Literature

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Mary gave her dog a cuddle, settled herself aft the wheel, and set off. The passport office was scarcely four kilometres away—a distance any sensible city ought to surrender in ten minutes. Bengaluru, however, had long ago abandoned such notions of proportion. The roads were already thick with cars, scooters, buses and the occasional motorist ostensibly engaged in a private argument with every traffic signal. Forty-five minutes, possibly thirty if fortune exhibited an unexpected mercy, would be needed to cover a journey that measured little more than a few streets on a map.

There are, on the other hand, indignities that arrive dressed in the uniform of authority. They rarely introduce themselves as cruel. They bear an identification card, consult a register, adjust their spectacles, and invite you to sit down with the sobriety of a man about to perform a perfectly ordinary duty. It is only later that one discerns the uniform was not concealing authority at all, but solely giving bigotry a davenport, a stamp, and the qualification to make you abide. Mary encountered precisely such a specimen on a Tuesday morning.

She held an Indian passport, an Indian address, a British business, and a husband named Vishnu. BetweenLondon and Bengaluru, their lives divided themselves nearly neatly: six months beneath English skies, six beneath the harsher brilliance of Karnataka.

Her passport was expiring, and so she did what subjects are instructed to do. She completed the online application, supplied the requisite particulars, uploaded the requisitioned documents, paid the prescribed fee, and left the remainder to the gear of the government. A message showed up on her registered telephone a few days later. Her appointment had been confirmed. She breathed deeply – nought about this untold adventure. As prophesied, the passport office cured her of that illusion.

The building was overflowing with applicants, clerks, security personnel, anxious parents, elderly couples, impatient husbands, bewildered foreigners and the peculiar human congestion created whenever government and red tape occupy the same square footage.

Mary waited as the names were being called. People disappeared through doors and emerged toting expressions ranging from relief to despair.

Ultimately:

“Mary.”

She rose.

The room into which she was directed contained a writing table, a computer, various files and a man whose demeanour suggested that civilisation had personally disappointed him.

He took her passport. Then he examined her face. Back to the photograph. Back to her. Again.

He nodded. “Your name?”

She answered.

“Address?”

She answered that too.

Then came the question. “Your husband?”

Mary paused. “Vishnu.”

“Vishnu what?”

She gave his full name.

The officer titled back. “You are Christian?”

“Yes.”

“He is Brahmin?”

“Yes.”

There was a small silence. The sort of silence in which a civil servant decides whether he is about to enact his responsibility or indulge his inquisitiveness.

“Why did you marry a Brahmin?”

Mary scrutinised him. For one magnificent moment she considered informing him exactly where he might position his dubiety. Unfortunately, she also fathomed the geography of influence. Her passport was in his hands. Her future travel depended upon it. Her husband was in London. Her industry mandated movement ’tween two countries. He had a desk. She had a deadline. Therefore, she half-grinned. Not amiably. “Is there anything else required for the renewal?”

The officer studied her with the satisfaction of a man who had discovered that the door could be locked from his side. “Yes.”

“What?”

“Proof of marriage.”

Mary frowned. “Our marriage certificate?”

“No.” He waved a hand. “Photograph.”

“What kind of photograph?”

“Both of you together.”

“We have photographs.”

“Date stamped.”

She stared. “Excuse me?”

“Date stamped photograph. Both standing together. Like the old photographs.” He gave a wicked mini beam. “The date must be…” He checked his calendar with exaggerated circumspection. “Next week.”

Mary comprehended. The request was absurd. More importantly, she realised something else. He knew it was absurd. That was why he had made it. There are people who unearth power and immediately begin searching for a place to press their thumb. This man had found hers. Mary gathered her binder. “Where should I submit it?”

He sneered without thoughtfulness. “Bring it next time.”

Outside, the hall seemed unbearably bright. She walked through the crowd with her jaw clenched. Her blood was no longer merely warm. It was furious. She imagined posting his name on social media. She imagined describing the encounter. She imagined the photograph of his countenance beside the announcement: This is the man who thinks my marriage necessitates his approval. Then practicality alighted, as it generally does when indignation has exhausted itself. What proof did she possess? None. No recording. No written substantiation. No witness willing to enter the contraption of complaint. Only her recollection. And recollection, she knew, is a poor weapon against a guaranteed dossier.

Vishnu was in London. She telephoned him. He gave an ear. For several seconds he uttered nothing.

“What am I supposed to do?” Mary coerced.

“I don’t know.”

Neither did she. That was the obscenity of it. They were married. They had built a life. They had conducted trade across continents. Yet some stranger behind a government department had managed, in less than ten minutes, to make their marriage feel as though it warranted certification from a man who had neither earned nor merited the right to judge it.

Eventually Vishnu gasped, “Send me one of our photographs on WhatsApp.” Mary did. He contacted a graphic designer he knew. The photograph was altered. The background was manipulated. A date stamp was inserted in the corner. The result struck one as sufficiently old-fashioned to satisfy a bureaucrat who apparently believed authenticity resided in pixels. When Mary gazed at it, she felt something colder than anger. Shame. Not because the photograph was false. Because the lie had become necessary. That was the true prurience. The state had solicited for evidence. The state had made fabrication the easiest route to compliance. Truth had become inconvenient. Appearance had become acceptance.

She returned to the office on the assigned day. The same corridor. The same queues. The same fluorescent lights humming overhead like trapped insects. The same bureau. The same man.

He took the photograph. Looked at it. Looked again. A smile surfaced. Not surprising. Recognition. “You know this is edited,” he remarked.

Mary said zilch.

He tapped the photograph with one finger. “Background changed.”

There was defiant stillness in the air.

“Date added,” he hissed.

She betrayed no emotion; her visible vocabulary stayed an impenetrable ledger beyond his reach. He leaned backwards. “Approved,” he exclaimed. Then, to Mary’s astonishment, he stamped the forms.

She gawked at him. “You knew?”

“Of course.”

“Then why—”

He raised a hand. The gesture was almost paternal. Almost. “Listen to me!”

Mary deliberated.

“You should tell your family something.”

Her stomach tightened.

“Tell them not to encourage these things.”

“What things?”

“Christian girl marrying Hindu boy.”

There it was. The system stripped apart. No procedure. No symbol. No regulation. No passport. Only discrimination sitting abaft a government agency. The man pushed the sheets towards her. “You are lucky I am allowing this.” Mary glimpsed at the approval. Then at him. A passport was supposed to prove who she was. Instead, for one miserable morning, it had become a slip of endorsement granted by an unknown who alleged her marriage was a social offence. She took the papers. “Thank you,” she enunciated.

The words tasted foul. She turned towards the door. Rearward her came the final sentence. “And don’t let another Christian in your family marry like this.” Mary stopped. She did not turn around.

Outside, hundreds of people moved through the building carrying certificates, photographs, birth records, affidavits and the fragile belief that official institutions existed to serve them. Mary understood something that morning. A passport does not only establish identity. It represents permission to propel through the world without asking every petty gatekeeper whether you deserve to belong in it. And when that permission is put in the hands of a prejudiced fool, citizenship itself can be made to feel conditional.

She sauntered into the sunlight. The photograph remained inside the folder. A counterfeit image accepted by a man who knew it was counterfeit. Perhaps that was the most factual validation produced in the building that day.

By the age of thirty-eight, Theodore Bell had become a curator of catastrophes that had not yet occurred. He could ruin a Tuesday with a Thursday that existed only in imagination. Breakfast frequently tasted of next month’s anxieties. He rehearsed conversations no one intended to have, mourned friendships that remained perfectly intact, and apologised for offences he had not committed. His life possessed all the drama of a great Victorian novel, except that every chapter unfolded completely within his own skull. Then, one peculiar Wednesday, something extraordinary happened. Nothing. The train arrived precisely on time. Rain fell with impeccable English manners. The cashier smirked. A pigeon inspected a croissant with the solemnity of a bishop. The world, Theodore noticed, had neglected to participate in the tragedy he had so carefully prepared. He wandered into a second-hand bookshop solely because he had never before entered one without first consulting reviews. On a dusty shelf lay a notebook bound in green leather. Across its first page someone had written:

“Suppose your life is merely the first draft of a novel. Would your protagonist truly spend six consecutive chapters wondering whether he had sounded foolish at lunch?”

Theodore laughed aloud. Not because it was funny. Because it was embarrassingly accurate. He purchased the notebook for three pounds and seventeen pence. That evening he conducted a peculiar experiment. Whenever indecision appeared, he refused to ask, “What is the safest thing to do?” Instead he questioned, “What would make this chapter worth reading?” The difference was astonishing. Rather than eating another lonely microwave supper, the protagonist wandered into an Italian restaurant despite having no companion. He ordered dessert first. He spoke with the elderly waiter about olives, opera, and why elderly gentlemen always seemed to know the location of excellent wine.

The chapter improved immediately.

The following morning, in lieu of declining an invitation to join colleagues for coffee because he feared awkward silence, the protagonist accepted. The silence lasted approximately four seconds. Then somebody confessed they had once confused a funeral procession for a parade and accidentally applauded. Everyone tittered until tears arrived. Apparently awkwardness, Theodore discovered, often possessed an unexpectedly generous sense of humour.

Soon the experiment expanded.

The protagonist bought flowers without requiring an anniversary. He wore the ridiculous emerald waistcoat hiding for years in the wardrobe awaiting an occasion sufficiently important to justify velvet buttons. He walked home through the rain rather than beneath umbrellas simply to discern whether novels exaggerated the romance of becoming soaked. They did not. It was marvellous. People began remarking that Theodore looked different. “What changed?” they quizzed. He never knew quite how to answer. Nothing had changed except the narrator. The voice inside his head had retired from its post as prosecutor and accepted employment as storyteller. Instead of declaring, “This is dreadful.” It now whispered, “Well... this should make for an interesting paragraph.”

Failures became plot twists. Embarrassments transformed into dialogue. Unexpected delays evolved into opportunities for side characters. Even grief acquired gentleness. When Theodore’s beloved aunt passed away, he uncovered that stories do not become beautiful by avoiding sorrow. They become beautiful because sorrow teaches every joyful page how precious it truly was.

One autumn afternoon he returned to the same second-hand bookshop hoping to ascertain who had written the mysterious sentence. The owner frowned. “What notebook?”

“The green one.”

“We’ve never sold green notebooks.”

Theodore insisted.

The proprietor searched every shelf. Nothing. Not even an empty space. He left puzzled. Perhaps memory had embroidered reality. Perhaps someone had misplaced the evidence. Or perhaps stories occasionally slipped helpful sentences into people’s lives without troubling themselves over authorship.

Years later, Theodore grew old. His hair surrendered with admirable dignity. His knees negotiated every staircase like diplomats concluding difficult treaties. Wrinkles arrived carrying maps of countless simpers. One evening, his granddaughter climbed upon his lap holding a blank notebook. “Grandad,” she asked, “I’m frightened I’ll make mistakes.” He smiled the sort of smile only accumulated years can produce. “My dear,” he replied, “mistakes are merely scenes before the editor arrives.” She frowned. “But what if people laugh at me?”

“Then you’ve accidentally written a comedy.”

“And what if everything goes wrong?”

“Ah,” Theodore expressed, “that depends totally.”

“On what?”

“Whether you’re reading your life as a police report...” He paused. “...or as a story.”

She thought about this for several silent moments before opening the notebook. “What shall I write first?”

Theodore glanced through the window. Outside, autumn leaves were dancing with absolutely no concern for symmetry. A dog had become convinced that chasing its own tail constituted a noble profession. Two strangers were chuckling over something the wind immediately carried away. The entire earth felt gloriously unconcerned with acting sensible. He beamed. “Begin,” he said, “with someone who finally stopped trying to be perfect and became intriguing instead.”

For that, after all, is the curious secret no anxious mind ever wishes to believe. Life is rarely asking us to perform flawlessly. It is utterly waiting for us to become a character worth following to the next page.

In Dance First (2023), director James Marsh has ventured, with a temerity bordering on irreverence, to offer us a version of Samuel Beckett’s life most curiously polished by the hand of Hollywood. Here is no dry recital of dates and deeds, but rather a whimsical, even fantastical, opening tableau: Beckett, that austere sentinel of silence, is depicted forsaking the solemnities of his Nobel ceremony to confer with a shadow-self — a suave, roll necked alter ego, more at ease in the world, more forgiving of its follies. Together they muse upon the peculiar question of how, or rather to whom, the laureate might dispense the prize money, his conscience summoning a cavalcade of old ghosts and grievances which unfurl the tale in retrospective reverie.

One hardly requires the gifts of prophecy to surmise what Beckett himself — that tireless architect of despair and economy — might have murmured about such a portrait. Yet despite a tendency now and then toward theatrical indulgence, the film is played with considerable spirit and sincerity. Marsh does not shrink from the essential paradox of his subject: that the creator of a world defined by paralysis and silence lived, in truth, a life marked by gallant service in the French Resistance and romantic entanglements of no small consequence.

Gabriel Byrne lends Beckett a weary gravitas, dry as old parchment yet glinting with wit, while Fionn O’Shea sketches the younger man with all the hauteur and hungry idealism of youth. Sandrine Bonnaire inhabits the long-suffering Suzanne, whose constancy Beckett betrayed in his affair with the incisive Barbara Bray, brought to life here by Maxine Peake.

And so the film, for all its softening edges and its faint sweetness, proves a persuasive companion, offering its audience not despair, but rather a bitter draught tempered by the smallest, most human dollop of hope, distilled in the film’s quiet, melancholy farewell.

Iss umeed se dil behalata rehta hoon

Ke tere manzil ke taraf mere kadam aate hain

Bas kuch dino ki hi toh baat hai

Iss hi umeed se dil behalata rehta hoon

Ab na aankhon mein hai namee

Aur na dil mein woh dukh

Bas kuch dino ki hi toh baat hai

Iss hi umeed se dil behalata rehta hoon

Loneliness, it would seem, has silently ripened into an affliction of epidemic proportions in our modernised aera. Not that solitude was unknown to those who came before us, but they bore it with a kind of dignity—fortified by convictions that tethered them to individuals somewhat than possessions, to collective significance relatively than milestones. They busied themselves not solely with the accumulation of awards, but with the cultivation of endearments. We, on the contrary, reside in a world increasingly unmoored from such anchorage—a world wherein deeds are too often done not for the still voice within, but for the clamour of applause without. We pursue illusions, chasing shimmering mirages across the desert of present-day existence, rarely pausing to examine whether the oasis we long for lies not without, but within.

In like manner, when the fundamental turns to marriage, I am bound to question—what might the world resemble if we approached this most consecrated of unions with vaster astuteness? What if we chose our mates not purely with our passions, but also with our prudence? Could we not imagine a civilisation wherein the attentions and natures of our progenies are nurtured in the fruitful loam of concord and reciprocal attachment? Might not our communities sprout more harmonious, our efforts more rewarding, and our homes more secure?

For the gospel, while often enshrouded underneath the noise of contemporary cynicism, is that a wholesome marriage possesses the taciturn competence to make us not only happier, but also, in many cases, healthier in physique as well as in psyche. Offspring raised in the shelter of parental protection—where kindness is exchanged like quotidian bread—are spared many of the perils that plague the young: the lesions of isolation, the bewilderment of internal neglect, the stumbles of educational struggle, and even the ailments that afflict the anatomy when the vitality is wearied.

Conversely, when a marriage sours—when bitterness replaces tenderness and reserve fills the place once occupied by laughter—it wrests a grievous knell. It damages the partners first, but not them alone; the children, those mum witnesses to adult anguish, schlep the ache long into their own becoming.

To stay continually in an atmosphere of discord—to engross in or even essentially endure chronic conflict—is to submit the soul and body alike to a sluggish undoing. Such discord does not exclusively steal our order; it diminishes the very quality of our days and the virility of our endeavours. Indeed, the toll it exacts is not wholly impassioned or intangible, but biological. Novel studies have revealed that telomeres—those mysterious guardians capping the ends of our chromosomes, entrusted with the stewardship of our cellular youth—show signs of premature erosion when the human heart is subjected ceaselessly to the tempests of relational wrangling.

Thus, the picking of one’s spouse is no minor matter of sentiment or fleeting fancy; it is a decision that reverberates across the breadth of one’s existence. It shapes not only the tenor of one’s circadian hours but casts long glooms into the future—affecting the rational, emotive, and even physical well-being of one’s broods, whether born or yet to be fantasised of. To marry sagely is to lay a foundation not only for one’s own jubilation, but for the flourishing of generations.

Here, then, are a few ways by which one might begin to take the cherished covenant of commitment with the seriousness it truly solicits—by exploring a liaison that elevates the imagination and fortifies the soul, rather than endlessly pursuing the sudden solace of mere carnal companionship. Let the aim be not naturally to marry, but to marry up—in character, in emotional resonance, and in the muted metier of joint psychological well-being.

(Don’t marry) to substantiate something.

Rightly or wrongly, our culture has adorned the utterance of “I do” and the signing of a civil document with a host of symbolic laurels—success, prosperity, happiness, maturity, and the longed-for stability of a life well-ordered. Thus it is that many enter the pact of marriage not as a divine joining of hearts, but as a ritual of performance—an emblem to be displayed before the world or held up to the mirror of self.

Some wed in haste to declare to their parents their independence and newfound adulthood. Others do so to convince an erstwhile sweetheart that they have not only survived heartache but transcended it with an element of treasure. There are those who marry as a means of flight—from the confines of their family of origin, desperate to demonstrate they are adept of individuality. And many, perhaps more than we realise, marry in the hope of convincing themselves that they are on the correct track—that their lives are promising, respectable, and, above all, “normal.”

But marriage, in the definitive reckoning, attests nothing.

If there is something to prove, let it not be found in the pageantry of vows or the rite of legality, but in the still, daily sweat of ardour. Prove instead that you can sustain a relationship of integrity in the present tense—that you can communicate with candour, give with gladness, and hold dear another not for who they might become, but for who they already are.

(Don’t marry) to take care of someone or to be taken care of.

The longing to care for another—and to be cared for in return—is no mere mawkish whim; it is a yearning etched into the very fibres of our nervous system, a design written unfathomably within our being. To desire affection, to wish to love and be loved—this is wholly natural, even virtuous. But there is a line, often subtle, yet crucial: it is one thing to chase comradeship, and quite another to hunt for someone to mend the broken places in us that we ourselves are unwilling to tend. And equally, it is no virtue to take upon ourselves the burdens that fittingly belong to another, imagining we can live their life for them.

A sturdy symbiosis insists that each soul stand first on its own feet—that both man and woman be whole and distinct persons before they attempt to become one. Without such inner sovereignty, the lines blur: the load of another’s unfinished business becomes confused with our own, and what once appeared the tender act of carting another’s burden quietly becomes the crushing yoke of co-dependence.

In time, the self—the singular, God-breathed self—begins to fade. You are no longer you, but a vague echo of the other, no longer a participant in love but an outline within its fortitude.

A happy marriage, then, is not built upon interactive neediness, but complementary solidity. It is a true partnership, forged by two souls capable of holding fort independently and yet choosing, with joy, to walk together. And to arrive at such a partnership, one must first learn the art not plainly of cerebral retreat, but of delighting in it. For until you have learned to be content in your own company, you are ill-prepared to offer that company as an offering to another.

(Don’t marry) to feel self-worth.

At last, you meet the one who implies to inhabit your every reverie. They are everything you are not, and in their presence you feel—for perhaps the first time—whole, worthy, complete. But if such feelings surge upon you like a revelation, take heed; raise the signal of caution—for here lies not the treasure of true love, but the glittering deceit of fool’s gold.

What you have encountered is not the unobtrusive, steady devotion that forges lasting bonds, but a figment conjured by inner emptiness. For if you have never known what it is to feel sound and sufficient within yourself—apart from the embrace of romance—then this combining, however intoxicating it may sound, will ultimately betray your expectation. No other soul can confer upon us a sense of merit we have not first recognised and nurtured within ourselves.

Before you pledge your heart in earnest allegiance, learn to dwell peacefully in your own company. Learn to delight in your own being—not in arrogance, but in the quiet assurance that you are already a person of value. Only then will you be ready to enter into a confederation not of dependence, but of requited offering—a love that strengthens, comparatively than substitutes, the self.

(Don’t marry) because you think you are running out of time.

It sometimes happens that a man or woman, having reached a certain season of life, sighs inwardly and says, “Very well, I suppose I ought to marry—what else is there left to do?” They look about and see friends, peers, and colleagues stepping into the hearth-warmed rhythms of domestic life, and a quiet dread begins to stir—the fear of being the last one unpaired, the friendless figure at the edge of the gathering.

Pride murmurs that to wait any longer would be to fall behind; fear suggests that one must settle before the final curtain falls. And so, driven by a mixture of vanity and trepidation, they take the plunge—often before their heart and spirit are truly prepared.

But I say: let yourself be the last one standing. Stand you must—and stand with courage. For nonetheless the waiting may be wearisome, and the hush daunting, a few years of patience may spare you a lifetime of disappointment. To rush headlong into a merger with the erroneous aide is to invite dissention, disillusionment, and raw regret. But to wait, to cherry-pick astutely and not barely promptly, may yield a marriage that brings not only comfort but true well-being—a collaboration that withstands not only the passage of time, but sanctifies it.

Better to walk alone in truth than to lie beside another in quiet despair.

(Don’t marry) to have the family you never had.

The scars of childhood are not easily mended. They lie buried beneath the surface, cavernous and tender, and one of the most seductive illusions the heart can entertain is that marriage will serve as a liniment—that in binding oneself to another, one might at last receive the family that was never truly given, but always deserved.

It is a beautiful dream, and a dangerous one.

Many enter matrimony with a bashful oath: I shall not repeat what was done to me. They believe, earnestly and with optimism, that love will redeem the past—that all the distress, negligence, or even cruelty of their early years can be alchemised into something exceptional: a new home, a new lineage, untainted by old grief.

But alas, the mortal soul is not so neatly rewired by ceremony. The pain we have not faced—have not named and brought into the light—follows us like a shadow. No spouse, however devoted, can carry what we ourselves have refused to touch. Until those inner wounds are tended—whether in isolation, in the quiet counsel of a friend, or under the gentle probing of a knowledgeable therapist—they shall continue to haunt the halls of your heart, rustling their old scripts into every new beginning.

Do not, therefore, look to marriage as a substitute for healing. Take this pensive time before the promise to turn inward. Aspire to know yourself as you truly are—your history, your pain, your patterns—and begin the slow and holy work of mending. Only then will you be ready not merely to marry, but to love—and to be loved in return—freely, wholly, and well.

(Don’t marry) because people think otherwise about your sexuality.

If one remains unmarried beyond a certain stage, the world—ever restless for answers it has no right to demand—tends to murmur its suspicions. Idle gossip begins to circle, casting veiled questions upon one’s inclinations and personality, as if a soul’s inmost truths might be discerned by something so outward as a marital status.

But take heart, and hold fast to what you know to be true of yourself. That knowledge—stoic, steadfast, and unshaken by the chatter of the crowd—is testimony enough. Let not the fear of false labels compel you to contort your life to satisfy the trivial mentalities of those who cannot recognise what it means to wait for something real.

To enter into an alliance utterly to gag wagging tongues is no remedy—it is, in truth, a self-inflicted torment of the cruellest kind. Love must never be forged in fear. Wait, slightly, for the one who makes the very ground under your feet tremble—the woman whose presence awakens something exemplary and stirring within you. And if the same bell bongs within her heart at the thought of you, then nothing—neither time, nor slander, nor doubt—can stand in the way of that intimacy.

Until such a thing blossoms in its own good season, pay no heed to the gossip-mongers. Trust instead in the loyal fraternity of friends who have stood beside you—not for appearances, but out of love unmarred by question or condition. Remain with them; they are your true kin. What matters, in the end, is not the configuration of gender, but the firmness of the support and the constancy of the love it offers. Happiness, after all, is not measured by public approval, but by the quiet assurance that you have lived in accordance with your truest self.

(In) conclusion.

Loneliness, I am convinced, is among the chief reasons why so many rush—often unwisely—into the bonds of marriage. The distinction between loneliness and the serene ebullience of seclusion is one that many find elusive, their temperaments trembling before the prospect of being truly comfortable in their own company. Society, with its many voices, has long ingrained in us the fear that to be alone is to be somehow incomplete or abnormal.

It is precisely here that I wish to share some musings—not as a philosopher or sage, but just as a brother—offered to me not long ago by Imran Abbas. To the world, he is architect, athlete, poet, singer, and actor; but to me, he is simply my brother, a man who, like myself, navigates life without pretence or regret.

These thoughts of his, combined with my own, may serve as a lantern in the dim walkways of your inner self—offering clarity where confusion reigns, and inviting you to discover a graver, truer apperception of yourself.

The stereotypes that often come with leading a single life are generally categorised into one group: loneliness. It is so often assumed that those who have not yet found that special person who makes the world a little perkier are experiencing those god-awful waves of loneliness. In reality, there is a magnificent difference between being lonely and being alone.

Being lonely is that kind of aching that resonates in your chest. That dull, constant feeling that follows you around all day long. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing or whom you’re with, it’s impossible to shake that feeling. Typically, these feelings are most prominent after recently losing that person who made your world a little sunnier.

Loneliness arrives accompanied by a host of unwelcome confidants: the relentless tide of memories, the unyielding grip of sleepless nights, and a bewildering fog that clouds the brain. It lays bare the finest treasures of one’s life, only to cast them into stark relief through their throbbing absence.

Loneliness provokes the most troubling questions—Why? Why me? Why does fortune’s favour come across as so cruelly withheld? Why does providence deny even the simplest stroke of luck? It is a yawning chasm within the soul, a void that stubbornly refuses to be filled, regardless of how fervently we attempt to fill it.

Loneliness is the restless spectre that visits at the witching hour, when the world is still and thoughts roam free. It is the mournful melody that drifts from the radio—so potent in its resonance that one must swiftly silence it, lest the sorrow overwhelm.

Yet to be alone is an entirely different circumstance. Being alone is a condition of one’s very existence; loneliness, by contrast, is a torment of the intellect. When you find yourself alone, you are undeniably confronted with all that you lack, but more importantly, you are obliged to confront the honesties within yourself—those honesties obscured when your days were spent in the service of another’s shade.

To be alone is to grant oneself the sacred knack of rumination—to ponder genuinely what you truly yearn in another, so that when love next calls, you may wield all your faculties to guard against ever succumbing again to that desolate malady called loneliness.

Being alone is to sit below the canopy of a tree, lost in the pages of a book, savouring every second with a gratitude born not of necessity but of choice. It is to engage in solitary undertakings not altogether by oneself, but for oneself; to cultivate one’s own closeness as a laudable and treasured ally.

Of course, there are flashes when the path of exultation crosses with the silhouette of loneliness. It is in such times—perhaps while browsing unaccompanied for a new garment—that your eye is drawn to a couple, laughing inaudibly in some distant corner. Their elation resembles to spark like a flame against the dullness of your own heart, and for a brief instant, that old sting stirs anew, a whisper of what once was.

Yet this pang, though sharp, does not linger.

To be alone can, in truth, be one of life’s most profound and empowering gifts. Should you allow loneliness to take root and grow, you risk forfeiting that precious, rare opportunity to discover and come to terms with your own self—your firmest crony, ever at hand. Loneliness will aim to coerce you to seek that sustenance in another, but every soul has its lawful place in the world, and yours was never meant to be wholly subsumed within the life of another.

To be alone is an art—a delicate, righteous craft to be learned and embraced with audacity and grace.

(Foot) note.

Remain free of needless anxiety as you journey along the path that life, in its inscrutable wisdom, has laid before you. Do not fret over what lies ahead, for none among us truly knows what the morrow shall bring. Live fully in the present moment—embrace it with all your heart and mind—because what unfolds today will inevitably shape the contours of your tomorrow. The events of this very day, like seeds sown in fertile soil, determine whether they shall bloom again in the days to come.

While we nourish the illusion of control, the truth remains that we hold none. Never have we possessed it, nor shall we ever. The lever that governs the course of our lives rests in hands beyond the grasp of our common understanding—whether divine or cosmic, this authority eludes our mortal comprehension.

Therefore, I urge you: breathe deeply, release your cares, live with intention, love without reservation, and know that this—this very striving and being—is enough.

In the learning of anthropological psychology, through the lenses of reading, reflection, and the rich tapestry of personal and relayed experience, I often find shape and form for my thoughts and hypotheses. These musings are, in truth, an intricate weave of many influences and insights.

I am grateful to you for your time and attention.

The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew - Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (C. 1599-1600)

AS BLUE AS BLOOD

It was early evening. He was stretched out on the grass. Exhausted. Above him were trees in full bloom, and beyond them the sky with great cottony clouds passing by. He was humming a song that had become quite his favourite from a recent movie he had seen when his friend handed him over a used cigarette. Pressing the butt between his lips, he imagined himself to be looking like some actor. “How wonderful would it be if a director from up inside the skies would spot me and offer me a role in his movie where the song I love would be re-picturised on me.” He made known with such significance. “Wake up!” exclaimed his friend as he held before him half a slice of dried bread, “For all you know we might be quite looking like used paper bags strewn about on the floor for anyone who would spot us from that distance.” He grinned wearily at what his friend had just expressed. “You very well know that paper bags don’t get roles in movies now, don’t you,” his friend went on, “the only thing that they would see would be the inside of wastebaskets.” They chuckled and lay next to each other, too tired to talk more.

It turned to night rather swiftly. Their bodies now reposed, both of them embarked towards home; a makeshift shelter that four of them shared in a ghetto meant for a certain minority community. Whilst walking, they came across a bunch of men embroiled in an argument. He strolled up to them. One of the men stopped talking and turned to him. He had glassy eyes and his face appeared hard-bitten from the vagaries of life. “What?” He snarled. He pointed to the puncture. “Oh,” he said brusquely, “I didn’t realise.” He smiled back kindly at the ill-mannered man. “Change it, you dunce,” growled another man curtly from the same cluster. He bobbed his head and waved out for his friend who was standing at a distance. The friend came closer to him. “These arseholes don’t seem like they merit any help.” He patted his friend gently on his shoulders and pointed to the sky above. “Last I heard they were looking for a replacement of Mother Teresa . . . and this time they aren’t advertising for any particular gender, so . . .” He smiled and asked his friend to hold the wheel as he seized the spanner and began unscrewing the bolts. While they were changing the tyre, they heard the three men quarrel about the failing economic state of the country and how nearly everything around the world was taking a turn for the worse. Two of the fellows were moderate in their views, and the one with the glassy eyes and hardened face was the venomous of the entire lot. He was incapable to accept a viewpoint that did not align with his own and used his voice in full capacity in order to display his raucous resistance. The spare tyre now secured in its place, his friend and he dusted their hands and gave the men a nod before making away. The men were so knotted in their row that they had overlooked to offer them any monetary reward. Humming his favourite tune, they were hardly a few steps away when one of the men called out loud. “Hey!” he barked, “Come back here and take this!” He noticed that the man was holding a bill of cash. “Thank you,” he said loud enough to be heard, “we didn’t help you for the money.” The man rolled his eyes and returned to the squabble with his associates.

“So what did you think about what they were speaking about the state of the country?” asked his friend, the breeze jesting about fondly on their skin. “Really?” he said squinting, “Do poor people like us enjoy the luxury to indulge in subjects like those?” His friend smiled. “I know what you mean, but we can have an opinion, can’t we?” He stopped walking and twisted his torso to face his friend. “Who would care for our opinion, eh? These rich people cannot even change a tyre and they talk of society like it were a shop. They have nothing worthy to call it a conversation simply because their bellies are full, and we have nothing worthy to call a conversation simply because our empty bellies leave us no room for theories. It is enough if we keep ourselves occupied with thinking about how best to secure our next meal than indulging in world affairs, don’t you think.”

He was a graduate, but worked as a daily wage operative at construction sites owing to the markets that were dreadfully haemorrhaging despite the media stating otherwise. There was no saviour in sight as the press was tortuously controlled by the ruling leadership, and in such a forbidding scenario, steady employment was extremely hard to come by. If by some stroke of luck something fruitful had ensued between you and your freelance work provider, you were conferred a contract with a construction firm that took care of your income for a minimum of three months, and after that, it was back to square one. It was at such trying times, with no apparent sign of any hope that life became not only troubling, but also demoralising, and his fellow mates and he humoured themselves to petty crimes, the only assured method that offered them meals daily at the local lockup. They also had, over the years, come to an understanding with the police – they shared with them some of their income as a barter of them letting them use the prison facilities until they had not found themselves a steady stream of income again.

Before tossing away the soiled piece of paper that the samosas were wrapped in, something grabbed his attention. He looked at his friend. “Did you see this?” he said, handing over the piece of paper on which was a picture of the house of the richest man on earth. His friend glanced at the snippet, “Whoa, twenty-five floors for what? After all we sleep in one, we shit in one, and we fuck in one.” They both laughed as his friend crumpled the soiled paper into a ball, flung it on the floor and kicked it as it went flying in the air, and onto the road where it was runover by an automobile.

Owing to their regularity of visiting the police station, the head constable had become a friend of sorts. As they sat one evening inside the cell, a rat was scampering nearby. He asked the head constable if he was happy with his job considering he was a part of the majority that were claiming stake of this nation as nobody else’s but their own. “What can I say,” said the head constable, “we are nothing but puppets of the politicians, and whether we have a conscience or not, we have to carry out our duties that the uniform demands.” He became thoughtfully silent and watched how the rat ran about here and there frantically in order to escape the piercing eyes of the cat that had now entered the cell. The rat, he observed at first was nimble, and past a few minutes his speed slackened, and that was exactly when he ended up being devoured by the chubby cat who smacked her lips and made away mewing like she had won a jackpot of a meal. “And what about when you are off your uniform?” he asked. “I am as human as anybody else. I love those who love me. I don’t look at it via the lens of caste, class or culture.” He rested his back to the cold wall of the lockup. “What do you think has gone wrong with the world?” The head constable breathed deeply, “I wish I could answer that.”

Once out of the lockup, he knocked at the door of a woman he often visited. They had met on a worksite, and ever since then he had grown into a habit of calling upon her for sexual musts. They asked no questions, offered no explanations, and purely followed whatever their bodies led them to whenever such appetites were aroused in their groins. He was dabbing away his sweat from his armpits with a tiny towel after a satisfactory session of intercourse when she informed him that she was leaving the country because things for their community were getting unhealthier by the day. He met her declaration with thorough disbelief. “We are born here and we will die here,” he declared with some deliberation, “how can you even think of leaving your land?” She sauntered up to him and held his face in her hands tenderly. They exchanged a prolonged look, a look that said more than what words might have been able to convey.

A week later certain parts of the city were struck by communal insurgence. He was enroute his house from the house of this woman when a mob confronted him. He recognised that they were the same men whom he had helped with the tyre puncture. They asked him bitterly as they began hammering him with blows if he had thought that he was a hero to have refused the money that they had offered him that day. His face pale with fright, he pleaded that they let him go because what he had done was not for any benefits but purely out of help to humanity. The hard-faced fellow gripped his jaw forcefully and squeezed it as he glared wrathfully into his mild eyes. He ordered him to chant some words of their deities. He did as he was told. They beat him further stating that they abhorred to hear names of their gods spoken from an unclean mouth such as his. He was about to say something when another man picked up a medium sized boulder from the side of the pavement and cast him a deadly blow to his head from behind. He dropped to the ground in an instant. The rest of the men kicked him mercilessly just as somebody in the cruel cluster lifted the same blood-spattered boulder and bludgeoned him to death.

When the news of his murder reached her, she opened a canister of rat poison and gulped it down her throat.

In no time people had assembled at the scene of the killing.

“Move away to some place safer I had warned him long ago,” said someone, “and he had said, ‘these are my people, they won’t hurt me’ and see what his people have done to him! See!”

“He deserved it,” murmured someone.

“For what?” someone else asked.

“Do I need to answer that?” said another man present there.

“Today you are enjoying this, but remember that . . .”

“That every dog has its day,” completed another.

“I think everyone from his creed must be doomed to die in a similar fashion,” voiced someone else astringently.

“What a dreary time to live in when people think like this,” whispered another and walked away.

The whiff of his butchery had spread over social media like wildfire. Though the police took their own time to arrive, the head constable dashed to the spot of the crime. The instant he set his eyes on him, he felt an unexplainable bite in his heart – to see someone as caring and ebullient as him lying there dead was something he felt was the worst form of injustice that god’s creatures could have ever bestowed upon him. He closed his eyes and tried to compose himself when the commissioner drew up in his car. A shifty and fidgety man, the commissioner inspected the corpse. The staff around him were awaiting orders when he grinned at them and said in the jolliest tone, “Seeing this blood reminds me that I have some strawberry pies in my jeep.” He paused and consulted his wristwatch, and then gestured that his staff fetch him the box from his jeep. He began then chomping on the strawberry pie with the body of an innocent man resting a few inches away, flies now feasting on the open wounds of the departed. Once done, he threw the box on the body and made away in his jeep.

The following day the headlines read –

Young man from a minority community atoned for his wrongdoings. He was carrying on him meat of an animal that was sacrosanct to the nation. Killed brutally by unidentified assailants. The police has closed the case due to lack of any evidence on the site, and due to the fact that there was no manner in which to find who had done this since there were no eye witnesses, or any kind of camera footage to provide any concrete proof.

The head constable who used a pseudonym online, tweeted: Before leaving they left a bag of animal meat near him to mislead everyone that he was killed because he was carrying on him that meat. The Truth: he was a vegetarian.

The public went berserk that someone from the their community was so agreeably in support of the minority. Organisations swore that if they unearthed the identity of the individual they would decapitate him.

Two days later, the head constable was discovered by his subordinates in a pool of blood. The cause: he had accidently moved the trigger while cleaning the gun that had resulted in his death.

The internet rejoiced. And so did majority of the people.

His friend was stretched out on the same spot that he was killed. The trees were blooming, as usual. The sky was clear, as usual. Tears streamed down the corners of his eyes. He made no attempt to wipe them.

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