be home for two whole years, because you have to work and earn money for Year 2 during your summer break. You’ll wonder what you thought was so great about McGill University.

Everything will seem pointless. You already told me that Montréal seems bland and colourless compared to Bangkok. Suddenly a future in that city, that country, will seem senseless. In an instant, all that you worked for these last four years will feel empty. All you’ll want is your mommy. Or you daddy. But because a part of you knows that things could not really be as meaningless as they feel right now. . .

. . . You might start wondering about God. Or religion at least. I heard Hindu bhajans (rapture music) coming from a doorway one evening and followed my ears till I was in a large hall with about 200 people swaying to religious chants. I sat in the back row and swayed with them to see if it did anything to me. It did nothing, but I began carrying a small idol of Krishna — that did nothing either. I fell in love with Mira’s achingly devotional songs to Krishna, and would sing them in my room and cry in my loneliness.

By and by I stumbled upon a book on Buddhism by Christmas Humphreys. And finally, that started a journey I am still on today.

Then you’ll stop wondering about God, and start wondering about yourself. You will want to know who you are because you sure as hell are not a schoolboy in Bangkok any more. You’ll want answers to the big questions — why you are here, why you are, what it’s all about. I expect this will start happening in your second term, when you return to classes in January.

And one day you will start realising that there is still one person who cares, who can and does do anything for you, who will never leave you the rest of your life. You only have to ask him. And that person is you.

Being alone is an opportunity. It’s like your first days in the empty house where you will live for many years to come. As you start adding things into it to make it cosier and more liveable, it will start blossoming from a bare house into a warm home. The necessities will come in first, the kitchen will grow, your workplace will take shape, but also slowly, art and pretty things will start going up on the walls, the sills, the mantel. One by one, you will add little touches and flourishes that will make this your special home.

In your case, that metaphorical empty house is the rest of your life. Yours to take and make your very own. Here are some ideas from me on how you can make gold come from your loneliness —

1 Make friends with the city you find yourself in. The only way to make Bangkok feel like less is by making Montreal feel like more. You have nine years of memories in Bangkok, and two months of nothing in Montreal. Make time to explore your city. Be adventurous. Have fun, make it fun. Make the city yours through discovery. Find lanes and corners no one knows about, and search out experiences the guide books don’t tell you about.

In Mumbai, a city I still dislike, I used to drive around alone in quarters I had never been to. This was how I stumbled upon what I now call Literacy Lane, a brightly lit, tomb-silent lane filled with the hunched forms of hundreds of shanty children studying for their exams by the light of the lane’s halogen lamps. This was how I discovered the sunset trip — getting on to a ferry at Bhau cha Dhaka with a two-way ticket to Mhad Island and back. I’d have chilled beer and chips, sit on the roof of the boat watching Bombay recede as the sunset cast its pink colors on the old stones, and gradually the stars appeared. And all the stress disappeared.

Memories like this made the city mine, and gave me something I could share with my friends and newcomers and family. So son, make it your Montreal.

2 Cook for your friends: There is a reason why the phrase ‘breaking bread together’ has come to mean ‘cementing friendship’. Even back when I was an embarrassing cook, I would have four or five friends over and cook for them. No one cared that the food sucked — the warmth and camaraderie that shared mealtimes build stays with you forever.

Cooking food for others and eating it at home builds primeval bonds — and I don’t care how corny that sounds. The friends I’ve made through cooking and sharing food have lasted me my whole life. You have cookbooks, you have Thai spices, you have herbs. All you need now is the intention. What’s keeping you?

3 Make your room special: What made your home in Bangkok special? Think of all the little touches, the trinkets, the wall hangings, the figurines, the bamboo and cane occasional furniture, the books, the aroma diffusers, the sound of chimes and bells when the wind came, the potted plants. Every one of those had the imprint of your parents — and in 9 cases out of 10 that parent was your mother. I have yet to meet a home-maker like her.

I know you do not earn yet, and even if you did, you’d want to save it for your Year 2 — but then, neither did I have money to spare in my college days. Yet, making a place your own does not cost money. It costs time. It needs little touches, not big flourishes. You’ll know it is working the day you feel a sense of lightness and relief as you walk in your door.

4 Give back. You start owning a place and a community when you start giving. Even an hour a week is a lot — and it does not matter whether you spend it reading to old people in a sanatorium or teaching math to schoolkids or washing dishes in a soup kitchen. Right now, you’re in Montreal to take an education from it. The day you start giving something back to it is the day your relationship with Montreal will start. It will become much more than a city and turn into a vibrant pulsing community of life of which you are part.

5 Read, watch, think. Rinse and repeat. The book I left with you, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was a cult classic in my college days, but remains so vitally relevant to any generation because it is about life and people and relationships — and the questions they raise in our minds.

This is your time to find your answers. Maybe the book I gave you will give you something. Maybe some other book will. You need to find your creed, the code you will live by. Take it where you find it.

6 See The Martian. Because despite everything, there will be days when you will want to give up, and crawl into a hole in the ground. So see The Martian. In it Matt Damon plays the loneliest man in the universe — he is stranded on Mars after his crew mates leave without him. But instead of curling up and dying, he decides that he is going to “science the shit out of this”. He has no intention of dying on Mars.

No spoilers from me. But Matt Damon’s very last words to a classroom of students are worth carving on a plaque and hanging on a wall. Here’s what he says:

I guarantee you that at some point, everything’s gonna go south on you. And you’re gonna say, ‘This is it. This is how I end.’ Now you can either accept that… or you can get to work.

You just do the math and solve the problem.

And then onto the next problem and solve that problem.

And solve the next problem too.

And if you solve enough problems, you get to go home.