Cities I Fold Myself Into
Arundhati A
When I first arrived in Delhi in July 2019, the heat hit me like a question. Sharp, unbearable and invasive. I came to Delhi because I had to; it was where Mahi from “That’s the Way Mahi Ve” found herself alongside her fifty pairs of heels. I saw the city like it was my salvation. But it wasn’t that romantic. Delhi was brutal, messy and indifferent.
Before Delhi, there was Guwahati, or maybe I was Guwahati - for a long time.
Guwahati would not let me disappear in the softness of its trees, in the ever-flowing and ever-questioning river. It constantly asked too much of me. Delhi, on the other hand, never looked me square in the face and said: What do you want to be? I didn’t know, and Delhi didn’t ask. I wasn’t yet fluent in my becoming, and Delhi didn’t push much.
Guwahati, you were the river, the terraces, the school uniforms and everything in between. Constantly lurking, constantly there. You moved slowly, like the Brahmaputra in winter. I always thought of the Brahmaputra as a living being, and Uzan Bazaar and Zoo Road its witnesses. I wish I whispered things I wanted to write down about you while sitting on my apartment terrace. The Chandmari Flyover heard me at times, my silent cry to leave. I had your humidity, and the ache you gave at the pit of my stomach, which I get every time I see someone I could have loved and but didn’t know how to. I remember staring at your sky for hours from my balcony, listening to Bihu songs from the neighbouring shops. You gave me rituals, Guwahati; maas bhat or mankho for lunch, and Ruti Kol for those mornings, I’d get late for my school bus. I always questioned your brutality and your silence. You were not safe, but maybe you were sacred.
In retrospect, that silence and its brutality were also my closet.
In Guwahati, I learned the art of erasure and refusal. Refusals from parents, friends, teachers and shopkeepers. You learn that in Guwahati, you are seen and marked. You want to disappear, but it catches up to you.
I didn’t grow up queer in Guwahati, I grew up ‘straight as a pole’ Arundhati. There was a silence and erasure of my queerness there, not very painful but always suppressed. God forbid someone knew I used to get butterflies looking at girls, too. I wore myself in layers of heteronormativity. I slipped into the role not because I wanted to but because the alternative felt like a violence I wasn't ready for. I wish I had my queer awakening in 11th Avenue Bistro, Dighalipukhuri, but I didn’t. I fell madly in love with a boy because it was the correct thing to do. I wore desire and love for the other sex on my sleeve, and guess what? I always ended up bruised and wanting to escape. My body was present, but I wasn’t in it. Not fully. The air in Guwahati knew me better than a lot of people did.
Delhi, by contrast, was a mirror I couldn’t avoid. Delhi was abrasive in pushing the issue. It multiplied me. I came here with two suitcases, a letter of admission and a mission to change the world. I messed up metro lines and got down at the wrong station so many times that I was fed up. But soon enough, I knew the map, and every metro ride after that was only a confrontation with my reflection in the glass. I was everyone and no one. The anonymity was a privilege and safety; everyone watched, and no one cared. The city was loud, layered, and perpetually moving. In that relentless rhythm, something in me started to take shape. Not all of it was comfortable, but it was real, it was me.
Delhi, in all its chaos and pretence, is nothing but a sea full of cracks. If you’re lucky, you find yourself slipping into one. A shared living space. A college meet. A too loud club. These become cities within the city. Places where your body begins to free itself from your constantly clenched jaw. In Delhi, I learned to say queer out loud. I learned to say I want and I don’t want, and this is who I am, take it or leave it. Not always without consequence. Not always with confidence. But I said it, and I kept saying it.
I think of the process often. It was not a singular moment of coming out or coming into, but a series of rehearsals. Delhi gave me those stages, late-night rooftops, seminar rooms full of people who didn’t blink when you said queer, friends who listened and didn’t flinch when you mentioned old wounds. People who didn’t ask you to translate yourself into their language.
Delhi wasn’t easy on me; it also asked things of me. To stay with my performance from the past, to harden when I accepted my truth, and to make my truth readable at least in some form. To hold my politics up like a placard. To be constantly legible as queer; bracelets, oversized shirts, androgynous, full of piercings, boots, vocabulary and rage. There were days when I wanted to hide. There still are. But Delhi doesn’t allow for soft absences. If you disappear, it keeps moving. No one stops. The city doesn’t miss you. And yet, it was here that I learned to hold myself.
Sometimes, I think of Delhi and Guwahati as opposing weather systems. Delhi taught me how to wear myself. Guwahati taught me how to hide.
There is no blame here. I know cities are not people, but they reflect the moods of thousands, if not millions; they inherit trauma cycles and hold deep memories. Guwahati is a city wrapped in humidity from the monsoon and the silence of nostalgia. In my school bells, my mother’s fish curry and my father’s duck curry. It is the squealing buses on Zoo Road and the weight of unsaid things during family dinners. I was a child there, but not a free one. I was always spoken for, as a daughter, student, neighbourhood girl and inbetweener. My queerness stayed curled up in pop songs I couldn’t explain why I liked, in diary pages, and in friendships that ended with too much lost in translation. And I was deeply lonely in Guwahati.
But Delhi, where the dry air contained the static scent of exhaust fumes and ambition, was a city that never stopped declaring itself - in stone, in noise, in history. You could be illegible in Delhi. It didn’t care, and that was sometimes a relief. I found chosen kin here. I found protest here. I found myself on sidewalks, learning to shout not in anger but in demand. I wore bracelets on purpose. I held hands. I stood and spoke of love without apology.
There’s a loneliness to it, too. Even in the so-called queer capital, I carried Guwahati’s hesitation like a second shadow. What no one tells you is that coming out doesn’t erase fear. It just rearranges it. My body, for a long time, didn’t know how to be held. Still, Delhi is redemption. It’s complex, heavy with its grief, police sirens, rent hikes, the daily violence of class divides, and the thick weight of entitlement. You don’t live in Delhi as much as you survive it, bend around it, learn its codes. You don’t mourn in public here. You turn grief into resistance. Perhaps that is the saddest part of it.
Sometimes, I look up at the sky in Delhi and miss Guwahati’s stars, or the way dusk would spill slowly over the hills, the water catching the last light, as if the city was whispering, You can rest now. I still don’t miss 5 PM pitch-dark evenings in Guwahati. Delhi stays bright until far later, although it demands a version of you that’s more rehearsed, more armoured, more performed. And yet, I chose it. I continue to choose it.
Because Delhi gave me language.
I didn’t have the words in Guwahati, not for queerness, not for love, not for desire, not for the aching in my chest that wasn’t always sadness but felt like it, like searching. In Delhi, as I read more, I found words like nonbinary, chosen family, dysphoria, and pleasure activism. I found Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison and Naisargi Dave. I read Ocean Voung, and it finally felt like someone had handed me a map, not of where to go but of how to stand still and understand where I was.
Delhi turned my body into text. Guwahati had made it silent.
When I walk past Jantar Mantar, I remember my first pride parade, the fear, the glitter, my best friend's sweaty hands, my ex-partner's call, the sheer refusal to shrink. I saw a placard that said We Exist, We Resist, and I thought of the riverfronts of Guwahati, which never allowed me to be this queer. I always tell myself not to hate Guwahati for what it couldn’t give me, but to grieve it.
There’s a strange guilt in admitting you miss the place that once stifled you. But I do. I miss Guwahati. Not the silences it forced, but the intimacy of knowing it so well. The way the air feels before a storm. The way the city raised me. The way it gave me language, through my mother’s stories and my father’s anger. It is the place where I learned that there exist two types of nemu (lemon). It gave me rituals like listening to Bihu Toli geet and kichidi on Asthomi. I am sure my queerness was there, just quieter. I buried it gently. Like a seed.
Delhi was where it sprouted, with force. With joy and sorrow.
In Guwahati, I was the girl who laughed too loudly and said no to indecent things. In Delhi, I became someone stitched together from theory, sweat, and dance floors. I kissed people in bookstores and sneaky corridors. I held heartbreak like a protest: visible and refusing to be hidden, because grief too felt like a form of resistance. I found softness in the arms of friends. In Delhi, I’ve been many versions of myself. Some were loud, some tender, and some too exhausted to continue. But none of them have felt false. That’s the gift of the city, it lets you try. It doesn’t always reward you for it, but it doesn’t slam the door shut either.
Still, I long for Guwahati at times, the predictability, the water, the sense of being seen even when you wish you weren’t. The shape of its silence. But I know I can’t go back. Not really. That version of me, closeted, hiding in plain sight, still exists, but she’s no longer steering the ship.
I have slowly learned to answer Delhi. I do. In long sentences, in performance art, in writings, in whispering my name into my ex’s mouth late at night and knowing I am being seen. In speaking, even when I’m tired. In asking questions. In fighting for space in rooms where I am not expected to exist.
I do not belong fully to either city. There are cities we are born into and cities we are born in. I was born into Guwahati. I was born in Delhi. One raised my silence. The other raised my voice. But between the two, I have learned the art of folding myself into spaces. I am Guwahati’s hush and Delhi’s shout. I am the hills and the horn. The ritual and the riot. The prayer and the protest. The wound and the will.
Some days, I carry Guwahati in my backpack, folded between a dog-eared journal and a gamusa. It comes to me in dreams. In food. In an awkward way, I still sometimes flinch when someone says love. It’s the first city that held me, even if its grip was too tight. Other days, Delhi lives in my walk, that urgent, fast-paced throb of someone always moving. In the way I pronounce resistance, the way I roll my eyes at Brahminical feminism, the way I demand space in conversations. Delhi is the bruise that taught me to fight.
Maybe a city isn’t a place. Maybe it’s a wound. A weather. A rhythm the body remembers. The shape of your spine when you walk through a street you used to know, knowing you are no longer that person. Maybe it’s not about choosing between Delhi and Guwahati, or naming one as the origin and the other destination. A city is not something you live in, it’s something you carry.I have carried Guwahati and Delhi like folded notes in the back of my college notebook, torn, wet and ink-dripping but still hanging on. I don’t want to romanticise Delhi and mythologise Guwahati. But, what can I do when my body talks to me when I cross their roads, or when I hear the word home? They live under my skin. They’re both cities I keep returning to, in terms of language, muscle memory, and how I map my days. They just don’t exist for me in geography but in gestures, the way I pack my bag before leaving the house, the way I walk in certain neighbourhoods, even the way I say my name. And between them, I have made a body. A queer, shifting, remembering, resisting body. And this body is mine, and these cities are the cities I will always belong to. With love, noise, memory, and always becoming.
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About the Author
Arundhati A. (she/they) is a queer researcher and student pursuing her master’s degree in Gender Studies from Dr B.R Ambedkar University, Delhi. With a professional background in communications, she worked for two years in the non-profit sector, with an organisation focusing on capacity building. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender and sexuality, particularly exploring how different spaces shape queer identities and relationships. Alongside her passion for advocacy and storytelling, she is equally passionate about books, sweet treats and coffee.
Instagram Handle: _stfuaru_