A Meaningless Number on an Average Star

I used to think there was something talismanic about the 16th of April, as if the date arrived each year wearing a small invisible crown and carrying a secret message for me personally, but no, that was only superstition wearing better trousers. A date is a square on a calendar. A bureaucratic scratch mark. A clerk’s convenience. The universe did not pause, cough politely, and say, “Ah yes, here he is.” As far as the eye can see, I am just another wriggling worm in the great damp congress of ordinary worms, clinging to the side of a rock spinning around a taciturn everyday star in an average-looking corner of a spiral galaxy of no special class. It is not a bad arrangement, exactly. It is just not the grand one the ego had ordered from the catalogue.

People, by which I mean Homo sapiens [the species that named itself wise before checking the evidence carefully], have a narcissistic fondness for dates that involve themselves. Birthdays, anniversaries, first meetings, last meetings, days of victory, days of grievance, days when someone bought a scooter, days when someone’s aunt’s neighbor’s son got a government job and permanently altered the gravitational field of the family WhatsApp group. We polish these dates like brass gods and pretend they are different from the others, though the planet, with touching indifference, continues its old habit of rotating. It is all in the thinking, of course, and the excesses of thinking come out as flatulence, diarrhea, or bad dreams. That last one I hope to avoid, having recently installed both a regimen of medication for depression and an air conditioner, which together may constitute the most practical theology available to a middle-aged man in Kolkata during a summer that feels personally assembled by a committee of vengeful furnace manufacturers.

The world around my 49th birthday is, again, as it was at any other time: unremarkable, repetitive, badly lit, and full of familiar stories performed by different actors in updated costumes. Autocrats hiss under their breath. Democracy, that charming old aunt with papers in her handbag and bruises on her shins, continues to decline in room after room. Poverty and corruption remain in the long unrelenting litany of the commoner’s angst, like two municipal dogs that have followed civilization home and refuse to leave the landing. Since I am close to fifty years old, and the usual mathematical reasoning about life suggests that most of the allotted sand has already poured through the hourglass, I should perhaps retire from the masturbatory fantasies of youth and work myself toward a meditative lifestyle where I simply breathe in and breathe out, abstaining from the burden of the mad rodent race.

This, mercifully, does not require great spiritual discipline. Opportunities dwindle effortlessly with advancing age. India assists. Here, any man who is not a scammer, goon, arsonist, guru, blatant liar, politician, sycophant, or morbidly religious in some flamboyant and useful way can find fitting in rather difficult. There is always a chair somewhere, but it is usually reserved for someone’s nephew, or for the man who knows how to nod before the sentence has finished, or for the fellow who can say “vision” without vomiting into his own shoes. From the seismic hopes of innocence to the barely audible subsonic mumbling of middle-aged deprecated dreams, the path trodden has been long, tiresome, and largely fruitless. The old ambitions still twitch now and then, like severed lizard tails on the hot floor of memory, but they no longer look like instructions from destiny. They look like paperwork from a department that has since been shut down.

I have realized, with no great drama, that I do not add up to much. The best option for me is to keep my expectations flatlined. You cannot be hurt that way, or at least you can reduce the size of the blade. People do not hurt you as much as the expectations you construct inside your own head, those little cardboard palaces of reciprocity, decency, loyalty, recognition, fairness, and other expensive imports. Then reality arrives, as it always does, in a vest and rubber sandals, and kicks the palace into a roadside drain. That I do not need as an old man. My life has been, and as far as I can see will remain, a small gray blur of no importance. But I am glad I know who I am, or at least know enough of the unpleasant outline to stop mistaking myself for a promising draft of someone else. An examined life, even when it has no extrinsic value whatsoever, has its own merit to the sad and hurt little man inside my head. He may be ridiculous, but he has taken notes.

The borrowed reality of assurance that religion, society, and various flavors of popular fiction give us is often an easier grab for the untrained eye. There is a reason the brain can sit comfortably with these consolations. We were not designed to worry about things moving at cosmic scale or subatomic scale, or about things that cannot be seen, measured by the hand, eaten, attacked, fled from, married into, or taxed. The caveman’s daily rituals did not require a working acquaintance with entropy, dark energy, or the philosophical implications of infinity. He had stones, weather, hunger, rivals, fire, and a short list of animals that might eat him. Abstractions arrived later, wearing spectacles and ruining the party.

But like Cantor, Boltzmann, and many others with minds that did not always consent to remain in the safe middle of the scale, the world inside my brain is a thick gravy of infinity. Sometimes I see glimpses of the horror when the medicines are missed or mistimed, and the floor of the mind becomes unreliable, and the ceiling starts whispering in mathematics. Infinity may not be a noble idea in me. It may be bitterness. It may be failed ambition leaking through the cracks in the ego. It may be the mind’s way of taking a private disappointment and inflating it until it becomes cosmology. Some people find God in the vastness. I mostly find poor wiring, bad sleep, and a suspicion that consciousness is a damp prank played by carbon on itself.

Bengalis, as a kind, and I say this with the inherited authority of one trapped among them and within them, have a suspicious gift for detecting ambition in another Bengali and immediately wishing to apply a spiritual pesticide to it. Not always. Not everyone. Let us not make this into a census report. But there is a recognizable type: the sentimental crab in the cultural bucket, the Schadenfreude-filled balloon, the apprehensive dystopian who goes around the sign for infinity, the lemniscate, in harrowing circles of created stress. To want something is vulgar. To admit wanting something is unforgivable. To fail after wanting something is delicious public nutrition. Past acquaintances, with a few noble exceptions preserved somewhere in the museum of unlikely decency, can become selfish slime, dripping slowly into the interior hell of memory, keeping it nicely damp for the worry worms and parasites to grow roots.

I am chronically hard up when the months become less than meager, but I still prefer it to the stifling comedy of a job that requires theatrical gratitude for calibrated humiliation. Anywhere I would want to work, they would likely oversell and underdeliver on the dream. The brochure would speak of mission, innovation, family, culture, purpose, and some other corporate incense. The reality would be the old dishwater: mistreat, underpay, extract, flatter upward, blame downward, and schedule meetings like a civilization trying to die by calendar invitation. Fuck that. I am not interested. Or perhaps I am interested and too old, too tired, too inconveniently honest, too poorly upholstered for the showroom. The distinction matters less every year.

So I sit in the corner of a thought, in the corner of my bipolar mind, in the corner of a sofa-cum-bed, in the corner of the only room I inhabit, in the frivolous corner of a house, in the unremarkable corner of the city’s boondocks, in the corner of a third-world country still extravagantly committed to god and shit, in the corner of a world heated mercilessly this summer, in the corner of a planet of apes who cannot get their shit together, in the corner of the only star system I will ever know, in the corner of a galaxy spiraling through an average-looking part of the universe, in the corner of a universe that may itself be one of countless others in a multiverse, in the corner of existence where time and space stretch into incomprehensible infinities, in the corner of everything we know and everything we do not, an infinitesimal speck in the vast unfathomable cosmos, having turned a meaningless number called 49 in some number system attached to a date named after a god who is not even from here.

A god whose existence, like all creation stories, looks to me like an embarrassing ink blot of fiction pressed against the origin of the universe itself, if origin is even the right word for that unimaginable beginning. Behind the little painted gods and household calendars and incense sticks and brass bells there is the cosmic microwave background [the faint afterglow of the early universe], dark energy [the name we give to whatever seems to be accelerating cosmic expansion because ignorance sounds better in formal shoes], and a silence so enormous that human certainty looks like a mosquito claiming property rights over the monsoon. My 49 years are just another flappy, fleeting moment in the grand narrative of existence, a bullshit blip on a toroidal timeline stretching back roughly 13.8 billion years.

Or perhaps not a timeline. Perhaps that too is only the mind turning mystery into furniture. Perhaps there was one big bang, one vast beginning, one violent blessing of density and heat. Perhaps there are cycles. Perhaps there are infinities nested inside infinities, a cosmic bureaucracy of births and deaths, stars and black holes, matter and absence, everything becoming something and then something becoming an exhausted, heat-dead nothing. A single grand explosion giving way to an infinite, rapacious gang of black holes littered across tired spacetime. Or a series of small creation farts concluding, after obscene duration, in the inaudible poot of a universe too cold to remember its own extravagance.

I will never know. That is the one honest sentence available at the end of most human thought. I will never know, except perhaps in the fancies of the many dreams and nightmares that fill my fumbling existence here on this spinning rock. I can ponder my significance, but the more accurate subject is my singular and significant lack thereof. The universe appears indifferent to my musings and struggles, and perhaps that is its one kindness. It does not hate me. It does not bless me. It does not keep score. It simply expands, burns, cools, collapses, mutters, and goes on being impossibly large while I sit here, medicated, sweating less than yesterday, another year older, another superstition discarded, another small gray animal trying to make a sentence hold still long enough to mean something.