The water bottle gives a small, hollow knock when I set it down on the floor—plastic on tile, a sound so ordinary it’s practically invisible, like a footnote in the diary of a man who has reduced his dependencies to a few stubborn objects and the remaining minutes on a Samsung screen.

The mattress is right there, not apologizing, not pretending. A thin domestic continent. Beside it: the bottle, the rice cooker (the little priest of starch, punctual and untheatrical), a pot that has boiled more tea than I have had coherent conversations in the last decade, the phone, the tablet with its glassy smugness, an old laptop that wheezes awake like an asthmatic kinsman called upon to lift something heavy, and books—yes, books—stacked and leaning in the peculiar way books do when they’ve given up expecting furniture.

It is the first of January, 2026, which means nothing in physics and everything in marketing, and also, annoyingly, something in my head: a click. Not a spiritual click, not some cosmic chakra aligning with Saturn’s eyebrows—just the mundane click of a brain trained, like a laboratory rat, to notice calendar edges.

The Ghost of 2002

I miss zipping past things now; now everything else is zipping past me. The Accord made speed feel democratic—press a pedal, hold a lane, watch the world become a ribbon—and even boredom had a kind of dignity when it came with forward motion and a horizon that kept agreeing to arrive: the little towns with one earnest main street and a water tower announcing itself like a signature, the heat haze making distant trucks wobble as if reality had gone soft at the edges, the sudden flirtations with quaint country roads when construction or stubborn curiosity nudged me off the interstate, and the small detours in confusing Austin downtown where I’d find myself accidentally baptized into some new one-way labyrinth before re-emerging, mildly furious, toward San Antonio or Houston or Dallas or Amarillo, each name like a different chapter title in the same long, sunstruck book.

Here in South Calcutta, I have no mate, no house, no car; I am stationary, reduced to a man and his few little things, the kind of inventory people at the bread line pay an inordinate interest in because objects become proof that you still exist: a phone with a tired battery, a rice cooker that coughs steam like an old clerk, a water bottle, a mattress on the floor, a stack of books that looks like a private fort against the future, and the small humiliations of survival—filters, chargers, cheap tea—where the grand ambitions of youth go to quietly shed their skin.

There’s this old, half-comic immigrant superstition I still carry—that “American cars” are a reputation more than a machine, all chrome confidence and a short attention span—whereas the Japanese ones, even the humble, slightly embarrassed ones, behave like decent civil servants: they show up, they do the job, they don’t ask to be worshipped. My first car was a Toyota, a burgundy Tercel I bought second-hand from a Japanese man, and it felt less like I’d purchased transportation than that I’d been adopted into a reliable family. That first weekend I drove it into downtown San Antonio on a trip with two delectable Japanese girls—students like me—who lived at Oak View Apartments near UTSA, back when I was technically a PhD student and then, in the way life quietly edits your ambitions, a master’s student instead; 1998 to 2000, when a PhD could feel less like a noble calling and more like a socially awkward refusal to “get on with it,” the deviant path of a man insisting on thinking too long.

The Tercel eventually gave up its life after I pushed it too hard on an interstate in Austin—US 183 S, the Texas numbers blur into heat shimmer in my memory—and it didn’t so much die as explode in a final, dramatic cough of mechanical mortality, as if even reliability has a breaking point when you treat it like immortality. The second car was the Honda—steadier, smoother, more grown-up—and of course it didn’t get the dignity of an old-age failure; it was mechanically violated by reality itself in a collision with a deer, a reminder that in America even a perfectly behaved machine can be taken out by a sudden brown blur with hooves, the universe’s way of saying: you may plan, but you don’t get to script the impact.

That cervine incident happened in the same long season when I was on multiple antipsychotics, Xanax and Ambien—an entire committee of chemicals convened in my skull—so I became an unreliable driver in the most frighteningly specific way: not just slow, not just dulled, but capable of “sleep-driving,” of finding myself somewhere with the engine warm and no clean memory of the minutes that moved me there. Wanderlust, that old American hobby of turning distance into therapy, got replaced by a primal suspicion of the car itself, as if the steering wheel had become a roulette wheel and I was no longer the one placing bets. Fast forward to India and the radius shrinks again, not because roads are shorter but because fear is: I can’t go anywhere without doing the inventory—carcinogenic air that bites the throat like a permanent low-grade insult, the background probability of being mugged, the possibility of being beaten up by unknown goons for no narrative reason at all—and the grim feature of all this is that it isn’t a novelist’s paranoia; it’s a statistic I’ve personally sampled, which means it always feels ready to happen again.

Most people here hear “car” and think: transport, metal, insurance premiums, a place to keep stale fries. I hear “car” and my brain insists on giving it a temperament. This is my little pathology: I anthropomorphize things. Not in the cute Pixar way where the toaster has dreams and the lamp falls in love. More like the way a lonely man assigns moral reliability to an object because the human alternative has a poor track record and no warranty.

Also, to be precise, “anthropomorphize” is one of those words that sounds like a Victorian scientist poking a frog with a stick. Anthrōpos + morphē, Greek for “human-form.” People sometimes say it means “man-shape,” which is a lazy translation with patriarchy baked into the subtitle; anthrōpos is human, not male. Even the etymology has to fight for breath.

Anyway. The Accord.

Silver, which is a color that tries to look like the future while actually being the diplomatic compromise of the universe: not white (too pure), not grey (too defeated), not black (too final). That car had a certain honest competence. It didn’t flirt with me. It didn’t make promises. It simply started when asked, like a well-trained dog that doesn’t need to be told it’s a “good boy” every morning.

The word “accord,” of course, is one of those deceptively friendly nouns—agreement, harmony, people in suits nodding at each other. Latin accordare, “to bring hearts together” (ad + cor, the heart). I’m not sure Honda’s naming committee sat around chanting Latin like monks of corporate semiotics, but it amuses me that the car carried “heart-agreement” in its name while my actual heart—if we’re using that word for the messy endocrine committee inside my ribcage—was busy disagreeing with everything.

It lasted almost as long as the legal dissolution of my domestic peace. That’s a sentence you can say casually, and then it sits there like a dead insect on the page: small, irreducible, quietly humiliating.

Here comes the cliché, I can feel it trying to climb into the room—cars are like relationships, they need maintenance, they break down, blah blah—so let me kick it back out into the street where it belongs. The honest comparison isn’t romantic. It’s statistical.

The Reliability of Objects

Objects are loyal because they are governed by simple rules and because their betrayal is usually legible. A battery dies; a belt cracks; a solder joint fractures; a quartz oscillator drifts; a lithium-ion cell slowly turns into a bag of sulking chemistry. You can point at the cause. You can measure it. You can replace a part. There is a kind of comfort in a failure mode that obeys the laws of thermodynamics instead of the laws of ego.

Humans, on the other hand, have failure modes that are interpretive. They require committees. They require post-mortems with too much narrative and not enough data. They fail in ways that feel like someone quietly editing the meaning of your life while you are out buying vegetables.

So yes, my slippers have been more steadfast than many kith or kin. The slippers do not ask me to “grow,” which is often code for “become convenient.” The slippers simply conform to my feet until one day they don’t, and even then their betrayal is polite: a torn strap, a thinning sole, the gradual revelation of the floor’s cold truth.

The Samsung phone—ridiculous little altar of glass and algorithms—has been in my palm more often than any human hand in years. It wakes me up. It distracts me. It feeds me information and poison in equal measure. It is both my tool and my parasite. But it shows up. It vibrates. It keeps time with a tiny quartz crystal trembling like a nervous bureaucrat trying to pass a file upward. The phone is a device that converts microscopic oscillations into the illusion of order. If that isn’t a metaphor for modern life, it’s at least a neat party trick.

April, I’ll be 51. I have learned that age doesn’t arrive like a dignified professor; it arrives like dust, like mildew, like the slow thickening of a file you didn’t know you were maintaining. And yes, I am almost on the bread line in a so-called cheap city in a poor country—though “cheap” is the sort of adjective used by people who haven’t tried to live in it with a thin wallet and a thick mind.

Cheapness is not an economic category; it’s a sensation. It’s the feeling of standing in a queue where everyone has been told this is normal. It’s the smell of frying oil that never quite leaves the staircase. It’s the city’s genius for making human aspiration feel like an unnecessary luxury, like a second pillow you don’t deserve.

Miracles So Commonplace

And yet: these objects.

A rice cooker is a miracle so commonplace we don’t call it one. In another century it would be witchcraft. In my childhood it would have been a status symbol. Now it is a modest cylinder that contains an entire political economy: the global supply chain of metal, polymer, silicon; the invisible labor of assembly; the electricity grid’s mood swings; the rice itself, domesticated grass that built empires and famines and election slogans.

It clicks when it’s done. That click is a little theorem: input energy → phase change → output food. It is the sound of a Curie point being reached, a transition as absolute and unarguable as death. Underneath the pot sits a small, unassuming permanent magnet held against a spring-loaded switch; as the water boils away, the temperature of the vessel finally climbs past the °C plateau of liquid stability, racing toward the 103°C mark where the magnet’s internal thermal agitation finally overcomes its crystalline alignment.

The magnetic domains, once a disciplined phalanx of attraction, succumb to the kinetic chaos—the material reaches its Curie Temperature, the magnetism vanishes into a state of paramagnetic indifference, and the spring, no longer restrained by the invisible tether, snaps the circuit open. It is a moment of pure, mechanical honesty; the physics of the ferrite doesn’t care about your hunger or your hurry. No speeches. No flags. No “civilizational resurgence.” Just the elegant, entropic surrender of magnetism to heat, followed by starch and steam.

Books—my actual oxygen—are the least shiny objects and the most dangerous. They do not merely keep you company. They rearrange your sense of what is possible, which is why authoritarian systems fear them more than they fear poverty. Poverty can be managed; hunger can be weaponized; but a citizen who reads widely develops the irritating habit of comparing reality to alternatives.

In India we have perfected the opposite habit: comparing reality to mythology, then awarding mythology a government job.

Nationalism here is often just astrology with better typography. People will argue about ancient aircraft and plastic surgery in epics with the same fervor they refuse to apply to, say, municipal drainage. The old trick is to make pride cheap so that competence can remain expensive. We run an education system that teaches children to memorize answers but not to ask how the answer was obtained, like training a generation of calculators without the ability to notice a misplaced decimal.

I’m supposed to be festive today. I’m supposed to “feel the new year.” Feel it where? In my pancreas? In the neighborhood’s loudspeakers? In the little dopamine slot machine inside the phone? There is no organ for “new year.” There is only time, indifferent, continuous, and very keen on taking everything away.

Systems of Mercy

Still, my brain goes back to Austin—heat on asphalt, the sun feeling like a large angry deity (the honest kind: no morals, just thermonuclear consistency). I remember the Accord’s steering wheel texture, the way the interior smelled faintly of warmed plastic and stale air freshener, the way the car would idle with a slight vibration like a purring animal. That vibration was not affection. It was combustion. But combustion, at least, is a kind of reliable devotion: fuel in, motion out, entropy paid in full.

Austin felt like a place where systems worked, which is not the same as saying people were kinder. Systems can work in a cold way. But a working system is a kind of mercy. You don’t realize how much of your intelligence gets squandered on navigating dysfunction until you leave a functioning place. In a broken system, even buying milk becomes a logic puzzle with hidden traps.

I came back here and discovered that my adulthood had been outsourced and the contract had been lost.

There’s a temptation now to romanticize my poverty—look at this ascetic scholar on a mattress, a Bengali Diogenes with a rice cooker—but that’s another cliché trying to sneak in wearing a shawl. This isn’t spiritual simplicity; it’s economic constriction with a literary aftertaste. If I were truly an ascetic I’d have serenity. What I have is inventory.

And yet, tenderness keeps arriving in embarrassing places.

I pick up a book and feel a kind of gratitude that is almost humiliating: this object, too, is steadfast. The author is dead or far away. The text doesn’t demand I perform an identity. It doesn’t threaten to leave unless I become a better version of myself by Tuesday. It sits there, patient as sediment, waiting for me to bring my eyes to it.

Even my old laptop—slow, battered, vaguely resentful—still opens a portal to thought. The screen flickers, the fan whines, the keys have that greasy shine of long use, and still: the machine cooperates. It does not judge my stalled ambitions. It does not bring up my failures in unrelated arguments.

Humans talk about “relationships” as if they are gardens to be tended, but many relationships are more like a pageant of administrative incontinence: everyone uses them, nobody cleans them, and then they blame you for noticing the smell of biological refuse. In my particular, reduced state, even the ostensibly pleasant memories have been poisoned by the retrospective realization of my own inadequacy; the “pleasant” is a fossilized remains of a past that has either been legally dissolved or has summarily canceled me because I failed the requisite status tests of the South Calcutta gentry.

I cannot wallow in nostalgia or “cherish” the ghosts of departed affection; for me, memories are not a sanctuary but a meristematic growth of thorns that I must actively, violently suppress to prevent them from tormenting my already fragile, bipolar-racked psyche. I am a man who must lobotomize his own history daily just to achieve the hollow peace of a rice cooker’s click.

So I depend on a water bottle and a rice cooker and a phone and a tablet and a pile of books, and that sounds like a defeat until you remember that dependence is universal; it’s just that some people depend on more expensive illusions.

The Accord is gone now, of course. Scrapped, sold, dissolved back into the metal economy. Somewhere its atoms are playing new roles, reincarnated without the metaphysical fanfare. The seat fabric is probably landfill. The engine block might be part of a rebar rod in a building in some other city. Matter is wonderfully unromantic.

And me?

I’m here, first day of 2026, watching my own inventory like a customs officer at the border of a small life. The phone tells me the date. The rice cooker will click later. The water bottle will knock again when I set it down. The books will wait, unbothered by my melodrama.

I place the bottle by the mattress, not ceremonially—just with the small care you give to the things that don’t leave.

The year begins, as years always do, not with fireworks or divine announcements, but with a cheap plastic sound on a hard floor, and the quiet realization that my most faithful companions still don’t have faces.