Insomniac Pauper Invisible Man

Three seventeen in the morning and the ceiling fan is doing that thing where it clicks, with the smug regularity of a metronome that has read my bank statement. I am awake. Obviously. Sleep has become one of those luxury goods they keep behind glass at the airport, the kind you walk past, admire, and never purchase because who has that kind of liquid capital, who has that kind of trust in the machinery of rest. My eyes are open. My worries are open. Everything is open in this city except the doors that matter.

I came back. That is the original sin, isn’t it? I came back to Calcutta with plans in my teeth like a dead bird a cat brings home, expecting perhaps a nod, some recognition that this thing I had dragged across the world might be useful. I had worked in the US. Built systems, worked with databases, done things people needed done and paid me to do. I thought some of that would travel with me. The knowledge did. I still have it. I would quite like to exchange a little of it for food without first having to explain why a man who knows anything should need food so badly.

The city, meanwhile, had not particularly noticed I had left. Now I am back, a cautionary tale that even the cautionary tale-tellers have forgotten to tell. Poverty in this town is not just the absence of money. It is the presence of a particular kind of glass between you and the rest of humanity, a glass that lets them look through you to the advertisements on the other side. You can see people needing things you know how to do. You can explain that you know how to do them. You can keep explaining until you hear yourself and wish you would shut up.

There is a mathematics to this invisibility that no textbook will teach you, though perhaps they have hidden it in one of those fat books people buy and never read. Let me propose an equation, since I cannot seem to propose anything that pays. If money is $M$ and visibility is $V$, then in the current arrangement of things, $V \propto M^{2}$. As $M$ approaches zero, people find it increasingly difficult to detect you, even when you are sitting directly in front of them. You become a ghost wearing sandals. You are present, technically, in the room, in the meeting, in the WhatsApp group. Your messages are there. You can see them. You go back and read them, looking for the sentence that apparently made a reply impossible.

And the opinions. Christ, the opinions. I have them. I have them in abundance, I have them in spades, I have them leaking from my pores like cheap deodorant failing in the Calcutta humidity. I will tell you what is wrong with your business, how to structure your code, why the numbers in your report do not agree, and then, because apparently I have not learned to stop, I will explain how to fix it. You will nod. You will smile. You will do that thing with your eyebrows that suggests you are listening to the fan, not to me.

And I will explain it again. In more detail. Perhaps the first explanation was unclear. Perhaps a longer message will help. By the time I have finished, I have done more unpaid work and given you something longer to ignore.

I know how this looks. Here is a man telling other people how to fix things while his own life sits there visibly unfixed. If I know so fucking much, why am I here? I ask myself that too. Often enough that you needn’t worry about my having missed the contradiction. But knowing why a database is broken does not tell me how to make someone answer a message, or agree to pay for repairing it. I can do the work. Getting from that sentence to money in my account is where I keep getting stuck, and the longer I stay stuck, the less anyone believes the sentence.

There was a time when I was paid for what I knew. That is not a fantasy I have invented to make this room less embarrassing. Now I offer the same skills, with more years of using them, and my explanations land like paper airplanes in a hurricane. The work has not become imaginary. The person offering to do it has become difficult to take seriously. I have become a free PDF download in a world that judges value by the thickness of the spine and the pain of the purchase. Had someone paid two hundred rupees for my thoughts, they might at least read the preface. They would want to find out whether they had wasted their money. When I give them my time, only mine has been wasted, and that seems to be a tolerable arrangement.

I keep helping because I still want to be useful, and because some part of me keeps hoping that being useful will lead to being paid. There. That is the humiliating little hope under all this unsolicited expertise. Perhaps this person will remember. Perhaps the next thing will be actual work. Meanwhile I have already done this thing, and asking for money afterward feels like trying to change an agreement I never had the sense to make.

And I am old. Fifty-one. Not ancient, I know, please spare me the examples of men who started empires at sixty. I am fifty-one and trying to find a way to pay for being fifty-two. I do not have the luxury of treating the next ten years as an inspiring experiment. I have experience. I also have a long stretch without a regular income, and I know which of those two things needs more explaining. The years I spent working are further away now. The years I have spent trying to get work are right here, accumulating, making the next explanation worse.

In this city I feel like one of those chairs in the corner of a coffee shop that nobody sits on because it wobbles, but nobody throws out because that would require doing something about it. Still there. Takes up space. Occasionally useful for putting a bag on.

So I lie here. I lie here and I calculate. Not the equations of worth, not the mathematics of invisibility, but the simple arithmetic of survival. How much for the rent. How much for the food. What can wait, how long it can wait, and what I am going to say when it cannot wait anymore. I go through it again as if the problem might be an addition error, as if somewhere in the same few numbers there is an amount I have overlooked. There isn’t. I know there isn’t. I do it again.

The mosquitoes conduct their blood audits. The fan clicks. I think of all the things I could still do, ordinary useful things, a broken system repaired, a report that finally adds up, some tedious job made less tedious for someone, and I cannot understand why I am lying here unable to afford my own continued existence. Then I start explaining it to myself. Again. The whole fucking thing, from the beginning, as if I were the latest person who needed convincing.

I would like to sleep before I finish.