It’s as common a question as I’m ever asked. And remember, I’m from an Indian family, and it’s more common even than questions regarding my ultimate wedding to a nice Hindu girl, or my decision to not study law or medicine, or why I’m not more like my cousin, Dinesh. It’s so pressing, in fact, that my dad himself, a man of few words, and certainly not with a vocabulary of emotive language, felt it necessary to ask: “Don’t you get lonely?”
This usually follows a tour of my flat, and is becoming as obligatory as the tour itself; my response as short. “No,” I say. “Of course not.” But, for some reason, people tend to equate my single life with a life of bleak loneliness, posing the question with a tilted head and a look of concern.
The truth is, I’m too busy to feel lonely. And, in fact, I’m rarely even alone. Sure, I don’t have a girlfriend, a life partner, a Hindu wife, or whatever else people think is the opposite loneliness, but I’m so inundated with visitors asking me whether I’m lonely that I’m, frankly...not.
