It has been fourteen years since I last spent a birthday without the self-inflicted Monicaisque pressure of hosting a good party, without the chatter of adorable friends and peers that fanned my narcissism, without the company of a community game that usually disintegrated into pockets of debauchery amidst drinks and dice, and without the feeling of community that shaped us all into a phoenix force of wildfire as we banged the delicate shot glasses in a world without care.
But this birthday has started on a different note. Google Memories, Deliveries, Zoom Calls and Sanitisers have lent the beginning of this new decade its cultural contours. And they all share a common trait: a sense of a solo-life.
While over the last two years, my mind had resorted to an auto-mode of ascetic survival by simply not ruminating on a parallel universe unaffected by a plague, this time I consciously (and cautiously) embarked on a journey of introspection to find out which side do I feel myself slipping towards.
Do I feel alone? And consequently, do I associate myself with all the unflattering words that choke the well of loneliness.
Or do I sense solitude? And consequently, feel the breeze of enlightenment that being with oneself brings about in a haze of imagined poetry by Farhan Akhtar.
I try to excavate that answer as the Quiet beautifully magnifies every sound around me: the chirp of the Bombay monsoon winds in these lush suburbs, the sounds of my brother cleaning the utensils which I was supposed to, the swish swash of a lone plastic wrapper on the floor-the last surviving residue of an Amazon Parcel that was gifted to me.
And then I abandon the futile effort that my generation is obsessed with: choosing one side or the other. The polarisation of states of being. I refuse to separate the threads of the aurora borealis of loneliness and solitude I feel around me to scientifically observe them from Earth; instead, I look up to enjoy the glimmerings of constellations I wish I could trace.
My hand involuntarily reaches out for the vibration I sense from a distance, but I retract it back like a turtle’s head, to duck away for a few moments from the Demon of Technology on whose altar I sacrifice myself every day.
I close my eyes strenuously for a heartbeat to force into me the state of ‘showerone” (mystically sounding like Sauron), a word coined by me to define the state of unbridled imagination each of us invariably ends up in, at least once, under a shower. The time where your brain takes a tea break from instructing your mind, and your mind runs down the elevator to smoke out clouded circles of fantasy, dreams, idle thoughts-stuff that should form the currency in which life ought to be measured.
But it is hard, especially when I hear the audio recording left behind my Pavloved (another invention) brain to ‘save’ this document lest I lose the few words it ‘allowed’ me to conjure. I feel like I have to break through a pane of glass to emerge from the cage of pine trees into the open field, to a place where my eyes don’t look down into the keyboard, a place where I am alone with my words, and the tapping of keys accompanies it musically like the, drat!, I wish I knew the word to describe the jewels a Kathak dancer wears around her ankle when she dances. Ah, ghugnroo! Suck it, Google!
I knock the competitive spirit within out cold to allow me to stay on this path with my fleeting thoughts. I feel like scrolling up to trace the direction of the journey I had intended to undertake with this piece. But I resist the temptation of crippling order to embrace healing chaos. A strange silhouette of a running man, nay, a fleeing man presents itself right behind my eye. I dismiss it. I don’t flee. I control my own narrative, or something delusional like that.
I allow myself to glance at the silent clock at the bottom right of my screen that reminds me that two hours hence, a few of my loveliest friends will stay awake to show their happy faces and make me feel wanted and loved while I navigate through the task of projecting my gratitude onto my awkward face as the birthday cake is brought in. I marvel at how the last two years of incredible distance has brought us all so close to each other through a weekly routine of calls, nay, conversations, mostly unabetted by alcohol, almost into a form of community.
Is it a symbol of the charm of our separateness from our usual lives on a Saturday or a survival technique to stay alive in a vast apartment, to keep away the shadows of dread realisation that we all may end up forlorn?
Don’t know. Don’t care. All I want is the Borealis.
I want to rhapsodize further about the pleasures of being wanted on a zoom call-a window into each other’s cell in this prison of plague and plight, through which we connect in zeros and ones of restorative solitude while we wear lounge pants, quaff our third glass of whisky and dredge up a can of snacks. So, what if we talk about the grim state of our country, the fucked up people on Succession, the lack of good men and women on dating apps- the topic of the conversation does not determine the nature of the conversation. For we all go back to beds with a smiling mind, a mind that shared and listened to kindred souls.
So do I wish that I did not have to celebrate my birthday alone in such monastic exclusion? Or do I savor the smiling faces across thousands of miles brought together in two grids by my birthday and a good Wifi. Or do I celebrate the financial stability that I will continue to enjoy on the day after my birthday- a luxury of not having had a decadent party, or do I cherish the spiritual autonomy that is sure to fill me, now that a hangover does not guard the gates. Is this resignation or self-realisation?
I don’t know or don’t care. All I want is the Borealis.
