Puja Pandal Din and the Loneliness of a Bipolar Brain

The music that wafts in, or should I say the din, because every pandal in the full 360 degrees around me is playing to a different game, nostalgia here, Gen Z there, whatever somebody found on an uploaded playlist somewhere else, arrives through the shut windows as something that has ceased to be music at all. One song cuts across another, a voice is swallowed by a beat that does not belong to it, and whatever anybody meant to play has become a loud, incoherent, shrill dispute inside my room. It inspires nothing except nausea. I dislike this sort of cacophony, as plenty of people my age do, though during Puja one apparently needs a better excuse than wanting to hear one’s own thoughts.

But I started writing this to describe the loneliness of bipolar depression during these few days, and I have already spent a paragraph complaining about the loudspeakers because they are easier to describe. They are outside. They have a location. There is presumably a switch. I can hear what sounds like an entire neighborhood enjoying itself and feel no nearer to anybody in it, and then feel worse because I cannot even receive other people’s enjoyment without its becoming another reminder of what I am unable to feel.

Puja has not properly started yet. Shasthi is still ahead of us, but in an age when you can have a stampede today, why wait for tomorrow. We are that age. We are certainly that crowd, the people of Calcutta, robbed of so many basic amenities the year around and then presented with a simulacrum of pleasantries, pleasures, royal riches we could never dream of possessing, all of it briefly available to walk through provided we keep moving because there are people behind us. For a few evenings we may enter a palace. We will, of course, be going back to the same room afterward.

And really these dreams are still cheap dreams, however much they cost to erect. Cloth and cardboard draped over wood and bamboo, lights arranged to make the temporary look eternal, enough glitter to keep the eye occupied while the rest of one’s life waits outside. Where wiring and fire precautions are neglected, the palace is also a fire hazard, but the LEDs do their work, twinkling a little grandeur into our eyes. The city can make itself look like something else for a few nights. I seem unable to do even that.

Religion and mythology, convenient fictions assembled and altered through centuries, continue to furnish the scenery. They may once have fitted the lives around them more comfortably; now so much of what they ask us to accept stands about as an anachronism, brightly illuminated and loudly defended. I cannot believe these nonexistent gods will come to our thwarted, clumsy, third-world lives in the City of Joy if push comes to shove. When something gives way, somebody human has to come and pull somebody else out. The goddess can remain magnificent throughout.

For a few days, though, we have an excuse for commerce and propaganda and a great many other things too long to list and, tonight, far too boring. Everything has its sponsor, its photograph, its important person in front of it. There is business to be done with all this happiness. Even unhappiness might be useful if somebody could persuade it to wear a logo.

And here I am, fifty-one, living alone, without steady paid work, trying to write about what it feels like to have so little place in any of this. Money matters. I cannot turn loneliness into an evening out simply by deciding that an evening out would be good for me. Even the apparently modest instruction to go somewhere and enjoy yourself assumes a few things about your pocket, your energy, your capacity to arrive among people without feeling that you have brought something embarrassing with you.

But having the money would not settle all of it either. I know myself well enough to know that. I dislike crowds and still ache for company. I want the noise to stop and somebody to stay. There is no tidy contradiction to resolve there, although explaining it can make me feel like an unreasonable customer who has rejected everything on the menu. I do not want to be entertained into submission. I would like to be with somebody without having to impersonate a man who is doing reasonably well.

The loneliness becomes especially difficult during Puja because there is so much apparent evidence against it. Look at the lights, look at the people, listen to the music, how can you possibly feel alone in all this. Easily, as it turns out. With a thoroughness that an ordinary evening does not always manage. The celebration gets into the room. The feeling of belonging to it does not. I am left with the noise and the additional knowledge that this is supposed to be a particularly happy time of year.

I sit here half asleep while my soporifics begin working, and the sentences become harder to hold together. Drowsiness has arrived; relief is less punctual. I feel useless in every way now, a dud standing outside the contemporary present, while the past supplies reasons I should have done better and the future offers very little I can imagine myself entering. Even remembering what I once knew, what I once did, can become another unpleasant exercise in accounting. All that education, all those years, and here is the evening I have managed to arrive at.

Sometimes the thought comes that it is a good thing people like me will be dead in a few years. I cannot make that thought respectable by calling it an observation. I know nothing of the sort about my lifespan. I know how long this evening feels, and how difficult it has become to imagine years that feel different.

That was what I was trying to write about before I wandered off into bamboo and cardboard and the municipal uses of mythology. The loneliness. The anguish of being unable to feel part of the life taking place close enough to make the windows vibrate. I can explain the irritation, argue about the religion, complain about the commerce, and still be sitting here with the part I have not managed to explain to anybody.

Another song starts before the previous one has finished. I have lost the thread of both. The windows are already shut.