The Local Disgrace Still Making Noise

Acronyms and terms:

I am not a good-for-nothing because I do nothing. That is the cheap diagnosis, the fifty-paise philosophy sold loose in every para like stale chanachur.

I am a good-for-nothing because whatever I have done has passed through the great Calcutta sorting machine: clerks, aunties, uncles, balcony philosophers, failed moral inspectors, retired men in sleeveless vests, women with wet hair and sharper eyes than airport scanners, and all those unpaid auditors of human failure who sit in judgment without having once balanced their own souls.

They looked at my education. They looked at my years in America. They looked at my work. They looked at my collapse. Then they stamped the file.

Useless.

Not dead. Not dangerous. Not criminal. Worse.

Useless.

So I clap.

Yes, I clap.

This is where the neighborhood gets excited, because nothing terrifies a respectable society like a man making unexplained noise without committee approval. A thief is understandable. A drunk is manageable. A corrupt man is almost decorative, provided he has a car and a good watch. But a middle-aged single man clapping alone in his rented room in the southern boondocks of Calcutta? Ah, now the republic is in danger.

I clap because if I do not, I may scream. I clap because rhythm is cheaper than therapy and available without appointment. I clap because the body, poor old animal that it is, wants one simple job while the mind is being eaten from inside by invisible termites.

Clap.

Clap.

There. Civilization has survived another three seconds.

Immediately the neighbors diagnose me.

Not medically, obviously. These people do not know neurotransmitters from nolen gur. Their science begins with “I heard” and ends with “everybody knows.” They diagnose socially.

“He is strange.”

“He is holy.”

“He is not holy, he is dirty.”

“He is probably perverted.”

“He is not normal.”

That last phrase is the national anthem of small people. “Not normal.” They say it with the confidence of people who have mistaken obedience for mental health. As if normality is some glorious mountain peak and not, more often, a damp queue outside a government office where everyone is sweating, lying, and pretending this is how life was meant to be.

I have lived long enough to learn one of the great truths of human society: cruelty is more forgivable than oddness.

You may cheat, flatter, bribe, gossip, lie, worship loudly, exploit quietly, grow a respectable paunch full of moral gas, and still be invited to weddings. But clap alone in your room and suddenly you are a civic incident. The local WhatsApp democracy begins. Eyebrows rise. Curtains move. Someone’s pressure cooker whistles like a witness under oath.

Then they giggle.

That giggle is the real obscenity.

Not my dirty words. Not the gutter-water language that sometimes bursts from my mouth when my skull becomes too crowded. The obscenity is that giggle: the small wet sound of collective cowardice. The little social fart of people who never dared become anything, laughing at a man because his damage is visible and theirs is better ironed.

So yes, I curse.

I curse because I do not own property, power, beauty, youth, influence, social polish, a wife arranging my tablets, children pretending I am wise, or a drawing room where visitors can sit under framed gods and discuss values while someone else washes the cups.

I own language.

Not beautiful language always. Not Rabindranath on a clean afternoon with the curtain moving gently and the tea behaving itself. No. I own cracked, overboiled, half-burnt, fish-market language. Language with sweat under its arms. Language that has travelled by minibus. Language that has stood in line for cooking gas. Language that has argued with the electricity bill and lost.

When a man owns nothing but language, he will weaponize even the drain water in it.

Do not tell me profanity is low. Poverty is low. Humiliation is low. Calculating the price of cooking oil is low. Watching your own brain tilt like a ceiling fan with one bent blade is low. Lying in bed while the day passes outside like a court summons you cannot answer is low.

Seeing people with half your intelligence move through life with twice your confidence because they know the password—respectability—is low.

My words are not low.

My words are the smoke from the low place.

People hear filth and think filth is the subject. This is because people are lazy listeners. They see a leaking roof and start scolding the rain. The filth is not the subject. The filth is the pressure valve. The subject is loneliness. The subject is contempt. The subject is a man standing in the cheap theatre of his own collapse, trying to convert public shame into private thunder.

When I say I want to smash the smug world, I do not mean I am powerful.

That is the joke.

I mean I am powerless and have discovered that rage, like cheap country liquor, gives a burning impression of strength while quietly damaging the furniture inside.

Some people have savings. Some have ancestral property. Some have nephews in Canada. Some have obedient children who know how to speak softly in hospitals. I have a laptop, a rice cooker, a few books, old American memories, an unreliable income, a room that heats up like a political argument, and a brain that sometimes behaves like a committee formed to investigate its own fire.

Naturally, society tells me to be polite.

Politeness is what the comfortable prescribe to the wounded so the carpet does not get stained.

I am not holy. I am not unholy. I am not masculine in the heroic sense, not spiritual in the perfumed sense, not respectable in the laminated-certificate sense. I am just a man with a malfunctioning weather system inside him. My moods arrive like government notices: late, confusing, destructive, and impossible to appeal.

Bipolar disorder did not make me funny.

Let us clear that up before some sentimental fool arrives with a flute and a tragic expression.

It did not give me genius. It did not polish my soul. It did not turn me into a deep European painting where a pale man stares at a window while rain explains philosophy. It made the floor unreliable. It made morning into an enemy. It made shame multiply like bacteria in warm milk. It made energy suspicious. It made joy, when it came, arrive with the smile of a loan shark.

But somewhere in the debris, language began twitching.

A line here. A curse there. A rhyme slipping out like a rat from behind the rice tin. A ridiculous sentence. A rude little trumpet from the basement of the mind. Not a cure. Not salvation. Just a pipe.

Pressure found a pipe.

That is all art is sometimes. Not beauty. Plumbing.

Through that pipe came this disgraceful music.

And now the neighbors are confused. They want madness to sit quietly. They want suffering to be properly dressed. They want failure to lower its voice. They want the unemployed man to look unemployed in the approved manner: ashamed, apologetic, grateful for advice, and preferably silent after 9 p.m.

But I am not silent.

This annoys them.

Good.

A man must have hobbies.

When I mock gods, gurus, slogans, flags, caste memories, purity certificates, and WhatsApp wisdom, I am not becoming religious in reverse. I am an atheist looking at the great Indian cupboard of excuses. Everyone has a deity, a doctrine, a group identity, a forwarded message, a historical grievance, and a moral lecture ready like a plastic chair at a para function. Yet ask people to behave decently for ten minutes and the whole civilization develops network issues.

What is holiness worth if it cannot survive one lonely man clapping?

What is masculinity worth if it collapses at gossip?

What is society worth if it bows to the successfully corrupt and laughs at the visibly damaged?

This is where someone will say, “But you are bitter.”

Yes. Congratulations. You have detected salt in the sea.

Bitterness is not always a character defect. Sometimes bitterness is memory refusing to become perfume. Sometimes it is the mind saying, “No, I will not decorate this injury for your comfort.” There is a kind of politeness that is really surrender wearing talcum powder.

And I have surrendered enough.

I have surrendered to the heat. To the rent. To the small humiliations of asking for money owed. To the great Bengali sport of advice-giving by people who cannot repair a table fan but can repair your entire life in four sentences. To the sudden silence of old friends. To the way your phone becomes heavier when no one is calling. To the small violence of ordinary days.

A day in my life is not a film. It is not even a good documentary. It is a cup of tea going cold while the laptop waits open like an unpaid creditor. It is the rice cooker clicking off with more professionalism than most institutions. It is a towel drying badly. It is a book opened and abandoned. It is the ceiling fan rotating with the philosophical optimism of a tired goat. It is me sitting there, fifty-one years old, educated enough to know exactly what is happening and poor enough to be unable to escape it neatly.

That is a special kind of comedy.

Not the comedy where people laugh.

The other kind.

Still, I live.

That is the irritating part.

I live like an accusation. I wake up, piss, curse, make tea, fail again, think too much, hate too much, laugh suddenly at something idiotic, remember something tender by accident, and then become angry because tenderness has never paid rent.

People say the planet is doomed. Maybe. Probably. Look around. We have built a civilization clever enough to split atoms and stupid enough to worship billionaires. We have machines that can imitate thought and humans proudly abandoning it. We have rockets, stock markets, sewage, nationalism, loneliness, spiritual influencers, and little plastic packets floating in drains like the national flower of modern life.

And in the middle of this magnificent circus, I am supposed to behave.

No, thank you.

I am a cartoon, yes.

But cartoons are honest. The anvil falls, the eyes pop out, the body becomes accordion-shaped, and still the fellow gets up. That is more truthful than most biographies. A respectable man hides his deformation. A cartoon displays it frame by frame.

My pleasures have become small because life has cut them down to size.

A good cup of tea. A working fan. A clean pillow cover. A message that does not demand money, performance, explanation, apology, or emotional gymnastics. A proper meal of rice and dal. The sudden mercy of digestion. The body saying, in its blunt village way, “Enough philosophy, babu, I have practical work.”

There, at least, truth remains democratic.

Rich man, holy man, married man, judge, guru, software architect, failed poet, neighbor, auntie, nationalist, liberal, saint, bastard—we all bow before the same chemistry. You may decorate life with status, but your intestine knows you better than your priest.

That is my ideology now.

Not hope.

Digestion.

The body’s final argument against pretension.

You may call me mad, obscene, failed, useless. Fine. Every morning your own body files its brown report against your dignity. Mine does too. The difference is I have stopped pretending the report is poetry.

So yes, sometimes I imagine flinging my accumulated contempt from the balcony like municipal sewage on the heads of the giggling world. Not literally. Calm down, Inspector. Metaphor is still legal, though I am sure someone is drafting a circular. I mean I want the world to look up for once. I want it to understand that the man it laughed at has been processing its hypocrisy for years in the dark machinery of his gut.

Let them look up.

Let them see what falls.

Let them understand that failure is not always empty. Sometimes failure is a warehouse. It stores every insult, every smirk, every unpaid debt of kindness, every little laugh from people who thought they were safe because they were ordinary.

And if nothing changes, fine.

Nothing usually does.

Tomorrow the rice cooker will click. The tea will overboil. The neighborhood will continue its surveillance operation from behind curtains. The world will produce new disasters with old confidence. Some minister somewhere will say something grand. Some billionaire will be praised for existing vertically. Some app will promise to improve humanity by making humans slightly less necessary.

And I will sit here in my rented Calcutta room, clap twice, curse once, drink my tea, and continue being the local disgrace.

Alive, unfortunately.

Still making noise.