Something recently disrupted my new life in the Himalayan foothills: going back to my big, noisy metropolis of a hometown.
After four months of being in recovery aided by pure mountain air, my lungs were screaming for one hit of the strong Delhi stuff. I had also stayed away too long from good pizza. Plus, before my parents began to suspect that I’d joined a cult, I deemed it most prudent to reappear and give them the chance to bemoan my life choices (non-cult, but still disappointing).
Quick disclaimer: I am now safely back in my hilly home and have had about two weeks to process everything, allowing me to write about the trip in hindsight.
My flight landed in Delhi on a muggy August afternoon. The moment I sat in my AC cab and began sipping on my overpriced coffee, I felt it acting like Polyjuice Potion. I was transforming into another version of myself—let’s call her City Aayushi. She is just... different. City Aayushi is more put-together because she pays closer attention to her appearance. City Aayushi engages in anecdotal small talk, has a favourite cocktail in every good bar in the city, must make a million weekend plans or she might just spontaneously combust. She knows the mall parking lot by heart, visits art galleries, and knows what nooks to share on Instagram. City Aayushi barely gets along with her mother.
I don’t particularly mind City Aayushi; she’s been through a lot and been to a lot. She is resourceful, resilient, interesting, and cultured. Before I left for Delhi, my partner, who has had a lot more experience with travelling and adapting back and forth, mentioned that he was excited to see how I’d feel after this trip and that things would be different. I told him (and myself) that I’d lived away from home before and knew what to expect. Well, you can go ahead and presume that this was a miscalculation.
Before I left it, I went through the motions of being a South Delhi resident without too much thought. It was the only reality I had known for a while, and I quietly adjusted my habits to keep up with expectations—both personal and otherwise.
This trip helped me see Delhi through a strange, nostalgic lens. The best I can explain it is a sort of emotional jetlag that made most days I spent in the city feel longer and more tiring than when I was living in that time zone, but somehow also more real and meaningful.
The biggest shift for me was temporal. As anyone who has spent even a full day in the mountains knows, time passes differently here. There are fewer distractions from your own brainrot, and you’d better get comfortable spending time with all your thoughts. Even the ones involving you getting lost in the vast, airless, soundless blackness of space with nobody to hear you scream. Can’t be just me, can it? I have learned to deal with thoughts, so living in Himachal let me truly flourish in my own company.
However, a New Delhi minute is different. As soon as City Aayushi reemerged, the days began whooshing past. I could feel my anxiety over getting to things and places on time spike again. Every act felt urgent and consequential, from booking Ubers to going for dinner with relatives. As someone who has never enjoyed performing a single urgent task in her life, this wasn’t giving.
Another one of City Aayushi’s returning exes was constant FOMO. Delhi already has a way of carrying on the party without you, and to exacerbate it all, my Instagram algorithm started pushing more local content. So, even in my tired, overbooked state, I kept feeling like I was missing out on some exhibition, a food pop-up, or a friend that I’d neglected to text back. This was usually followed by hours spent doomscrolling in bed at night, frozen in place. Before moving away, this feeling had shadowed me everywhere—I simply accepted it as a part of life.
Well, things were different now. I had tasted the joy of missing out (JOMO), and I was hungry for more. With some inner cogitation, I was able to pinpoint that this feeling left me drained. But I also had to admit (with some embarrassment) that despite the exhaustion... I sort of liked being busy. Nobody was demanding that I make plans at gunpoint. I was telling myself it was a short trip and I needed to Get Shit Done. But a short trip also meant that I had the option to retreat into my quiet oasis again, that all the cacophony would be drowned out the moment I got back. And knowing that I could tap into joy over fear for decision-making flipped my entire approach on its head.
I decided to make sure both City Aayushi and I were being heard and respected for the rest of the trip. This meant that I had to stop giving myself shit—for not being able to see certain friends, for pissing off my parents, for not having my career plans sorted whenever someone asked me, for missing out on a few restaurants I wanted to visit. It felt whack at first. I am an elder daughter after all; guilt and self-loathing come pretty naturally to me. Next, I had to embrace the pace of the city. Having a busy trip meant that I wouldn’t be able to get the same hours of sleep I get in the mountains. This was frankly the most difficult for me (please read Rachel Katz’ fantastic piece on why she and some people need. sleep. for more context), and I feel like I am still in sleep debt from the trip. But hey, at least I accepted the tradeoff like a grownup, right? RIGHT?
Finally, I doubled down on the nostalgic appreciation of my trip. My friends and I took photos in the verdant Lodhi Gardens that you get only in the monsoons. I told everyone exactly where I wanted to eat, and they showed up there! Every meal, every good drink, and every cute dog I met was a keepsake. I asked my mom to loiter in the mall with me and helped her pick out outfits for an upcoming family event. I did all my favourite city things, like moviegoing and late-night driving. In the evenings, I went to my neighbourhood park, where I’d spent plenty of time from when I was ten up until I became a sad adult, and wrote about it for myself. And finally, when it was time to head back, I gave City Aayushi two delicious cocktails at Sidecar, popped her a melatonin, and tucked her into hibernation until next time.
I don’t know if moving away from the city has transformed me into a woman of the woods. I’m still fairly vain and privileged, and I’m not waking up early morning for hikes (much to my partner’s chagrin). It did, however, break that decades-long curse of being constantly ‘on’ that urban life had cast on me. It allowed me to lay claim to my life in the mountains, making everything more real than it had felt before. And most importantly, in a strange, convoluted way, it helped me enjoy my own city again at a time in my life when I had given up on it.
Thanks for reading another self-indulgent reflection on my personal growth during this critical period of transition in my life. Let’s hope that my next visit to Delhi is less emotionally confusing, so you instead get a nice, frothy post on the top 10 places for margaritas in Delhi. Please take this with a pinch of salt.
I like how it is City Ayushi and I. and not City Ayushi and Mountain Ayushi.
Aayushi!! Omg omg, I loved reading about City Aayushi! You made me giggle at how she’s got everything in Delhi figured out like a superhero with a map of the mall in her head! I'm mentally at a beach all the time but I travel to Delhi a few times a week, and it’s so funny because every time I step out of the car, it’s like whoosh, the city energy zaps me too! I get what you mean about the “emotional jetlag”, one second it’s peaceful, and the next, it’s like I’m racing against time, trying to keep up with everything!
Also, can I just scream a little about that EVOO pizza? Their half-and-half is the besttttt! 🍕🥳