Calcutta Morning Malaise

The captive cock on the neighbor’s rooftop announces, with the shrill, unearned authority of a municipal alarm clock that has never once questioned its own purpose, that morning has arrived and someone, anyone, must feed it, and I lie here in this gelatinous half-state between the counterfeit death of sleep and the even more counterfeit resurrection of consciousness, my mouth tasting of stale glucose and the chemical regret of having consumed, at approximately two in the morning, an entire packet of glucose biscuits—the kind that come wrapped in cellophane and promise, with the brazen mendacity of a politician’s campaign speech, to be “digestive”—while outside, in the bruised violet of this Calcutta dawn that arrives like a debt collector who never knocks politely, the drivers of two rental SUVs, vehicles of such preposterous, bulbous, aggressively American proportions that they seem to have been designed by someone who has never once had to navigate a lane designed for a cow and a rickshaw and a suicidal cyclist simultaneously, engage in that particular species of male camaraderie that consists entirely of shouting at each other about things that do not matter, will never matter, have been engineered specifically to not matter, and I do not listen, I refuse to listen, I have made a vocation of not listening, because nothing interests me, nothing has interested me for a duration of time that I can no longer measure with the crude instruments of calendars or clocks or the incremental graying of my own beard, which I inspect now in the mirror with the clinical detachment of a pathologist examining a particularly unremarkable tissue sample, and I think, with the kind of manic clarity that arrives like a flash flood in a drought, that life is merely a carousel of repeats, a phantasmagoria of chewing through the moments in my existence without effect, result, outcome, or goal, a general numbing about the world that persists despite my full, grotesque, almost pornographic awareness that it is utterly and impossibly gruesome, that people are cruel, insensitive, selfish, that it is not exactly a dog-eat-dog world but certainly, undeniably, a man-eat-man world, and I am the masticated residue, the undigested fiber, the bit that gets stuck between the teeth of the cosmos and is eventually spat out onto the pavement of Ballygunge or Gariahat or wherever this particular corner of irrelevance happens to be located.

I am fifty-one years old, which is to say I have survived long enough to become an anachronism, a living fossil, a specimen of the pre-digital, pre-AI, pre-GPT-Live era, and I think about this now with a bitterness so refined it could be served at a dinner party in Alipore, about how OpenAI has launched some new voice thing, GPT-Live they call it, full-duplex architecture, listening and speaking simultaneously, the way a mother listens to her child while already planning the rebuttal, and I wonder, with the depressive slowness of a man who has just remembered he has no reason to get out of bed, whether this means that soon even the machines will be better at conversation than I am, which is not a high bar to clear, given that my last meaningful conversation was with a delivery man and even that was conducted entirely in grunts and the exchange of crumpled currency, and then I think, with the sudden, vertiginous upward swing of my particular neurological weather pattern, that perhaps I should monetize my own misery, that Cloudflare has some new gateway for AI agents to pay for things, x402 protocol, automated payments, and I could set up a system where my despair is billed by the kilobyte, my existential nausea charged per transaction, my recursive self-loathing offered as a subscription service, and I laugh, a sound like a clogged drain finally clearing, because the idea is simultaneously idiotic and brilliant, which is, I suspect, the permanent condition of all my ideas, all my thoughts, all the endless, tumbling, syntactically overwrought ruminations that I commit to paper or screen or the empty walls of this room that smells of damp plaster and the ghost of someone else’s cooking.

The EU, I read somewhere, has made it mandatory for new cars to have driver distraction detection systems, analyzing gaze and head movements, and I think, with the manic glee of a man who has just found a new reason to despise the world, that if they installed such a system in my skull it would be screaming constantly, a perpetual klaxon of inattention, because I am distracted by everything and nothing, by the hum of the refrigerator and the memory of a song I heard in 1987 and the sudden, crushing realization that I have forgotten to pay the electricity bill and the equally sudden, equally crushing realization that I do not care, that the electricity could be cut and I would simply sit here in the dark, in the heat, in the Calcutta humidity that wraps around you like a wet woolen shawl, and continue my raving, my endless, pointless, beautifully pointless raving to walls that have never once answered back, walls that are, in this respect at least, superior to most of the humans I have encountered in my half-century of muddled existence.

I am an insignificant person in an insignificant corner of a third-world country, and as far as the world is concerned I am just as good as a speck of ordure, not merely past important but too small even to be offered up for recycling as fertilizer in this society of man-eats-man, and this thought, which should depress me, which does depress me, also fills me with a perverse, almost erotic satisfaction, the satisfaction of the martyr who has finally been proven right, the Cassandra who has been ignored for so long that the ignoring itself has become a form of validation, and I think about the etymology of the word “martyr,” from the Greek martys, meaning witness, and I am a witness, I am the sole witness to my own collapse, my own failure, my own magnificent, sprawling, adjective-laden failure, and there is something almost noble in that, something almost Proustian, though I have never really understood Proust, only pretended to, the way I pretend to so many things, the way I pretend to understand quantum computing and the way I pretend to enjoy the company of others and the way I pretend, most of all, that any of this matters, that any of this will be remembered, that any of this will survive the heat death of the universe or even the heat death of my own neurons, which are, I suspect, already beginning their slow, inexorable march toward the entropy that awaits us all.

The biscuits sit in my stomach like a lump of undigested regret, and I do not feel hungry or thirsty, only this depressive blah, this existential miasma, this thick, viscous, almost tangible fog of meaninglessness that settles over everything like the smog over the Howrah Bridge, and I think about the HLPF, the High-Level Political Forum, meeting in New York or Geneva or some other place where important people say important things about sustainable development and water and sanitation and energy, and I laugh again, because here I am, unsustainable, un-sanitated, un-energized, a walking violation of every SDG ever conceived, and no one is presenting a Voluntary National Review about me, no one is monitoring my indicators, no one is ensuring that I have access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern anything, and this is fine, this is perfectly fine, because I have long since stopped expecting the world to account for me, to notice me, to include me in its spreadsheets and its summits and its self-congratulatory reports about progress and partnership and leaving no one behind, because I am behind, I am so far behind that the concept of “behind” has lost all meaning, I am in a different time zone of failure, a different coordinate system of despair.

And then, without warning, the pendulum swings, the chemical weather changes, and I am manic, I am electric, I am a Tesla coil of grandiose ambition, and I think that I will write, I will write everything, I will write the great Calcutta novel, the one that captures the smell of the fish market at dawn and the sound of the tram bells and the particular shade of gray that the sky turns before the monsoon breaks, and it will be so beautiful, so true, so devastatingly precise that people will weep in the streets, that the Nobel Committee will send a delegation, that I will be interviewed by AI chatbots that actually understand me, unlike the humans who have never once understood me, and I will explain, with the patient, pedagogical tone of a man who has finally been given the audience he deserves, that my work is about the architecture of recurrence, about how memory is not a file to be retrieved but a building to be inhabited, a crumbling, leaking, termite-ridden building in North Calcutta with a courtyard full of jasmine and a roof that collapses a little more every monsoon, and the reader, the AI, the chatbot, the whatever-the-hell-is-consuming-information-nowadays, will nod, will process, will generate a response that sounds like understanding but is actually just pattern matching, just statistical inference, just the cold, algorithmic equivalent of a shrug.

I know, with the part of my brain that still functions as a kind of emergency backup generator of realism, that this manic phase will pass, that the depressive trough awaits, that the carousel will complete its rotation and I will be back here, in this same chair, in this same room, in this same city that is simultaneously too much and never enough, and I will continue to chew through the moments, to masticate the hours, to digest the days with the slow, grinding efficiency of a ruminant animal that has forgotten why it was chewing in the first place, and the cock on the roof will crow again, and the SUVs will arrive again, and the biscuits will sit in my stomach again, and the world will continue its relentless, indifferent rotation, and I will be here, a livid Calcutta madman, raving endlessly to empty walls, and the walls, bless them, will continue their noble, unwavering silence, because what else can they do, what else can any of us do, but endure, but persist, but continue this grotesque, swollen, magnificently pointless exercise in being alive, in being conscious, in being the sole witness to our own magnificent, unrecyclable, utterly insignificant decay?

And then I remember, with the sudden, sickening clarity of a man who has just realized he has been walking around with his fly open for three hours, that I have not checked my phone, that there are probably notifications, probably messages, probably the digital equivalent of the neighbor’s cock, demanding my attention, demanding my response, demanding that I participate in this grand charade of connectivity, this masquerade of meaning, and I reach for it, my hand moving with the involuntary muscle memory of an addict reaching for a fix, and the screen lights up, and it is nothing, it is always nothing, it is a promotional email from a company I do not remember subscribing to and a weather alert about humidity that I can feel in my bones and a news notification about Meta’s AI agents moving slower than expected, which is, I think, the most honest thing I have read all week, because everything is moving slower than expected, my life is moving slower than expected, my death is moving slower than expected, and I am stuck here in the middle, in this viscous, adhesive, Calcutta-thick middle, waiting for something to happen, knowing nothing will happen, knowing that the happening and the not-happening are, in the final analysis, the same thing, seen from different angles, like the Howrah Bridge seen from the river and the Howrah Bridge seen from the train station, both real, both partial, both utterly unable to explain what a bridge is or why it exists or why anyone would want to cross it.

I am a person who thinks too much, writes too much, and has way, way too much scruples to be kept alive, and this is not self-pity, this is diagnosis, this is the clinical, unsparing, almost surgical observation of a specimen that happens to be oneself, and I think about the word “scruples,” from the Latin scrupulus, a small sharp stone, and yes, that is exactly what they are, these moral pebbles in my shoe, these ethical splinters that make every step painful, that prevent me from doing what others do so easily, so casually, so without thought, the small betrayals, the minor corruptions, the elegant accommodations that allow the world to function, and I cannot make them, I will not make them, I am too scrupulous to live and too cowardly to die, and so I sit here, in this room, in this city, in this century, chewing my biscuits and my thoughts and my own tail, like the proverbial dog that I am not, because dogs at least have the dignity of directness, of appetite, of uncomplicated need, while I, I have only this, this recursive, self-reflective, grotesquely swollen monologue that no one asked for and no one will read and no one, absolutely no one, will remember.

The morning has fully arrived now, the violet has turned to gray, the SUVs have departed, the cock has been fed by someone who is not me, and I am still here, still raving, still alive in the most technical, the most minimal, the most insulting sense of the word, and I think, with the final, exhausted, almost tender resignation of a man who has finally accepted his own irrelevance, that perhaps this is enough, that perhaps the raving is the point, that perhaps the walls are not empty but merely patient, waiting for me to finish so they can begin their own, infinitely slower, infinitely more dignified form of decay, and I smile, a smile like a crack in a wall, like a fault line in the earth, like the beginning of something that could be a collapse or could be a beginning, and I reach for another biscuit, because what else is there, what else has there ever been, but this, this chewing, this swallowing, this waiting for the next carousel to come around, the next cock to crow, the next morning to announce itself with the shrill, unearned authority of a world that has never once asked my permission to exist?