Walking back to my room a couple of nights ago, I realized that for the past five-and-a-half years I have lived in one-room homes. ‘Accommodation’ sounds more befitting than ‘home’, but when I have lived in an accommodation for four years, I think it does (reluctantly) qualify as home.

The room that I now live in is very similar to the one in Leeds. And very, very different from the one in which I lived in Bombay. Here, solitude feels like the way it technically should. It has all the accompaniments and qualifiers you can think of. In Bombay, solitude is a state that exists amid claustrophobic crowds; the crowds that push you deeper and deeper into solitude, while, at the same time, threaten to yank you out of it.

Living in a single room for so long also makes me realize how little you really need to live with. Apart from a clutch of things, everything else is, honestly, distractions. Distractions we willingly stuff our lives with, to make it look full.