COMFORTABLE APPARENTLY

My father once said, “Putting up a gate means you don’t need people.” Then he built one. Scrap wood leaning, half-ashamed to stand. He had always opposed gates. “Putting up a gate is signaling to everyone that we no longer need them,” he said. Yet there it was, quietly announcing, performing security.

The old house didn’t bother with performances. Doors were barely doors. Neighbors drifted in. Relatives sprawled. Strangers lingered. Privacy wasn’t real, so we called it virtue. Belonging. Survival. Pick your word. Intimacy wasn’t a choice. It was mandatory, sticky, relentless. We were cramped, exposed, alive.

Life outside our building was tense. Streets held their breath. Trust could flare and vanish in a single evening. Perhaps the gate wasn’t just wood but an apology to fear. A contract with a world that had shown itself capable of betrayal. Security became physical. A muscle hardened by disappointment like a heart learning to mistrust even tenderness.

I remember the chaos of our old home. Three rooms, a sinking staircase, a living room cluttered with brassware, calendars, and the smell of shared meals. A peculiar memory: a heavy wooden rake with two holes, said to support a cross beam that expanded the sleeping area for everyone back in the days of our great-grandparents and their platoon of relatives. I had my own space under a sofa. We slept together, ate together, somehow survived together. Walls were thin, lives overlapped. The small town’s unrest crept in like a shadow outside the door.

Now I live behind an iron gate heavy enough to bruise your wrist. Progress, apparently. Space to breathe. Silence to think. Walls thick enough to muffle even your own thoughts. No barging relatives. No nosy neighbors. Just isolation dressed up as comfort. Security looks suspiciously like exile.

Space has always been a master manipulator. A room can cradle laughter one day and choke you the next. Streets curate memory with careful cruelty. Some wounds etched into stone. Others paved over until even grief forgets where it bled. Small towns offer belonging with one hand while the other quietly shifts borders. Suddenly you’re the foreigner in your own story. Even emptiness gaslights you. “Look how free you are,” it says, while quietly starving you of warmth.

Darjeeling has perfected this performance. The open doors of childhood replaced by concrete boxes and collapsible iron gates. Even my mother notices that when the house was small, people crammed in. Now with more room than we need, people hesitate to ring the bell. Progress again. We built walls high enough to keep out neighbors and somehow managed to keep out tenderness too.

Despite the physical permanence of my new home, there is still a sense of dislocation. Nostalgia for my childhood living room tugs at a spatial intangibility that feels most like home.

A question arises. Does the shift from intimate, shared spaces to isolated, secure ones reflect broader trends in individualism and materialism, often at the cost of communal bonds, trust, and emotional well-being?

And if so, where does that leave us? Behind gates and walls, telling ourselves we are safe, or in the spaces where boundaries blur, risking exposure and tenderness?