I have been in Bagdogra for the last ten years and the thing that keeps tugging at me is how quiet the evenings have become, because the verandah where four families used to sit till midnight arguing about nothing is empty now and every house has a router glowing somewhere in the dark, and the man who used to know whose son had failed his exams and whose daughter had a fever has been replaced by an app that will bring me dinner in eleven minutes and never once ask how my mother is.

I read somewhere that you can measure a country by how it treats its prisoners, and I think the sharper barometer is the pavement, because the people sleeping on it are rarely there only because a roof costs too much for one person, they are there because the last person who would have taken them in stopped answering the phone, and one study I read found that nine in ten of the people living on the street are single adults with nobody left to call, and that close to two thirds of them trace it back to a conflict or to the fear of becoming a burden, which means the doorway they are curled up in was closed by a relationship running out and not by rent. And the top of that funnel is now a very specific kid, which is the one who gets a remote job in Bangalore, moves into a one room PG with a curfew on visitors, has no family within a thousand kilometres and never once invests in a friend.

I have been driving the hill roads here my whole life, and the small thing that never fails me is what happens when a car breaks down on a blind curve, because within a few minutes strangers have stopped and somebody is holding a torch and somebody has a jack that fits and nobody asks who you are before kneeling on the gravel, and the reason that matters is bigger than the road, because we did not take over this planet by being the strongest ape, we took it over by being the one that turns around for the one who fell, and the tribes that shunned their bullies and carried their stragglers are the ones whose grandchildren are still here arguing about it, so the loneliness we are all swimming in now is the oldest survival mechanism we own finally reporting that it has gone quiet.

The numbers stopped being soft for me a while ago, since people who feel they belong somewhere are about two and a half times more likely to report good physical and mental health, and one study put the extra risk of dying early from social isolation somewhere around twenty nine percent, which is the kind of number that otherwise only comes attached to smoking, and there is a study I keep coming back to which found that the lonelier a child is at twelve the more likely they are to be out of work and out of school at eighteen, with every notch up that loneliness scale pushing the odds by roughly a quarter. Damn! And none of it shows up on any scan, which is exactly why we file it under mood and get on with the day instead of treating it as the slow organ failure it actually is.

My grandmother’s generation had one test for all of this and it fit in two words, which was “Khechis”, and the answer mattered far less than the asking because to ask it you had to know who was standing in the room and when they had last eaten. I notice my own generation has replaced the question with a status update that reaches nine hundred people and commits none of them to anything, and the phone cheerfully reports my screen time climbing while the family group sits at sixty members and I cannot remember the last time I called anyone in it just to ask. Do we really need nine hundred people to see our lunch and none of them at the door? I don’t think so!

India is the strangest place to carry this, because we are almost never physically alone, since there is always a queue and a crowd and a wedding to attend and a relative to be introduced to, and I have started to think that being in a crowd and being seen turn out to be two entirely different things, because the man who queues two hours at the bank and hands his phone to nobody and goes back to a room where the landlord forbids visitors so that the corridor stays clean is lonelier than the man alone on a mountain, and the new economy quietly built its whole architecture on that, since the delivery rider has no colleagues and the remote developer has no corridor and the gig that pays by the minute cannot afford a friendship that pays by the decade, and in plain English; we deleted every place where you were forced to bump into the same person twice.

The machines showed up to fill the gap and I have to be honest that I let them, because I have had conversations at midnight with a model that were easier than the one I wished I had with my own father, and it never tires of me and never asks anything back and never tells me I am wrong about my own life, and what makes it dangerous is that it is warm on demand, which is the exact opposite of the thing, because the whole value of being loved is that somebody had to keep choosing it on the days when it was inconvenient.

What I keep returning to is the ritual I grew up with, which is that the local election is the biggest oxytocin event of the year around here, because the whole village walks to the same booth and stands in the same line and is suddenly a room again, and it is disheartening to read that a majority of people now say they feel little or no responsibility to help the community they live in, since that one sentence is the whole disease in a single line and it says we have drifted to a place where the neighbour is a subscription you can cancel rather than the duty that dharma always told us we were born holding.

The story I cannot shake is the one about a man in his seventies who, a few years after he lost his wife, bought two season tickets to the local football ground and posted on Facebook asking strangers to come and sit with him, and his inbox filled with people quietly carrying the same weight, and what he was really asking for was somebody to notice whether he showed up at all, which is the exact thing the tea stall and the barbershop and the temple steps used to do for free before we handed the job to a feed that never notices who is missing and only ever notices who is loud.

I do not have a policy for any of this and I am not going to dress it up as a tax code or an app, because the diagnosis is embarrassingly simple and the cure is embarrassingly small, which is that the inequality and the loneliness and the rage and the man on the pavement all keep arriving at the same word, and the word is each other, and nobody can legislate you into calling your brother or sitting with your neighbour’s widower, so I have started with the smallest version and I am mostly failing at it, and the failing is honestly the point. Tweet to me the last time somebody wondered out loud where you were, I am @troysk704.