Friday.
Happiness is simple yet so fleeting. I can’t hold on to happiness. I don’t know how it is for other people. I am neither happy nor sad as I write this. I am probably at peace. A kind of serene blankness envelops my mind and clouds my thoughts. I aspire to be aware. I am aware of my breathing, aware of the sounds emanating from nearby rooms – the sounds of my mother cooking and father talking over the phone. I am aware of the mild strain in my hand as I grasp the pen and write these lines. My left eye is involuntarily blinking. I have no idea of what to write next. Yet I drag my pen through the paper hoping something mildly comprehensible will emerge. For a moment I smell dot-pen ink from this notebook. It is an old Classmate notebook, some of whose pages are filled with academic notes. I don’t have anything to say, I am merely writing for the sake of it, to fill up line after line and then page after page. I am trying to squeeze out a grain of joy from my hapless being. Why do I call myself hapless? you might ask. I myself don’t know why. It just feels apt. it is 9 o’ clock at night. Around 10, mother will lay the table and our family will have dinner. The domestic help who makes rotis and a curry is on leave. The rotis had to be bought from outside. Around half an hour back I asked father if I could go out for a walk; he seized the opportunity to tell me to buy rotis as I was going out anyway. I pleaded for an extra ten rupees which I spent on a small cup of tea and a cigarette. After I came back, I stared at the wall for some time. I sat cross-legged on the bed and cast a blank look at the soft pink wall and breathed. I focused on every inhale and exhale, being aware of every breath. It is a meditation practice called anapanasati. I learnt it from YouTube. Writing this feels like nothing more than a conversation with myself. I am reminiscing to the pages of a diary with no particular topic to talk about. It may seem selfish to not interrupt myself and ask you, the reader, how you are doing. If you are doing good, I am happy for you. If things are not that great for you, I am with you. At the time of writing this, things are going shit for me. I am not sure if I will get my master’s degree. I had a paper in which I needed to score 33 out of 60 in the final exam. Needless to say, I failed. Then there was a supplementary exam for the same. I didn’t turn up for the supplementary either. Now according to the rules of my university I have been allowed to sit for a special supplementary exam in which I still need to score 33 out of 60. This exam has not yet happened. If I fail the special supplementary, I will have to redo the course, something my father will not allow. According to him, if I fail the paper now, after the three-month time I had for preparation, I will never be able to pass, or he simply won’t fund me for another semester in the university. Thus, I am now at home, preparing for this exam, uncertain of my fate. I have three weeks left till the exam and I can’t take it anymore. Imagine: a twenty-three-year-old boy on antidepressants and antipsychotics, stuck in a closed apartment with the unkind words of his parents, whose phone has been confiscated, who sits all day with a printed copy of his book and is made to study. He is given only twenty rupees a day with which he buys four of the cheapest cigarettes available at five rupees per piece. Four cigarettes are hardly enough to pass the day, especially for someone with a crippling nicotine addiction like me, so I buy a ten-rupee pack of beedis. Beedis are locally made handmade cigarettes comprising of raw tobacco wrapped in leaves and sold in packets, each having fifteen or sixteen beedis. Beedis come with no filter and are harsher and more harmful than cigarettes, but under the circumstances this is all I can afford. A majority of the working-class people, or truly productive individuals smoke beedis almost exclusively as they can’t afford cigarettes.
Sometimes as I write, I randomly take a deep breath and go into anapanasati meditation where I just focus on every inhale and exhale. I find this to be a grounding experience. Whenever I am bored, I just start mindfully breathing. I find myself doing this even now as I write. It doesn’t do much except distil out one moment from the next as my breathing becomes a marker by which to gauge the passage of time.
Sunday.
It’s been two days since I last wrote in this journal. Nothing much has happened in this span. It is Sunday morning now. The date is irrelevant because I have no idea if I will ever complete this journal. I write in bits and spurts with no consistent practice. Today I just happened to want to write. I feel the recurring theme in this journal so far might be my lack of anything concrete to say. I don’t apologise for that. I woke up at 10.30 am today. My sleep had already been disturbed at 8 by my need to pee but I slept again as my designated time to wake up is 9. Sleep is part of a bargain I made with my parents. Father suggests that I either wake up early or sleep late as that will leave me more time to study.
Friday.
It took me a while to realise but I actually pulled a pretty average chick. Her name was Sidra. After she broke up with me (I would never break up with her) there were brief flings with other women. Diksha, a fair girl from Delhi, and Deepakshi, a sultry chick from Kolkata. I didn’t really get far with either woman. There was also Malty, who was Anooj’s girlfriend at that time. I still text her sometimes and she always replies fast. I have always been a semi-finalist with women. I easily end up among the top five choices of a woman but never seem to make it to no. 1. I have been bitchless for a really long time now. Today I had an interview. The interview went average. I left the room feeling a good vibe but realised the interviewers probably made everyone feel that way. I don’t feel like doing anything today. I have to study but don’t feel like doing that either. Of late my beedi consumption has skyrocketed. I smoke every fifteen minutes. Every morning I wake up with a lump of cough in my throat. Throughout the day, I smoke before meals, after meals, with tea, without tea, basically any interval in my day is filled with smoke. I can’t even write without smoking. I am afraid I write like shit. I am afraid I may never make it as a writer. I want to reiterate that I feel like shit all the time. I am getting fat, I rarely exercise, I am ravenously hungry all the time, I use tobacco as a coping drug because I can’t find anything else. Father returned from office and yelled again today. Monday was the only day he didn’t yell. Today is Friday. Tomorrow is Saturday that means he will stay at home. That means more yelling. I hate the conflicts between my parents. Everyday it’s a new thing but in the same old way. Today morning for instance, as I was bathing a loud bestial shriek emanated from the other room and over the din of running water my father’s voice rang out. He was presumably angry. He is often angry when he finds that things are not to his liking. I wish to go out for a walk now but for that I need my parents’ permission.
So, I did go out for a walk after all. I strolled through some unknown streets nearby (I am new to this place) and smoked a lot of beedis. My throat is raspy and sore from all that tobacco smoke. Yet I won’t stop. I cannot stop. I feel restless without tobacco. There is a slight round growth on the left side of my tongue. Sometimes I fear it is cancer. Cancer and heart disease run in my family. I love beedis. There are different brands of beedis to choose from – Nimai, Mina, Bongolokhhi and Ganesh. All of them made with ‘special nepani tamak (tobacco)’. Some people are indifferent to the brand of beedis and smoke all of them with equal indifference. I have a preference. I smoke only Mina beedis which come from the village of Tiktikipara in Murshidabad.
Smoking a beedi is a ritual. First you roll the beedi along its vertical length. This is done to check how densely or loosely the tobacco is packed. If it’s too tight, the beedi won’t smoke. If I encounter such a beedi I am greatly disappointed and throw away the beedi after breaking it into two. Sometimes you come across a bad batch of beedis. Every single beedi is too tight. It all depends on luck. The proper amount of tightness in a beedi is when you roll it gently and hear a soft crunchy sound like when you step on a pile of dried leaves, if you bring it close to your ear. That’s the sound of the tobacco moving with your fingers. Then you light the beedi. You may use a lighter or a matchbox. Once the tip is lit to a glowing ember, it is customary to put the lit end in your mouth (carefully) while gently holding the beedi with your lips, and blow. This expels smoke from the other end of the beedi and ensures that the smoke flows smoothly into your mouth. I just came back after smoking a beedi. It had not even been ten minutes since I smoked the last one before that. My lungs feel heavy and smokeblasted. I imagine the numerous cilia in the inner linings of my respiratory system which have hardened stiff with tobacco tar. I sigh deeply, as if to acknowledge this fact.
Writing is an escape from my reality. As my mother phrased it today morning – I am no longer a student. I now belong to that specific class called unemployed educated youth. I really should be studying, yet I am writing here. The moment anyone enters my room, I scuttle and try to hide this notebook. My parents are under the illusion that I am at my desk studying, so, it is imperative that my cover not be blown. I am an idealist at heart. That’s why even amidst all this strife, I continue to write. Not a day goes by without my father reminding me that I am a worthless burden to them and a drain on my dad’s hard-earned money. I am also reminded that soon even the twenty rupees I get each day will dry up. On top of that, the sword of my special supplementary is hanging over my head. Less than two weeks are left now. I will have time to complete this journal but I won’t get a second chance at this exam. To be honest my preparations are less than satisfactory. I am well-versed in some sections but am unfamiliar with a lot of other sections. I have barely studied these past few weeks. First, I started skipping my medication. That led to me being unmotivated as fuck. I have been sitting with my book all day but barely peruse two to three pages. If I can’t comprehend a concept, I stick with it till I waste a whole day on it. I simply am unable to move beyond that point once I get stuck. I have a problem letting things go. I am not particularly happy with my writing style but I find it enough that I am able to pen four to five pages a day. I have just begun writing the sixth page today. I am toying with the idea of smoking a beedi.
There, I smoked one again. Writing about my smoking doesn’t alleviate the effects of smoking. I must go on a break tomorrow. When I think of the wooden ashtray, how quickly it gets filled to the brim with beedi ends and cigarette butts, and then I think of all those beedis I consume, all that smoked ash residing in my lungs, it makes me sick. But tomorrow morning I might wake up and again decide to smoke. I have terrible self-control. I am a speck of dust in the vast sea of humanity. I do not matter. Yet I do. I matter to me, to those in my proximity. I will always matter to some people. I must really stop smoking from tomorrow. I just drank some water and it rankled the phlegm in my throat. How will I quit smoking? The plan of action is to focus on my breathing in the way I have described before (anapanasati, google it). Let’s see how things turn out. Goodnight, for now.
Sunday.
It is 3 pm now. I just had lunch. Parents were supposed to go out for a movie but it got postponed to 7.40 pm. I smoked a few beedis today. My throat has just begun to feel raspy. I should not torture my lungs further. I am again writing instead of studying. Like I said, this is an escape for me.
Wednesday.
It started out as a sunny day then it suddenly rained. I feel somewhat energetic now. Again, I am at a loss of words. There is so much I want to write about but I can’t. I haven’t written for two days. I should write every day. It gives me a sense of accomplishment. Yesterday my friend’s ex-girlfriend sent me a follow request on Instagram. I, of course, accepted it. Then I messaged her. It led to an unbelievably dry conversation. I should not text her again.
I have always wanted to be a writer. Never mind the fact that I write like shit. I am afraid of being a mediocre writer. This style of writing is too journalistic and vapid. It lacks depth. It is Wikipedia-writing. Yet these are words I must let out. I cannot afford to let these words and thoughts accumulate inside me. I must let them all out. I don’t care about the final form my writing takes. I just want to consummately indulge myself in the process. I have no story to tell. Only a long, interrupted commentary about daily life. This is not a novel. It is a journal of a sad insignificant boy. I am twenty-three now. The sky is a beautiful hue of gloomy blue. I wish to be as vast and endless as the sky. I wish to be as unbothered as the tiny birds gliding through it. But I am chained to humanity. Today morning mother told me of the scandalous and tragic death of a young reputed doctor who slipped to death while climbing down the drainpipes of a flat. He had gone to visit his Thai girlfriend and was trying to return to his wife and children. A sad story indeed. It was in the papers. The more I write, the worse my handwriting gets. I have a feeling this journal is mind-numbingly boring. Self-deprecation is an integral part of me. Yet I must write! As long as I write I feel alive. I only exist in between these lines. I do not know what else to base my existence upon. I want to find beauty in the ordinary. Mundane unpoetic things are the daily bread of my existence. How shamelessly privileged I am to be able to keep on writing even as another human being cleans and sweeps the floors of this apartment. Her name is Mamta, she is our domestic help. She is terribly underpaid as most domestic helps are. Her true indispensability manifests when she is on a leave. Mother has to step in then to wash the dishes, sweep the floors and also cook. As a result, she is tired and in a foul mood and doesn’t cook much. Mother and Mamta are two women integral to the functioning of our household. My handwriting is getting progressively worse as I write (I am writing by hand, not typing). I need to type out these pages soon. The song ‘Boys don’t Cry’ by The Cure is playing over and over in my head. I do not know the lyrics to this song. Only the tune with the chorus (‘cause boys don’t cry) keeps repeating. I woke up today with the song ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’ by Nancy Sinatra playing in my head: ‘these boots are made for walking/ and that’s what they will do//one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you’.
I jerked off today morning while taking a shit. I asked mother for my phone which I took with me to the washroom. I watched some old vs young porn. I have a thing for mature women. However, porn doesn’t get me as hard. There’s not much left to the imagination. So, I went to the Instagram page of Kanni and thought of her ample curves and fleshy breasts. She was the first girl I had any intimacy with ever. We met one day as we were going to Udupi (a South-Indian restaurant) and hit it off immediately. We walked back together from the university gate to our hostels. It is a three-km-long walk. On the way she really opened up to me and got real vulnerable. It was a new thing for me, having a woman lay bare all her past trauma to me. The next day we met at a designated place inside campus and lay next to each other for two hours. I played Led Zeppelin. She played a melodious nostalgic song. I was feeling cold so she covered us both in her large dupatta. Anyway, after some time I began to feel bored and indicated that I wanted to leave. For some reason physical intimacy gave me the ick. After returning to my hostel room, I never met her again. I had ghosted her. Anyway, I masturbated today morning to a man with a large cock fucking a curvaceous mature woman. I jerk off just to keep my dick functional. The anti-depressants I take have greatly reduced my libido making it difficult for me to get hard. That was one of the reasons I started skipping my medication. But then I started feeling terrible so I made the wise decision to take it again. Of course, the doctors don’t know anything about this.
It is evening now, almost 7 o’ clock. I have sat down to study and am writing again. The windows are open and a cool breeze is airing my unshaved armpits. I don’t wear a shirt at home generally. I live in the tropics. I feel really good. Time and space form a viscous jelly-like matrix in which I exist. I have around twelve days left before my exam but I don’t feel any urgency to study. I have a warped sense of priorities. I do not feel anything at all. That’s just how I am. Words and events glide over my skin, uninterrupted. I don’t know what to do, so I write. I don’t know what to write about yet I keep on writing. A sense of blankness pervades every moment of my life. I am a mustard seed tossed in the winds of fate. There is a routine in which I have become embedded. I wake up, sit at my desk, breakfast, sit at my desk, lunch, at my desk, dinner, at my desk, then sleep. I live from day to day with the knowledge that it will pass. My days are spent in waiting. Waiting for my exam to end, waiting for the day to end, waiting till its time to sleep. In between, I try to write.
Thursday
Today, I stole some liquor from my father’s cabinet. Now I am drunk. I feel great. Yesterday there was a marketing survey going on for Marlboro pocket advance. I gave my name and signature and got one box of cigarettes for free. Then I enrolled my mom and got another box for free.
Saturday
Today we went to the counsellor. All four of us – mother, father, sister, and me. I don’t want to talk about it. The psychologist told me to quit drugs (weed, cough syrup, and the edible bhang balls I regularly consume) and try to empathise with my parents who were investing so much time and resources to pull me out of my drugged haze and get me back to normal life. There was nothing wrong with what she said. On the drive back home from the hospital, parents tried to talk some sense into me. After we came home, I nicked ten rupees from father’s wallet. Then, as father left to drop sister off at a birthday party she was invited to, and mother went into the bathroom to clean up, I quietly slipped out, purchased two balls of bhang, and slipped back in. As I was chewing the balls down with water, mother saw me and guessed what I was doing. She was cross at me for a while, but her anger quickly subsided. It didn’t subside but she hid it away somewhere in her heart, and continued with the everyday habits of existence without mentioning a word to father. Peace at home was more important to her than her son’s sobriety. After a while, I quietly slipped into a mild high without anyone finding out.
Sometimes I worry I have a small penis. My insecurity led me to do some research and I came to the conclusion that I have an average dick. Part of this insecurity, I believe, was caused by my proximity to big dicked men. My dear friend Pankaj once showed me his cock on account of some skin condition down there. I couldn’t help but notice the enormity of his member. Agnit, fourteen, and the son of my father’s close friend told me about the size of his member. I remarked that it was indeed big. And finally, my father. I know he is well-endowed for a fact. This I know by the size of his underwear and by his sharp aquiline nose. The size of the penis shows a close correlation with one’s nose. You can tell a lot about a man’s dick by his nose. Agnit for example also has a significant nose. I inherited instead, my mother’s blunt nose. Yesterday, we went to watch the movie Oppenheimer starring Cillian Murphy. I noticed that Cillian has a nose similar to mine.
Sometimes I feel a spike of pain deep in my heart, I ruminate on that feeling till its roots grow throughout my limbs and bones and makes the hairs on my skin stand. The roots spread out, dissipating the feeling I felt. And the pain is buried deeper in this graveyard I carry within me, till it shows up again someday.
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Nilarghya Datta is a postgraduate in Economics from the University of Hyderabad. He claims he doesn’t know much about Economics and has always wanted to be a writer.