The Cockroaches

 

Cockroaches peeping over the water-pipes. Cobwebs at the ceiling corners. Red stains of tobacco spits all over the walls. I continue to gaze at the walls below the staircase as her head slowly disappears beneath the flight of stairs. The cobwebs have grown, the red stains have been replenished over the year, the cockroaches in our bathroom have given birth to tiny babies who scamper all over when the rooms get dark. They say cockroaches can survive anything, even an apocalypse. I wonder, are we cockroaches?

Over the year, the world has turned upside down. Economy has crumbled. Peasants, who had been rotting in the hell of their lives, have risen in revolt. The relentless online classes have cost my 7-year old brother a pair of big heavy spectacles. Market is on fire. Maybe my eyes are burning too but I can’t feel it.

Yes, for us, the cockroaches, who struggle through make it through a day, who fight endlessly to get up in the morning, to carry ourselves to the basin and force ourselves to eat and drink and work, so that we can live one more day, for us, to whom, life has lost all of its meaning – for us, it has all been the same. Only, we don’t have to struggle anymore to get out of our room. The pandemic has ensured that.

Sometimes, I think after everything we have gone through, an apocalypse would be a blessing, that is, if we don’t survive it.

Very often, some friend calls me and says, “I don’t feel like living anymore. Life feels so empty, so damn meaningless.” It fills me with frantic despair. I feel helpless because I don’t have anything to console them. I can’t offer them fake solace saying, it’s going to be better because in situations like these, you never know how the sun will shine the next morning. I understand what they are going through and I can’t do anything to make them feel better. And that sucks.

The kind of reaction you get when you share this crisis with anyone, makes things worse and you end up alone with all of your frustration, grief, hopelessness, emptiness, and desperation and anguish. What’s worse, most of the time, you don’t even have a good reason for depression and that makes it sound all the more ridiculous. “No one will get it” you think to yourself and go off to sleep. When you get up, you feel worse. And you sleep again. That is, if you have the luxury to do so. Otherwise, the battle continues. The battle to remain alive at the thoroughfare of death.

Sometimes, you wonder. With so much of death around us, with so much of death sipping in through the cracks of our life each and every day, how do people or if people remain alive? How do people live in a world teeming with such adulteration, affectation, betrayal, deception and cruelty? How do people dream in a life that has essentially nothing to offer but a void deep as abyss? What is the point in thriving amidst all this chaos? Questions. Questions. Questions. So many unanswered questions, questions that are never asked, questions that will perhaps always remain unanswered but that will continue to define and redefine your life.

I have been grappling with depression for over years and it has only worsened with time and I know thousands like me, are out there. Call it playing victim card, luxury of the aristocratic, being egocentric and self-obsessed or whatever, you cannot deny our existence. Yeah, people say all of that, but you know what, if you are one of us, then you know better than to get intimidated by them. For all you care they can go to hell. They haven’t sparred like you did, they haven’t survived life and death, they haven’t been the ‘losers’, marked and pitied and looked down upon by the rest of the world. They can babble all they like but at the end of the day, you and you alone will stand before life incarnate and confront it single-handed. And you know what that costs.

It sucks. It pains. It stings like hell. But you need to figure out your life for yourself. You need to sort out the mess and fight on.

‘That’s Life’…