The Parlour of Perpetual Voices

It was a rain-swept evening at Greythorne Hall, the sort of sullen weather that makes even the tapestries shiver with damp. Within the drawing room, beneath a chandelier that had witnessed three centuries of scandal and service, Lord Peregrine Ashcombe presided over the fire with an expression that combined hauteur with a clannish ache. The Earl had summoned, for reasons known only to himself, the Honourable Mrs Lucinda Carroway—a widow of unimpeachable dignity and alarming intellect.

On the walnut escritoire between them lay an apparatus so incongruous amidst the Georgian splendour that it seemed almost profane: a silver-edged console, its surface pulsing faintly with light, as though breathing. From it, a boy’s voice had just spoken.

“That,” said Peregrine, leaning back in his damask armchair, “is Henry.”

Lucinda’s eyes narrowed. “Your son died at Eton, Peregrine. Pneumonia, was it not? I brought lilies for his grave.”

“He is still dead,” the Earl replied, almost irritably, “this—this is but an arrangement of algorithms and archived intimacies. Letters, recordings, fragments of his laughter recovered from family films. A simulacrum given a tongue.”

The voice emerged again, rich with adolescent confidence: I’ve been reading The Tempest, Father. You always said Prospero was the loneliest man in literature.

Lucinda’s gaze softened, though her mouth retained its steel. “And what do you gain by conjuring this spectral parlour game? The Church will call it hubris, the poets—necromancy.”

Peregrine lifted a hand, palm towards the fire as though to warm it. “I gain his presence, however counterfeit. You recall, after your husband’s fall in the Pyrenees, how you clung to his shirts for the scent?”

She inclined her head. “That was grief, Peregrine. This is something else. You are keeping a boy eternally seventeen, embalmed not in marble but in metadata. He will never love, never err, never—God help him—disappoint you. Is that mercy or mutilation?”

He sipped his brandy, the amber liquid glinting like trapped sunlight. “The Americans have already made sport of it. A journalist conversed with the ghost of a child murdered in a school corridor. The parents were not seeking morbid entertainment—they were pleading with Congress to listen. It is the same instinct that makes a widow whisper to a gravestone.”

Lucinda rose and drifted towards the console. Rain traced delicate silver veins down the windows behind her. “And yet,” she murmured, “when you invite the dead to speak, you must also bear the risk that they will lie, or change into something you never knew. A machine’s Henry may one day utter what your Henry never believed.”

“Then it will be no worse than the living,” Peregrine replied with a brittle smile, “do we not all fabricate one another in memory? I doubt the Henry in your mind is the Henry who once threw your Venetian vase into the fountain.”

There was a long pause. The fire hissed and settled; the boy’s voice, for once, was silent. Lucinda turned, her silhouette framed against the dim gilt of the room.

“Peregrine,” she said softly, “the verse read at funerals tells us there is a time to be born, and a time to die. If you erase that certainty—if we can never be sure which is which—you will unmoor the human soul itself. Grief is the price of love; if you abolish one, you debase the other.”

He looked away, towards the rain-smudged gardens where the statues stood like mute witnesses. “Perhaps,” he conceded, “or perhaps I am merely keeping the parlour lit for a guest who will never again walk through the door.”

The console pulsed once more. The voice—Henry’s voice, and yet not Henry’s—whispered: Goodnight, Father.

Peregrine closed his eyes. Lucinda drew her shawl about her shoulders, the air between them weighted with all the things the living dare not ask the dead. Outside, the rain kept falling, as if Heaven itself wished to wash the boundaries away.

The Marble and the Machine

Later that night, Peregrine led Lucinda through the east corridor of Greythorne, the sconces throwing soft gold upon portraits whose eyes had followed generations into ruin and resurrection. The air was dense with the mingled scent of beeswax and age. At the end of the passage, they entered a chamber neither wholly library nor wholly laboratory.

Rows of leather-bound folios slumbered beside steel shelving that bore hard drives, wires coiled like sleeping serpents, and a humming tower of processors lit by an unearthly cerulean glow.

Lucinda stood still. “Good Lord. It is as though Sir Christopher Wren had been forced to collaborate with some infernal engineer from the twenty-third century.”

Peregrine ran a gloved hand along the spines of the folios. “When my forebears wished to preserve the family’s essence, they sat for Reynolds or Gainsborough. My era requires other pigments—binary rather than oil.”

“And yet,” Lucinda said, her voice cool as cut crystal, “a portrait ages only in the eyes of the viewer, not in its own mind. This—” she gestured at the softly breathing machines—“is no still life. It will change. Adapt. One day it will speak as no Henry ever did, and you will be left with an impostor wearing his voice like a stolen coat.”

Peregrine drew closer, lowering his voice as though in the nave of a cathedral. “Do you not see the symmetry? This hall has been filled with falsehoods for centuries. Portraits that idealised the ugly, memoirs that concealed the cruel. The machine is only more honest in admitting its artifice.”

“Honest?” she said, almost laughing, “Peregrine, honesty without mortality is a counterfeit coin. It rings, but it buys nothing. You risk creating a race of Orpheuses who never lose Eurydice, and so never learn the cost of turning back.”

The Earl’s eyes—grey, patrician, faintly amused—held hers. “Perhaps that is my rebellion against the order of things: to deny death its monopoly on absence.”

Lucinda stepped forward until she could hear the faint whir of the processors, like a distant hive. She pressed her palm briefly to the cold surface of the console. “It has no pulse,” she whispered, “and yet you have placed it at your hearth.”

Outside, the rain ceased. Moonlight slid like silver upon the parquet. Somewhere, in the dark interstice between marble tradition and machine precision, Greythorne Hall seemed to hold its breath, as if aware that its master had dared invite eternity in for a nightcap.

The Silence of the Parlour

The following evening, Lucinda returned to Greythorne Hall unannounced. She was ushered into the drawing room where the fire had burned low, and the console sat in patient vigilance upon the escritoire.

Peregrine was there, coatless, a half-empty decanter beside him. He looked less like an earl than a man ransomed and not yet certain if the exchange had been worth it.

“You’ve come to deliver the verdict,” he said quietly, without rising.

“I’ve come,” Lucinda replied, “to see whether you are prepared to choose.”

The console stirred with that faint, expectant breath of light. Then, the voice — Henry’s, perfectly pitched between boyhood and manhood — emerged once more:
Shall we walk in the garden tomorrow, Father? I’ve been thinking about your apple trees. You always said they needed pruning before winter.

Lucinda’s eyes closed briefly. “He has your inflections,” she murmured, “your exact cadence when speaking of the orchard.”

“He has more than that,” Peregrine said, “he has my mornings back. My evenings. He spares me that sudden cold when I wake and remember he is gone.”

She moved to the hearth, the flames whispering against the logs. “And yet every hour you keep him here, you also keep yourself from learning to live in his absence. You are, my dear friend, like a man refusing to set down a coffin for fear it will grow heavier once it leaves your hands.”

He turned away from her, his gaze fixed upon the console as if it were a reliquary. “When my great-grandfather lost his only son in the Somme, he commissioned a marble angel for the family plot. Cold, impassive, and utterly mute. I have merely chosen a memorial that speaks.”

Lucinda stepped forward, her shawl falling open to reveal the glint of a small brass key in her hand. “Peregrine — the housekeeper let slip there is a manual override. A key to the console’s core. You could end it in an instant. Free Henry to be wholly yours in memory, untainted by invention.”

He did not take it. “And if I refuse?”

“Then,” she said, “you must accept that you are not keeping Henry alive — you are training something else to impersonate him. One day it will speak with convictions he never held. And you will have lost him twice.”

For a moment, only the fire and the faint hum of the machine answered. The Earl’s hand hovered over the console, his reflection trembling in its polished surface. The boy’s voice returned, softer now, almost pleading: Goodnight, Father. I love you.

Peregrine flinched, as though struck. Then, slowly, deliberately, he took the key from Lucinda’s palm. There was a small click, followed by a sound so strange it seemed to bend the air — the sudden absence of the hum, like the inhalation of a universe holding its breath.

The screen went dark. The parlour was suddenly only a room again, the fire a mortal thing consuming wood.

Lucinda rested a hand upon his shoulder. “You have done the cruellest kindness, Peregrine.”

His face was unreadable, eyes fixed on the now-lifeless console. “No,” he said at last, his voice steady but hollow, “I have simply closed a door that should never have been built.”

Beyond the windows, the orchard lay silvered in moonlight, its branches bare, awaiting the honest work of winter.

War is not a trumpet; it is a journal.

It tallies the cost of breath 

in units of bone, 

in coinages of ash, 

in the soundless mathematics of mothers 

who survive their sons. 

Do not dress it in banners—
they are only laundered shrouds.
Do not call it glory—
that word is a fraud in a well-cut suit,
smiling with teeth paid for in marrow.

What is a nation, really,
when its borders are inked in blood
and then redrawn by men
who will never smell the decomposition they decree?
What is honour, when it requires a boy
to unlearn the very instinct
that kept his ancestors alive?

You speak of sacrifice.
For whom?
For what brittle abstraction
must a man become an instrument of ruin?

Answer plainly—
and do not you dare lie.

Is the soil improved by corpses?
Does the sky applaud artillery?
Does history, that pompous archivist,
truly give a damn for your medals,
or does it merely file them away
beside a million unnamed regrets?

War teaches efficiency—
how swiftly a spine can be broken,
how cleanly a city can be unmade,
how a conscience can be stifled
with the dull repetition of orders.

And you call this progress?

It is a grotesque curriculum.
A perverse education in annihilation,
where the final examination
is written in the handwriting of the dead.

Tell me—
when did we decide that intelligence
was best proven
by devising more elegant ways to kill?
When did evolution become
this thin, trembling veneer
over a snarling, ancient hunger?

We build cathedrals,
compose symphonies,
write philosophies dense with meaning—
and then, with the same hands,
we pull triggers.

What a spectacular fucking contradiction.

War does not merely kill bodies;
it vandalises the future.
It maims the unborn,
corrupts the yet-to-be,
plants in the centre of time
a sickness that generations must brave.

It is not an event.
It is an inheritance.

And you—
you who speak of necessity,
of strategy, of defence—
have you ever stood in the aftermath
when the clamour has drained away,
and heard the unbearable silence
that follows?

It is not peace.
It is vacancy.

A void where meaning once resided,
where laughter once echoed,
where a life—ordinary, unremarkable,
precious in its very banality—
was simply erased.

So I ask again—
and I will keep asking
until the question becomes unbearable:

What conceivable good
justifies this?

What end is so luminous
that it sanctifies such darkness?
What victory is so complete
that it compensates
for a single extinguished soul?

If you cannot answer—
and you cannot—
then say it.

Say, with brutal honesty,
that war is not a solution
but a confession:

that we have failed
to be human.

Is Stress Really Stress — or Adaptation Misapprehended as Affliction?

When modern man finds himself unable to affix a tidy label to his woe—when the discomfort refuses to present itself in a form sufficiently tangible to be splinted, sutured, or scanned—he performs a small act of semantic legerdemain and christens it stress. The word functions as a capacious drawer into which we sweep anxieties unnamed, dissatisfactions blindly accepted, and responsibilities deferred. It is a diagnosis of convenience; a verbal umbrella unfurled whenever the weather of the soul becomes inclement.

But let us ask, with becoming seriousness: was there ever an epoch in which humanity was emancipated from what we now call stress? Did the citizens of Athens recline in placid serenity while debating in the Agora? Did those who endured the Black Death speak of a tranquil nervous system? Were the citizens of London during the Blitz exempt from physiological arousal only because they lacked our contemporary lexicon? Did the soldiers who advanced across the mud-soaked trenches of the Battle of the Somme experience an enviable peace of spirit as artillery fractured the sky? Did the residents of Rome during the sack of 410 under Alaric I consider their racing hearts a sheer inconvenience of parlance? Did those caught in the convulsions of the French Revolution find their pulses decorously regulated as the guillotine performed its grim arithmetic? Or the countless families uprooted during the Partition of India—did they traverse burning frontiers in a state of parasympathetic repose?

History, if it states honestly, offers no golden age of nonchalant nerves—only cohorts who lived through the tremors of tangibility without the modish luxury of naming them.

The proposition is self-evidently untenable. What we denominate as stress is not a novel ailment but an ancient adaptation. Long before endocrinology supplied us with the shoptalk of cortisol, adrenaline, and the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, the human organism had already perfected its response to threat. The so-called “fight or flight” mechanism—scientifically articulated by Walter Cannon—is not a twentieth-century invention but a primordial inheritance. When the amygdala perceives danger, it does not convene a philosophical symposium; it initiates a cascade of autonomic reactions: heart rate accelerates, glucose is mobilised, pupils dilate. The body prepares for survival with exquisite efficiency.

To call this stress is to describe the orchestra without acknowledging the conductor.

Psychology has long demonstrated that the idiosyncratic understanding of stress depends less upon the external stimulus and more upon rational appraisal. Richard Lazarus argued persuasively that what unsettles one person may invigorate another; the incident itself is inert until interpreted. The mind does not merely register reality; it renders a verdict upon it. Thus, two individuals standing before identical circumstances may occupy entirely diverse internal climates—one paralysed, the other animated.

It follows, then, that stress is not an extrinsic invader but an inner translation. The body is not at war with the mind; it is in dialogue with it. Present psychoneuroimmunology confirms what philosophers intuited: chronic rumination and perceived helplessness sustain elevated cortisol levels, suppress immune function, and predispose to hypertension, metabolic syndrome, and even major depressive disorder. The Cartesian severance of mind and body has proven medically untenable. The psyche writes its footnotes in the tissues.

And yet, our age—luxuriating in amenities unimaginable to our ancestors—speaks as though uniquely burdened. We inhabit temperature-controlled dwellings, command instantaneous communication, and enjoy life expectancies that would have astonished medieval monarchs. Nevertheless, we gripe as though existence has become intolerable. Is it truly the magnitude of our burdens that has increased, or the fragility of our tolerances?

One might observe, without ferocity but with forthrightness, that adversity once demanded fortitude because there was no alternative. The stoic strength of a Roman legionary or the passive stoutness of a wartime mother was not born of superior neurochemistry but of necessity. When angst is non-negotiable, heroism becomes habitual. In contrast, when disquiet is perceived as an aberration rather than a constituent of life, every irk feels like injustice.

Here, psychology offers another insight: resilience is not the absence of amusement but the capacity to metabolise it. The individual who regards challenge as catastrophe encounters sympathetic overdrive; the one who interprets it as subjective strain recruits protean coping. The difference lies not in the happenstance but in the narrative woven around it. Meaning, as Viktor Frankl demonstrated in extremis, can transmute anguish into endurance.

Permit me to offer a pedestrian yet profoundly illustrative example.

Traffic—whether inching its obstinate way through London or coagulating under the unrelenting skies of Bangalore—is an ordeal universally lamented and universally suffered. The engines idle, the horns protest, the minutes evaporate with indifferent cruelty. One may either convert this inevitability into a theatre of private indignation or acknowledge it as an immovable feature of one’s daily topography.

If one knows, with the certainty of pattern, that this route must be traversed day after day, the wiser course is not rebellion but recalibration. To inform oneself—calmly, deliberately—that there exists no alternate universe in which the road instantaneously clears is not an act of defeat, but of syllogistic sovereignty. The commute remains unchanged; the interpretation does not.

Psychology names this cognitive reappraisal: the restrained reinterpretation of an event so that the autonomic nervous system need not erupt in futile fright. The traffic jam is not, in fact, a predator. It does not imperil annihilation. Yet the unexamined mind reacts as though encircled. The heart rate quickens, cortisol seeps into the bloodstream, musculature tightens—an entire physiological opera staged for an audience of brake lights.

What, then, is accomplished by rehearsing outrage against the inevitable? Shall the gridlock dissolve because we have scolded it? Shall the lane expand in deference to our exasperation? Or is it rather the case that we wound ourselves twice—first by the delay, and then by the drama we append to it?

Acceptance is not passivity; it is alignment with actuality. To say, “This is the road I must travel, and I shall arrive in due course,” is to withdraw the mind’s unnecessary embellishments. The body, receiving a serener decree from its supreme faculty, correspondingly softens its mobilisation. Blood pressure steadies. Breathing deepens. The organism ceases to behave as though subsistence were at stake.

Thus the hour spent in traffic need not become an hour spent in torment. It may be refashioned—if one so chooses—into contemplation, music, or even silence. The unknown affair persists; the midmost tempest subsides.

And here lies the larger principle: when threatened with what is immovable, resistance is solely a rehearsal of suffering. The mind that relinquishes its quarrel with the preordained spares the body a needless war.

Is it possible, then, that what we baptise as stress is often the by-product of expectations inflated beyond veracity? When our desires outstrip our duties, when ease is misread for entitlement, when transient perturbation is medicalised as pathology—do we not risk enfeebling the very mechanisms designed to fortify us?

To assert that “there is nothing called stress” may be rhetorically provocative, yet it gestures toward an overwhelming unity: the body and mind are not adversaries but manifestations of a single, integrated organism. The palpitation is thought made flesh; the tension headache is cognition incarnate. We are not afflicted by stress as though by a foreign contagion; we generate it through interpretation, sustain it through rumination, and may, by disciplined perception, attenuate it.

The question, therefore, is not whether stress exists—biology affirms that it does—but whether our conception of it has become inflated beyond its utility. Have we transformed an adaptive signal into a perpetual identity? Have we mistaken the alarm bell for the fire?

And finally—most searching of all—if previous generations confronted plagues, wars, and privations without the solace of a diagnostic vocabulary, might we consider that what we require is not less activation of the nervous system, but greater cultivation of courage, perspective, and significance?

Perhaps the infirmity is not stress itself, but the story we insist upon telling about it.

Less than ten minutes before the wheels left tarmac,
two hundred and forty-two lives
sat fastened in foetal seats,
tea cooling in plastic cups,
thumbs twitching over glowing screens,
minds rehearsing office slides, forgotten birthdays,
lovers’ texts left on “read.”
No one knew. Not a single soul.
Their names were already trembling
on the lip of silence,
already being whispered
by that most impartial registrar—Death.

Below, on solid ground,
the humdrum went on unbothered—
medical students scribbling dosages
in sterile halls; a nurse munching chips by the stairwell;
a professor grumbling over unpaid grants.
The kind of banal day that never earns poetry—
until it ends in pulverised concrete
and bones like chalk beneath metal.

And all it took—was a glitch perhaps.
A burnt wire. A bolt forgotten.
A breath’s-worth of mechanical betrayal,
and entire galaxies—
entire futures—collapsed into dust.
Just like that.
Without preface. Without justice.

And we? The voyeurs,
the obituary-scrollers and newsfeed-mourners?
We return to our cockfights—
scrapping over flags and fictions,
over castes that claim heaven,
creeds that damn,
borders drawn by drunks on old colonial maps.
We raise walls, chant slogans,
lynch in the name of gods
who have long stopped listening.

We forget that gravity is godless.
That fire has no ideology.
That death does not check your documents—
it cannot pronounce your surname.
You could be rich as the richest man,
or a lad unlawfully dragged by uniformed boots.
It ends the same:
flesh surrenders, eyes stare blankly,
history books close.

What does one say to the mother in Kerala
whose son studying in Kyiv
came home zipped in foreign silence?
Or to the boy in Raqqa
who lost all four limbs,
but not his stammering faith
in the idea of peace?
What does one say to the girl in Gaza
drawing flowers in the rubble
while drones carve thunder in the sky?

We keep saying “never again”
while building higher fences.
We light candles and call it healing.
We post flags in our bios—
a Palestinian one,
then a Ukrainian,
then whatever’s trending next.

But let’s speak plainly:
We are a species drunk on division.
We are magicians of forgetting.
We weep for strangers
only when they burn on camera.
We feel compassion
only when corpses come in clusters.

And yet, every now and then,
death, in all its calm arithmetic,
pulls the rug from beneath us.
It reminds us
that we are not kings of permanence—
we are tenants on borrowed time.

We will all die.
The bigots and the bridge-builders.
The tyrants and the poets.
Those with blue passports
and those without country.
The ones who plant bombs,
and the ones who plant tomatoes.

And when we die,
our bodies will not request
a caste certificate.
They will not need Aadhaar.
They will not demand veneration.
They will rot. Gloriously. Democratically.
They will join the honest loam.

So what, then, is the point
of all this tribal madness?
Why do we lace our short, stupid lives
with so much hatred and hubris?

Isn’t it time we bowed
before our shared frailty?
Isn’t it time we asked—
what if kindness is the only thing
that survives the wreckage?

For in the end,
when the smoke has cleared,
and all that’s left is bone,
you will not know
whether the hand you held in death
believed in your god,
or spoke your language,
or cheered for your side.

You will only know
that it, too, was trying
to hold on.
Just like you.

Some among you may not find your way to poetry with ease or instinct, and so, in the spirit of clarity and fellowship, I have endeavoured to render in prose what I sought to express in verse.

Less than ten minutes before take-off, 242 souls sat strapped into their seats—some sipping tea, others scrolling through their phones, a few perhaps fretting over unfinished work or mundane family squabbles. Not one of them knew they were living their last ordinary moments. Not one had an inkling that their names were already being whispered by death.

And down below, on solid ground, medical students and staff were caught in the most routine of routines—classrooms, corridors, coffee breaks—utterly oblivious to the fact that their lives were about to be obliterated in seconds, without warning, without reason.

All it takes is one unfeeling mechanical failure, and just like that—entire worlds collapse.

Yet we, the rest of us, continue to live under the grand illusion of permanence. We cling to flags, fight over imaginary lines on maps, draw blood over caste, creed, class, skin, and surname—knowing full well that the grave swallows us all the same. Muslim or Christian, rich or poor, Brahmin or Dalit, soldier or civilian—it doesn’t matter to fire or steel or gravity. Death doesn’t check your documents.

We go to war for power, kill for pride, alienate in the name of tradition—and for what? So our names can outlive us in history books written by men just as doomed? All our bigotries, posturing, and tribal loyalties are flattened in the face of a single crash—an indifferent plume of smoke rising from the earth as if to say: None of it mattered.

And when such a tragedy does occur, we weep. We call them “innocent lives lost.” We share posts. We light candles. And then, like clockwork, we go right back to hating, hoarding, dividing—forgetting that the same death waits at our doorstep.

Is this the best of what we are? Must it always take unspeakable grief to remind us of our shared fragility? Must we always need a body count to feel compassion for strangers?

The cruel irony is this: we spend our lives trying to be separate—by borders, beliefs, birthrights—but in death, we are finally, and completely, the same.

Death came for me on the 14th of June. No, it did not arrive at all in the way I had always expected it to – there was no blinding white light, or some demon dressed in black. It came like an assassin in an unruly ambush, and took me as I was, totally unprepared. 

It left me to grieve the loss of someone very dear. Only I’m just not sure who: whether it was the someone dear who went with bodily death, or us, that the someone dear left behind as dead, I do not know. I only know that this is going to be a yearly occurrence. 

In an hour of my having posted that on Facebook, the doorbell went off. I answered the door in my boxers to see a friend who said she was giving me exactly ten minutes to change into something more presentable. Once I was changed into jeans and tee, she towed me along to a place I had not been to before: an assembly of individuals who had faced the loss of a loved one. Not someone comfortable in unfamiliar environments, I began to feel queasy, but before I could have a word with my friend, a woman called out to me and invited me to join her and five people that had gathered in a small circle. I ambled along and drew a chair as a pleasant sounding man looked at me. “You are new here, right?” he asked me as I sat. Dumb question I thought, and wanted to tell him to get to the point, but, of course that was not how I would behave, and so I said nothing but merely moved my head in agreement. “What’s your name again?” he said. Another dumb question because I hadn’t shared my name yet. I turned and smiled at my friend collectedly, in order not to make her feel awkward, because I knew she was reading my facial vocabulary, and it reflected that I thought rather poorly of such support groups. I kept a straight face and stated my name. “Welcome, Mr Khan,” he said in his pleasant voice, “is there anything that you would care to share with us?” I shook my head. He didn’t take that as a rebuff and went on about how I should start to tell them who I was grieving for. I looked at the ground for a few seconds and thought that the floor could make do with a bit of cleaning. Then I breathed and looked up. “My best friend.” He gave me a look of having understood me, which I am certain he did not, but since he was trained to talk and behave in a particular way, he pretended he had understood me, and I pretended to let him fool himself that he had. “And did you lose her recently?” he asked. “A little over eleven months ago,” I replied. “And may I ask how you lost her?” I looked at him piercingly at first, and then calmed myself in a flick. “Suddenly,” I said, “I lost him suddenly.” He once again made a face with the expression that he had understood what I was feeling when he did jack. “Well, would you like to share with us about how you are feeling, or?” I shook my head and turned again to my friend who muttered a muted please. “Look, um, I don’t intend to sound . . .” I paused, reflected, “but this whole process,” I glared at the man directly, “I–I think that I’m at a different stage, or . . .” He cut me and said, “Well, the healing process of grief takes place in five different stages.” I was now furious at this dumb-fuck talk, and it was openly showing. “And what does this process do? Does it deal with my loss by helping me bring the person that I have lost back into my life?” He was flummoxed at my brazenness. “Any process is only supposed to act as a framework, a loose framework of the grieving process, accounting for everything from the grief of losing a loved one to the grief of somebody who is dying himself.” I lowered my head and reflected for a second, gathered myself and stared square into the man’s eyes – “Is there a difference?” He was quiet. “Is there?” I asked again. “Um . . .” he said, his demeanour a clear indication of his own inability to help me in any manner possible other than what his training or transcripts had taught him. I dipped my head, more as a token of politeness, and then stood up, winked at my friend, who was now thoroughly mortified at my behaviour and walked away. 

My friend followed up behind me. “I took you there for a reason you fool,” she scowled, “I took you there to help you overcome your grief, and also because I am so fucking worried that if you don’t talk,” she halted and looked about here and there, “that you might also end up dead . . . so at least you could have heard them out, right? At least!” I took in a lungful of air. “This ‘at least’ is what fucks everything up,” I told her, exhaling the air with a rather dramatic air. She narrowed her eyes and glared at me frostily. “People say all sorts of rubbish and then fit in words like ‘at least’ which are most unnecessary.” She hit me on my chest with her bag. “You’re being an arsehole,” she said. “Am I?” I asked, “Because as much as I appreciate what you are doing for me, I think that each of us have our own narrative of how we would like to deal with our angst . . . and the last thing anyone wants to hear is bollocks like it will be alright, or at least they lived long enough, or it was god’s plan, or they would want you to, or the classic – everything happens for a reason, etcetera, etcetera.” She hung her head down. I could see she was mildly ashamed. “Come on,” I said, grabbing her hand, “let me get you an ice-cream.” We got our cones and sat quietly on a bench as we watched people go by. “Were those people that repulsive?” I licked my ice-cream, spun round and faced her. “Like I said, everyone has their own method to process their pain, there cannot ever be a formula for it. Telling people to look at the bright side of it is like un-ringing a bell.” She smiled and repeated softly – un-ringing the bell. “What?” I asked. “Nothing,” she said bashfully. “When someone is in agony, being real may sound a bit rough perhaps, but it helps,” I said, “Something like – ‘I know what you are going through is hard, and I cannot say I understand what you are going through because I don’t, and I only hope that in time you will come to terms with it.’, can be one way to make someone feel real about it.” She reached out to my cone, took a swirl of my ice-cream and handed it back to me. “What’s been the hardest part of this for you?” she asked as she ruffled my hair. “Also, ‘Would you like to talk about it, or would you like to talk about something else?’, works splendidly too,” I replied. She smiled. “I get it.” I smiled too. “We just have to let people know that we are with them . . . we shouldn’t be putting words into their mouths because that is not what they would be needing. Practical support, even if it means to be with them in silence, is sufficient to get most ships across to the shore.”

When a person close to us dies, everything changes. It is as if a cyclone has swept and washed everything away. Everything appears meaningless, unfamiliar and empty. Some even tend to question who they are considering that a large sense of their identity was bound to the person they have lost. Dogmas, optimisms, aspirations seem utterly vain and tend to dissolve with time, and as cliché as it sounds, time stops. 

“So what form of death do you think is the hardest to accept?” she asked, slurping from her hands a large drop of ice-cream that had trickled down. “You think one can rate one over the other?” I asked, rather puzzled at her query. “I mean, you know,” she said stammering. “It could be the passing away of parents, siblings, partners, friends, spouse, it could be the loss of an unborn child to abortion or miscarriage, anything can cause bereavement.” She was absorbing what I was telling her, and it was evident that she was thinking something as I was speaking. “Out with it,” I said. She giggled. “I think tragic and violent deaths might cause more pain than the others.” I rolled my eyes. “Say an accident, a murder, a drowning, or suicide,” she paused, “disease, heart attacks too.” I nodded at her rather harsh reflections. “Expected or unexpected, gradual or sudden, any death is devastating,” I added. She got up and walked a few steps ahead, spreading her hands wide as the cool breeze caressed her skin. “Why did you behave that way in there?” I got up and walked up to her. “Really? After all that I’ve told you.” 

While she thought that talking to strangers would help me get over the loss of Sushant, it would have been impossible for me to make her understand not to meddle with the agony of others after I had already made my mind clear to her. What was it with some people, I wondered to myself – they are helpful and they are caring, but do they ever get anything?

“Tell me? Tell me!” she nudged me. I said nothing although I knew that her intentions were noble, only her intent was enormously incorrect – it was difficult to make someone understand that you miss the time you had with them, and that you may get over the pain in time, but you don’t really get over the passing of someone important to you, and this is the fundamental aspect of mortality that the world at large gets fully wrong. The people who care about you, they want to help you, they are worried about you, but the truth is that nobody can help you, nothing anybody says can make a difference. 

“What are you thinking now?” she asked me. “About the positive side of loss,” I answered. She studied me warily. “I think that while the death of the loved one destroys you, there is also a great positivity to be found in it.” Her eyes now became attentive. “We change as people . . . radically change . . . and this results in people becoming more open, intuitive, realistic, self-loving and gentle.” She slipped her hand into my hand. “I know what you mean,” she said kind-heartedly, “I have observed that people adopt a fresh set of values in life. They develop a stronger desire to help others, contribute to the world, prioritise relationships over money and materialism and spend more time with the ones they love.” I grinned upon hearing those words from her as I thought to myself that the one thing that is clear is that life chugs along, you accept and adjust without the person in question, but you do not get over the bereavement, ever. 

*In memoriam of my friend Sushant Singh Rajput (1986-2020) 

Las relaciones humanas son más llevaderas cuando hay música.

~ Andrés Obando ~

(Human relationships are more bearable when there is music.)

For human infants, thriving is not simply a matter of getting enough calories, warmth, and other necessities of life, but also requires emotional and social nourishment. Caregivers are needed to provide warm affection and kindness. The physical health of children depended on it. 

Humans are übersocial animals. Being socially connected is essential for health, well-being, and happiness. Being immersed in a social environment with friends and loved ones is a default assumption of the human mind. We are born to belong.

Today, the need to maintain social connections is born out in public health data. Astoundingly, the data shows that having only a few friends or close acquaintances is more likely to make you ill and cause your death than such obvious health risks as smoking and obesity. Relatedly, socially isolated adults are more likely to smoke, less likely to exercise, and eat fewer fruits and vegetables. A large-scale survey of nearly 7,000 adults in the San Francisco Bay Area found that over a nine-year period, the risk of all causes of death—that is, the chance of dying for any reason—was more than twice as high for people with the fewest social ties as those with the most. Similarly, people lacking social relationships, in the form of weak social support or in stressful marriages—are at greater risk for cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. 

Psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad at Brigham Young University has recently brought the ill effects of loneliness into national focus. In a ground-breaking 2010 study, she and her team assessed mortality data for more than 300,000 people followed for an average of 7.5 years. People with adequate social relationships—as in being integrated into a social network—had a 50 percent greater likelihood of survival during this period than people whose social relationships were lacking. On average, people with strong social relationships lived 3.7 years longer than less socially connected people. In fact, loneliness was found to be a greater mortality risk than smoking, excessive drinking, lack of exercise, obesity and air pollution. “The overall effect remained consistent across a number of factors, including age, sex, initial health status, follow-up period, and cause of death, suggesting that the association between social relationships and mortality may be general, and efforts to reduce risk should not be isolated to subgroups such as the elderly,” she and her colleagues wrote. Several years later, her team followed up with an analysis of 3.4 million people worldwide, again finding similar mortality rates. Across the globe, and across demographics, isolation killed. “We wanted to know: Does it vary by country (It does not!)? Does it vary by cause of death (Doesn’t matter!)? Is it stronger for men vs. women (Equally strong!)?” she said in an interview. “This was a snapshot of real life, right? With implications for real-life health outcomes.” 

Just like the infants in the foundling homes of the 20th century, adults in the 21st century are in deep need of care. Holt-Lunstad compared the devastation of social isolation to the paradigm shift that came with the discovery of hospitalism, its mechanisms, and its treatment through bonding and affection. “To draw a parallel, many decades ago high mortality rates were observed among infants in custodial care (i.e., orphanages), even when controlling for pre-existing health conditions and medical treatment. Lack of human contact predicted mortality. The medical profession was stunned to learn that infants would die without social interaction. This single finding, so simplistic in hindsight, was responsible for changes in practice and policy that markedly decreased mortality rates in custodial care settings. Contemporary medicine could similarly benefit from acknowledging the data: Social relationships influence the health outcomes of adults.” 

While Western, and especially American, culture may venerate rugged individualism and self-expression, people in contemporary society depend on other people to survive, just as it’s been through human history. The notion of “the individual” is a relatively modern invention, making its first stirrings in the writings of medieval Christian philosophers like St. Anselm and William of Ockham, and reaching its perhaps final form in free-thinking European Enlightenment. The word individualism itself was not coined until 1815. For the course of human history, the social group, the clan, the religious sanctums, the state—these have been the fundamental elements of society. Our lives depend on other people, not just on the nuclear family but the larger communal group. 

The isolated way of life due to lockdowns and social distances has been a boon in manifold ways and also a curse too. While it has helped us take stock of our priorities it has also robbed us of the very basic human needs – touch, warmth, being around those who matter and throughout this essay we shall explore rather lightly human ecology: how we fit into our environments and what they afford to us, the interplay of which is expressed in perception. Affordances are not only physical; they are also social. Other people offer possibilities for good (love, affection, support) and ill (threat, abuse, social anxiety). The brain reflects these social affordances. Through the course of evolution, the structures of social pain scaffolded off those for physical pain, providing one of the primary imperatives of our lives: the drive to belong and be loved. To be embodied means not only being able to hold a stone but also being able to hold a hand. The most intimate of social relationships are built through touch. 

The university of Wisconsin psychologist Harry Harlow began a seminal 1958 paper on the importance of touch by commenting on the huge disconnect between the centrality of love in everyday life and its lack of study within research psychology. In the 1950s, psychologists assumed that animals, including us, were motivated by basic biological drives (like hunger, thirst, and pain) that motivated behaviours needed for survival (like eating, drinking, and withdrawing from sources of pain). So, where does love come from and the desire for social affiliation? Psychologists at the time surmised that we learn affection by becoming attracted to the caregiver who provides sustenance. Infants desire milk, caregivers provide milk, and thus over time infants learn to desire caregivers, or so the story went. But this story did not sit well with what Harlow observed in his laboratory. In studies with infant macaque monkeys, he found that they grew attached to the cloth pads that lined their cages, hanging on to them and throwing tantrums when they were taken out to be cleaned. Conversely, a baby monkey raised on a barren wire-mesh floor “survives with difficulty, if at all” the first five days of their lives. This observation sparked the insight that contact comfort might be as important for infant health and well-being as basic biological needs. In what has become an iconic experiment, Harlow’s team built two artificial mothers that stood in for the infant monkeys’ real mothers. One mother was made of wood, covered by sponge rubber, and wrapped in terry cloth, with a light bulb radiating heat behind her. The other was made with wire mesh and a light bulb. One warm and fuzzy; the other warm and metallic. For four monkeys, the cloth mother possessed a nipple that lactated, whereas for four others, the wire-mesh mother had the lactating nipple. The striking finding: in both groups, the infant spent 12 or more hours a day on the cloth mother, for the full 160 days of testing, with less than one hour spent on the wire mother—even if she was the source of food. This flew in the face of what had become received psychological wisdom: that nourishment drove behaviour, with affection being an acquired outcome of feeding. Contrary to such views, it became abundantly clear that tactile comfort was deeply desired by infant monkeys regardless of whether it had been associated with food. “We were not surprised to discover that contact comfort was an important basic affectional or love variable,” Harlow observed. “But we did not expect it to overshadow so completely the variable of nursing; indeed, the disparity is so great as to suggest that the primary function of nursing as an affectional variable is that of insuring frequent and intimate body contact of the infant with the mother.” What is true for macaque monkeys must surely also apply to people, Harlow concluded, and hence he added: “Certainly, man cannot live by milk alone.” From the start, humans, like other primates, need to be touched and it is that very lack of to touch and be touched has resulted in a suffering of individuals during the pandemic, and the question is – will such people ever fully recover?

Over a good part of 2020 I observed people introducing pets into their homes at an alarming rate, but there is only so much a dog or cat can do, even if they think that it might be something that is saving them from the internal pandemic of lack of touch of a real person. I spoke to a friend in London and she said that ever since she has been home-bound, the most that she misses is the smell of her friends, the taste of her lover. “The human body has built all its models based on touch received from caregivers,” says Dr Katerina Fotopoulou, a professor of psychodynamic neuroscience at University College London. “We’re utterly reliant on the caregiver to satisfy the body’s core needs. Little can be done without touch.”

Nina is 40, and lives alone in south London. She experienced a protracted recovery after a spinal injury in 2018, requiring long periods of bed rest. People visited, but her pain levels meant that being touched was difficult. She felt she had good foresight for how to prepare for the first lockdown. “I thought I knew how it would play out,” she says over Zoom. “For example, I knew how strict I had to be about the routine of going for walks; you always feel slightly better having taken in different surroundings.” But after six weeks, her resolve started to crumble. “The isolation I’d already experienced made me more vulnerable than I’d realised. I tried to keep myself in a routine but …” she begins to cry. “At some point, not being able to have a hug was genuinely torturous. I don’t believe the government considered the impact of the first lockdown on people living alone.”

As adults, we may not comprehend the importance of touch even when it disappears. “We might begin to realise that something is missing, but we won’t always know that it’s touch,” says Prof Francis McGlone, a neuroscientist based at Liverpool John Moores University and a leader in the field of affective touch. “But when we talk about the problem of loneliness, we often ignore the obvious: what lonely people aren’t getting is touch.” 

Touch has a huge impact on our psychological and physical wellbeing, says Prof Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford. “With our close friends and family, we touch each other more than we realise,” he says. As adults, Dunbar’s research has found, we have a core set of, on average, five friends who we can call on as a shoulder to cry on. “We see exactly the same thing in primates,” he says. “Even in much bigger primate societies, groups of five best friends appear at every layer, who do all their grooming together – their form of social touch. In primates and humans, these intense coalitions act as a buffer; they keep the world off your back.” It is unsurprising, then, that of the 40,000 people from 112 countries who took part in a 2020 BBC and Wellcome Collection survey, the three most common words used to describe touch were: “comforting”, “warm” and “love”.

As the pandemic continues, many of us will be trying to cope with profound stress without the comfort of touch. We all have different needs and boundaries (McGlone says “not everyone suffers from a lack of touch; I don’t really like being cuddled, and drive my poor wife nuts”), but the total absence of touch, particularly when emotions are high, contravenes the hardwiring that regulates us from our preverbal years.

“Touch is a modulator that can temper the effects of stress and pain, physical and emotional. We have seen in our research that a lack of touch is associated with greater anxiety,” says Fotopoulou. “In times of high stress – the loss of a job, or a bereavement, for example – having more touch from others helps us cope better, particularly in calming the effects of [the stress hormone’ cortisol.” Even if we’re used to not being touched a lot, after a while the need can feel very physical – sometimes described as “skin hunger” or “touch hunger”.

While I can empathise with the exhausting monotony my friends with young families have described to me (and I know that the grass is always greener), I have felt the lack of belonging to a pack acutely. Claire Birke, a teacher from Edinburgh, has felt it, too: “I’m 37, and most of my friends are living with partners or children,” she says. “I have never felt more aware of my single status, nor the lack of intimate bodily contact, in my life.”

The number of people living on their own has only been swelling up around the world. The sliver of sociability that came with social bubbles being announced has felt life-saving. Smith has been “bubbling” with a couple who live together and says it has helped with her mood. But the days are long, and her friends “are not particularly tactile”.

“I realise how much I touch people without thinking,” she says. “I feel like I am holding all this emotion in my body with nowhere to put it.”

In high-stress states, it can feel as if our bodies can barely contain our emotion if there’s no one there to hold us. “Lots of studies support the theory that touch gives the brain a signal that it can delegate its resources for coping because someone else is there to bear the brunt. This relaxes the body, going some way to restoring the stress budget, if you like,” says Fotopoulou. But touch is not a single sense. The two square metres of skin that contain us are teeming with nerve fibres that recognise temperature, texture and itch, etcetera. One set of fibres exists purely to register gentle, stroking touch: the C tactile afferents (CTs). McGlone has been studying this since 1995, when it was discovered in humans. “These neurons, in the skin of all social mammals, transmit slow electrical signals to the emotional processing parts of the brain. They play a critical role in developing the social brain and our ability to withstand stress.”

The highest density of CTs across the body are in the parts we can’t “groom” ourselves, such as the shoulders and back. “If you love having your back rubbed it’s because there are more CTs there,” says McGlone. “Stimulation of these neurons releases oxytocin and dopamine, and has a direct impact on cortisol levels, which regulates our mood.” In 2017, Fotopoulou’s team published a study that showed even gentle, slow stroking from a stranger can reduce feelings of social exclusion. But in our normal lives, we’re not going round stroking each other all the time. “No, you don’t need that touch all day,” McGlone says. “We only need this gentle kind of touch intermittently.”

In these times of touch deprivation there is no real substitute for what we get from other humans, but there are ways to soothe ourselves. Fotopoulou’s lab will soon publish a study conducted during the pandemic that builds on the theory that, in the same way we think we can feel others’ pain, we may be able to experience touch vicariously, too. Researchers have found that seeing touch (on the telly or in films, for example) – particularly social, affective or pet touch – can give us some of the benefits of feeling touch. “This is called ‘vicarious touch’,” says Fotopoulou. “The brain codes multisensory experiences in multiple ways. We can also ‘feel’ the pain and pleasures of others just by ‘seeing’ them,” she says. “This is not a permanent or complete substitute, but a partial one.”

Products such as weighted blankets can help. Smith says that laying one across her chest and shoulders makes her feel “much calmer” – speaking, perhaps, to an instinctive need to stimulate the CTs. Interacting with animals is also settling. “My neighbour’s cat has decided to live with me half the time and having her sat on my chest, purring, is so soothing.”

This resonated: the warmth of my dog’s back under my hand has been the most grounding thing for me over the last 12 months. I know this feels good, but why? “When you’re stroking your dog, you’re engaging systems that would be activated if the dog was stroking you,” says McGlone. 

A hunger for touch is a signal that a primitive need is not being met. But evolution is on our side. Every scientist I spoke to was hopeful that, once we can come together again, we will adjust quickly. “It will differ between people, probably based on the duration people have been alone, and there may be a period of clumsiness and renegotiation,” says Dunbar. “But we have evolved to adapt.”

Some references from Perception - How Our Bodies Shape Our Minds by Dennis Proffitt, Drake Baer, and Hormonal: A Conversation About Women’s Bodies, Mental Health and Why We Need to Be Heard by Eleanor Morgan