I moved to Bangalore in June.
The city was loud in a different way than I expected. Not louder than home - just differently loud. Different traffic sounds, different street food smells, different timing to everything. The autorickshaws negotiated differently. The grocery shops closed at different hours. Even the rain felt different - heavier, more sudden, less apologetic.
My room was on the third floor of a house in Koramangala. The landlady was a quiet woman who left a small plant outside my door on the first day without explanation. I watered it for eight months before I left. I never asked her why she gave it to me.
The first two weeks were fine in the way that new things are fine - everything is interesting because everything is unfamiliar. I explored. I found a good filter coffee place four lanes away. I learned which roads flooded first when it rained.
Then the novelty wore off and I was just living there.
I called home more in months three and four than I ever had before or have since. Not because anything was wrong. Just because the evenings were long and the room was quiet and my mother's voice sounded like something I recognised in a city full of things I was still learning.
She never mentioned that I was calling more. I appreciated that.
The thing about moving to a new city is that it happens twice.
The first time is when you arrive with your bags and your address written on a piece of paper and no idea where anything is.
The second time is quieter. It is the morning you wake up and realise you know which way to turn when you leave the building. You know the shopkeeper's name. You know the rain is coming because of a particular smell in the air that you have now smelled enough times to recognise.
The second arrival is the real one. It takes about six months.
I have moved three times since Bangalore. The six months is always roughly the same.
