“Is Anu here for lunch? Or dinner?” I ask my daughter, referring to her visiting friend. I know now that nothing should be assumed. Ever.

“Not for lunch,” she says, and adds a few rare words of explanation. “She is going to meet Tanuj. And she has to first take a metro and then an auto to his barsati. But he has a guitar lesson so he is only free till 5pm. So yeah, she will be back for dinner.”

I admit I have time and a fairly fertile thinkscape. While I secretly tip my hat to Anu who in 48 degrees is going to undertake this expedition, I wonder why this Tanuj doesn’t meet her midway. And apparently I do tend to think aloud, which in this case irks my twenty-four-year-old daughter. “What’s the big deal? In any case they are in a situationship so she doesn’t want to ask him to come midway and all that. It’s a very talking stage.”

I am going to rewind a bit here. With two girls in age groups hopping around the mark of twenty-five, I am suddenly privy to a rather elaborate dating vocabulary. While Situationship, Ghosting, The Ick are more understandable, there is a rather long list understood mostly by internet natives and used online. These would be Pocketing, Kittenfishing and the like.

No. Orbiting is not what the earth does around the sun any more.

My daughters eyes are still rolled up to crescent moons. This gesture, if you are unfamiliar, is reserved for when you think your mother is an utter and hopeless idiot but you have been brought up well so you hold yourself from actually verbalising this. Her expression tells me what she has actually said in words before. “We are far more mature than your generation in relationships. We don’t just have a black and a white.”

In your vocabulary dear girl, your generation is Delulu.

Attraction, driven by raging hormones and natural curiosity, with an occasional culmination to long-term relationships, has largely two variants of emotion. And they can be best categorised by two simple phrases.

They are crazy about you.

Or they are just not that into you.

It is the second phrase that currently has a longer and crazier list of terms to disguise it. In my opinion (I have learnt this caveat is imperative if you do not want to be rebuked by your progeny) terms like dry texting, benching, breadcrumbing are simply ‘paryayavachi shabds‘ for one and the same thing. For the Hindi challenged, that means synonyms. Simply put, ‘they’ do not see you as the ‘one’. If you have any experience with a 20-year-old boy who really is ‘in love’, then you best believe that they will jump through a dozen fire rings, push a mother on crutches and steal money to reach the object of their affection.

That’s right Anu. Tanuj is just not that into you. Guitar lessons, my left toe.

Statistically represented, the probability that your undying love is reciprocated by the object of your affection in equal measure is equivalent to the probability of going through a family lunch in your thirties without an aunty asking ‘beta, settle kab hoge?’ Hence I can understand why a disproportionately long list of words is needed to balm the feelings of the ones left pining. Very possibly by friends who know from experience that an indefinite number of evenings will be ruined if the truth is stripped bare in one stroke. In a way, these words seem to serve a very philanthropic purpose for those who need to be eased gently into the truth of their relationship.

Frankly, to me, the words selected for this dictionary tell half the story.

Let’s take the example of any one of these literary gems. Bread Crumbing. Defined in dating parlance as ‘Giving small, inconsistent bits of attention to keep someone interested without real commitment’. And in the dictionary as ‘a fragment of stale, hard, or dried bread that has been crushed’. I rest my case. In 80s Bollywood, a rotund Sethji would have spat the word at a young Amitabh Bachchan’s screen father, kicking the weeping old man to the floor with an evil laugh, taunting him for living on his ‘roti ke tukde’. Hence if the word is being used to describe your equation with someone, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where you stand. Or the term ‘Dry Texting’ which is pretty self-explanatory. I mean… please!

My favourite is ‘The Ick’. It is ‘a sudden loss of attraction, often triggered by a small behaviour or detail’. I fell off the floor laughing. Most marriages in the world would be dead in a month if they couldn’t battle an ick with resilience (or something like it). The number of things my husband and I do to trigger, upset or gross-out each other is infinite. I thought the whole point of a relationship was to accept the ‘icks’. To hold close a partner who is both the witness to your life and the anchor in it. Armpit hair be damned.

I may scoff a little but I have been there. I was once besotted with a boy from a neighbouring college. I was convinced it was fate, locking eyes over a college rock band belching Pink Floyd with rum racing through my veins. Later it turned out he was a friend of a friend, which I took as a ‘sign’. Over endless vodka orange juice vomits in numerous gnarly sinks, I went over every smirk, every sentence, every hostel visit of his, justifying every time he ignored me or stole a kiss just to disappear for months. The friend group stood stoically divided between those who could see ‘deep down he loved me’ and those who said ‘he is just a bastard’. I stood precariously on the ledge till he pushed me over with callousness that failed excuses. So I guess the malaise is age-old even if the terminology keeps changing.

So what then is the fuss all about?

Basically, there are two kinds of romantic relationships that create minimum chaos. These are ones where neither party wants exclusivity, and the ones in which both partners want complete exclusivity and commitment. In a manner of speaking, both parties are squarely on the same page albeit on different sides of the coin.

The problematic equation is one in which the terms of the relationship are left ambiguous, where one party is imagining a Bollywood romance that ends with seven pheras and the other is quintessentially masquerading to bide time, possibly for the perceived benefits of the charade, or sometimes simply too sheepish to spell out their intention. Now an entire vocabulary has developed to disguise this as a workable model for the party holding the short end of the stick while it is mostly nothing but an illusion. There is no foundation here on which a real relationship can ever really be built. Yet the heart wants to hear what it wants to.

The truth, once again, found in cinema. Sigh. The 2009 ensemble comedy hands you the advice, with no volley of words to cushion it, right there in its title:

He’s Just Not That Into You.

“Closing my rings everyday. Awesome streak. I am at 19% body fat. And since I am off alcohol my HRV is 90.”
“Good bro. My resting heart rate is 48. 45% muscle percentage, that’s my north star. So protein is up to 110 grams.”

I was on my fifth chakkar around the park when I overheard this. My knees were creaking a conversation of their own. These are two boys I watched grow up on this same road. I guessed they were comparing performance reviews. They were not. This technically coded discussion was about their bodies. Their own bodies. With the misplaced confidence of middle management presenting Q3 numbers from slides made by an intern.

Though they looked delirious with satisfaction.

I left the arena 400 meters short before they could ask me for my metrics.

I have seen some part of this madness up close. My husband discovered what he calls his sleep score last year. There has been little sleep since. I asked him one morning if he’d slept well. I promise you he nodded, got out of bed and went pale. He was staring at his wrist in disbelief. Sleep score: 36. He spent the rest of that morning in forensic reconstruction mode. The AC was too cold. Our daughter messaged late hence notification ping at 2am was suspect number two. He does remember stirring. And just maybe the gluten at dinner caused flatulence. By lunch, his mother, our daughter and the household help had all been briefed on the tragedy. I made the absolutely ridiculous suggestion that if he felt rested, maybe he was, in fact, rested. He looked at me with the pity he reserves for gaon wali buaji or the wilfully unscientific.

The watch had spoken. The watch is god.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have handed ourselves over to Big Boss. No, not the one that gave Salman Khan a decade of redemption, though the similarities are worrisome enough. The OG. A circular prison where a jail warden sits in a tower seeing everything, and the prisoners assuming they are being watched all the time (they can’t see him), function at all times like they are under scrutiny. They police themselves. Bentham called it a panopticon. We call it a wellness journey. And we pay an eighteen thousand rupee subscription for the privilege.

Even with the TV show Big Boss, the roadmap is identical. Folks compete ferociously, sometimes with themselves. There are tasks allocated and there are badges for completion. I have friends who will perish before they risk breaking a streak and being on the leaderboard is more important than your son’s birthday. There are penalties for non-compliance and celebrations when you close your rings with digital confetti. Legit uncles of mine are running around dining tables at 11pm to complete their steps. The boys in the park are eating 110 grams of protein with the seriousness of someone filing advance tax. And my husband is now going to bed at 9:30 because his watch has directed him to.

It seems forgotten that you are being monitored and manipulated. You just become a whole new person. Someone apparently more optimised. Someone who knows their body data.

Here is the thing though, the data of your body is not yours. It belongs to a company that has Terms and Conditions that run into more pages than the UPSC syllabus. And they can remove your access to your own metrics if you default on your monthly subscription. You are actually leasing out your heartbeats. Your walking speed, your sleep patterns, all of it monetised somewhere by somebody. Big Boss dekh rahein hain, and he has investors.

Thoreau said the cost of a thing is the amount of life required to be exchanged for it. By that math, the wearable may be costing you exactly what it promises to enhance. Your life.

Well, if I must confess, I have dipped my toes in this mess. My previous employer Meta gave a wellness allowance and the Apple Watch was on the list of approved things, if you know what I mean. I dutifully purchased one and handcuffed myself. There was an odd pride in being the first in the family to own one. Our middle class mentality had never allowed us, for a moment, to consider it in the years it was legitimately not a budgeted item.

It brought with it an adversary that was difficult to shake off. I saw my heartbeat rise every time I bent my elbow to check my vitals. It flagged a possible rise in BP, which naturally raised my blood pressure further. My colleagues asked me to share data and I was soon competing on kilometres traversed. This had an unhappy ending for my osteoarthritic knees.

I eventually realised my newfound under-confident, anxious self was not a friend I wanted. I gave the watch to my cousin.

But the beast is back. It just moved wrists.

I read up that sleep tracking done by our wearables is actually not accurate. Apparently the only way to do that is with electrodes on your scalp, in a facility, overnight. The wearable is actually reading your heart rate and making guesses by comparing the data to others in its system. It is monitoring your pulse and doing a vibe check.

But your body and mind always knew when you had a bad night, didn’t they? It’s been in the business of telling you about you from the day you were born. So why are we suddenly so crippled by a device that has a warranty period shorter than the age of my youngest niece.

I stand by X-rays looking into my ribs. I understand the MRI, the stethoscope, even Dr Mehta’s fingers clamped at my wrist before sending me off without medication. But I will not be signing up for a stalker. And certainly not one that tells me I’ve been sitting for too long.

I may be indulging in some timely thinking, or the blasphemous thing of staring out a window, or missing my mother who is no longer with us.

There is no dashboard required for that.

So somewhere in the city my cousin is running in circles, proudly texting me her HRV every Tuesday, and an uncle is eating boiled eggs while his samosa runs cold. And a founder’s blood pressure is rising as he monitors it every hour.

Kyonki “Big Boss chahte hain ki aap ………….warna….”

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I laugh loudly. Others around me are laughing too. The dark shadows wobbling in my peripheral vision confirm that. I am in the audience of Vir Das’s Sounds of India Show. He is on stage playing the sound of a Koel cuckooing from his iPad and asking us which bird this is. Why is it calling at 4am? And why is it not getting the message that no one, not even a fellow bird, is returning its call. One such Koel is lurking in the tree near my bedroom. It is guilty of routinely entering my dreams with its cooing and confusing the zombie who was chasing me in my sleep. It is very much a sound of my own mornings.

Vir Das has chosen to dedicate his latest tour to the sounds that are quintessentially India. He chooses the ringing of a school bell, the temple bells, the incessant horn of a truck to the call of the azaan to remind us of the everyday cacophony of life in India. His act carries one across the country to touch on sounds that are peculiar to certain regions and to festivals. Going as wide as the clatter of the Mumbai local to as specific as the sound of the Thinthini Patthar which locals in Chhattisgarh revere.

My mother’s gold bangles, six of them, clinking against each other as she came in to check on my brother and me one last time before bed. The sound meant that my parents had returned from the party, that my mother was no longer angry at my grades, that my parents’ fight had resolved and that all was well in the world. My ears waited for that confirmation to slip into happy slumber.

“Kulfi Malai Rabdi le lo” is what the Guptaji Kulfiwale called out as he navigated the meandering lanes of our colony on his scooter with a big round matka full of the delicious frozen dessert. As a child, I never quite understood what he was saying. I thought it was “Kulfi Malrabdia” and this is how we imitated him when we cousins played house. Because he was an essential part of the home experience at least eight months of the year. The family gathered around the table to crack open the kulfies and everyone stayed around talking as we ate. There were reprimands when a limp kulfi dirtied someone’s clothes or a call to brush your teeth better if anyone grimaced as the cold hit their enamel. Either way, his call signalled fun times, it was the sound of a hot summer afternoon cooling down and it felt like all was well in the world. Over a period of time, Guptaji grew old and we grew up. The ice cream carts arrived. And like most traditions, this one was laid to rest too.

As I listened to Vir dig up every emotion that I had buried somewhere, I began reviewing the soundtrack of my life. From the garbage van that blasts “UP ki shaan Noida” at 9am sharp, to the rhythmic tabla beat from Munni Aunty’s makeshift music school next door and the whistle of the night guard as he patrols nothing in particular on his bicycle at 10pm. When Mr Khanna’s blind dog stops barking, I know that most strangers have left our lanes for the night. And the peculiar gate bell of the house in front is evidence of the amount of food young Ratna is ordering from Zomato. And when I stepped out for a walk yesterday, Bakhshiji laughed a good morning and added “Kal to party thi Ratna ke ghar mein. Shaam bhar ghanti baj rahi thi.” Yes, while this is the playlist I live to, it is also shared with others who are around. I laughed back because I understood what he meant.

And then, sometimes I don’t hear it at all.

Das is making precisely this point under all the theatrics. There was a time when a sound unified a colony, a state or a country. It was what everyone heard together, a shared experience that made us more a nation than just maps or governments. These sounds were not invited by any one of us, they came with the territory. No one opted in. We were all inside the same acoustic box with both the temple bells and the azaan playing alongside. There was no requirement for folks to hear a stand-up comic reintroduce us to our soundscape and its relevance.

But today, we all hear what we have chosen to in our own cocoons. We have willingly opted out of our shared soundscape into a very individual one. My own playlists, my notifications, my podcast and my personal ringtone. The earphone is the final plug that blocks out any sound, leaving very little in common. The very calls, barks or bells that signalled to our brain that other people exist and share your experiences are silent. You almost hear, or in this case do not hear, the loneliness. The tall multi-storeyed gated societies distance us further. Three levels of security to get to my cousin on the 25th floor. We are slowly becoming a country insulated from each other’s sounds or cries. And here we are in this ticketed auditorium to hear these sounds together, once again.

Vir Das knows this well. Which is precisely why the architecture of the Sounds of India show integrates sound, light and stand-up. He doesn’t merely speak of the Mumbai local, he plays its chugging. Sound can only make its argument when heard together, in a room, at the same time. The immersive format is not a gimmick. It is the only honest way to prove it. Not all of it always worked, the tech failed a few times. But it was an experiment in taking stand-up shows to the next level.

I left the show with a warm, jalebi-like afterglow of having relived a bit of my childhood. Of having time travelled. Only it wasn’t free.

Last year, a week into our vacation in the German countryside, my husband and I were ready to leave. "The place feels very foreign na?" I had complained, not quite understanding then that what was missing was not familiarity. It was sound.

This morning I heard the koel as always. It had not opted out. And it left me with the same question.

Who the hell is this bird cooing to?

Parvaty Murugan, all saree-clad five feet two inches of her, was standing before us like a child reciting a poem for visiting guests. Only she was sexplaining the absence of her best friend Mrs Seema Lakra. It transpired that Mr Lakra, at lunch, had flung the bowl of dal to the left of the dining table declaring it inedible. Seema had quickly run back into the kitchen and in a minute had the cooker whistling again. In parallel she mopped up the mess on the floor her husband’s disapproval had created. Parvaty proclaimed that in record time, tempering Dal attempt No 2 with ghee and asafoetida, Seema served it to her husband. Only then did he finally eat and go in for a nap. Thus Seema was unable to join the get together in progress.

The gathering had nodders, sympathetic eye blinkers and smilers. But the verdict was unanimous. “Mrs Lakra is such a nice person I tell you.”

Mrs Lakra missed the party. Her husband frisbee-ed her inedible dal. She mopped and cooked a second approved version. Then proceeded to tuck him in for a nap.

The room labelled her nice.

Nice saved the day. It saved Mrs Lakra. It saved the nodding heads.

Back in school there was Shruti. Intelligent, or at least the hardworking sort. When we had sinister designs for the ensuing class, we asked Shruti to take notes we could all copy. She always smiled and agreed. One time a volunteer was needed to mind prep time for the fifth graders on a day the rest of the class was going to the botanical park. We proposed Shruti’s name without asking her. When informed, she agreed to stay back. And it was not unheard of, when the queue for the extra gulab jamun got long, to simply take hers. Were we bullies, probably. But it was unanimously agreed that Shruti was such a nice person.

There was a Sharma uncle who recently passed away. The WhatsApp group of the colony was the first to announce the end of his tenure on earth. After the customary folded hands, the entire lane agreed he was a very nice man. There was no repository of anecdotes. No evidence of current interactions. But after months at loggerheads over the colony guards’ salary, the potty schedule of every pet, and the Holi party contribution, this was the first time the lane agreed on anything.

Very nice. Flower image.

So nice. Om Shanti.

Shruti is still standing in a line for somebody somewhere. And Sharma uncle, well, signed out. Nice is holding them together.

Nice is a superhero.

My apron too is not untainted. In my last job, there was a senior I temporarily reported to. He wished me good morning, calling me Malini, Madhavi or sometimes just Mo..umm..oo. In the weekly meetings, he just smiled and said ‘a very nice presentation’. You people use computers so well, or something of the kind. He seldom gave input or challenged my lofty plans of shaking the market within a quarter. When I sought his support to act against a non-performing member of my team, he scrupulously avoided me till I finally caught him at the office Diwali celebrations, where he remarked that my saree seemed to be from Bihar and that my husband was such a gentleman. He left shortly thereafter. Whenever asked about him, I found myself dutifully saying Mr Arora was very nice though.

Maybe it was his kind gastroenterologist energy, where they neither commit nor deny you have a gut issue but gently ask if you are having enough probiotics. And Mr Arora, my name is Madhu.

It is difficult to say doormat, abandoned, forgettable or useless. Nice is easier and silently deceptive. It is like currency that has been demonetised but not notified to the users yet.

She is ‘not a nice girl’ is often the label my aunties have for any woman they find dressing, speaking or taking decisions in a manner they wouldn’t necessarily approve of. ‘He is not a nice boy’, is what you are if the neighbour’s father spotted you with a rum and coke in the bar he frequents. And they are ‘not a nice family’ can mean anything from a different income bracket, a different religion, or simply a voracious non-vegetarian who hosts often.

Recently a close friend ranted and vented as she usually does. She messaged that I was really nice to always hear her out. For a moment, I admit, I was sort of pleased. Then I realised she had done a Mrs Lakra on me. Or I had been Lakra-ed.

Oh! So nice of you to say so.

A rescue dog on the screen mocks me as he snuggles gratefully in the lap of a woman watching Netflix. She turns to tell me, no actually show me, a montage of how he came to her scared and scarred. Afraid of every sound. Snarling at her family’s effort to integrate him. Till lo and behold, five months later, here he is. Watching White Lotus 3 from the lap of his foster pet parent. The comments had more conversation than I had with my entire family this year.

Cut to the security footage of my daughter making coffee and walking calmly to the balcony to watch the sun declare it morning. Our dog, a rescue, is at the landing. He walks up the stairs, runs into the balcony, and attacks her from behind. First her bottom, then his jaws on her calf. It takes two people waving kitchen towels at his face to get him off. He walks away like nothing happened. It was the fourth attack on my daughter in two years.

I had said goodbye to working life and set out to complete the picture of a perfect slow life as I had been sold it, with the addition of a dog. Rescue, obviously. An adoption plea popped up on my feed, no thanks to hours of adoption videos devoured, and we were soon on our way to pick up Piku, the missing piece in my perfect half life picture. Seven months old, no deterrent to my spirit. The family went in full strength. We bundled Mr Piku into the car and drove two hours back into the sunset.

The first week was difficult. He was settling in. He was afraid of new sounds and routinely peed all over the house in fear. He did not want to be leashed and resisted being taken out of the gate. We were delighted. This is perfect. We had seen over a thousand videos that validated this was exactly how it was meant to be.

By the second month we had a few growls at staff and some unexpected snaps. Straight out of the script where everything eventually ends very wholesomely. We followed every article on the internet and every nugget from ChatGPT. Give him space. Don’t look directly in the eyes. Walk sideways when passing him. No over-indulgence.

By month six we had seen a few nips but explained them as the folly of the nipped. We confidently left him at home with our daughter and went to bring in the New Years, like all good North Indians, in Goa. At 2am our daughter called. She and our didi were on the bed and Piku was circling, growling. He would neither climb up nor let them come down. From where we were, and with more than a few Fenis in our gullets, our helpline was fairly redundant. It took joint operations from relatives, neighbours and a locksmith to extract Piku’s prisoners.

We shared these stories with his erstwhile caregivers but they were surprised to hear of his behaviour. The two ladies who had rescued him as a puppy had assured us he was Cuddlebuns, not a violent bone in his body. The shelter owner suggested an animal communication specialist. I did not know such a thing existed. After three sessions and almost ten thousand cash, we were advised that Piku did not like his name as he found it feminine, he hated closed doors and preferred peeing inside versus being walked. Unfortunately, calling him Mr Shamshera did not abate his behaviour.

Two dog behaviourists came home at different times and both laid down their weapons in submission to Piku’s absolute refusal to toe any line. We had always had pedigreed dogs till now and it seemed like everyone would judge us for giving up on a rescue. My husband often told me this was a losing battle. I held my ground. The tide would turn. It didn’t.

By this time the entire house had been bitten at least twice and I had been bitten once. The local hospital had a standing joke when our family turned up at the emergency. Sirohi Saab ke kutte ne phir se kissi de di. I made excuses for each bite.

She went too close.

It was his meal time.

He was agitated by the party last night.

Till an experienced vet wrote non-cooperative on Piku’s card and said, Madam, you should whack him with a newspaper. If he was with other dogs, they would not have tolerated this behaviour.

Truth be told, I was shattered. Mostly because I had so wanted to be the woman in the reel. There was a part of me that wanted to play god. I imagined the story being told. How Madhu transformed Piku from absolute horror into a grateful companion. By now everyone in my life knew Piku. The naysayers, like my mother-in-law. The cheerleaders, like my tarot-reader friend. I needed to succeed as the woman who reformed him. I had always been the one people came to. This win would make me an urban legend. I wanted it. For me the picture of my slow life or successful second innings did not complete without a story of good doing. I imagined long walks with him faithfully walking beside me. Hours of staring at the sunset and his warm body on my lap.

By now no one but me could walk him. I woke up and routinely saw the sunrise my husband had been urging me to see since 1993.

A fortnight ago Piku almost took my daughter’s calf off. Seven injections on one site and two on the other. Her screams were heard through the hospital. After two and a half years, we sent Piku back to the shelter and decided to support his stay there for life. He went happily without once looking back.

I still get a video about him every day. My eyes still cloud up.

But then I go back to the words of the last trainer who had put in four months trying to modify Piku’s behaviour through internationally vetted techniques.

Madhu, your dog is an arsehole.

I did not know such a thing existed but now I do. So for anyone who may need it, I am linking ‘dog calming music’ that helped Piku on days he felt like it.

Did I just see Fleabag after a double cleanse, make-up balm-ed off, scrubbed and bare? While the former feels like a show, performative with a fourth wall and all, Somebody Somewhere feels like bare skin. Familiar, uneven, with every pore enlarged. Sam, a woman past midlife and unwillingly back home in Kansas, is barely holding it together. So while Fleabag’s staging was mind-blowing, Sam’s life-watching is uncomfortable. She is not winking at the camera with tongue-in-cheek one-liners. She is just living, miserably and meaninglessly, till she is not.

You go in expecting the recovery saga. Sister grief, return to home town, the slow stitching back. Except Somebody Somewhere is not interested in that show.

Sam, the protagonist, is played by Bridget Everett, the writer-producer of the show, herself. It strikes a chord to see her stuck in a rut of a career with everything from her breasts to her morale losing the battle with gravity. She is struggling to hold salvage her ruptured relationship with her family.

And then Joel finds her.

Joel, played by Jeff Hiller (Emmy-nominated, 2025), invites Sam to choir practice, knowing she sang in school, a version of her he quietly admired. Sam tells him she hasn’t sung in years and would possibly be terrible at it. “You don’t have to be good. You just have to show up,” he replies. Joel cajoles Sam back to singing. A self she thought was gone, simply waiting.

The show gives Sam and her surviving sister, Tricia, a second chance at being friends in the most gloriously absurd way. Tricia, recently cheated on and freshly divorced, ropes Sam into selling embroidered cushions with phrases like Lying Cunt and Big Juicy Cunt. It is ridiculous, and it works.

Somebody Somewhere brings forth something we don’t see on our screens often: the possibility of new friendships at midlife. We see friendships between twenty-somethings trying to make it, or aged mates recounting the good old days. As if the only relationship you can meaningfully build in the middle years is a romantic one? Is it simply unthinkable to open your heart at a stage when your shoulders are already heavy with life, finances, grief, and everything else you are carrying? Where are the stories of friendships that begin after 40, a time when opening up feels awkward and every piece of yourself you share carries genuine weight? The show understands something most television, or people, don’t. Simply being fully present to each other is the whole point.

The truth is, most of us carry friendships from our early years. Children of our parents’ friends, school and college connections and the occasional one from a first job. Friendships of proximity. Somebody Somewhere shows something else entirely. Friendships that are chosen. The possibility of finding your people after 40, in places you would never have imagined being in, let alone enjoying.

My own core group is school friends and first-job colleagues. The idea of actively making a new friend hasn’t crossed my mind in over two decades. Even at the gym, where I show up at least three times a week, my resting bitch face is firmly in place. More than adding extra weight to the chest press, I dread someone saying hello.

I have refused more than one invitation to a new experience or gathering simply because the idea of conversations with people I did not know was exhausting as a concept. Like going to a new therapist who has to now be told the history of your entire trauma all over again.

And I think I know why.

Midlife friendships can be genuinely messy. By this point, people have edges, a blunter tongue, and a gavel that drops without warning. But isn’t that precisely what makes this the most honest time to form a real bond? The trouble is, we’ve been quietly indoctrinated into a version of midlife dynamics that must be frictionless. Where etiquette, careful language and social graces rule. The fear of offending someone becomes the metric. Boundaries are tight. Eyes are guarded. And when have great friendships ever emerged from such a dynamic?

There is a growing loneliness in a world that has never been more connected. Most established friendships now hang precariously by the ping of a notification. The demographic hit hardest is the one most overlooked. The mid-life, mid-career and the quietly friendless. New experiences feel risky. New people feel exhausting. A new friendship feels, frankly, unthinkable.

And then this show arrives. With the inconvenient suggestion that it is not, in fact, too late. That the move at this age is not the career pivot or the wellness retreat. It is the yes to choir practice. The hello at the gym I keep refusing.

Age is etcetera.

Not least, the show’s music, originals, instrumentals, tracks that move in perfect step with whatever the story is quietly doing to you. The playlist is attached. It’s worth your time.

“Can you imagine? My son asks me after every meal if I have taken my medicine. And he insists that only he will take Mamma’s blood pressure…”

“My daughter now joins us for dinner every time we are eating at the table. She may be in her night suit but she comes down…”

“The twins let me clean their cupboard. Earlier they would never let me even peer inside…”

“Poplu has taken to farming in our orchards. He will grow red mangoes through a Brazilian technique that fruits only once in five years…”

I nod with a patient smile when I hear this from my aunts, friends and folks in every other living room. After all, this boy slammed doors in her face, not one call from college in four years and a no-show at his father’s sixtieth. It is not a small feat that the girl who barely stuck her hand out through the door crack to accept her dinner plate, who they saw fortnightly, is now joining the family to break bread. These are miracles in the eyes of these parents. My ovaries are exploding at these heartwarming tales. Misty-eyed parents, each sharing the devotion of the child who has given up an important part of their life to live with them, in what they describe as an act of supreme sacrifice.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is the perfect scam. The accused is an entitled, shrewd little scamster who plays the vulnerable victim, caught in generational parental guilt, to win lifelong board and lodging without as much as promising good behaviour. The license to live free of cost for another year, no job, no educational pursuit, no household responsibility, has been bought with as little as a polite enquiry about blood pressure.

Now let me look in the mirror. I have two daughters. One I am happy to report is in another city, in a job. When she first spoke of the relocation, my Indian mothersome heart immediately belched, “why don’t you try a job in Gurgaon so you can come home for weekends, or commute from home.” Thank god she was unable to do as requested. The distance has made her a bigger woman and us less needy. The little one is now leaving for her masters abroad. I am training myself to let her go and she is training herself to be a Barista to earn on the side. Every Monday I want to tell her to forget it since we can cover her tuition and stay. But then, every Tuesday I rap my knuckles and check myself.

Which is to say, I understand exactly how the scam works, because I have been one bad week from running it on my own children.

The problem begins with us, I’m not sure what we are called now, but the current midlifers. We grew up under parents who enforced rules. Most of us also got routinely whacked. This gave rise to a strong desire to be better parents when the opportunity arose, and hence we swung too far left in allowing everything. We spared the rod, spoke in whispers, did little to hurt the bugger and stretched ourselves like a ten paisa rubber band. This brought forward children with fragile emotions and the resilience of wet tissue. The world outside can be intimidating to such a child and staying within the warm, fuzzy cocoon is a natural choice. That it may destroy his sense of self-worth is sometimes not evident. The cost is camouflaged. It returns much later, with interest.

From most Indian parents’ point of view, this situation is sometimes almost welcome. A starved mother is happy to read love in a query about her medicine. In this world of youngsters drunk on screens, parents struggle to participate in their children’s lives. An offer to help settle a cupboard is a mother’s version of sharing a part of her child’s life. Marriages later in life are making children seem younger than they are to parents, thus making the delay into adulthood permissible.

In households with a family business, the lines blur further. The parents are keen to have the next generation nurture what they built. The presence of the scion on the bed munching chips, or turning up after three reminders to accept the ‘best whatever’ trophy alongside the father, is taken as evidence of involvement. The third-level managers do the heavy lifting. The heir-apparent sits on the office chair occasionally, just to get a photograph for the matrimonial circuit.

The phenomenon is by no means exclusive to Indians. ‘Extended adolescence’ is the academically accepted term. Every culture has its own name for this phenomenon, invented by parents who finally sobered up. The Italians call them Bamboccioni, the Germans have Hotel Mama, the Japanese label them parasite singles, the Americans have boomerang kids, the Australians have the kangaroo generation. Indians had the quintessential Kunwar sahibs, but today women are as much a part of the mix. Let’s just agree to call them Baby and Baba.

But this is where I sign out. It is with sweat and blood that parents raise and educate children. It is difficult and often at the cost of large chunks of their youth. The losses are not merely financial. Unless plagued by grave misfortune, our next generation needs to take on the responsibility of becoming adults. And the midlife mourners deserve the chance to recalibrate from being only parents to being people again.

Else, to misquote the Beatles, they will still need you, will still feed off you, when they are sixty-four.