My year of suburban rest & relaxation
Exploring the contrast between the noisy city life of Delhi and the silence of Gothenburg suburbs.
Every time I tell someone which part of Gothenburg I call home, they shoot a look of disbelief. A few have even made a trip out here, as if to inspect a lab experiment in suburban living. How are these two thoroughbred city-rats surviving suburbia (exurbia,even)? It’s a neighborhood of more villas than humans, and it’s fair to say we’ve had our share of decompression sickness moving here from our former lives in Frankfurt and Delhi.
From the hyper-social urban sprawl of Delhi to the silence a Gothenburg suburb feels less like a relocation of the sensory systems. In Delhi, the city is a constant, loud interlocutor, breathing down your neck, demanding your attention, and offering a chaotic sort of companionship. Here in Sweden’s second largest city, the streets are impeccably clean, viscerally empty, as is the air. As much as I’ve written about Delhi (links at the end), it doesn’t fully capture the colour, heft, volume and character the city lent to my life.
As I think with it now, more than Delhi it was the mixed use neighbourhood I lived in that made everything sing. The city with its myriad issues — the air, the noise, the water, the traffic, the queues for everything — still made sense. But here, in the suburbs of Sweden’s thinly populated second city, the silence leaves much to be desired.
Some Snapshots
Delhi: In the middle of the afternoon on a workday, after a meeting if I wanted to stretch for a bit and catch some fresh air, the balcony would be the last place to go because of the sun, the sound of school children playing next doors and the constant coming and going of door to door vendors (from vegetables to Kashmiri shawls).
Gothenburg: The only time I see traffic from my windows seems strictly scheduled: 7-8am and 4-6pm. Nary a car before or after. Trams trundle past, as do buses, but mostly vacant. Empty, rattling, electric canisters carrying ghosts of imagined passengers.
Delhi: The neighborhood DDA park provided the succour and solace needed to cut out the city’s din. I’d take endless walks there, soaking in the managed greenery, going for runs, or simply retiring to a bench with a friend. I made friends with older folks from the neighbourhood, met relatives from the other side of the park and enjoyed a sense of community there.
Gothenburg: Around our house, there is a small forested pathway that leads up to the sea. I take walks, go for runs, even exasperated end of the day strolls. Others cycle and run along the coast, some walking their dogs, others still commuting to and from work. I’ve discovered here that specific, comforting magic to sitting on the shore on a maudlin, eerily lonesome cloudy day, watching the waves crash against the rocks as you down an alcohol free beer.
Delhi: A trip for milk was a social tour, riven with people, choices, variety of reasons. I’d drop by the dry cleaners, chat with the momo-stall vendor, and lose twenty minutes in the stationery store. I’d inevitably spot a celebrity doing the mundane: in 2024, I watched the 93-year-old historian Romila Thapar meticulously choosing hair clips; another day, it was journalist Sreenivasan Jain nibbling an ice cream. These trips were times of accidental community— where I’d often have to duck behind a pillar to avoid a cousin or acquaintance or colleague simply because I didn't have the time for an update.
Gothenburg: I shoulder my tote bag, walk five minutes to the supermarket, and I am back in twenty. I rarely encounter a human, though a few local cats have kept me steady company. Cars whiz by; a lone cyclist passes. At the tram station, one, maybe two people stand like statues, waiting.
Delhi: I kept my windows shut throughout the day to keep out the sound of: metal clanging from construction, a gardener sawing an ailing branch, the visceral cheers from the next door schoolyard, cars backing in the parking lot, street dogs barking at nothing, the calls of vendors, and just the general sounds of people calling each other out loud whether on the street or inside other houses. During Zoom calls I’d profusely apologize to my American and European colleagues for any background sound (they had absolutely none, ever).
Gothenburg: The sound that harasses me here even with windows shut and sealed tight is the Sequoias and Firs rattling, shaking wildly in the wind that blows here on most days. During work I play Hindustani classical music in the background to ward off the ominous sound and in meetings I blend in.
Delhi: Pre-covid when ordering food online (Zomato) was not a thing, we’d often just walk to any of the nearby neighborhood markets from our house. And we had four markets to choose from. The neighborhood I lived in was known for it’s street-food and I’d often meet friends and colleagues or hear of their excursions to my side of the city just to hog on some sumptuous delicacies. When we hosted friends, we’d have at least three different (all highly venerated) Kolkata Biryani (Awadhi-style) shops to choose from in addition to various Indo-chinese restaurants, pizza places, some heavy-weight legendary (Pr-partition) snack stores and newer kiosks.
Gothenburg: One cafe (with coffee expensive than most parts of the city), an Italian restaurant and bar that opens during select hours only, an Indian joint that opens at 3pm on Saturday and a Turkish pizza joint — is the food makeup of our area. That options are limited is not the point, but that they’re far less imaginative in timing, spread, services is kind of baffling.
I realize this is an apples to oranges scenario. Gothenburg is better designed by every objective urban planning metric.
While we often blame the overstimulation of the city for our distress, it is the isolation of the suburb - the lack of multistory life and shared open spaces - that may be the heavier burden to carry. As I walk these quiet Swedish streets, I’m realizing that while Gothenburg is better planned on paper, my soul is still searching for the density that once kept it looking.
In Delhi, the city demanded something of me every time I stepped outside. In Gothenburg, the city is polite enough to leave me entirely alone. I’m still deciding which one is more exhausting.
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