Philosophy and Psychology (Translated)

# Life, Once Again: One There's a peculiar arithmetic to living. We begin with a single breath, and from that first exhalation, we're already engaged in the business of counting—our days, our losses, our small victories. But what if life itself is not a sum we're meant to calculate, but a repetition we're meant to understand? In Bengali, we have a word that carries the weight of return: *আবার*—again. It doesn't merely denote recurrence; it whispers of inevitability, of cycles that fold back upon themselves like hands coming together in prayer. Life, then, is *আবার*—perpetually again. Not as a curse of monotony, but as the fundamental rhythm of existence itself. Consider the day. Dawn breaks, and we wake as if for the first time, yet it is the ten-thousandth morning. The sun rises—*আবার*—indifferent to our exhaustion, our doubts. A child learns to walk by falling and rising, falling and rising. A lover returns, or doesn't. We return, always returning, to the same street, the same room, the same question: What now? The ancients understood this. The wheel of *samsara* turning. The eternal return that Nietzsche would later resurrect in Western thought. But perhaps they missed something crucial: each *আবার*—each again—is not identical. The same river never flows twice, as Heraclitus knew. We are not the same person waking to the same dawn. So when we speak of life as *আবার*—as again—we're speaking of transformation disguised as repetition. The trick is to see it.

(I am not writing this with any particular person in mind.)1.A room. A room will do. Four walls, a ceiling overhead, a floor underfoot—everything that's needed is here. The smell of dampness, old wood, a…

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Philosophy and Psychology (Translated)

# Life Again and Again: Three The question that kept circling in the mind was not whether life repeats itself—that much seemed obvious to anyone who had lived long enough to notice patterns. Rather, it was whether this repetition held any meaning, or whether it was simply the mechanical grinding of time, the same wheel turning endlessly, crushing the same hopes beneath it. Consider the morning. Every morning arrives with the promise of newness. The light falls through the window at the same angle as yesterday, yet we greet it as if for the first time. Perhaps this is not deception but wisdom—the small mercy our minds grant us. We forget, and in forgetting, we are reborn. But there is something else. Something that whispers beneath these thoughts. When the old man walked the same street for fifty years, he did not walk it the way a child walks it. The repetition had written itself into his body, his eyes, the very rhythm of his breath. He saw what was not there—the faces of the dead, the dreams abandoned in doorways, the love that had curdled into habit. The street remained the same; he had become someone else. And this, perhaps, was the secret: we do not repeat our lives. We are repeated by them. We are shaped and reshaped by the same forces, until we become unrecognizable to ourselves. There is a particular loneliness in this knowledge. To understand that tomorrow will resemble today, that the same battles will be fought with the same weapons by weaker hands—this is not pessimism. It is merely the clear sight of one who has stopped averting his gaze. The seasons turn. Children grow and become their parents. Dreams crystallize into duties. And we move through it all with the strange dignity of those who know they are actors in a play they did not write, delivering lines they did not choose. Yet—and here the thought catches, splinters—there remains something that does not repeat. In the midst of the familiar, something breaks through. A word spoken at the right moment. A silence that says what words cannot. The sudden awareness of another person beside you, separate and whole and impossibly real. These moments do not erase the repetition. They do not make it bearable. But they do something else: they prove that repetition is not the whole truth. Life repeats, yes. But it also contains ruptures. Within the cycle, there are lines that refuse to close. Perhaps this is why we continue. Not because we believe the next day will be different—we have lived long enough to know better. But because there is no other choice, and because the possibility of rupture, however thin, however unlikely, keeps us standing at the threshold each morning, waiting.

2.You stopped. Start from here. If there is such a thing as a start.No one wanted you. Nowhere. No one at all.…

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Philosophy and Psychology (Translated)

# Life Once More: Two I find myself thinking, these days, about the architecture of forgetting. How memory doesn't preserve the past as a photograph preserves light—static, unchanging—but rather as a living thing transforms it. Each time we remember, we remake what we remember. The past is never done with us, and we are never done with it. There's a peculiar burden in this. When you've lived long enough, you carry not one life but many lives—all the versions of yourself you've been, all the interpretations of events you've rehearsed in the privacy of your mind. Which one is true? Perhaps all of them. Perhaps none. I was thinking of this while watching a bird at my window this morning. It came back to the same branch, day after day, as if following a map written into its body. Is memory, for such a creature, different from ours? Does it remember the branch, or does it simply recognize it—the way your hand knows where to find the light switch in a darkened room? And is there really a difference? The question troubles me because I suspect that much of what we call memory is not remembering at all but recognition. We see the world anew each moment, yet we've trained ourselves to see it as we saw it before. Habit masquerades as memory. Repetition poses as knowledge. An old teacher of mine once said that to truly live again—to experience life as "again" rather than as mere continuation—one must forget enough to be surprised by what remains. Not amnesia, but a kind of deliberate unknowing. To see your own life as if for the first time, even as you're living it for the hundredth. This seems impossible. And yet, in rare moments, it happens. You catch your reflection unexpectedly and for an instant don't recognize yourself. You say something you've said a thousand times and hear it as though someone else were speaking. A familiar room becomes strange because the light has fallen differently, or because you have. These are not pleasant moments. They carry a dizziness, an unmooring. But they're also—I think—necessary. They're the points at which life breaks open, where the crust of habit cracks and something genuine can breathe through. I don't know if this is wisdom or merely the rambling of someone trying to make sense of the fact that he is both who he was and entirely other than he was. That time moves forward while memory spirals. That every day we wake as if for the first time, even as we wake from sleep shaped by all our yesterday's. Life as repetition, yes. But also life as perpetual return to what was never finished, never fully known. Life once more—not because it repeats, but because it can never be fully grasped the first time. Or the second. Or the last. Perhaps this is what being alive means: the permanent incompleteness of understanding oneself.

A kettle, a cup, some vessel filled with something—call it tea, or call what passes for tea that powder. Boil the water—the…

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Stories and Prose (Translated)

# The Wish-Granter's Measure The old woman sat by the window of her cramped room on the fourth floor of a crumbling building in North Calcutta, and counted the days on her fingers. Thirty years she'd been here. Thirty years of the same view—the rooftop of a printing press, two clotheslines strung between buildings, and beyond them, the blur of the city's indifferent face. Her name was Asha, though people had stopped using it long ago. They called her Ashaji—a small courtesy that cost nothing and granted her a measure of respect she'd never quite earned. She'd been a schoolteacher once, in a different life, in a different Calcutta. That woman seemed like someone else's memory now. The room was narrow and tall, with a door that stuck in the monsoon and a window that rattled when the wind came from the north. On one wall hung a calendar from 1987—she'd forgotten to change it, and somehow the act of changing it had become an impossibility, a small paralysis of the soul. The calendar girl's smile had faded to a ghost's smile. Asha found this comforting. She was waiting for something, though she couldn't have said what. Not a person. Not a letter. Not a knock on the door that would deliver her into some other life. The waiting itself had become the shape of her days. She woke at six—her body's clock needed no winding—made tea on the small gas stove, and took her chair by the window. There she sat, watching the city move without her, touching her without touching. The neighborhood had changed. The printing press had become a storage facility. The clotheslines remained, though no one hung clothes on them anymore—they held rope, plastic bags, things that had lost their owners' names. Younger people had moved into the building, people with mobile phones and urgent footsteps. They didn't acknowledge Asha on the stairs. She didn't expect them to. One Tuesday, a girl came to her door. She was perhaps nineteen, with the kind of beauty that was already becoming a hardship for her—Asha could see this in the way she held her shoulders. The girl wanted to rent the room for the afternoons. There were reasons, whispered reasons, reasons that made the girl's eyes look away. "I'll give you five hundred rupees," the girl said. "Just the afternoons. Two to five." Asha didn't ask questions. She'd learned, over the decades, that questions were a luxury. She nodded and the girl produced the money, folded small and exact, and after that, Tuesdays and Thursdays and sometimes Wednesdays belonged to the girl and someone who came to meet her in the afternoons. Asha would move to the common room in those hours, a space shared with three other tenants where a television broadcast cricket matches and soap operas into the thick air. She'd sit in the corner with her knitting—a shawl she'd been making for ten years—and listen to the lives that unfolded in the blue light. She felt like a spy in her own displacement. The girl would emerge from the room after an hour or two, composed and careful, and leave money on the small table by the door. Asha never looked up. They never spoke beyond the initial transaction. But Asha noticed things: the girl wore the same two salwar suits, alternating them. She carried a small school bag though she was clearly not a student. Her left hand had a mark, a thin crescent scar between thumb and finger, which she would touch when she was thinking. One afternoon, the girl didn't come. Then another didn't. Asha kept the money from those days in a tin box under her bed, and its growing weight began to feel like an accusation. The money was a story, and the story was not Asha's to have, but it was hers to hold. Three months passed. Six. Then one morning, there came a knock. Not the girl's knock—that had always been tentative, almost apologetic. This was a man's knock, official and hard. Police, Asha thought immediately. She was right. They wanted to know about the girl. When she came, what she did, who came to see her. Asha sat in her room and told them nothing. She said she'd rented the space to a girl for typing work—sometimes young people did typing from home, she said. The officers looked at her as if she was a very old ghost telling very old lies, and perhaps she was, and perhaps the lies were so old they'd turned into a kind of truth. After they left, Asha opened the tin box and looked at the money. There was quite a lot of it now. Enough for a year, perhaps. Enough to matter, though it didn't. She never saw the girl again. She should have felt relief, or at least the normality of emptiness. Instead, she felt a strange displacement, as if the girl had taken the room's one window with her when she left. Weeks turned to months. The calendar still showed 1987. Asha stopped updating it, then stopped noticing that it hadn't been updated. Time became something that happened to other people. She counted the days still, but no longer on her fingers. Now she counted in the way stones count in a river—not adding up, just existing, submerged. Then one afternoon, there was a knock. Asha's hands stilled on her knitting. The knock was soft, the girl's knock, unmistakable now in its gentleness. Asha rose and opened the door. The girl stood there in the hallway, but she was changed. There was something settled in her face, something resolved that hadn't been there before. She wasn't asking to rent the room. She was holding a baby—a small child, no more than a few months old, wrapped in a cloth that had once been yellow. "I wanted to show you," the girl said. "I wanted you to know." Asha didn't understand at first. Then she did. The girl was showing her an ending that wasn't an ending, a continuation, a life that had split and reformed into something new and stubborn and real. "His name is Rohan," the girl said. "Rohan Kumar. I'm married now. I'm living with my husband's family outside the city. In a small house. There's a garden." Asha found herself smiling. It was an unexpected action, her face creasing into lines that had forgotten their purpose. "He's beautiful," Asha said. This was true. The child had the girl's eyes, dark and questioning. The girl stayed for twenty minutes. She told Asha things—about the man, how he came back for her, how he fought with his family, how he'd waited while she tried to become someone else and then helped her become someone true. The words tumbled out like she'd been saving them for someone specific, and Asha was the someone she'd chosen. Before she left, the girl pressed money into Asha's hands. More money than their transaction would have cost. "For your kindness," the girl said. "For not asking. For giving me space to become." After she left, Asha sat by her window and held the money and felt, for the first time in thirty years, like she'd been granted a wish. Not her own wish—someone else's. And yet. That evening, she changed the calendar. 1987 became 2015 with a small violence, a tearing away. The room looked different immediately, as if it had aged another decade in a single moment. Asha looked at the new year pasted on the wall and decided she would count the days differently now. Not as an absence, but as a measure. A measure of what, she couldn't say. Perhaps the measure of a room that had held a girl's secret and then let it go. Perhaps the measure of a woman who had learned that the most generous thing you could give someone was your lack of judgment, your willingness to not ask, your quiet allowance of their becoming. The sun set over the printing press turned storage facility. The clotheslines held their rope. The city moved and did not move. And Asha sat by her window, counting—not the days anymore, but the small wishes granted, the ones that went unnamed and unreckoned, the ones that passed through your life like prayers you'd answered without knowing you were praying.

# Asha Bhosle and the Intimate World of the Ghazal I was listening to "Dil Cheez Kya Hai" the night I heard…

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The Plaster of Thought-Walls (Translated)

# The Plaster of Thought's Wall: 151 The mind builds walls to protect itself—not from external harm, but from the vastness within. We call these walls reason, logic, habit. They are the plaster we apply daily to the cracks that might swallow us whole. Without them, we would dissolve into the infinite. With them, we suffocate slowly. There exists a peculiar fear in the thoughtful person: not of the unknown, but of knowing too much. For in the moment we glimpse the architecture of our own consciousness—the borrowed thoughts, the inherited anxieties, the constructed certainties—the plaster begins to crack. And what pours through those fissures is neither darkness nor light, but a kind of terrible clarity. We are not thinkers by nature. We are survivors who have learned to think. Thinking is the scar tissue of consciousness, formed after some ancient wound. We built these walls because the naked mind, once exposed, cannot bear its own reflection. The wise person, perhaps, is not one who tears down these walls entirely—that way lies madness—but one who knows exactly where the plaster is thinnest, where the cracks run deepest. They learn to stand at those narrow places and listen. Not to repair the damage, but to hear what the wall has been keeping out. Or what it has been keeping in. This is the loneliness of thought: to be forever aware that the fortress you inhabit is also the prison you have built.

April 11, 2026 · 18 min read
Stories and Prose (Translated)

# The Winter of Neglect The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning, slipped under the door like an apology no one had asked for. Ravi didn't open it immediately. He stood in his kitchen, holding the envelope between two fingers as if it might burn him, watching the frost patterns on the window catch the weak December light. Twenty years. That's how long it had been since he'd left. Twenty years since he'd walked out of his father's house at dusk, when the shadows were long enough to hide his face. He made tea first—the way he always did when something needed thinking through. The kettle whistled its familiar song, steam rising like the ghosts of all those unspoken words. His hands trembled slightly as he poured the water, and he pretended not to notice. The envelope sat on the kitchen table, cream-colored and expensive-looking. His father's taste, even in paper. Even in endings. The thing about silence is that it grows. In the beginning, it's manageable—a gap you tell yourself you'll bridge someday. But years pass, and the silence becomes a landscape. Mountains rise up in it. Rivers form. Forests grow thick and dark, and you stop being able to see across to the other side. Ravi had built his life on the other side. A small life, a quiet one. Books and solitude. A job that required little of him emotionally. Coffee in the mornings, walks in the evening. He had made peace with being alone, or so he'd convinced himself. Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing—that's what he'd tell himself on the difficult nights, when the apartment felt less like a refuge and more like a cell. He opened the envelope. The handwriting was shaky, uncertain. Not his father's steady hand—this was written by someone whose body was failing, whose mind was perhaps already half-turned toward leaving. *Ravi,* *I don't know if you will read this. I don't know if you will care. Perhaps you have built a life where I am not even a memory—just a story you tell yourself, a reason for something. That would be fair.* *But I am dying, and before I go, I wanted to say what I never could in life. I wanted to say sorry.* The tea had gone cold. Ravi didn't touch it. *I was a man who loved wrongly. I loved you, but I didn't know how to show it in a way that didn't feel like demand. Everything I gave came with strings attached—expectations, disappointments, the weight of my own failures pressing down on you. I wanted you to be better than me, stronger than me, different from me. As if that was something I could forge in you like metal in fire.* *You were right to leave. I see that now.* *The house is quiet without you. It has been quiet for twenty years. I filled the rooms with books I didn't read, with routines I didn't enjoy, with the thought of you—always the thought of you—the way you looked when you left, like you were escaping a burning building.* *I don't expect forgiveness. I write this because I want you to know that someone once loved you, even if they were terrible at it. Even if loving you meant hurting you. Even if the way I loved you became the reason you had to leave.* *I'm going to die soon. The doctors don't give it long. And I find I am afraid not of death, but of ceasing to exist in your memory even as a wound. At least now you think of me. After I'm gone, perhaps you won't think of me at all.* *I think that's what I'm asking for in this letter. Not forgiveness. Just—remember that I lived. Remember that I tried, however badly. Remember that the silence between us was never empty. It was full of things I didn't know how to say.* *If you want to come, the house is still here. It still has your room. The window still looks out on the garden. The old mimosa tree has grown taller.* *If you don't come, I will understand.* *—Father* Ravi read the letter three times. The fourth time, he found he couldn't see the words clearly anymore. His face was wet, though he couldn't remember crying. The tea had definitely gone cold now. Outside, the winter pressed against the windows, patient and relentless. He thought of his room in that house—a room he hadn't entered in two decades. He thought of the mimosa tree, how in spring it would burst into clouds of pale yellow flowers. He thought of his father, alone in that big house, filling the silence with books and regret. He thought of all the winters between them, stacked up like cards in a house that could collapse with one wrong word. Ravi stood and walked to the window. The frost was melting now, leaving clear patches of glass. Outside, the city moved on with its own life—people hurrying, lives colliding and separating, people letting each other go, people holding on too tight, people never quite learning how to love without crushing what they held. He didn't know what he would do yet. Whether he would go back to that house. Whether he could sit across from the man who had broken him and accept that breaking as love, even if misshapen, even if born of his own confusion and pain. But he folded the letter carefully and placed it back in the envelope. And then he sat down again at the kitchen table, where the cold tea waited like a meditation, like a vigil, like the beginning of something he didn't yet have a name for. Outside, the winter deepened. Inside, very slowly, something began to thaw.

April 11, 2026 · 1 min read
Stories and Prose (Translated)

# The Long Life of Sorrow The old woman sat by the window, her fingers working the prayer beads with the mechanical devotion of decades. Outside, the monsoon had turned the world into a watercolor of grays and greens. She did not look up as her daughter-in-law entered with tea. "You haven't eaten since morning, Ma," the younger woman said, setting the cup on the small table beside her. The old woman's fingers paused for a moment. Then they resumed their rhythm. One bead. A whispered prayer. Another bead. The prayer was the same one she had recited for fifty-three years—ever since the day her husband had not come home from the market. "I'm not hungry," she said. Her daughter-in-law sighed. This sigh had become the punctuation of their household, a small exhalation that meant: *I cannot change you, but I will keep trying.* The old woman remembered hunger differently. Not the hunger of the stomach, which was easy—a glass of milk, a handful of rice, and it passed. But the hunger of the heart, the kind that gnawed and gnawed without ever being satisfied. That hunger had been her constant companion. It had walked with her through her son's childhood, through the arranging of his marriage, through the births of her grandchildren. It had aged alongside her, taking on new shapes, new disguises, but never truly leaving. "Your grandson called from the city," the daughter-in-law ventured. "He wants to know if you need anything." The old woman smiled—a small, private smile that belonged entirely to herself. Need. What a young word. As if need were something that could be satisfied, something finite. As if it had an end. She had needed her husband to come home. Fifty-three years had passed, and he had not. The monsoon continued outside. Water streamed down the window in rivulets, distorting the shapes of the trees, the houses, the world beyond. Everything looked softer this way, less certain. Perhaps that was mercy—to make the world blurry enough that you couldn't see it clearly, couldn't see how much time had stolen from you. "Do you remember when Abbu used to bring jasmine flowers?" the old woman asked suddenly. Her daughter-in-law paused. She had heard this before—many times before. But she sat down beside the old woman, smoothing her sari across her knees. "He would bring them in the evening. Just a small bunch, tied with a thread. He would say, 'These won't last long, but neither does the day. We might as well enjoy them while they're here.'" The old woman's voice had become thin, reedy, like wind through dry grass. "He was a foolish man in many ways. But he understood things." "He loved you very much," the daughter-in-law said. She had said this many times too. It was a small kindness, offered regularly, like watering a plant that would not bloom. The old woman did not respond. Love was another young word, another word that promised more than it could deliver. Love was the thing that made sorrow live so long. If she had not loved him, perhaps she would have forgotten him. Perhaps the years would have erased him by now, and she would be at peace. But love had kept him alive inside her, as vivid and present as if he were still stepping through the door at dusk, bringing jasmine flowers that wouldn't last long. The tea cooled on the table beside her. Outside, the monsoon showed no sign of stopping. The old woman returned to her prayer beads, counting them one by one, each bead a year, each prayer a small, stubborn refusal to let go of what was gone. Her daughter-in-law rose quietly and left her alone. There was nothing else to say. There never had been. The prayer beads clicked softly in the gathering dark. One bead. One prayer. One more year that the old woman had survived, carrying her sorrow like a child she refused to set down, even though her arms had long since grown weak. Even though it would never grow lighter.

April 11, 2026 · 1 min read
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