As a patron of the metro rail system in my city and other cities such as Delhi, I've seen my fair share of beauty in the coaches. The cute couple that just started dating and only have eyes for each other and the elderly who sit in the Senior Citizen seats and talk about the days of their youth when the Metro either extended to Tollygunge or didn't exist at all.
And as I'm travelling, book in hand or earphones blasting James Blunt, I sometimes see a spectre loom over me, winged and black and ominous, wearing a double breasted suit. I know who it is, it is my guardian angel in some ways.
The other day I saw a play at Gyan Manch called Eka Ki..? (Alone...?) which was performed by Ankur (follow them on Instagram @ankur_kolkata_official). It was a play set in a college which brought me back to my college days and it was about the personification of a person's loneliness. It got me thinking a lot about how lonely a person can be, even in a crowd of people...how alone social media has made us in the attempt to make the world a smaller place.
Every morning, I wake up and open my WhatsApp and Instagram to check what my circle is doing. This circle is wide- Delhi, Kerala, Darjeeling, Assam, Romania, USA, UK and then there's the celebs I follow as well. After getting my social media fix, commenting or liking some posts and reading a few good comics and seeing some jaw dropping photos, I either go to work wherein I listen to a podcast or music on Spotify and (you guessed it!) my spectre looms somewhere over my right shoulder as we're travelling. I'm always online in some ways, I'm always keyed in to the Internet and what that does is cause the spectre to loom more and more.
So one day, I took off my Bluetooth headset and I went to a chai shop and I asked the spectre to sit down. bought it a cup of tea and I asked it what it wanted.
It whispered that it was me, the part of me I was trying to shove away, the part of me I was trying to bury. I saw it start to cry. It told me it had never known a day when I had not summoned it, be it when I was a child and lost myself in books to escape it, or played violent video games because my mother had picked another one of her fights for no goddammed reason with my father and they were locked in World War III in the next room, or my "friends" in high school had as usual bullied me and were jealous of my vocabulary. The spectre said it had seen me grow into a fine man but it had never left my side. It was the Julio in my life and it had waited all my life down by the schoolyard.
And then it started to scream. Why was I fighting something that was a part of me? Was it so hard to accept it? Why was I trying to segregate it? Why? Why? Why?
Isn't that all of us at some level, especially if we are intelligent? My father has been lonely, my teachers have been lonely, my doctors have been lonely, my friends are lonely.
Why you ask? I think deep down every person on this planet has a core of loneliness and they turn to art to dissipate it. I write, I read, I listen to music and podcasts and I talk.
And it was at this chai shop that I was at, sipping tea with the spectre that I came to understand this.
We're all lonely people deep down. But I think that, rather than fight something that's such an integral part of us we should have some chai with it now and then.
And then, I put my small earthenware cup of chai down and I stood up. I extended my hand to the spectre and shook it. The spectre looked into my eyes and smiled. I smiled back.
As I walked back, Blunt came on the playlist again...
"You're beautiful
You're beautiful
You're beautiful, it's true"
The Bilge Master
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