Under the Clocks: Life in Melbourne

It was the middle of November 2024. Time to finally sort through my shortlist of universities. I was counting the days till the year-end, and the start of the Border–Gavaskar Trophy (BGT). For someone whose first love has been sports, Australia, and Melbourne, in particular, was a foreign song that felt almost native. The colloquialisms and the critics, the pubs and the pitches — I already knew them all. As I sorted my shortlist, this knowledge moved the University of Melbourne, a Gothic-style haunt housing Australia’s foremost Business programme, and conveniently a stone’s throw away from the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), to the top.

The first instance of setting up home in a new city is a coming-of-age marker. Suitcases stuffed with warm sweaters and warmer dreams — so luminous with hope that no chill can dare touch us. Before Melbourne, I had never made a home outside of home. I had no idea how our old self splits apart to make room for something new. Yet, in this city, it felt as easy as breathing. People chat cricket at coffee houses and paint the city blue over the summer, welcoming the Australian Open.

Evenings are spent cheering local teams at the Australian Football League, for a game whose rules still go over my head. For someone whose second language has always been sports, knowing the meanings of ‘love’ and ‘bowled’ made up for not knowing an arvo from a brekkie. That second language was the bridge that let me become a part of Melbourne’s chatter, teaching me how to read sounds. Today, I know that a gasp sounds the same in every language, and a hello can still find ways to delight.

Melbourne is so vividly cosmopolitan that separating the local from the global is not easy. On a weekday morning, I step into Queen Victoria Market to buy a recipe box, and end up chatting politics with a familiar stranger from Bombay for half-an-hour. At a Sunday market, a Chinese couple sells painted matchboxes, all the while using Google Translate to talk to their customers. People here treat foreignness so much like a fact of life that you forget to feel out of place. In shops or on the street, I am yet to encounter a stranger who won’t ask after your day. In my second month, I remember texting my friends that I, chronically shy and painfully introverted, have taken up small-talk like a hobby.

Beyond the revelations in the classroom and stumbling upon new sidewalks, these discoveries of myself have been most rewarding. Since coming here, I have spent a day at St Kilda beach, taken myself out to explore the Royal Arcade, had a Negroni at two in the afternoon, and spent an entire evening just bookstore-hopping. I have taken a sewing workshop in the rain and block painted on New Year’s Eve. I have spent enough time at my neighbourhood bar to befriend the owner, and score an invite to their book club. Sometimes, it feels like I have lived more life in 10 months than in the past 24 years.

I came to Melbourne armed with prophecies of adulthood. Instead, I have found myself a child again — mouth open to swallow the world whole. Growing up in New Delhi makes one used to noise; this seems like the first time in my life I can hear myself think. I am so full all the time — there are enough deadlines, opportunities, food and laughter to never leave me hungry. And yet, as is the lot of a student, I still find my hands empty.

But, as I am learning, all the better to hold onto something new.