Terrace Tea Manic Depression

I get maybe four of these a year. Good mornings. Peaceful ones. The kind where the depressive chatter or the manic static drops below the threshold where I can actually spring from my dirty bachelor’s unkempt mattress, boil water, dunk a tea bag like I’m performing some sacred ablution, and climb the staircase to the terrace without my chest feeling like a collapsed lung full of hornets. Today was one. I don’t waste these. I treat them like a person with type 1 diabetes treats insulin, like a death row inmate treats a last meal, like a Bengali treats his afternoon nap—sacred, non-negotiable, and slightly desperate.

The terrace. In an earlier life, when I was US-educated and working in healthcare research and had a car and a paycheck that didn’t feel like an apology, I used to drive to scenic wooded areas near Austin. Tortuous detours around lakes, the kind of self-indulgent pastoral bullshit that Americans excel at and that I, being a Bengali smart-ass with a PhD in running away from myself, absolutely adored. I remember the limestone, the cedar, the suspiciously happy joggers. Now I have no car. No wooded areas. No Austin. I have a lower-middle-class suburb of Calcutta, a boondocks far from the center, and a terrace that smells of pigeon guano and dried laundry. This is my Walden. This is my Walden, and Thoreau can go eat a bag of unwashed lentils.

The sky was uncharacteristically overcast, but the air had that thin, clear quality that makes you feel like you’re breathing through a sieve made of crystal. I walked up and down, sipping tea, looking at the shadows of tall buildings in the far distance—that hazy, blue-gray geometry of a city that hasn’t decided whether it’s waking up or dying—and the textural granularity of bricks in the near.

The bricks. God, the bricks.

Each one a tiny rectangular testament to some poor bastard’s labor, arranged in courses using a technology that has outlasted empires and will probably outlast my neuroses too. Some shrubs in the field opposite, trembling with a vitality I envy so much it feels like a personal insult. The general clamor of birds, livestock, and insects that pervades such early hours—a cacophony that is, if you listen properly, a symphony composed by evolution and conducted by entropy.

The city hadn’t woken up yet. Or rather, this suburb, this peripheral purgatory, was still rubbing its eyes. But I could spy some busybodies on terraces far away, already running errands. Women. It’s usually women around this part that I see starting the day with chores, staying ahead of their Devi Durga-like responsibilities throughout the day. I watch them and feel a strange, uncomfortable admiration mixed with guilt. They are the load-bearing walls of this civilization, and here I am, a bipolar bachelor with a mattress that has seen things, drinking tea and contemplating the ontology of bricks.

The Manusmriti says, “Yatra nāryastu pūjyante, ramante tatra devatāḥ”—where women are honored, there the gods rejoice. I would add: where women are not honored but simply expected to carry the entire fucking cosmos on their shoulders while men contemplate bricks, there the gods are probably taking a very long, very cowardly nap.

I finished my tea. The cup was empty, but the warmth lingered in my palms like a memory of a memory. And then I climbed down to my den, my prison of sorts, to type this up.

I felt better.

Rejuvenated by the infinitesimally tiny excursion outside my own mind.

That’s a lot, I think. That’s a whole fucking lot.

When you spend most of your days inside the meat grinder of your own cognition, when your brain is a haunted house where the ghosts are all versions of you screaming slightly different variations of the same accusation, then twenty minutes on a terrace looking at bricks and birds is not a small thing. It is not a small thing at all. It is, in the precise mathematical sense, one divided by some obscenely large but finite number: tiny enough to dismiss, but still greater than zero.

And not-zero is the entire fucking battle.

I write these posts with the hope that someone in my mental state, someone caught in some catastrophic or nightmarish middling station of life, can find a soulmate of sorts. I know from the numbers—and I worked in healthcare research for fifteen years, so I know my way around a confidence interval, I know my p-values from my pee-values—that not many people read these posts. Fewer, I suspect, read all the way through. Most skim, looking for I don’t know what. Maybe a cure. Maybe a confession. Maybe a shortcut to enlightenment that doesn’t involve the tedious, humiliating work of actually living.

Pearls or gems aren’t important to me.

What is important, and what someone might find if they stop skimming and actually read, is the plain reality of a manic-depressive living alone in Calcutta, drinking tea on a terrace, and finding, for twenty minutes, that the sky is not falling, that the bricks are just bricks, that the birds are just birds, and that he, too, is just a man.

Just a man. Just a man. Just a man.

P.S. References not needed. The statistics are in my head, the bricks are on the terrace, and the madness is, as always, entirely my own.