Heartbreak and Happiness

 June 22, 2022

The heartbreak continues and intensifies. The heartbreak of seeing my country change and change, and change more rapidly, and not in a direction of my choice. It cannot be captured on this page. Since Monday my body has been feeling it, breaking down. It is a churning that feels like Pralaya, the end of the Universe, before the next beginning. The epoch where evil is the only thing that succeeds. Where meaningless cruel truths become political goals and the explanations justifying them make some of us doubt our sanity. I am being overly dramatic. But there are political maelstroms brewing daily in India and I experience myself carried away in their tsunamic waves.  My identity feels like a red giant star about to crash into its own belly. 

 

This morning I spoke to my artist friend. We looked at each other’s battered faces and grimaced. Tired, dark, swollen eyes. His maelstrom was more personal — financial issues, loss of a friend, grief of another kind. As it often does our talk took us through it all. At one point I said I don’t care about pushing through anymore, all I want is to feel happy. 

 

He nodded, and we ended the call telling ourselves that we would each do something that would do that for us. Make us happy. He probably was going to make cheesy nachos with shrimp, watch a film with his partner, and finish off with an ice-cream sandwich. I groped around that sticky boiling terror within to find something, anything, that would make me happy, and I couldn’t. It happens to me sometimes when I am gripped within such darkness, that I cannot see any light even when it is shining on me. 

 

I decided to listen to a podcast a friend had sent a link to a few days ago. An interview with a writer whose previous book I had adored. The new book she was talking about seemed fascinating and I reserved a print copy from the NLB, as I listened to the podcast. At some point she talked about literature helping people cope with difficult periods of life. She went on to say that she, and the character in her new book, looked to books to find ways to live their lives. I know this character from the previous book she appears in, a super intelligent seeker, and if that was good enough for her to try, then it is for me too. My happy place?

 

This year I am 13 books behind in my 50 books a year goal. I will attempt to close the gap now. Do what is necessary, what I have committed myself to — though retreating from everything would be ideal — and read. And even as this excites me immensely, a daemon inside laughs and reminds how the only constant over this year, or even the last, has been that everything I began with enthusiasm and joy collapsed into insignificance.  

 

And so this might too. But I need to find a way of surviving, of making sense of how my life feels further away from some ideal I want for it, than it has ever felt before. Perhaps I need to move away a bit from my normal preoccupations — many over which I have no control. And I need to start today.