“I come from two Indias,” a phrase I had heard before, but it never really settled into my body the way it did today.
It happened when I was forced by my four friends to do something about the scorching heat, the fatigue, the dullness of a tiresome day. Out in search of some form of relief, some small salvation, I followed along with their logic, their easy optimism. Bearable, I thought.
Only to be stopped, almost abruptly, by a different kind of realization.
Reality? It reminds me how there are always two realities at once.
It happened inside Phoenix Pallassio, a large, premium shopping mall in Gomti Nagar, Lucknow, a city I have grown to call mine through comfort, through familiarity. And yet, at times, that very comfort feels like a kind of incarceration, a geographical luck that both holds and limits me.
I didn’t walk in out of desire. You don’t desire something you have never tasted. I arrived carried by circumstance, almost by coincidence. But the moment I entered, something shifted, not dramatically, not in a way that demands attention, but quietly, like a change in air pressure.
For a moment, it didn’t feel like Lucknow anymore.
It felt like a constructed interior of a dream. Marble floors, diffused golden light, air-conditioning so precise it did not just cool the body, it erased memory, the memory of heat, of sweat, of dust, of the outside. The city did not exist here, not as absence, but as something gently edited out.
And that is what stayed with me.
Not the luxury, not the leisure, not the fortune, but the editing.
Everything felt smooth, uninterrupted. People moved as if this ease belonged to them, as if uncertainty had no texture here. No one looked burdened by the weight of negotiation that usually accompanies life outside, money, time, survival, compromise. It wasn’t that they were unaware. It was that none of it was required of them in that moment.
I found myself looking at clothes, rows of baggy fits, straight-cut jeans, mango pants, things I had already seen elsewhere. The same I see on advertising screens, the same I see girls my age wearing all around me.
Nothing felt unfamiliar.
And yet something about that familiarity felt excessive, almost rehearsed.
It wasn’t that individuality had disappeared. It was that it had begun to take on a predictable shape.
The difference was still there, visible, tangible, almost physical, but I couldn’t touch it. I couldn’t name it. At least, I couldn’t pretend to escape it.
And suddenly, I became aware of myself.
Not in the sense of being watched, but in the sense of being out of sync. My body felt slightly rigid, like it hadn’t learned the choreography of this space, like I hadn’t earned the rhythm this place moves in. A strange kind of visibility, not social, but internal. As if the space revealed a distance I don’t usually name.
What unsettled me was not the presence of comfort.
It was the absence of friction.
A few hours before this, I had been reading about conflict, about lives being interrupted elsewhere, about violence unfolding in ways that refuse neat understanding. And now I stood under controlled light, watching people fret over their pizza toppings.
The contrast did not shock me. It had settled into something easier than shock.
And that is what disturbed me.
Because if the world is as connected as we are told it is, why does that connection not translate into feeling? Why does proximity, digital, informational, even physical, fail to produce any real sense of shared weight?
Globalisation, I hear about it every day. It has breathed itself into almost every domain of life, political, social, even personal. But maybe globalization does not collapse distances in the way we imagine.
Maybe it reorganizes them.
It allows vastly different realities to exist alongside each other without demanding that they touch. It connects flows of capital, of images, of goods, but leaves experience uneven, insulated. We begin to share the same desires, the same aesthetics, the same imagined futures. But the conditions that shape our present remain sharply unequal.
And spaces like malls begin to feel less like places of consumption and more like environments of calibration.
They calibrate what is visible and what is not.
They soften the edges of life, not by resolving them, but by excluding them. Climate disappears. Noise disappears. Urgency disappears. Even time seems to move differently, slower, more forgiving. It is not that reality is denied. It is that it is rendered unnecessary for the duration of one’s presence there.
A kind of temporary amnesia.
And perhaps what disturbed me was not that people seemed comfortable inside it.
But how easily the mind adapts to that comfort.
There is no active forgetting. No deliberate indifference. Just a quiet adjustment, a shifting of attention. The world outside does not intrude unless invited. And most of the time, it isn’t.
We learn, slowly, to carry multiple realities without letting them interfere with each other.
To read about suffering, and then move through spaces where that suffering has no relevance, no significance.
To feel, briefly, and then continue.
It is not hypocrisy.
It is a kind of habit, perhaps even a kind of training.
And maybe that is where the idea of “two Indias” becomes insufficient. Because it suggests a division, as if there are two separate worlds. But what I felt today was not separation.
It was coexistence without contact.
The same city, holding different versions of reality, layered on top of each other. Not hidden, not invisible, but structured in such a way that they rarely disturb one another.
The mall does not oppose the outside.
It simply does not need it.
And in that quiet independence, or maybe indifference, something shifts, not just economically or socially, but perceptually. Belonging begins to detach from place and attach itself to access, the ability to enter certain spaces, to move within them without friction, to not feel the need to adjust yourself constantly.
Standing there, I did not feel excluded.
I felt misaligned.
As if I was present in the same geography, but not in the same reality.
And that distance felt more immediate than any distance I have felt from people I will never meet, in places I will never see.
Because proximity, it turns out, does not guarantee connection.
And comfort, however carefully designed, does not resolve the question of where one belongs. At certain moments, the illusion of comfort begins to blur into confinement.