If you stand in my balcony, you’ll see the cityscape stretch out on the left till the suburbs, and on the other side are the icy blue waters of Lake Michigan till as far as the eye can see. The sound of fire engines roaring past on the streets below fills the city. The way chocolate is the typical smell of downtown Chicago, the long, wailing siren of fire trucks is the typical sound of downtown. In the interval between two fire trucks passing by, a low buzzing sound fills the air, and that’s all the silence that one can find here. From where I’m standing on the balcony, I can see people hurrying on the roads below. Almost all of them are on their way to work, with cups of coffee in their hands, ear pods stuffed into their ears and laptops stashed inside their bags. Like ants on the march. I’ll join them in a couple of minutes when I step out of my apartment for work.

To live life peacefully here, one needs to have a routine. You work hard for the first five days of the week and then you play equally hard for the next two. The boundaries are well defined and clear. You work when you work, and you play when you play. Do you remember that proverb from school? All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy? I never fully understood it when I was in India, but it makes so much more sense to me now that I work in the States.

I quickly finish my coffee, pick up my bag and lock the apartment behind me, making a beeline for the lift. It’s empty when I get in, but it stops on the sixteenth floor and a blonde white woman, dressed in all-black active wear, enters with her pet golden retriever in tow. One thing that I’ve figured out after living here for this long is that you either need to be a pet owner yourself or you need to have a conversation with people’s pets to befriend them. But you aren’t allowed to touch anyone’s pets, or babies, without their permission. Oh no, not at all.

Interestingly, except for humans, all you’ll find here in the city are cats and dogs. Nothing else from the animal kingdom. And no, there aren’t any stray animals here like there are in India. Every cat and every dog here is owned by someone. Sometimes, people with mental health problems own emotional support animals to help them overcome their loneliness.

When I first moved here, I didn’t see a pig, cow or buffalo anywhere in the city. Then I visited a supermarket and found them all in the super gigantic section labelled ‘Protein’. They were all processed and meticulously packaged in attractive food packets and had multiple racks dedicated to them.