Once upon a time, there was a dream called the city — Nakaram.
It promised a speculative future of glass towers that touched the clouds.
They said it had everything — you could be anything.
It never slept, its skylines shimmered like promises.
They called it progress, a way forward — the architecture of tomorrow.
People spoke of it with reverence,
as if concrete and steel could save them
from the mess of being human.
But I was born elsewhere — in the humidity of a coastal plain.
A vast land of vayal (farm lands) and vistas of vaazhai (banana fields),
where the smell of fish, spices, and rain-soaked soil
was the first thing you breathe each morning.
Where you didn’t just hear your neighbour cough through the wall —
you heard the rattle in their lungs, the domestic dispute,
the private grief you had no right to,
yet were forced to carry.
Why do I have to be here? I’d wonder. Is this home?
Here, architecture was constructed and constituted
by people’s way of life — so organic, so bodily.
It was lived into being.
Every crack, every uneven corner had a story.
They were context-born entities — morphed, emerged from people.
Was this nostalgia?
Perhaps.
But it was also a cage of coherence.
When I first stepped into the city, my first feeling was relief.
I broke away from those places — from invisible threads
that had bound me all these years.
The anonymous air, smelling only of refrigerant,
was a release from the thick, communal air of home,
where every breath was shared, judged, accounted for.
The wide, empty streets belonged to no one —
and for the first time, neither did I.
No children ran across them barefoot.
No one waved from a window.
It was beautiful because it was hollow — a sterile lie.
And I wanted it.
Then, somewhere in the dense midst of this maze,
I heard it — a song drifting from a faraway temple.
A memory I hadn’t encountered in what felt like years.
For a moment, it was as if a small portal had opened.
My body paused before my mind did.
In that sliver of stillness, the city split open, and I could see
its flavours, its fractures, its forgotten textures.
I looked around wondering —
as if I had slipped into the meta-world of my own memory,
wandering through two places at once —
the one I belonged to, and the one that made me disappear.
They call this the Anthropocene — the age of humans.
But I think it’s the age when humans began to vanish
from their own creations —
a theatre of absence, where we are ghosts in our own homes.
Look at the city.
It repeats itself like a glitch — apartment after apartment,
each a sterile box for a life.
The balconies are empty ledges,
altars to a view of other empty ledges.
Every window mirrors your isolation back at you.
We call these spaces modern, efficient.
But what they are is a kind of forgetting.
Back home, the houses bled into one another.
When someone cooked, the entire lane knew your meal.
When someone mourned, the entire lane bore the weight of it.
There was no privacy (nothing was hidden) — only witness (lived in the open)
The verandah was a courtroom,
the temple gopuram a clocktower of obligation.
And the sandhai — the weekly market —
was a living theatre of coexistence.
The ballets of the streets could be felt and lived.
We knew the texture of time
because the seasons left stains on our walls.
But in the city, time loops endlessly —
recycled air from a vent.
Architecture no longer holds memory;
it performs and simulates it.
There is no context —
only a globally marketable imagery.
Once, I saw a billboard that read:
Dubai is here.
And I wondered — where is here now?
Where are our own imaginaries of heaven?
Why must our skylines aspire to be someone else’s future?
He once told me he hated the rain.
I chucked, how could anyone hate the rain?
Until I experienced “why”
How did we turn something transcendent,
something worthy of memory,
into something to despise?
“Mom, I can’t feel anything. I want to come home.
Everything is damp, and even rain isn’t pleasant here anymore.”
This is the new myth of the Global South:
to be modern is to erase oneself —
to aspire toward a utopia that does not remember its soil.
Our context-born generators,
our sense of place —
the tea stalls, the rituals spilled on the streets,
the gossip corners, the weekly dives in the ponds,
the unexpected encounters, petti shops —
are dismissed as informal, unplanned, encroachments.
Was it a disease?
To be cured by the clean lines of a masterplan?
If the city is our utopia,
then why does everyone dream of going home?
If progress is our promise,
why does it feel like exile?
And here is the uncomfortable truth:
I write this on a laptop, in the hum of traffic the city affords me.
I am the product of the escape I condemn.
Nakaram — the city I once dreamed of —
now a mausoleum of borrowed utopias,
designing for ghosts we no longer see.
We are architects of absence.
To the death of analogous cities.
To the ones that were never ours to begin with.
But perhaps the truest architecture of the future
will be the one that listens again —
to the soil, to the human/non-human,
to the small and the subaltern.
To the voices that were always there,
buried beneath the concrete.
Where should I go now — home, or back to sleep?