Stories of starvation deaths that appear in newspapers usually emerge from severely malnourished, poorer parts of our country, places remote, where the PDS has all but failed. Not from cities. And so the story of the two Bahl sisters  found in a starving, very disturbed state in their Noida home was shocking and also sounded terribly familiar. Their story echoed line by line, the lives of the Bali sisters who were  found in a similar state in their Kalkaji home four years ago. The stories once again made for the same explanations of loneliness, social neglect and apathy.

The sisters had been on their own, unable to sustain themselves because of unemployment, and lack of other support systems. But the similarities and the too easy explanations require more examination. In 2007, the youngest of the Bali sisters, Neeru, was 30 and she was already dead from starvation when police made a forced entry into their home. But the older two were in their 40s,  as are the Bahl sisters. Noida and Kalkaji like most suburbs of the National Capital are witness to continuous change. Neighbourhoods transform swiftly in a matter of years, familiar places alter within weeks, and soon the city does appear totally unrecognizable to the long time resident.

This is a story that rings true across most Delhi suburbs and sectors in the wake of the Commonwealth Games and the need to be a modernized, hyper-urban city. Arguably, most of our cities now cater to the short term resident, the itinerant traveler, the occasional visitor, than to the long term resident.

So there are more takeaways, more hotels and residences but no libraries, old age homes or even recreational centres. Even the local kiranawala is insecure about the threat new malls could pose to his livelihood, but the latter may offer viable discounts but may not “home deliver.” If the Bali/Bahl sisters didn’t step out of their homes, it was perhaps because the world around them had changed too much and they were afraid. Another sweeping statement made soon after the Bahl sisters were taken to hospital attributed their “depressive psychotic state” to the recent loss of their parents. Both sets of women were in their 40s, single and isolated. Did they as single women run out of options to live by?

Was it also a “depression” if at all,  driven by a poor self-image? The belief that there can be only a few certain ways of living for women – to be married or to be successful in some way – and these sisters fell through the cracks, somehow deciding they were ‘failures’? The story once again speaks to us also about social apathy, that systems such as police checks on isolated people, or the elderly are actually failing. But apart from the vital need to establish and maintain connectivity between citizens, cities in a way have deprived us of the equally necessary need for solitude. More than ever before, cities are now greedy living entities, where life must be lived out on in the open – in malls, new restaurants, in the public transport systems.

To live in the city now means to live among crowds; even the nightlife has its own meaning, its own crowds. Solitude is a word seen with suspicion. In this tragedy, we need to look anew at reasons for isolation, why for some people, solitude becomes unbearable, and if in a city, we can still be happy in our own, (perhaps different) selves, living simultaneously with many other selves. We need to ask why and when did loneliness become a bad word. And difficult to live with.

Anu Kumar’s latest book is The Dollmaker’s Island. (http://www.flipkart.com/dollmakers-island-anu-kumar-book-8190939130) More about her on Story Wallahs.