In winter I used to go to the Royal Calcutta Turf Club. Not to bet — I had no talent for that particular mathematics of hope and loss. I went to watch the horses.
They were magnificent. Trained, disciplined, broken into a strange bargain: run for us, entertain us, make us money. They did it beautifully, their muscles moving like poetry under skin, hooves pounding out rhythms that stirred something ancient in the crowd. But watching them circle the track I felt a nausea I couldn’t name. They should have been running because wind called them, because space opened before them like an invitation. Instead they ran for us. And we called it sport.
The cruelty isn’t in the training or even the racing. It’s in the theft of purpose.
I knew this because I recognised it. I’d run those circuits myself — the television serial years, sixteen-hour shifts manufacturing nineteen minutes of footage, the same emotional beats recycled until they became muscle memory drained of meaning. We measured time not in days but in episodes, not in seasons but in TRP ratings. Trained, groomed, our wildness converted into marketable form.
But then came the nights. Those rare stolen hours when I’d step out into Kolkata’s empty streets at 3 AM and feel something crack open inside me. The city at that hour was a different creature. Streets that choked with humanity by day became mine alone. Stray dogs owned the intersections. Street lights painted everything in amber and shadow.
Once, at the crossing near Hazra, I stopped without reason. A single street cleaner was bent over his broom, sweeping dust into small obedient piles. The scrape of bristles on asphalt echoed through the silence, steady and unhurried. We were both doing what the emptiness allowed: moving at our own pace, accountable to no clock but our own exhaustion. He never looked up. He didn’t need to.
Another night, outside a shuttered sweet shop on Rashbehari, the air still held the ghost of syrup and fried ghee. Not hunger that stirred in me — something stranger. Like being tugged toward a festival I’d never attended, or a life that had passed me by while I was locked in fluorescent rooms manufacturing emotions I didn’t feel.
Then one afternoon the monsoon came so hard it flooded the shooting floor. Water seeped under doors, pooled in corners, turned our manufactured drama into an actual crisis. Production halted. I walked outside where rain was coming down in sheets and made a paper boat. A grown man folding paper while a city drowned. I set it in the water and watched it navigate the current with more grace than I’d managed in months. It went where the water took it, surrendered to forces larger than itself, and somehow that surrender looked like freedom.
I’d forgotten how to float.
Kolkata is not my city. It is my circulatory system. I can’t tell where its veins end and mine begin. Its streets exhale fried onions and monsoon earth. I’ve stood in Burrabazar at dawn watching men haul rice sacks with mythic strength. I’ve watched trams slide down College Street like ghosts of empire, trailing blue sparks like failed constellations. I’ve walked Kalighat in the brutal heat of May where faith and commerce tangle into something neither sacred nor profane but startlingly alive.
But here’s what proximity does: it murders sight. The cries in New Market collapse into one long undifferentiated drone. The colonial facades peel into sameness. Even the fog on the Maidan, once mystery incarnate, becomes an irritant for my glasses.
My grandmother had a word: ador. Not quite love, not quite affection — something closer to the act of cherishing, of holding precious. But ador withers in unbroken contact. It needs air, the shock of absence, to remember what it holds.
Family love arrives like the polestar — fixed, constant. But in the claustrophobia of proximity, care metastasizes into entanglement. My uncle, dear to me, told a story about my father’s last winter. I’d heard it twenty times. The same beats, the same punchline, the same nostalgic sigh. I smiled, nodded at the right places. Inside, something collapsed. Not boredom. Saturation. The story embalmed in overuse, its tenderness murdered by repetition.
My mother has a way of touching my face that used to undo me. Now sometimes I stiffen. Not because I don’t love her. Because I’ve been loved in that exact way so many times my body has learned to brace for it, to no longer let it through.
And then there’s the recliner. My accomplice, my trap. It sits in the corner like a patient animal, has absorbed me like an old friend, learned the weight of my body in a dozen postures of defeat and rest. I know the truth: sometimes I don’t sit to think. I sit to avoid. Comfort calcifies into habit. Habit ossifies into paralysis, camouflaged as peace.
The horses ran their circles. Mine were smaller. Just the distance from bed to chair, chair to window, window back to chair.
Arundhati Roy once said she had to step away from her mother in order to love her. I learned the same thing watching thoroughbreds run for crowds, floating a paper boat in a flooded street, stiffening under my mother’s hand, sinking into a chair that asks nothing of me.
To love what holds me, I have to slip free of it first. Not abandonment. The deliberate retreat that makes vision sharp again. That transforms the blurred familiar into the suddenly, startlingly seen.