One Life, No Rehearsal, No Refund Counter

We get one life, which is a very small number when you think about it properly.

One.

Not two, not three, not one hidden in the drawer for emergencies, not a secret spare kept by the universe like those old Bengali mothers who keep one good sari wrapped in newspaper for “special occasions” that never arrive. One life. That is the whole packet. Open carefully.

Religion, of course, offers many attractive installment schemes. Rebirth. Heaven. Return ticket. Cosmic upgrade. A second childhood perhaps, this time with better teeth, better marks, better courage, and a father who does not compare you to the neighbor’s son who is already in America, already doing something important with computers, already making the family look like a defective pressure cooker.

I cannot believe it.

I wish I could sometimes. It would be convenient. Like getting a reserved seat in a local train after standing for forty years near the toilet door. But wishing is not evidence. And I have spent too much of my life among systems, data, broken promises, and human exaggeration to trust a claim simply because it reduces panic.

So I am left with this blunt little brick of truth.

One life.

And at 51, one begins to notice that a large fraction of it has quietly migrated into hindsight. It did not ask permission. It packed its trunk, took the good years, and left behind receipts. You look back and think, here I was foolish, there I was frightened, there I mistook obedience for virtue, there I confused silence with dignity, there I wasted three years because my nervous system was behaving like a ceiling fan with loose wiring.

No second childhood. No second youth. No rerun with improved lighting.

The movies lie beautifully about this. Novels also lie, but more politely. They allow people to relive, revise, return, rediscover. The old lover appears. The lost chance knocks. The broken man gets one clean final chapter with a lamp glowing in the window and some violins behaving themselves in the background.

Real life is less cinematic. Real life is the gas cylinder running out when the rice is half-cooked.

I am brown, short, Indian, not handsome in any way that would trouble a casting director, diffident where the world rewards brass bands, broke enough to understand the exact moral weight of a delayed payment, and lower middle-class on the shanty edge of Calcutta, where the city is still called the City of Joy by people who have not recently tried to fix a leaking roof in May.

This is not a complaint form.

It is a location pin.

There is a difference.

Add bipolar depression and anxiety, and the whole thing becomes even more comical, in the black way life has of dropping a coconut on your head and then asking why you are not more grateful for shade. Depression is not sadness. Sadness is when rain spoils the laundry. Depression is when the mind opens a court case against your entire existence and appoints itself judge, lawyer, witness, and the bored clerk chewing paan in the corner.

Some mornings, my mind wakes before I do and begins its small municipal work of demolition.

Still unemployed enough. Still poor enough. Still old enough. Still not loved enough. Still not successful enough. Still not what you might have been.

It is a very efficient department.

And yet, despite all this, I have not fully given up. This surprises me more than anyone. I say this with the modest astonishment of a man who opens an old torch expecting dead batteries and finds one weak yellow beam still alive.

I have not given up on randomness.

Not entirely.

I have not given up on serendipity either, though serendipity in my neighborhood does not arrive wearing perfume and speaking French. It arrives as a wrong phone call, a sentence in a book, a stray conversation at the tea stall, a forgotten idea returning while the pump is groaning and someone’s pressure cooker is whistling like a small angry train.

My hopes are not grand. They are not criminal. I do not want to become a billionaire, buy an island, and lecture poor people about mindset. I do not want to loot the universe. I do not want revenge served cold, hot, or with kasundi.

I only want to remain awake.

That sounds simple until life starts charging rent for it.

I want to learn a little more. Write a little better. Understand a little deeper. Leave behind a few thoughts that are not completely useless. Maybe one paragraph that reaches one person on one bad evening and says, yes, I know this room too, the airless one, the one where time sits on your chest like a fat clerk refusing to move.

That may be enough.

Or it may not.

But it is not nothing.

People talk about contribution as if it must be large enough to have a logo. But most human contribution is tiny. A word said at the right time. A small kindness. A correction. A memory. A warning. A joke that prevents someone from sinking for five more minutes. A page written honestly without wearing the ridiculous sherwani of importance.

Even this little thought I am writing may travel strangely. A human may read it. Or nobody may. Or one day some AI may chew through it in a giant machine somewhere, along with tax documents, love letters, insurance forms, recipes, bad poetry, and speeches by people who should have stopped after the first paragraph.

And perhaps that machine, if machines can ever be said to pause, will pause at the phrase one life.

There is comedy there. A future system consuming the grief of a broke Bengali man from the edge of Calcutta, while the man himself once sat under a fan making helicopter noises, wondering whether the electricity bill could wait.

This is not immortality.

But it is a peculiar afterlife for a sentence.

Outside, May in Calcutta behaves like a punishment devised by a committee. The air is thick. The lane smells of dust, frying oil, damp cloth, exhaust, and something ancestral rising from the drain. A dog sleeps with the expertise of a saint. A vegetable seller shouts prices as if announcing war. Someone’s phone is playing news at full volume, because modern civilization has decided that even despair must now come with notifications.

The world is on fire in several directions. Markets wobble. Leaders shout. Machines get cleverer. Men get lonelier. The rich build larger rooms to feel smaller in. The poor stand in line for things that should have been simple. Everyone has an opinion. Few have examined it for termites.

Meanwhile, here I am, 51, single, anxious, medically imperfect, financially cornered, and still capable of wondering why a cloud forms the way it does.

That is the little rebellion.

Curiosity.

Curiosity is not happiness. Let us not insult it. Happiness is too soft a word, too scented-candle. Curiosity is tougher. It is a crowbar. It pries open a stuck day. It says, wait, what is this? How does this work? Why do people believe nonsense? Why does time feel slow in pain and fast in memory? Why does the brain, which can imagine galaxies, also spend three hours replaying an awkward sentence from 1998?

Science has always felt cleaner to me than consolation. It does not hug you. It does not say everything happens for a reason. Good. I distrust that sentence. Plenty of things happen for no reason except chemistry, chance, stupidity, weather, birth, class, timing, or one man in one office not signing one paper.

Science says something better.

Look again.

Measure if you can.

Doubt yourself.

Do not worship your first explanation.

This is not warm. But it is honest. And honesty, after a certain age, becomes warmer than flattery.

The terrible part of one life is that the losses are real.

The beautiful part is the same.

Because if there is no second life waiting like a polite waiter with the corrected menu, then this life matters terribly. The tea matters. The sentence matters. The friend you did not call matters. The day you wasted matters, but so does the evening you still have. The body matters. The roof matters. The page matters. The little joke you make while everything is collapsing matters more than it should.

No cosmic accountant may be watching.

Fine.

Then we must watch.

We must watch what we do with our limited ration of mornings. Not with the fake discipline of motivational speakers who have never missed rent, but with the battered seriousness of people who know that time is not an abstract idea. It is the thing that took our grandparents, then our parents’ youth, then our own knees, then our certainty, and is now looking calmly at the rest.

This sounds grim.

It is not only grim.

There is freedom in it too. If one life is all, then many false gods become ridiculous at once. Status. Caste. Fairness cream. Imported accent. The neighbor’s opinion. The school WhatsApp group. The boss who thinks his designation is a personality. The relative who asks about money with the tenderness of a debt collector. The whole circus shrinks.

What remains?

A few honest relationships, if lucky.

A little work done well.

A few ideas understood clearly.

A few pleasures not spoiled by comparison.

A little courage.

And the refusal to become entirely bitter.

That last one is difficult. Bitterness is always available. It is cheap, local, and home-delivered. In Calcutta it should probably have its own app. You can become bitter about money, looks, illness, missed chances, family, country, class, corruption, weather, youth, love, luck, other people’s success, and your own failure to become the person who once seemed possible.

I know this shop. I have bought from it.

But bitterness is a poor landlord. It takes the whole house and still complains about the rent.

So I try, not nobly, not daily, not always successfully, to keep one window open. For science. For language. For wit. For the stray miracle of understanding something that had been foggy for years. For the possibility that even a damaged man may still be a useful instrument, if not a violin then at least a spoon striking a glass at the right moment.

There is no need to romanticize suffering. Suffering does not automatically make people deep. Sometimes it only makes them tired, suspicious, and rude to delivery boys. Poverty is not poetry. Mental illness is not a secret university. Anxiety does not make you wise; it makes you check the same message seventeen times and still feel ambushed by the reply.

But if suffering teaches anything, it teaches scale.

It teaches that the human mind is not a palace. It is more like a rented room with water stains, a brilliant library, a rat in the ceiling, and one window facing the sky. You may not control the whole room. But you can sometimes move the chair toward the light.

That is where I am trying to sit.

Near the light.

Not inside glory. Not inside success. Not inside any grand redemption story with applause and background music. Just near enough to see the page.

Because one life, even a dented one, is still an astonishing arrangement. Atoms learned to worry. Dust learned to remember. A mammal in Calcutta learned English, databases, grief, sarcasm, and the price of onions, then sat down to write about time.

This is absurd.

This is magnificent.

This is Tuesday.

And if there is only one life, then perhaps the task is not to win it like a contest. Perhaps the task is to notice it before it leaves. To taste the tea while it is hot. To forgive some things without pretending they did not hurt. To learn something difficult. To laugh at the pompous. To help where possible. To write one clean sentence from the muddy heart of things.

I do not know whether that is enough.

But today, from this hot, noisy, financially unstable, philosophically overactive corner of Calcutta, it is what I have.

A small life.

A thinking life.

A one-time offer.

No refund counter.