People would think I am crazy if they saw me sitting alone and smiling at my phone. It s such a silly thing to say, said Singh, as we flipped through the caf s exhaustive menu and zeroed in on a
“People would think I am crazy if they saw me sitting alone and smiling at my phone. It’s such a silly thing to say,” said Singh, as we flipped through the café’s exhaustive menu and zeroed in on a beetroot orange salad and a prawn starter.
Then one evening, as she sat down for a drink alone at The Chatter House in Khan Market, two men at the pub asked her if she had been stood up. “I found it quite funny, honestly. They were quite polite and we ended up having a long chat. They said it was uncommon to see someone drink alone, without friends or partners. A lot of people also think I am single. They ask why I am out alone? I say why not?” Singh said.
Many days later, while scrolling through her phone, it dawned on Singh that she needed a challenge: 30 days, 30 places, alone. “That’s how @tableforone happened,” said Singh, whose opening lines to most videos – “I went to a bar in Delhi on my own and someone asked if I had been stood up, so now I’m on a mission to find places I can actually hang out in alone” – are now being imitated by others on the social media.
“It’s such a compliment when I watch other people using that line in their videos. I should get t-shirts printed! Maybe it’s time for @tableforone merch,” said Singh.
Singh posted the first video in March. By April, it was a 25,000-strong online community, and now it’s close to 34,000. On June 9, she hosted the first offline gathering called Table for One Club at Hauz Khas’s Fort City, one of the few breweries in the city, whose cocktail menu is an ode to Delhi with drinks named after the many cities that rose and fell in its history – Tughlaqabad (tequila, aperol), Mehruali (jasmine gin), Lal Kot (gin), Siri (hopped bourbon), and Shahjahanabad (gin, campari), among others.
At least 40 people showed up at 7pm, each one alone, and the last person standing only left at 1am. “I had casually posted about this on Tuesday and asked people to DM me if they’d like to come alone. Through this journey, so many people have told me how much they relate to what I am doing – going out alone. So, this is one way of bringing all those people together. Not one of them came with their friends or partners. It was fantastic,” said Singh. Tickets were priced at ₹2,900 per person and included one drink and some starters.
After a few followers wrote to her, rather passionately, about wanting to take her out for a meal, Singh said, “Why not?” In early June, she landed up at the Delhi Gymkhana Club with an HT colleague and called it “Summer House for old people whose families once had money,” and before that, a chef took her to Defence Colony’s unassuming Barbar 99. “I do this weekly now. It’s quite something to look at a city through the eyes of people who love it,” said Singh, who now has a list of her Delhi favourites – Beanly Coffee in Panchsheel Park, Plus Nine One in Kailash Colony, Coffee Under Palms (CUP) in Vasant Kunj, 4S in Defence Colony, Strangr in Greater Kailash-1, and LoCol by Subko in Lodhi Colony.
As we dug into juicy, garlicky prawns, a platter of bruschetta arrived and we gave each other confused looks. “Compliments of the chef,” said the server. Singh is getting used to people recognising her on the road, at the market, at a bar or a cafe. “I love it when someone recognises me and comes to say hi. I don’t mind it at all. Since most of them are genuine followers, they know I enjoy my solitude and are not intrusive,” Singh said.
Growing up in the UK with her two younger siblings meant solitude was often rationed, but Singh found it anyway – in her car in London, at Toit bar in Bengaluru, and in Jasauli Pakoli, a village in Bihar’s Siwan district where she was born and to which she keeps returning. When she turned one, her father was offered a job at TCS in the UK, and the family of three moved there; however, India kept pulling Singh back. “When we were children, we’d return to Jasauli Pakoli every summer, where life moved slowly. We’d feed cows, walk in the fields, and dry chillies. I lived there for three months in 2015 when I dropped out of university,” she said.
In 2018, when she finally moved to India with a job in Bengaluru, her father wasn’t too pleased. “He thought I was foolish, and said he had worked too hard to have one of his children move back to a country where he had experienced hardship. My father will slowly come around to the idea of me living here – like I have accepted Delhi, and Delhi has accepted me,” said Singh.