The Terrace Republic
I sit with a cup of tea, and the tea does what tea has always done in Bengal: it accepts defeat, philosophy, indigestion, ambition, regret, and the entire damp laundry of memory without complaint.
Into that small brown republic my thoughts dissolve, and the quiet night begins its old work. It loosens the present. It lets the past walk in without knocking. Soon I am back in South Sinthee, in that brick house without plaster, where so much of my early definition still lives like an old tenant who never paid rent but cannot be evicted because he knows the family secrets.
Memory is not an archive. It is a crooked clerk. It misfiles the syllabus, misplaces the terror, preserves the smell of a wet wall, and loses the face of a boy who was once supposed to become me. From that house came the small academic triumphs that trained the later lampoon of a person in me, the careful stickler, the nervous examiner of facts, the man who would rather polish one sentence until it squeaks than nod along to a roomful of agreeable nonsense. The past keeps operating its creaking loom, and I keep spinning some embroidered fib out of it, not because the fib is false, but because plain truth has no tailoring. It arrives naked, goose-pimpled, and socially unacceptable.
I was an unwillingly ordinary chap. This is a terrible thing to be, because ordinary life itself is not terrible. It is the unwilling part that produces the mischief. A sensible boy accepts the queue, the school bell, the exercise book, the moral instruction, the adult finger wagging near his nose like a defective semaphore. I could not. I disliked queues chiefly because a head was always in front of me, obstructing the view, and I seemed to have been born with a lifelong allergy to obstructed views.
I decided very early that I could not be ordinary. I did not know what extraordinary meant. I merely knew that the available model of life seemed suspiciously like a badly printed government form: stand here, write this, believe that, marry then, earn enough, stop asking questions, die after sufficient social compliance. Even as a boy, I could smell the damp under the paint.
Is ambition the seed that germinates into a bipolar tree? I do not know. I distrust neat explanations of the self, especially when they come with laminated diagrams and the confidence of people who have never had to live inside their own weather. But I know this much: even now I need medication to keep myself in the safety zone of a no-one, a nondescript middle-aged discard, the sort of harmless citizen who can stand near a tea stall without trying to redesign civilization. Without the chemical sandbags, my mind starts acquiring wings, engines, trumpets, manifestos, and credit-card debt. Ideas bounce off the walls. Energy turns mutinous. The brain becomes a parliamentary session during a power cut.
The hurricane lamp did not seem magical then. It was just light, poor light, practical light, a trembling little bureaucracy of flame. The sultry summer without electricity did not seem romantic either. It was sweat, mosquitoes, homework, heat rash, and that peculiar Bengali night in which the ceiling fan becomes an absent god. Yet the years were harried forward by the rush of syllabus and examination, and now what remains has acquired a warm afterglow. That is nostalgia’s most dishonest talent. It takes discomfort, lets it dry in memory, varnishes it, and returns it as tenderness.
Sometimes when I try to think of who I was as a child, I hit a wall. Not a metaphorical wall only, though there were enough of those, but an actual blankness, an old border post where the official says no visa can be issued because the country no longer exists. Childhood was a bad diarist. It left behind scribbles of awe, blotches of fear, a few bright stamps of sensation, and a pile of emotions no longer attached to their original causes. Somewhere in that extinct country lives a large part of my definition, but I cannot enter it. I can only look at its weather from a distance.
Perhaps that is why I have not properly grown up. I do not mean this in the usual insulting sense, though the usual insulting sense may also apply, depending on the witness. I mean that the world has not ceased to astonish me. I still look at the sky, magnets, insects, old maps, equations, telescopes, computers, fossils, languages, stars, and human stupidity with a child’s mixture of reverence and alarm. The difference is that now I understand a little more, which makes the wonder sharper and the stupidity more expensive.
We live in a wonderful time, and most people seem determined to spend it like a fool spending inherited gold on plastic keychains. There are galaxies to understand, cells to examine, histories to untangle, languages to learn, music to hear, mathematics to climb, and machines that can now simulate fragments of thought. Yet so much human attention is burned in the ritual furnace of gossip, shopping, status, career theater, outrage, and the polishing of social masks. Time is the only wealth that never forgives accounting errors. People talk of wasting money, which is comic. Money can sometimes return. Time has the manners of a train leaving Howrah while you are still arguing with the porter.
I know this makes me sound old-fashioned, pompous, or simply wrong. So be it. A man must eventually become whatever kind of fool he is designed to be. My own existence interests me not because I am important, but because existence itself is a strange contraption, and I happen to have been issued one unit of it with slightly defective wiring. To ponder it is not vanity. It is inspection after delivery.
The defective brain is not a decorative detail. It is central information. I would not know how a normal person lives because I have never lived as one. My life has always come through extremes of emotion, even before I had a name for them. Later, when the name arrived, it did not arrive as a cure. It arrived as a label on an old bottle containing the same storm. Knowing the mechanism is useful, but it does not make the mechanism vanish. This is not a pair of colored sunglasses one removes with a little theatrical wisdom. It is closer to a lens bolted to the eye socket. The medicines do not remove the color. They make it less imperial.
As a child, I used to wonder why there were so many brick walls. South Sinthee had walls, our house had walls, the neighbors had walls, everyone seemed determined to guard something, though I could rarely identify the treasure. If the walls were meant to stop wildlife, cats and birds treated them as minor suggestions. If they were meant to stop thieves, they mostly advertised anxiety. To me they were ugly interruptions to imagination, and imagination then was tied to vision. A wall was not just a wall. It was a censor.
That is why I loved the terrace. The terrace was jurisdiction-free territory. It was not exactly independence, but it was the nearest thing available to a boy whose movements were otherwise regulated by school, family, weather, manners, and the thin sadism of adult advice. There was a little room on the terrace, and that became my home inside the home. I moved my books there, my magnets, my magnifying glasses, my stamp collection, coin collection, matchbox collection, my two Lego sets, and whatever else qualified as private property in the republic of a child.
From that little room, through its three windows or under the open sky, I explored the world without going anywhere. This is what books and solitude can do when they are allowed to breed. A boy in a small room in North Calcutta can sit among dust, lizards, paper, and cheap plastic objects and become, for an hour, an astronomer, archaeologist, spy, engineer, monk, pirate, or failed philosopher with excellent intentions. The body remains in the house. The mind defects.
School, by comparison, was an underfunded prison for curiosity. It was useful in the way a railway timetable is useful: not because it contains wisdom, but because civilization has decided to punish those who ignore it. The great crime of school was not discipline. Discipline can be noble. The crime was the routine murder of wonder by people who confused obedience with education. A child asks why, and the system replies, “Because it will be in the exam.” That answer should be tried at The Hague.
The terrace gave me what school withheld. It gave me unassigned thought. It gave me silence large enough to hear my own mind misbehaving. It gave me the beginnings of a spine, though not necessarily a socially convenient one. I became a loner there, and I remain one. Even now, I run from crowds whenever possible, not because I hate all people equally, though on difficult days I make progress toward that democratic ideal, but because solitude lets thought breathe.
Conversation rarely gives me what books give me, or what the whirring wheels of thought give me when left alone. Most conversation is packaging. People exchange softened noises, padded sentiments, cautious little phrases wrapped in politeness so nothing sharp can escape. If I insert reality into such an exchange, people startle as if a ghost has entered the room carrying documentation.
This is especially true in the modern cult of neutral words. The age has perfected the art of taking serious matters, sanding them down, painting them beige, and calling this kindness. Euphemism has its place. No civilized person wants cruelty as a default operating system. But when language becomes surface treatment, when the word is improved while the wound is left untreated, then speech becomes cosmetics for decay. A kinder interpretation of a malady is not the same as a remedy. Sometimes the new word is not compassion. Sometimes it is merely anesthesia administered to the listener.
People have grown strangely attached to this artificial language. They polish the surface until it reflects their virtue back at them. Meanwhile the structure underneath rots away, moist and cheerful. I hate this. Perhaps hate is an unfashionable word, too angular for modern drawing rooms, but it has the merit of being accurate. This blog, in its small, uneven, often ill-tempered way, has been a protest against that false polishing. I do not want cruelty. I want clarity. They are not the same animal, though many cowards pretend otherwise.
The great plague of humanity, banal as it sounds, is humanity itself, especially the portion appointed to improve the herd. The moment people are promoted into responsibility, many develop a fascinating narrowing of the skull. Their horizon collapses to the size of their immediate advantage. They speak of the greater good in the tone of temple bells while counting their private coconuts behind the shrine. The ability to identify genuinely unselfish people remains beyond our science. Declaring oneself noble has never worked, though it remains a popular technology among committees, parties, corporations, and families.
It is strange that the thoughts that kept me awake as a child still keep me awake now, though they have changed clothes. Then I wondered about walls, stars, death, injustice, school, adults, God, money, and why some people seemed rewarded for being confidently wrong. Now I wonder about institutions, systems, history, technology, power, loneliness, aging, illness, and why some people are still rewarded for being confidently wrong. The syllabus has expanded. The examination continues.
I am in my fifties, and the systems are where they were, only worse in scale. More people, more noise, more devices, more slogans, more surfaces, more ways to avoid saying the obvious. Humanity has acquired tools of astonishing sophistication and retained motives of antique shabby quality. We can send machines toward the outer planets, sequence genomes, simulate weather, move money at the speed of light, and still fail to arrange public honesty at the level of a decent neighborhood meeting.
This should make me despair completely, and sometimes it nearly does. But the same defective brain that darkens everything also lights up at the absurd magnificence of being alive at all. The universe remains excessive. A leaf, correctly examined, is enough to ruin cynicism for an afternoon. A line of mathematics can still feel like a hidden door opening in a wall. A forgotten childhood object can summon a continent. A night sky above a terrace can still make a middle-aged man feel, briefly, like the boy who had escaped into his own republic with books, magnets, and a head full of illegal weather.
So I sit with tea and think. The house in South Sinthee returns, not as it was, but as memory can bear it. The hurricane lamp trembles again. The walls rise again. The terrace waits above them, stubborn and free. Somewhere in that little room, a boy is arranging his collections and preparing to distrust the world’s official explanations. He does not know what will happen to him. He does not know about diagnosis, medication, failure, age, disappointment, or the long comic brutality of being a thinking animal among other thinking animals who often prefer not to think.
He only knows that the sky is large, the walls are stupid, and the mind must get out.