The Cephalalgia Chronicles

The headache arrives like a viceroy who has forgotten he was deposed, a colonial phantom still demanding tribute from the sinuses, and I am the subject who must pay in ibuprofen—four hundred milligrams, eight hundred, twelve hundred at the worst, which is to say at the best, because the worst is when even twelve hundred milligrams of that blessed white tablet, that tiny pharmaceutical obelisk, fails to erect itself against the siege, and then I am left with nothing but the throbbing, the pulsing, the grand mal of the frontal lobe that makes me wonder, in my more manic moments, whether this is what it felt like to be Lord Curzon trying to partition Bengal in 1905, that same splitting, that same arrogant cleaving of a whole into wounded halves, though of course I am no Lord Curzon, I am a fifty-one-year-old Bengali man in Calcutta with a dust allergy and a landlord who thinks construction is a form of prayer, and the only partition happening here is the one between my skull and my sanity.

I know nothing about headaches, medically speaking, which is to say I know everything about them phenomenologically, which is the kind of distinction that would make a philosopher weep with recognition or a doctor weep with frustration, and I do not care which because I am too busy not caring, too busy nursing my cup of caffeine tea or coffee, which is not a beverage so much as it is a contract, a non-negotiable treaty between my nervous system and the chemical gods, and if I miss it—if I miss it by so much as a quarter of an hour—I might as well sign my own death warrant in invisible ink, because the headache will metastasize, that is the word I choose, metastasize, from the Greek meta meaning beyond and stasis meaning standing, so that what was once standing still within me now stands beyond itself, spreading like a rumor through the corridors of my neck muscles, my shoulder blades, my very posture, which collapses under stress like a folding chair at a political rally, and stress, let me tell you, is the great metastasis candidate, the primary tumor of modern existence, the thing that turns a minor inconvenience into a major catastrophe, a pebble into an avalanche, a missed deadline into a nervous breakdown, and I have missed so many deadlines that they have become a kind of calendar, a reverse chronology of my failures, each one a tombstone in the graveyard of my ambition.

The terrace used to be my sanctuary, my aerie, my little patch of sky above the chaos of Calcutta, where I could pace like a caged philosopher and pretend that the city below was not a living organism but a map, a diagram, a problem to be solved, but the landlord, that magnificent architect of inconvenience, has decided that construction is the highest form of meditation, and now the terrace is a dust factory, a particulate matter paradise, a bronchial nightmare, and I have an allergy to dust that is not so much an allergy as it is a vendetta, a blood feud between my immune system and every mote of silica, every flake of plaster, every microscopic shard of what used to be someone’s wall, and when I say I cannot breathe up there, I mean it literally and figuratively, because Calcutta itself is a city that breathes dust, that exhales humidity and inhales despair, that has never met a particle it did not want to keep close, like a miser hoarding grains of sand, and I am the miser now, hoarding my breath, rationing my inhalations, counting my exhalations like a miser counts his coins, because every breath is a transaction, every lungful a negotiation with the air itself.

Financially, I have the leeway of a man walking a tightrope over a chasm filled with creditors, which is to say I have no leeway at all, none, zero, the null set, the empty set, the set of all things that are not, and I cannot rent a car, cannot flee this city of dust and headaches for some imagined elsewhere where the air is clean and the headaches are theoretical, some hill station or beach town or even just a park with trees that have not been colonized by exhaust fumes, because to rent a car would be to admit that I have money, and to admit that I have money would be a lie so grotesque that even my own bank account would laugh at me, would mock me with its decimal places, its negative signs, its overdraft fees that accumulate like interest on a loan from a loan shark who is also my landlord who is also the city of Calcutta itself, that great creditor in the sky, that cosmic moneylender who charges compound interest on existence.

The only break I get is through reading, which is to say through entering other people’s headaches, other people’s dust allergies, other people’s financial ruin, and finding, in the grotesque mirror of literature, a reflection that is almost but not quite my own, a funhouse distortion that makes my own suffering seem simultaneously more absurd and more universal, and writing, which is what I am doing now, this very sentence, this very word, this very syllable, each one a tiny rebellion against the silence, a microscopic uprising against the void, and sometimes Netflix, if I can force myself to it, if I can overcome the inertia that is not laziness but something deeper, something more cellular, something encoded in my DNA like a recessive gene for despair, and I sit there watching stories unfold on a screen while my own story remains stubbornly, gloriously, miserably static, a still life in dust and debt and throbbing temples.

Calcutta is too messy, too crowded, too unreliable, and I do not want to risk a depressive episode by going out all by myself, which is not cowardice so much as it is strategic self-preservation, a military decision made by a general who has seen too many battles lost to the enemy of his own mind, and the enemy is everywhere, in the rickshaw wallah who overcharges by ten rupees, in the pothole that swallows your ankle, in the power cut that turns your apartment into a sauna at three in the afternoon, in the neighbor who plays Bollywood music at volumes that suggest he is either deaf or malicious or both, and I cannot risk it, cannot risk the descent, because once the descent begins it is not a descent but a plummet, a free fall, a gravitational catastrophe from which there is no recovery except through the slow, humiliating, pharmaceutical climb back up, and I have climbed too many times, my fingernails are worn to nubs, my palms are calloused, my rope is frayed, and still the abyss beckons, still it whispers my name in the voice of a headache that will not quit, a dust mote that will not settle, a debt that will not forgive.

I think sometimes, in my more manic phases, which are not so much phases as they are brief, hallucinatory respites from the depressive gravity, I think that I am a kind of artist, a performance artist whose medium is suffering, whose canvas is the inside of his own skull, whose audience is the void, and I perform with a dedication that would make Stanislavski weep, method acting my way through despair, staying in character for days, weeks, months, until the line between performance and reality dissolves like a sugar cube in tea, and then I am the suffering, I am the headache, I am the dust, I am the debt, and there is no observer left to observe, no narrator left to narrate, only the raw, unmediated, grotesquely swollen fact of existence, which is, if we are being honest, which we are not because honesty is a luxury I cannot afford, a kind of comedy, a cosmic joke, a prank played by a universe that has long since stopped caring whether we laugh or cry or do both simultaneously in a kind of epileptic seizure of the soul.

The ibuprofen is kicking in now, or maybe it is not, maybe I am only imagining the relief, which is a kind of relief in itself, a placebo effect that is no less real for being imaginary, because what is real anyway, what is reality but a consensus hallucination, a shared delusion, a mass psychogenic illness that we call society, and Calcutta is the patient zero of this illness, the ground zero of this hallucination, a city that persists in existing despite all evidence that it should not, that it should have collapsed under its own weight decades ago, under the weight of its population, its pollution, its poverty, its pretensions, and yet it persists, it endures, it survives, like a cockroach after the nuclear apocalypse, like a headache after twelve hundred milligrams, like a fifty-one-year-old Bengali man after fifty-one years of being alive in a world that was not designed for him, that was designed for someone else entirely, someone with money, someone without dust allergies, someone whose headaches are merely theoretical, merely metaphorical, merely a literary device in a story with a happy ending.

But there are no happy endings, only endings, and the ending is always the same, always a small defeat, always a casually bleak, hilarious line delivered by a universe that has run out of patience, and so I will end with this: I took my ibuprofen, I drank my tea, I stared at the wall where the dust motes danced in the slanted afternoon light like tiny galaxies in the process of collapsing, and I thought, with a clarity that was either madness or enlightenment, that the headache would return tomorrow, and the dust would return tomorrow, and the debt would return tomorrow, and Calcutta would return tomorrow, and I would return tomorrow, because what else is there to do, what else is there but to return, to endure, to persist, to be the cockroach, to be the headache, to be the dust, to be the city, to be the man, to be the word, to be the silence, to be the thing that is and is not, the metastasis and the original tumor, the partition and the whole, the ibuprofen and the pain, the tea and the thirst, the breath and the suffocation, the life and the living of it, the grotesque, swollen, cynically beautiful, wholly original, standalone, self-reflective, bipolar, manic-depressive, rambling, ranting, refusing, enduring, Calcutta-colored fact of being here, now, in this cramped apartment, with this throbbing skull, with this empty wallet, with this full heart, with this bitter, comic, chronically unresolved, magnificently defeated, determined mouth.

P.S. — The etymology of ibuprofen, should anyone care, which they do not, derives from the chemical name isobutylphenylpropanoic acid, first synthesized in 1961 by the Boots Pure Drug Company in Nottingham, England, which is to say that my relief comes from the same country that once colonized mine, a small historical irony that I swallow with my pill, along with the dust, along with the tea, along with the headache, along with the whole grotesque, swollen, beautiful, unbearable weight of being alive in Calcutta on a Thursday afternoon in July, when the humidity is a physical presence, a second skin, a wet wool blanket wrapped around the city, and the only cool thing in the room is the screen of my phone, which tells me that it is 4:47 PM, and that I have seventeen unread messages, and that the world continues to turn, indifferent, magnificent, cruel, and I am still here, still typing, still breathing, still somehow, against all odds, against all reason, against all ibuprofen, still alive.