The Smorgasbord of Impotence

Impotence arrives first as a bedroom rumor, then quietly expands into a whole municipal department.

You think it is about one reluctant organ, one private failure, one awkward silence under a slow ceiling fan. That is the popular version, the pharmacy version, the joke version. But by fifty-one, broke, single, unemployed, bipolar, and living somewhere on the ragged edges of Calcutta where the city begins to lose interest in itself, you discover that impotence has many counters, many clerks, many rubber stamps.

There is sexual impotence, yes.

There is financial impotence.

There is social impotence.

There is the impotence of watching your own mind sit down in the middle of the road like a goat, refusing all traffic.

There is the impotence of knowing things, having done things, having crossed oceans, worked in American hospitals, wrestled with serious systems, survived enough paperwork to qualify as a minor freedom fighter, and still finding yourself negotiating with the price of eggs.

This is not tragedy. Tragedy has better lighting.

This is more like a damp afternoon in May when the power goes out, the inverter coughs, the phone battery is at seventeen percent, and somewhere a neighbor’s pressure cooker screams as if it has seen the future.

The body, naturally, begins the rebellion. It is the nearest province. In youth, the body is a noisy para club with a microphone and no permission. Desire used to arrive with ridiculous confidence, like a local political procession blocking the road for no reason except that it could. A thought came, blood followed, and the whole shabby orchestra struck up a tune.

Now?

Now desire knocks twice a year, usually by mistake, like a delivery boy with the wrong address.

The fantasy may still appear, but it has lost its electrician. The picture comes, the current does not. The mind raises a flag. The body says, “Very good. Proud of you. I am taking a nap.”

And it would be comic if it were only comic.

Middle age does not remove desire cleanly. It does not come like a polite barber and trim the excess. It scrambles the wiring. The eye still notices beauty. Memory still misbehaves. Loneliness still opens little back doors at odd hours. But the old engine, which once started with the foolishness of a scooter on a cold morning, now needs coaxing, pushing, bargaining, perhaps even a committee meeting.

Bipolar depression adds its own mischief. It is not merely sadness. Sadness is rain. Bipolar depression is rain, municipal delay, a missing file, a medicine bill, a broken umbrella, and one philosophical crow sitting on the parapet saying, “I told you so.”

It robs you not only of mood but of sequence. First you lose enthusiasm. Then appetite becomes negotiable. Then sleep becomes either a tyrant or a missing person. Then desire, ambition, flirtation, confidence, even ordinary irritation begin reporting late to duty. You are not dead. That is the insult. You are present, but unassembled.

And because the body and mind are not separate tenants but one quarrelsome joint family, the trouble spreads.

You do not simply fail in bed. You fail to answer messages. You fail to send proposals. You fail to chase payments with the smooth ruthlessness required in this century. You fail to pretend cheerfully that everything is fine, which is now apparently a professional skill. You fail to become “market ready,” that magnificent phrase which makes a human being sound like packaged chicken.

Then unemployment arrives with its little polished shoes.

Nobody tells you that unemployment at twenty-five and unemployment at fifty-one are different animals. At twenty-five, unemployment is a pause, a gap, a dramatic cloud before the film hero returns after interval. At fifty-one, it becomes a mirror held too close to the face. You see pores. You see fatigue. You see old decisions standing in the background like relatives who came early and will not leave.

The world still talks to you, but its tone changes.

It does not say, “You have experience.”

It says, “Why are you still available?”

It does not say, “You have seen systems fail in real life.”

It says, “Do you know the latest tool?”

It does not ask whether you can think. It asks whether your résumé has the proper glitter sprinkled on top. The hiring market has become a wedding caterer’s pulao: ninety percent rice, ten percent decorative cashew, and everyone pretending it is royal.

Meanwhile, the day must be lived.

This is the part that never appears in motivational essays. The day.

A broke single middle-aged man in Calcutta does not wake inside a TED Talk. He wakes inside heat, fan noise, the smell of yesterday’s dust, a phone full of unread anxiety, and a kitchen where the utensils look personally disappointed. Tea must be made. Medicines, if there are medicines, must be remembered. The body must be persuaded to bathe. The mind must be prevented from holding a full parliamentary debate before breakfast.

Outside, the city performs its usual circus. A bus groans. Someone shouts about fish. A scooter passes with three people and the confidence of an aircraft carrier. A political poster fades on a wall, promising a future that seems to have missed the lane. The world is busy. The world is employed. Even the stray dogs appear to have a committee.

You stand there with your tea.

This, too, is impotence.

Not the dramatic kind. The daily kind. The kind where you know exactly what should be done and cannot produce the inner weather to do it. The kind where you can diagnose the room but not rearrange it. The kind where you understand your own decay with excellent vocabulary, which is useful in the same way a man drowning in a pond may appreciate the Latin name of water.

But here is the little crack in the wall.

Some aloneness is not failure. Some aloneness is sandbagging before a flood.

People with tidy minds often misunderstand this. They think solitude is a mood, a preference, a romantic shawl thrown over the shoulder. For some of us, solitude is flood control. It is the bamboo scaffolding around a cracked house. It is not glamorous. It is not Instagrammable. It is what stops the roof from joining the floor in one bold architectural experiment.

I keep myself alone partly because the world is tiring, partly because people are expensive even when they are free, and partly because my mind has a history of treating disturbance like kerosene. One wrong conversation, one insulting message, one unpaid invoice, one family remark delivered with the sweetness of a poisoned rasgulla, and the day can tilt.

So I protect the day.

Not heroically.

More like a poor man protecting the last good matchstick in a damp matchbox.

This is not careerist energy. It is not ambition. It is not “grindset,” that hideous little imported word that sounds like a mixer-grinder chewing stones. It is a safety net. A small circle drawn with chalk around sanity. Inside it are tea, reading, writing, a little walking, a little silence, a little refusal to explain myself to people who arrive carrying advice in one hand and judgment in the other.

Still, the shame comes.

Of course it comes.

A man is expected to have evidence. Salary. Wife. children. property. promotion. blood pressure controlled by maturity and not tablets. A bank balance that does not behave like a vanishing magic trick. A future with chairs in it.

Society is not cruel in one clean blow. It is cruel by inventory. It counts what you do not have. Then it makes you count along.

No job.

No steady income.

No partner.

No robust desire.

No impressive social life.

No heroic recovery arc.

No before-and-after photograph where the second version is wearing a blazer and smiling at Singapore.

And yet, inconveniently, no complete collapse either.

That is the strange middle zone. You are not thriving. You are not finished. You are not climbing. You are not buried. You are, to use the most Bengali possible measurement, somehow managing.

Somehow managing is not a slogan. It is an entire civilization.

It is the mother stretching one fish into four plates. It is the father repairing the same broken latch for the seventh time. It is the old man in the tea shop reading yesterday’s newspaper as if fresh outrage were a renewable resource. It is the unemployed man opening the laptop again after lunch, though nothing in the universe has encouraged him. It is the sentence written when the brain would prefer to lie down in a dark room and become furniture.

This is where I locate my remaining potency.

Not in the obvious places. Not in the triumphant mammal department. Not in the marketplace. Not in the old masculine circus of conquest, performance, and noise. Those tents are torn. The elephants have retired. The ringmaster has acidity.

But I can still name things.

That sounds small until you try it.

To say “I am depleted” instead of “I am lazy” is a serious act of repair.

To say “I am protecting my nervous system” instead of “I am antisocial” changes the whole room.

To say “my desire has thinned but my tenderness has not disappeared” is not self-pity. It is accounting.

And to say “I am broke, frightened, aging, mentally weather-beaten, and still capable of writing a paragraph that tells the truth” is not nothing.

In fact, it may be the one tool still lying within reach.

Words are cheap, yes. So are matchsticks. Entire kitchens begin with them.

This smorgasbord of impotence remains spread before me. Body, money, work, sex, ambition, society, memory, loneliness, Calcutta, all arranged like suspicious dishes at a wedding where the mutton has clearly been inflated with potato. I inspect the plates. Some days I eat. Some days I push them away. Some days I laugh, because laughter is still legal, still untaxed, and still occasionally sharper than despair.

The old powers have weakened.

Fine.

Let them.

A man must eventually stop auditioning for the version of life that did not cast him. The body changes. The market forgets. The city sweats. The mind misfires. The phone does not ring. The bank balance makes small squeaking sounds. Still the afternoon light falls on the cracked wall. Still the tea darkens in the cup. Still one sentence waits for another.

And somewhere behind the ribs, not roaring, not grand, not useful for advertising, a small pilot light keeps burning.

Not enough to heat the house.

Enough to prove the house is not empty.