4 ideas
He watches her drift toward cinema-fed glamour, fashion, and a pleasure-seeking Westernised social life. Unable to reach her or change the city's direction, he withdraws into writing Simeranya, an imagined country run on the opposite principles, and the novel alternates between his private failure and that designed alternative.
Simeranya is an invented country whose institutions, customs, and education put inner life above material wants. Status, love, and public order in it rest on spiritual depth rather than wealth or appearance. It works as a negative image of the real city: every rule in Simeranya answers a specific sickness Samim sees around him.
When people relate to each other mainly through possessions, pleasures, and surfaces, they lose the shared inner ground that real communion needs. The outcome is isolation even amid crowds, lovers, and family, which the title states outright: "we are alone." In this view loneliness is a structural result of a value system, not a personal misfortune.
Westernisation can be judged by what gets copied. Borrowing another civilisation's outward forms, such as fashion, entertainment, and consumption, while leaving out any spiritual or moral core produces rootless people who belong to neither culture. Seen this way, a society's modernity is measured by the depth of its inner life, not by the look of its streets.