Shadow Citizen of My Own Room

I am still here, which is not quite the same as saying I survived. Survival implies some muscular little moral victory, some brass-band resilience, some grinning idiot standing on a hill with his arms spread as if the universe had awarded him a certificate. I merely remained. I had once imagined that after ten years of self-inflicted incarceration I would leave India again, step out of this long domestic sentence, return to motion, to airports, to American pavements, to that earlier version of myself who still believed a life could be resumed like a paused film. But I did not leave. I am not leaving. I cannot leave. The passport may exist, the old memories may still twitch, the maps may still lie open in the skull, but the person who was meant to travel through them has thinned into a watermark.

What remains is not a plan but a residue. I am the shadow cast by former intentions, the faint gray outline of a man who once mistook possibility for structure. I have given up, though even that phrase sounds too active, too athletic, as if I marched to a cliff edge and hurled my ambitions into the Bay of Bengal with tragic ceremony. No. They simply lost temperature. They cooled, stiffened, and became furniture. The only possession I recognize as entirely mine is the depression, and even that is less a possession than a tenancy dispute inside the bones. It lives where appetite should live. It occupies the room in which hope used to keep its ridiculous luggage.

There is a deadness in me, but not the clean deadness of endings. It is more like a morbid inner weather, a low-pressure system that refuses to move on because it has discovered cheap rent. Nothing useful comes out of it. It is not the dramatic kind of suffering that can be converted into art, money, charm, or a TED Talk in a dark blazer. It is a black hole with a bad municipal address. Whatever falls in—desire, optimism, affection, vanity, hunger for recognition—does not return with a philosophical souvenir. It is swallowed whole. Even grief comes back poorly formatted.

I am comfortable only alone. This is one of those sentences that sounds serene if spoken by a monk and diseased if spoken by a middle-aged unemployed man on a sofa in Calcutta. Company does not refresh me. It inflames me. Crowds, chatter, social warmth, polite expectation, those small bright rituals by which people prove they are not wolves dressed in cotton shirts—all of it makes me recoil into the pathological shell. I can perform civility for a while, as a badly repaired ceiling fan can rotate for a few heroic minutes before declaring independence from physics, but the cost is absurd. The nervous system sends circulars. The face stiffens. The soul, that most unreliable department, locks itself in the pantry.

Alone, at least, I am not asked to be legible. I can sit with my squirrelly, demented thoughts and let them gnaw at the rafters. I can scribble, sketch the ghoulish little visitors that collect in the mind’s damp corners, arrange words like bones on a table and pretend the pattern means something. The stillness does not cure me, but it is honest. Depression, for all its cruelty, has one advantage over happiness: it does not arrive wearing a sales badge. Happiness has a face for photographs, a voice for relatives, a posture for festivals, a costume for LinkedIn. Depression does not bother with cosmetics. It sits down heavily and says, well, here we are again, old horse.

Everything else seems masked. People are masked. Politeness is masked. Encouragement is often a mask worn by impatience. Concern is sometimes merely curiosity with a shawl over its head. Happiness is more moth than monument. It flutters near a bulb, dies quietly, and is later misremembered as evidence of a season. The web holding my reality together feels gossamer, theatrical, full of holes large enough for an elephant to pass through sideways. I feel secure only in my grotto, my room, the sofa, the corner, the skull-cave where my own harrying echoes at least have the courtesy to be familiar.

Perhaps this is better for the world. That is one of the minor consolations available to the failed: the belief that one’s collapse has improved traffic conditions for others. Ambition has done enough damage already. The earth is full of men and women with polished shoes, expensive teeth, managerial verbs, and the spiritual warmth of office furniture, all galloping toward destinations they barely understand because stopping would expose the terror underneath. If a few of us wilt in the lane, if a few exhausted donkeys lie down before the finish line and refuse the whip, perhaps the race becomes marginally less crowded. The young, the well-lubricated, the cheerfully predatory, and the astonishingly shameless can then advance with fewer elbows in their ribs.

This is not nobility. I am not renouncing the world like a sage with clean fingernails and a decisive beard. I am massaging defeat into tolerable language. Disillusionment, when properly kneaded, can become a pit stop for the jaded. Step away from the hedonistic rodent Olympics. Let the wheels squeal past. Let the prize-chasers chase. Let the ambitious climb over each other like ants on spilled sugar. There is relief in discovering that one is not required at every banquet, not needed in every committee, not destined for every staircase. The ego dislikes this. The ego, being a small and insolent landlord, wants rent from every future. But even the ego becomes tired when the tenant has no earnings.

I was lucky once. That is the embarrassing truth behind many lives later described as promising. Serendipity played its part. I was never the successful person, not in the way successful people appear to themselves under flattering light, but I was in the game. I had movement, context, a few plausible badges, some evidence that I could pass among the properly credentialed without immediately being removed by security. America gave me corridors, fluorescent rooms, large systems, professional weather. It gave me the strange intoxication of being useful inside machines larger than myself. It also gave me the illusion that usefulness could be stored like grain and eaten later.

It cannot. Usefulness expires. Confidence curdles. Contacts move, forget, retire, die, become important, become unreachable, become decorative names in an old inbox. Former lives do not wait in climate-controlled storage. They become a smell on a coat. Every now and then some old association produces a retro flashback—one of those disappointed bleats about unrealized potential, that soft funeral music people play when they want to sound kind while confirming your obsolescence. You could have done so much. You had such promise. What happened? As if life were a train I missed because I was busy buying peanuts.

What happened is that the machinery did not hold. Or I did not. Or both, which is usually the honest answer and therefore the least socially useful. People prefer a single cause. Destiny, perhaps. Temperament. Bad luck. Poor choices. India. America. Age. Depression. Ego. Family. The economy. The stars. All these are candidates in the great Bengali courtroom where nothing is ever solved but everything is cross-examined until tea is required. My mother, very aged now, still carries the ghost of expectation in unfinished sentences and long pauses. She does not always say it. She does not need to. The silence has subtitles. I could have been more. I became less.

She wonders, perhaps, if it was destiny. This is customary. When reality is too obvious and too rude to be invited inside, we summon the supernatural and make it remove its shoes at the door. Destiny is polite. Destiny does not accuse. Destiny turns bad temperament, weak adaptive machinery, poor timing, rigid habits, and a spectacular shortage of socially profitable traits into a cosmic arrangement. It is soothing in the way a mosquito net is soothing after the mosquitoes have already conducted their conference. I do not entirely reject it, because I am Bengali enough to distrust my own rationality after sunset. But I suspect the truth is more ordinary, and therefore more humiliating.

I was not built for the terrain. Perhaps my father had some of this in him too: a vapid, cheerless rigidity, an inability to become breezy at the right moment, an allergy to that oil-slick human facility by which certain people pass through Indian life with five faces, eight hands, and a portable explanation for every crime. The successful here are often amphibious. They can swim in muck and then emerge at a wedding reception smelling of sandalwood. They know when to flatter, when to vanish, when to exaggerate, when to grow another head from an available orifice, when to crawl on all fours across the byzantine terrain while maintaining the public expression of a man discussing mutual funds. I watch this with horrified admiration.

I am not one of them. I am a square peg in a country where the holes are round, triangular, hereditary, political, religious, under-the-table, over-the-table, and occasionally imaginary. To fit, one must be filed down or inflated dishonestly. I have proved poor at both. I am too rigid to bend and too unimpressive to break anything. This is not integrity. Let us not perfume the corpse. Some of it is cowardice. Some of it is temperament. Some of it is the miserable vanity of a man who would rather be misunderstood than efficiently fraudulent. A thinker, yes, but not a doer of practical advantage. A worrier, not a warrior. A clerk of dread. A minor civil servant in the ministry of inward collapse.

So I have reduced the size of the world to what can be survived. The room. The sofa. The corner. The page. The sketch. The private muttering. Limited communication with the ecosystem, mostly one-way, like messages sent from a submarine that has no intention of surfacing. This saves me from roiling perturbations. It also confirms my uselessness, but uselessness has at least become a stable address. There are worse things than being unnecessary. There is being necessary to fools. There is being useful to liars. There is being praised by people whose approval would require the amputation of one’s remaining self-respect.

Still, the old ache arrives. Not ambition exactly. More like phantom ambition, the missing limb itching under a blanket. I do not want the old race, but I remember the sound of my own feet in it. I do not want company, but I remember being seen without immediately feeling invaded. I do not want to become one of those triumphant creatures with polished optimism foaming at the mouth, but I remember wanting a life that could be explained without comedy, apology, or footnotes. That memory is not harmless. It prowls. It presses its face against the glass.

What I want now is smaller and therefore harder to admit. Not greatness. Not recovery in the cinematic sense, with sunlight and violins and a clean shirt. Not even happiness, that unreliable insect. I want relief from the constant internal prosecution. I want a few hours in which the mind does not behave like a magistrate with indigestion. I want to remain without being permanently accused by the remaining. I want the black hole to loosen its jurisdiction. I want to sit in my corner and feel, for once, not triumphant, not redeemed, not useful, but merely unpunished.

This may be a poor life. It is certainly not the life advertised to me by youth, family, education, America, ambition, or those glossy pamphlets distributed by the fraud department of the human spirit. But it is the life in front of me, and the only one I can presently lift. I am here. Barely, perhaps. Annoyingly. Wastefully. Like a flickering shadow in a dim, candle-lit room, appearing and disappearing according to the tremor of the flame. But here.