The Scarab Under the Skin

Acronyms and terms:

BD: Bipolar Disorder, a mood disorder where depression, agitation, irritability, energy changes, sleep disturbance, and mood elevation can appear in different mixtures.

CNS: Central Nervous System, the brain and spinal cord, the body’s main wiring room.

PFC: Prefrontal Cortex, the front part of the brain that helps with judgment, restraint, planning, and the noble human art of not throwing a cup at the wall.

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Sometimes sadness does not enter the room with a handkerchief, a violin, and decent lighting. It does not stand by the window like a widow in an English novel. It does not sigh tastefully beside good curtains.

Sometimes sadness comes like an Egyptian scarab beetle from those mummy films, shiny, black, purposeful, and a little too professional, as if it has received government approval to dig under the skin.

Not just in the mind.

That is the first mistake.

People think sadness is an emotion sitting politely in a chair. Mine is not like that. Mine walks into the body wearing boots. It enters the jaw, the neck, the shoulder, the scalp, the stomach, the ribs. It crawls under the skin like some ancient insect from a badly dubbed Sunday afternoon movie on television, except now the television is inside the chest and the reception is terrible.

You think sadness is soft.

Mine has elbows.

Mine has municipal anger.

Mine smells faintly of old sweat, cheap vest, damp towel, mosquito coil, and that tired Calcutta room where the fan turns not because it wants to help but because it has no better career option.

I sit on the mattress.

The mattress has done nothing wrong.

Naturally, I resent it.

The rice cooker sits in the corner with the innocent face of a small appliance that knows too much. The tea pan looks dented and philosophical. A motorbike coughs downstairs like an elderly goat with political opinions. Somewhere a pressure cooker whistles. Somewhere a child shouts. Somewhere a crow screams as if it has just opened an electricity bill.

And inside me, the beetle digs.

This is not elegant sadness. This is not Tagore sadness, not rain-on-window sadness, not “let me play a haunting tune on the flute” sadness. This is red-black irritation. This is heat under old memory. This is the body remembering insults that the mind had filed away as “completed,” only to discover, like most Indian paperwork, that nothing was completed and the file has merely shifted from one damp table to another.

The past is not past.

The body keeps copies.

Bad copies.

Photocopies with black lines, missing corners, and one clerk’s thumbprint over the important part.

One old humiliation comes back. Then another. A teacher’s tone. A relative’s smirk. A friend’s disappearance. A phone call not made. A job not got. A woman not approached. A room not left. A life that once looked like a train ticket and now looks like a platform after the train has gone.

The beetle pushes all this along.

A little ball of memory.

Roll, roll, roll.

The Egyptians once made the scarab sacred because the dung beetle rolled its ball across the earth like the sun being pushed through the sky. This became a symbol of rebirth, order, morning, creation. Very fine. Very museum-friendly. A tourist can stand before it, nod intelligently, buy a bookmark, and feel briefly connected to civilization.

But when the beetle is under your own skin, symbolism loses its charm.

Then it is not rebirth.

It is irritation with legs.

The brain, poor old meat office, tries to manage the situation. The amygdala, that small almond-shaped security guard, starts shouting danger. The PFC, the supposedly civilized gentleman with spectacles and a fountain pen, is expected to calm things down. The hippocampus drags in memory like a relative bringing old disputes to a wedding. The hypothalamus adjusts heat, pulse, hunger, panic, and other small domestic disasters.

In theory, these departments cooperate.

In my head, the clerk is absent, the file is damp, the fan is making a clicking sound, and someone has shouted fire because a spoon fell in the sink.

Once upon a time, this system made sense. If there was a snake near your foot, the alarm had to ring before poetry could put on its slippers. If there was a tiger in the grass, the body had to prepare. Run, fight, freeze, climb a tree, become philosophical later.

Very useful.

But give that same alarm system a fifty-one-year-old Bengali man in the shanty boondocks of Calcutta, with debt, loneliness, insomnia, professional uncertainty, old ambition, cracked pride, heat, memory, and one small room full of unfinished work, and the poor alarm system loses all proportion.

The spoon falls.

The empire burns.

That is the comic tragedy of it.

A normal person hears a motorbike downstairs and thinks, motorbike.

I hear a motorbike downstairs and my nervous system opens a Supreme Court case against noise, modernity, petrol engines, failed urban planning, weak municipal enforcement, my own life choices, and possibly the decline of civilization after the invention of plastic chairs.

This is why people misunderstand depression.

They imagine a person lying quietly in bed, face turned toward the wall, sad as a rainy afternoon. That version exists. I know it well. But depression also has another uniform. It arrives as agitation. As irritation. As sudden rage. As a body full of sparks. As a mind pacing like a stray dog outside a closed meat shop.

It does not always say, “I am sad.”

Sometimes it says, “Why is that bucket handle so stupid?”

And then the bucket becomes the villain of the afternoon.

A plastic bucket, by the way, is one of the least spiritually satisfying objects in human civilization. It has no dignity. It cracks at the wrong time. The handle pinches the fingers. It sits in the bathroom collecting stains and moral judgment. If a bucket could speak, it would give advice about discipline.

This is the sort of thing one thinks in a bad mood.

Not noble thoughts.

Not balanced thoughts.

But lively ones.

That is the trap.

Rage feels alive.

Sadness is a dead room. Rage switches on the tube light. True, the tube light flickers, attracts insects, and makes everyone look like they are being interrogated in a police station, but still, it is light. Rage says, get up. Rage warms the blood. Rage gives speech to the parts that had gone mute. Rage is the last working appliance in the rented house of the self.

Hope has packed and left.

Ambition is not taking calls.

Discipline has gone to a cousin’s house.

Libido has changed its number.

Normal hygiene is sitting somewhere with a towel, refusing eye contact.

But anger?

Anger still works.

It hums like an old fridge in a rented room.

The trouble is, anger is also a thief. A very busy thief. It spends tomorrow’s energy today. It burns furniture for warmth and calls it strategy. It writes speeches nobody requested. It argues with people who are not present. It turns one small injury into a complete theory of society.

Give me one bad afternoon and I can explain, with unnecessary confidence, what is wrong with family structure, office culture, Indian politics, global capitalism, school reunions, real estate brokers, spiritual gurus, male vanity, LinkedIn optimism, and the person who decided every modern building should have tiles that become skating rinks when wet.

Some of it may even be true.

That is the dangerous part.

If the rage were completely false, life would be easier. You could reject it like a spam call. But rage is clever. It carries fragments of truth in its pocket. People are often selfish. Institutions do rot. India does test your suspicion like an entrance exam. Loneliness is not poetic. It is logistical. It means there is no emergency contact who will automatically notice if you vanish for three days. It means the same hand cooks the rice, washes the plate, pays the bill, answers the phone, and then tries to comfort the skull in which all this noise is taking place.

All true.

And still the beetle exaggerates.

That is its talent.

It takes one fact and adds poison. It takes one insult and adds drums. It takes one unpaid bill and adds a funeral band. It takes one hot afternoon and says, “This is the final proof that everything is finished.”

No, little insect.

Not proof.

Only weather.

Bad weather, yes.

But weather.

This distinction matters because in the middle of an episode the mind begins acting like a news channel with no editor. Everything is breaking news. Everything is urgent. Everything has a red banner. A dropped cup becomes a national crisis. A memory becomes evidence. A silence becomes betrayal. A headache becomes destiny. A delayed payment becomes biography.

And if the body is hot, the whole thing worsens.

Calcutta heat is not temperature. Temperature is a number. Calcutta heat is a committee. It surrounds you, discusses you, disagrees with you, and then sits on your chest. The room becomes a tiffin carrier full of steam. The shirt sticks. The towel smells defeated. The water in the bottle becomes warm enough to raise tadpoles. The fan moves air around like a tired peon moving files from one table to another without changing the outcome.

In that heat, sadness ferments.

It becomes irritation.

Irritation becomes anger.

Anger becomes a speech.

The speech becomes shame.

Shame arrives late, like police after the riot.

It says, “You overdid it.”

It says, “You are becoming ugly.”

It says, “Normal people do not feel like this because a tap dripped or because someone spoke in that tone.”

Perhaps shame is right. Shame often is. It is a nasty little auditor with good records.

But normal people are overrated.

Normal people built many of the offices, committees, marriages, housing societies, WhatsApp groups, patriotic slogans, spiritual markets, gated complexes, and school reunions that make a man want to crawl under the bed and discuss extinction with a cockroach. Normal people are not necessarily wiser. Many are simply better regulated.

Regulation.

That is the word.

The nervous system is like a railway signal box. Green, amber, red. Stop, wait, proceed. In a well-run system, trains do not arrive from Sealdah, Howrah, childhood, unpaid invoices, sexual frustration, professional failure, and existential dread on the same track at the same time.

In mine, they do.

There is one man asleep at the lever.

A monkey is chewing the wire.

A train full of old insults is arriving without brakes.

And still, sometimes, for a few seconds, there is a small gap.

Not enlightenment. Please. I am not about to sit under a tree and become a logo. Just a gap.

The beetle moves. The skin burns. The jaw tightens. The speech rises. The enemy appears. The ceiling fan becomes smug. The bucket becomes ideological. The whole republic of irritation assembles.

Then some tired observer inside me, some last surviving clerk in the flooded office, writes one line in pencil:

Agitation is not truth.

Then another:

Heat is not prophecy.

Then another:

Memory is not command.

The pencil breaks soon after, naturally.

But even a broken pencil has done its duty.

So I get up and make tea.

Badly.

The water boils over. The milk sticks. The tea leaves look like drowned insects. The spoon falls once, loudly enough to restart a small constitutional crisis. I stand there scratching my chest where nothing is visible, where the scarab has gone quiet for the moment, hiding in some deeper corridor.

Outside, a child laughs.

A scooter backfires.

A crow screams like a tax notice.

Someone in the next building is watching a news debate loud enough to damage marine life.

The world continues, vulgar and miraculous.

And I think, all right, let the beetle dig.

Where will it go?

This is not a pyramid. This is not a royal tomb. This is one small Calcutta room, one old mattress, one rice cooker, one pan, one half-finished cup of tea, and one middle-aged Bengali man guarding his own ruins with a spoon.