At times, when vicissitudes turn out to be too orderly and my intellect finds itself clawing at the walls of routine like a drunk aristocrat locked out of his cozy Kensington manor, I amuse myself by walking with groups of middle-class women from Hounslow. Not companions, mind you—specimens. A travelling symposium on anxiety, gossip, cholesterol, and spiritual tourism.
We gather under rain trees admitting the air smells practically of petrol, jasmine, and disappointment. Then the performance begins.
“Oh, Meera,” one gasps, clutching her dupatta as though auditioning for sainthood, “he came home at eleven last night. Eleven! And then he asked for dinner.”
“Disgraceful, twat,” another mutters with the moral gravity of a Supreme Court judge sentencing a war criminal, “men these days have no sanskaar.”
Then comes the inevitable whisper:
“And Kavita’s husband… apparently there are rumours.”
Rumours. Christ. These dames circulate rumours with the efficiency of Swiss banking systems. They discuss temples, affairs, husbands, daughters-in-law, bowel movements, and God with precisely the same tone of exhausted catastrophe. Their mentalities swing endlessly between piety and prurience like a broken church bell in a storm.
And then—typically—they turn to me.
“But why do you work so hard?” one demands, sounding sincerely distressed. “You are not married. No offspring also.”
“No.”
“Then what is the need?”
The need.
There it is: the great middle-class philosophy of continuation. According to this clan, a dude may largely labour if he possesses a wife, three litters, a house loan, and chronic hypertension. Ambition sans domestic burden appears to them dubious, about pornographic. If you earn well without offspring, gentry ganders at you as withal you are hoarding gold bars in a bunker whilst laughing maniacally in silk pyjamas.
And this disease is not confined to the middle class. Oh, no. The rich simply wear better shoes while speaking the same guff.
Among my intimate circles—those palatial in bequeathed treasure and docile narcissism—the questions purely become more expensively phrased.
“Old boy,” someone utters over a ten-thousand-pound whisky, “you’re terribly committed to the gym lately. Who’s the lady?”
Another smirks. “Come now. No joe trains that consistently unless he’s trying to impress someone.”
Seemingly self-discipline is unattainable minus an erection attached to it.
Clearly a mister cannot deadlift saving some matron with excellent cheekbones has shattered his feelings first. The sheer wanker absurdity of it all is almost athletic in itself.
What saddens me is not merely the stupidity, but the confidence with which it is carried. These herds literally believe brio exists chiefly in approved formats. Matrimony. Broods. School admissions. Weekend brunches. Lipid medication. Death.
That is the script.
Anything outside it produces panic.
If a fella has no descendants, why does he require wealth? If a couple chooses not to procreate, why are they working so hard? Who comes into the money?
The entire ontology resembles a badly run relay race where wearied folks spend their lives passing batons to scions who at no time solicited to participate in the blooming event.
It is like quizzing a painter, “Why paint if no one buys the canvas?” Or besieging a pianist, “Why practise if Carnegie Hall never calls?” It reduces entity to utility. Everything must justify itself commercially, reproductively, socially.
Otherwise association becomes uncomfortable.
And community, let us be candid, is largely composed of petrified citizens desperately policing one another so they may avoid confronting the horrifying emptiness of their innermost esprit.
Most mortals do not think. They acquire thoughts in the manner like one acquires old furniture: dusty, ugly, impractical, but impossible to throw away inasmuch as grandmother would have wanted it.
Common sense, in myriad cases, has migrated completely out of the brain and settled somewhere near the ankles.
And nowhere is this idiocy more obvious than in the matter of infants.
Society talks of progeny not as anthropoidal beings, but as retirement schemes with birthdays.
“At least our successor will look after us.”
“There must be someone for old age.”
Presumably heirs are sentimentally spontaneous support Labradors with engineering degrees.
No one pronounces the placid part aloud: that innumerable plebeians have kiddies considering they are terrified of being lonely. Terrified of ageing. Terrified of confronting the fact that survival is intrinsically solitary.
So they create tiny creatures and silently hand them a debt they under no circumstances consented to paying.
Love becomes investment.
Parenthood becomes insurance.
Family becomes a pension policy with emotional blackmail indentured.
Absolute bellend bollocks.
A baby is not a sauntering life-protection document. Nor should one build an exclusive breath around the hope that someone else will eventually sit beside one’s hospital bed pretending not to check WhatsApp.
One must live for oneself.
Not selfishly. Not cruelly. But honestly.
And the same applies to the body.
The number of heads who assume my commitment to fitness ought to originate from romance is genuinelystaggering.
“There must be a woman.”
Why?
Why the fuck must there always be a woman?
Can a man not humbly wish to preserve his own health? Must every disciplined act be fastened to seduction like some cheap cologne advertisement?
No, darling. I go to the health club owing to this protoplasm is the only permanent residence I possess, and unlike most landlords, biology is an unforgiving cunt when neglected.
If I fall ill tomorrow, a few may sympathise. They may send flowers. They may post tragic captions online. Sundry may even cry.
But none of them can suffer in my place.
Zip can bench-press your cancer for you.
Zero can cardio their way through your heart attack.
Zilch can squat your depression into submission as you sit there eating biscuits and romanticising self-destruction.
We are fundamentally alone in the maintenance of ourselves.
That is not pessimism.
That is sensibility stripped naked of decorative hogwash.
To remain fit, then, is not vanity. It is responsibility. It is basic self-respect. It is the acknowledgement that one owes oneself care before performing care theatrically for the approval of others.
But culture dislikes this idea enormously therefore civilisation depends upon collective delusion.
Idiots want you knackered. Espoused cause you “should be.” Parenting given “time is running out.” Extant according to templates written by deceased dimwits who themselves probably perished confused and constipated.
And the tragedy is that most seldom inquest any of it.
They circumnavigate from educational institution to marriage to rearing to funerals with the dull obedience of cattle strolling toward an abattoir howbeit deliberating interest rates.
Then they imply at someone living differently and become disconcerted.
Not because you are wrong.
But because your existence exposes the possibility that they on no account categorically chose theirs.
That is the real horror.
Not seclusion.
Not ageing.
Not even death.
But waking up one afternoon at sixty-three alongside someone equally bewildered and comprehending you have spent your whole specie performing a role in a play you barely blinkingly auditioned for.
And still—still—they persist.
These people mistake conformity for wisdom and repetition for meaning. They inherit fears from their parents, then lovingly hand them to their children like ancestral jewellery.
And when confronted with someone who refuses the script, they stare as peasants previously stared at astronomers: suspicious, irritated, faintly offended by the essence of alternative actualities.
I confess, beneath my irritation, there is pity.
Now that many of these imbeciles shall dwell and die beyond ever truly meeting themselves. They will know their spouse’s blood pressure, their neighbour’s scandal, their son’s exam scores, their daughter-in-law’s shortcomings, the opening hours of each shrine within a forty-mile radius—
—but not their private belfries.
Not their personal souls.
Not once.
And bloody hell, what a catastrophic waste of a human cycle that is.
