A Private Nuisance at Five-Thirty in Calcutta

Acronyms and terms:

Anhedonia: The loss of pleasure or interest in things that normally bring some satisfaction.

Ketorol: A strong pain medicine used for short-term pain relief.

Doomscrolling: The habit of endlessly scrolling through bad news, noise, quarrels, videos, and disasters on the phone, usually while feeling worse with every thumb movement.

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Some mornings do not begin. They crawl in through the crack under the door and sit on your chest.

Today is one of those mornings.

It is half past five in Calcutta, which means somewhere a milk packet is being flung at a gate, some tea stall is boiling its first large aluminum pot of sweet brown rescue, one dog is explaining foreign policy to another dog, and a newspaper boy is performing Tour de France maneuvers through lanes that were last repaired during the geological age of the tram conductor.

And I am in bed.

Not sleeping. That would be decent. That would at least be one clean human activity, like bathing, eating, or telling the electricity board that yes, we are still alive and no, we have not opened a textile mill in the bedroom.

I am awake.

I have been awake for four hours.

The mind, my old unreliable landlord, has been knocking on the inside wall since around one-thirty. It has brought its usual files. Money. Failure. Loneliness. Teeth. Age. Work. No work. The outside world. My shrinking relationship with the outside world. The more private and more dangerous matter of my relationship with my own mind, which at present resembles a cracked mirror being asked to serve as a window.

Some days are worse than others. Then there are days that seem to arrive pre-damaged, like a plastic bucket already split before the first mug of water.

This is one.

I cannot get out of bed, but the body is not peacefully still. That is the trick. Depression is popularly imagined as a sad man lying quietly under a blanket while violins behave badly in the background. Very tidy. Very cinematic. Very false.

This is not quiet sadness.

This is irritation with needles.

This is tiredness with chilli powder mixed in.

This is lying still while something inside me runs from room to room, overturning stools, checking old bills, opening closed windows, shouting, “See? See? This also failed. That also failed. And what about this? Have you considered this disaster from 2009?”

The mind has a dreadful memory when it wants to hurt you. Ask it where the nail cutter is and it becomes a retired municipal clerk with cataract. Ask it for proof that your life has gone wrong and suddenly it becomes the National Library.

So I doomscroll.

Of course I doomscroll. What else does the modern half-broken man do before sunrise? Earlier generations had ghosts, owls, and philosophical tobacco. We have phones. The phone glows in the dark like a small privately owned moon, except the moon did not usually show you ten arguments, seven wars, three cooking reels, a man dancing with a pressure cooker, and some billionaire explaining discipline before you have brushed your teeth.

I scroll.

Nothing holds.

A song begins. I stop it.

A video begins. I abandon it.

A post appears. I distrust it.

Someone is shouting about politics. Someone is shouting about health. Someone is shouting about money. Someone is shouting about how to become successful by waking at five, which is especially insulting because I am awake at five and success has not yet entered the premises. Perhaps it took the wrong auto from Garia.

Everything passes over the mind like rain on a tarpaulin.

Except writing.

Writing still catches a little.

Not enough to save me. Let us not become foolish. Writing does not put money in the bank by breakfast. Writing does not fix a molar. Writing does not make a lonely man lovable, employable, brave, cheerful, photogenic, punctual, spiritually evolved, or any of the other marketable species currently in circulation.

But writing allows me to point at the beast while it is still in the room.

That matters.

If I cannot defeat the morning, I can at least describe its shirt.

There is also the question of tea.

In Bengal, tea is not a drink. It is a small domestic referendum on whether life should continue for another forty minutes.

You may have no money, no plan, no sleep, no waistline worth mentioning, no future visible through the fog, but still the question will arise with astonishing administrative seriousness: should I make cha?

Usually the answer is yes. Tea is cheap civilization. Tea is the poor man’s committee meeting with himself. Tea says, “We have reviewed the situation and decided not to collapse immediately.”

But today even tea looks ambitious.

To make tea, one must rise. To rise, one must believe that verticality has some advantage over horizontality. This morning I am not convinced.

Also, there is the molar.

A back molar has been aching with the solemn menace of an old building in Bowbazar that has developed a crack and is pretending nothing has happened. I took ketorol to bring the pain under control. It helped, but not in the grand victorious way medicine behaves in advertisements. More like a tired constable arriving late at a lane fight and saying, “Enough now, go home, all of you.”

The tooth is not roaring. It is muttering.

That is worse in some ways. A roar is at least honest. A mutter follows you.

So there I am, a fifty-one-year-old man, bankrupt in the practical sense, tired in the cellular sense, irritated in the chili-fried sense, debating tea with a toothache at dawn while the city begins its day without seeking my opinion.

There is something especially cruel about unemployed time.

People with jobs complain about time as if it were a narrow bridge. They must cross it quickly. There are meetings, calls, trains, targets, grocery lists, school fees, office gossip, tea breaks, someone asking for the revised file, someone else asking why the revised file was revised. Their time has handles.

Unemployed time has no handles.

It spreads.

It pools in the corners.

It becomes damp.

A working person’s morning says, “Move, you have somewhere to be.”

My morning says, “Stay, nobody is waiting.”

And that sentence, if it is allowed to repeat often enough, becomes a kind of acid.

There is a flat somewhere in the shanty boondocks of this giant, sweating, argumentative city. Inside that flat is a room. Inside that room is a bed. On that bed is a man who once crossed oceans, studied, worked, wrote code, handled data, sat in offices where the air-conditioning had the moral confidence of empire, and thought life would continue as a complicated but manageable spreadsheet.

Then life, with its usual comic timing, removed the spreadsheet.

Now the bank balance is zero.

Zero has a personality. People underestimate this. Zero is not a number sitting politely between minus one and one. Zero is a small bald accountant with steel spectacles who arrives early and clears his throat. Zero says, “Heroism is currently not funded.”

And he is right.

A man can be brave in theory. In practice, bravery often requires bus fare, dental money, a working laptop, a tolerable nervous system, and at least one clean shirt that does not look as if it has survived a border conflict.

No heroic feats are possible with such financial heft.

This is why the motivational industry irritates me. It talks to the desperate as if despair were a posture problem. Stand straight. Think positive. Take action. Build your brand. Wake early.

My dear motivational uncle, I have woken early. I have been awake since one-thirty. The sunrise has not given me equity.

The trouble today is not one thing. If it were one thing, one could at least quarrel with it properly. It is a swarm.

Bad sleep.

Bad thoughts.

Aching tooth.

No money.

No outside life.

No easy work.

No stable relationship with my own mind.

A peculiar anger at nothing and everything.

And over all of it, anhedonia, that polite word for when the inner shopkeeper pulls down the shutter and refuses to sell pleasure even to old customers.

You try music. No.

You try reading. No.

You try a video. No.

You try the news. That was a mistake.

You try thinking of work. The chest tightens.

You try not thinking. The mind laughs.

You try memory. Memory brings the wrong suitcase.

So you flail.

That is the word. Flail.

Not fight. Fight sounds too noble. Fight has posters. Fight has theme music. Flailing is what happens when the boat has overturned and you are not sure whether the dark thing touching your foot is a rope, a fish, or fate with poor hygiene.

I flail until I get tired.

Then perhaps I sleep.

Then another day is gone.

Not dramatically gone. No explosion. No announcement. Just gone, like a coin rolling under a cupboard in a rented room.

This is the part people do not see. They see failure from outside and imagine a story with clear chapters. He did this. Then this happened. Then he should have done that. Very neat. Very reassuring. The observer is always a genius when standing outside the burning house.

Inside, it is mostly smoke.

I am glad, in one crooked way, to be invisible.

Not completely invisible. I write this blog, so I am leaving chalk marks. A truly invisible man does not publish his distress under his own name like a badly dressed ghost with broadband. But I am invisible enough. I am not making a scene in anyone’s drawing room. I am not collapsing at anyone’s office reception. I am not calling old acquaintances at five-thirty in the morning and asking them to explain the purpose of life between their toothbrush and their first tea.

I am mostly my own problem.

My own private nuisance.

My own leaking tap.

My own unpaid bill folded twice and kept under a steel bowl.

A single bankrupt middle-class bipolar Bengali man in Calcutta, lying in bed before sunrise, with an aching molar, a bad bank balance, a restless mind, and the question of tea still unresolved.

That may sound small.

It is not small from inside.

From inside, it is a whole country.