‘Writing from the Solitary’: This anthology on loneliness articulates a feeling that most dread

In the post-pandemic world of the 2020s, connectivity is no longer something we consciously opt into. It has become the condition of everyday life. Our Wi-Fi connections are stronger than ever. We have apps for food, transport, medicines, work and even other human beings. Everything is just a click or a swipe away.

And yet, in this hyperconnected world where we are constantly reachable, we are rarely met.

Writing from the Solitary: An Anthology on Loneliness, edited by Semeen Ali and Priyanka Sarkar and jointly published by Yoda Press and Simon and Schuster India, takes shape within this contradiction. Bringing together 26 pieces across genres, in addition to micro fiction, the anthology does not attempt to diagnose loneliness or offer solutions. Instead, it allows the reader to remain with discomfort, grief, and at times, the nothingness of it. Loneliness reveals itself in the opening and closing of doors, in empty chairs, and in the quiet rituals that gather around silence.

Across the anthology, loneliness does not appear as a single emotional state. Some writers return to it from a distance, shaping it into something like solitude. Others remain inside its immediacy, without the relief of hindsight. A third set holds it at arm’s length through fiction. The distinction matters. Loneliness that has been lived through feels different from loneliness still being endured. It is not a fixed condition but something that moves, shapes us, and is later reshaped in language. For those still in its midst, the writings do not resolve anything. They give rhythm and words to the experience.

Isolation and loneliness

One such register emerges through autobiographical first-person accounts in which loneliness has already been reflected upon and, in some cases, reshaped into solitude. ​​In Manjiri Indurkar’s “OkStupid, I am tired,” a woman in her thirties navigates dating apps and encounters a loneliness structured as much by social expectation as by romantic disappointment. The essay traces the fatigue of swiping, the emotional labour of conversation, and the calibration and compromise demanded of women in intimate spaces. Refusing to compromise her political and ethical commitments, she confronts the cost of self-respect in a culture that continues to measure women’s worth through marriage. Why must dignity require the absence of connection?

What gives the essay its force is its restraint. Loneliness accumulates through routine disappointments rather than dramatic rupture. It is named not as a crisis but as something lived with long enough to be recognised. As she writes, “We are yearning. Yet we are scared of that yearning. And so we isolate ourselves.”

A similar movement unfolds in Bhaswati Ghosh’s “The Mysterious Gifts of a Fake Snake”, which begins by imagining loneliness as a snake. The essay traces her shifting relationship to being unmarried in a society that reads single women as incomplete. What initially appears as loneliness shaped by social pressure gradually turns into a more self-possessed solitude, especially during her travels for a grant. Distance, both spatial and emotional, alters the meaning of being alone. Travel does not function as escape here, but as a different rhythm of living with oneself. What changes is not the fact of aloneness, but who gets to define it. Loneliness, once imposed as stigma, becomes a space she can inhabit on her own terms.

If Ghosh’s solitude emerges through chosen distance, Maaz Bin Bilal’s in “A Game of Tennis” is forged under watchfulness. Writing about life in an international residential society as a Muslim man, Bilal captures loneliness shaped by surveillance and suspicion. The essay opens with a nightmare, signalling the psychic weight of being seen as potentially threatening. In such a space, being alone becomes a way of preserving dignity and interior life within an exclusionary environment. This solitude is not restorative or romantic. It is effortful, vigilant, and necessary. Here, aloneness is less retreat than self-protection.

Not all the pieces in the anthology allow for transformation or distance. A second register remains with loneliness in its raw state. Here, loneliness is not processed retrospectively or converted into insight. It is lived in real time, unresolved and exposed, without the reassurance of meaning.

In Sara Rai’s prose poem “Love”, loneliness appears less as a narrative problem and more as an atmosphere. It is something the reader breathes rather than something to be explained. Doors open onto absence. Hands are left empty. Love passes like the wind through a peepul tree that continues to rustle long after it has gone. The poem moves in loops rather than progression, returning to images as if repetition itself were the structure of loss. There is no attempt to dignify loneliness through clarity or resolution. The reader is not offered distance, only proximity to yearning and emotional opacity. Loneliness here is heavy, unsettled, and deliberately without consolation.

A similar attentiveness shapes Sumana Roy’s “Dying Alone.” Writing about moving to Sonipat and living by herself, Roy builds loneliness through objects and habit rather than declaration. Empty chairs. An open kitchen cabinet. Meals eaten repeatedly on one side of the bed. These details accumulate quietly until absence becomes tangible. What gives the essay its depth is the way it places loneliness in proximity to death. The two seem to hover near one another, as if one were a rehearsal for the other. Loneliness becomes a daily rehearsal of being unwitnessed. Death becomes its final and irreversible form. Roy does not dramatise this pairing. She observes it carefully, allowing fragility to surface without spectacle.

If Roy’s loneliness is quiet and personal, Kamal Chakraborty’s “Maradona”, translated by Arunava Sinha, shows loneliness as a spectacle. Here, loneliness almost unfolds as performance. The disgraced icon pleads, boasts, weeps, and mythologises himself in the same breath. Ego and vulnerability collapse into one another. Even at the centre of the world’s gaze, the public figure remains profoundly alone.

Akhil Katyal’s poem “And I’m thinking, again, of husbands and wives,” approaches loneliness through attentiveness rather than confession. Loneliness here sharpens perception. It allows the poem to notice the quiet crevices of normalcy where isolation lives between married couples. Marriage promises permanence, a refuge from loneliness, yet the poem quietly suggests that such refuge is never complete. It observes how coupled friends seek brief relief from one another, only to return to the familiar structure of marriage.

Katyal writes, “We are walls to each other but walls are also something people lean on.” Within the poem’s movement, being a wall suggests impermeability. Nothing passes through, and yet it remains. It also holds, bears weight, allows leaning. The metaphor holds distance, dependence, and permanence together without resolving the contradiction. Marriage, like the wall, contains both separation and support. The poem lingers on marriage without either condemning or romanticising it. There is yearning for the solidity and permanence it promises, but also an awareness that loneliness persists within its “familiar looking shape.”

A third register appears in fiction. In Jamuna Bini’s “Nalai,” translated by Pooja Sancheti, loneliness unfolds within a social ritual that prioritises collective norms over individual desire. The characters Nalai, Anok and Gamtong are entangled in structures that exceed them, where hierarchy and customs determine intimacy. Here, isolation does not arise from interiority alone but from the demands of ritual and social order. Fictional distance allows loneliness to be examined structurally rather than confessionally. What emerges is not a diary of feeling, but an understanding of how loneliness is produced and sustained within particular arrangements of power. In this sense, fiction offers a form of protection. It enables the reader to confront isolation without the pressure of self-exposure.

Loneliness and solitude

The anthology’s movement between these registers sharpens the distinction between loneliness and solitude, articulated most clearly in “The Pleasures of Solitude,” a conversation between Jeet Thayil and Nilanjana S Roy. For Thayil, solitude is not withdrawal but a deliberate turning inward, a site of creativity and recalibration. Solitude is shaped by connection to the self. Loneliness, by contrast, emerges when this connection fractures.

Anil Menon’s story “The Kingdom,” which closes the anthology, occupies an uneasy and ambiguous position. The narrator’s grievance as a “twice damned” Brahmin man denied entry into elite institutions is rendered with exaggeration that invites a satirical reading. His invocation of “inheritance lost” and the philosophical inflation of disappointment verge on caricature. One could read the performance of injury as a staging of caste-privileged anxiety, a mockery of entitlement that refuses to recognise itself as privilege. Yet the text offers little overt tonal distance from the narrator’s self-pity. If satire is intended, it remains restrained, even gentle.

As the anthology’s final piece, the story lingers. It is also the only text in the collection to name caste so explicitly. When caste surfaces, it does so from the perspective of the privileged, as injury claimed rather than structure examined. Loneliness becomes existential abstraction, supported by references to Kierkegaard, while the caste capital that sustains him remains uninterrogated.

Whether read as satire or sincerity, the story reveals how caste-privileged entitlement can recast itself as dispossession, how structural advantage narrates itself as loneliness. Its ambiguity is productive, but it sharpens a question the anthology does not fully address: when caste appears primarily as grievance from a position of power, what forms of structural loneliness remain unnamed?

Reading Writing from the Solitary ultimately made loneliness feel less exceptional and more ordinary, not because it resolves it, but because it insists on articulating it. Milestones, productivity, and the movement of daily life may distract us from it for a while, but loss and change return us to its presence. The anthology asks what becomes possible when loneliness is neither dramatised nor denied, but named.

Joy does not resolve aloneness. Nor does being alone inevitably produce loneliness. The difference between the two lies in the presence or absence of sustaining connections to oneself and to others.

The anthology does not dissolve these tensions, and perhaps it should not. Its achievement lies in making visible the different forms loneliness takes, and in asking whose loneliness is granted language and whose remains unspoken. In a world where we are constantly reachable, being met is something else entirely.

Kamna Singh is a researcher whose work centres on life writings by Dalit women and the historiography of Dalit women’s movements in India.

Writing from the Solitary: An Anthology Of Loneliness, edited by Priyanka Sarkar and Semeen Ali, Yoda Press and Simon and Schuster India.