# A Man Full of Mistakes There lives a man who is full of mistakes. His life is a testament to the art of getting things wrong. He doesn't possess the cunning to hide his errors or the wit to explain them away—they spill out of him like water from a broken vessel, visible to all. In the morning, he wakes and begins his day as though the previous one had taught him nothing. He promises himself: today will be different. Today he will be careful, measured, wise. But by noon, he has already stumbled. By evening, he wears his blunders like a second skin. People point and whisper. They exchange knowing glances—*there he goes again*, the expression says. Some pity him. Others, the harsher sort, derive a quiet satisfaction from his repeated falls. After all, his failures confirm something in them: that they are, at least, more careful. More prudent. More right. But this man—this creature of endless missteps—has begun to understand something the careful world does not. His mistakes have taught him more than any success ever could. Through each error, he has learned the texture of his own limits, the geography of his ignorance, the way the world actually works when you stop pretending to master it. His life reads like a rough map drawn by a trembling hand, and yet it covers more ground than the polished maps drawn by those who have scarcely ventured anywhere. There is a strange freedom in being thoroughly wrong. When you have failed at so many things, you cease to fear failure. When everyone knows you are flawed, you no longer need to perform perfection. He walks through the world lighter for it—unburdened by the exhausting pretense of infallibility. And perhaps—though he does not claim this with certainty, for he is suspicious of his own certainties—perhaps this is closer to what a human being is meant to be. Not the edited, curated version that society rewards. But the rough, genuine, truthful thing. The man who admits he does not know. Who falls and rises not because he has learned never to fall again, but because falling is simply part of being alive. His mistakes have made him humble. And humility, it seems, is the only honest foundation from which to begin understanding anything at all.

# I Am a Man of Mistakes

I am a man full of mistakes. I blunder at the simplest of tasks—the kind where others hardly ever stumble. It has become such a thing with me: if no one else will make a mistake at something, I surely will. My breathing troubles me greatly these days, and I keep filling the doctor’s pockets with money. This mistake consoles me.

I arrive at the classroom late, yet I reach the railway station absurdly early. I know what time the class begins. I also know what time the train arrives. And I know this too—and yet the mistake is mine all the same. Not that I err on purpose. It simply happens.

I compose a message carefully, pouring emotion and beautiful thoughts into every word, and send it to the wrong person. Time and again, I receive only the sender’s code-name in return. This mistake keeps happening. I cannot escape it, though not for want of trying. I truly cannot.

I wear a handloom saree to a wedding, and a gadwal to wander alone in a rickshaw. What does this mean, really? I do not know. In that moment, that is what I wish to do. My desire may be mistaken, but I find no harm in living with this mistake.

Seeing so much work piled before me, I grow afraid and flee to sleep early at night. By morning, I cannot even recall what tasks I was supposed to do. Much remains undone. I suffer for it later. Perhaps I was born to suffer. Such thoughts visit me.

As a child, I read incomprehensively. As an adult, I continue to read people the same way—incomprehensibly. I do not understand myself, nor do I understand those around me. Both the inner and outer worlds are worlds of error to me. How I have lived in such a world, even that I do not understand.

Long ago, I mistook a good man and drove him away. Now I must live a household life with the wrong man, taking him to be right. This is the law. Nature keeps count, and settles all accounts precisely. I understand it well: nature does not err in its reckoning.

During the day I light the lamps in my house; at night I keep it in darkness. To me, light does not always mean light, nor darkness always mean darkness. Not all light illuminates—some light brings blindness. Not all darkness obscures—some darkness is a mirror.

I often feel the urge to leave home. I pack my bags carefully, bid goodbye to everyone, step out—only to reach, at most, the salon two hundred and fifty yards away, then return. This has happened many times. I do not know where I would go. But I know I want to go somewhere. The salon-keeper’s uncle laughs when he sees me. Why does he laugh? His daughter died last year. No, not that way—it was not suicide, we know that much. Could it be that seeing me reminds him of his own daughter?

In an exam where I should have scored full marks, I received zero. Later, I learned I had written the wrong roll number on the answer sheet. I remember feeling a deep pity for myself that day. Perhaps mankind cannot bear such misfortune.

Sometimes I’ve left a crowded gathering early, exhausted, and hurried home. Only to find the whole household standing there—every face weighted with fatigue, sagging from their necks, moving toward me. Of course, I felt no added burden then.

I have understood only this, and once more: not everything needs to return.

I waited with rice kneaded in my hands for that boy—the one who would never come home. And the boy who stayed, I never even asked if he had eaten. I have still not learned for whom to knead rice, whom to feed.

I never cared for flattery, yet I heard from those I held dear that one cannot be beloved without knowing how to flatter. That hope—that I might be as dear to my beloved as they are to me—I have accepted now as a false hope. A person cannot love another, accepting them as they truly are, the way they are.

I have always trusted the betrayer and condemned the innocent. Life keeps answering this endlessly, yet I cannot stop. I place some faith carefully in the house of disbelief, and some disbelief in the house of faith.

I keep shouting at that deaf man, again and again, as if I had something to tell him; and the one who wished to hear “I love you” from my lips—I never even threw a smile his way. The result: in the first man’s eyes I live as a chatterbox, and in the second’s, as deaf. And in my own eyes, I live with this thought: no one loves me.

I wept through countless nights because I could not paint, my chest drowning in tears, yet the dance that flowed in my very blood—I never once knew joy in it. Now they think I cannot dance; I think I cannot paint.

In this life, I have believed I truly knew so many people in so few words, and yet standing before the mirror, I have never known myself! I think of people as mirrors, and of mirrors as people!

I have rubbed expensive soap on my body, scrubbed away the dirt; yet on this mind of mine where so much filth has accumulated, not even cheap soap has touched it. A soiled mind wrapped inside a gleaming body. This is who I am.

I have always worn a watch on my wrist, yet I never had a sense of time. When that sense came, I found the watch was no longer there. I wander desperate with the money for a new watch in my pocket, yet the watch business in the world has ceased!

I could never tell the one I loved that I loved them. And the one I cannot bring myself to hate—they extracted “I love you” from me twice over! I have understood: the love on one’s lips is the reverse of the hatred in one’s eyes, and the name of life is keeping those lips busy anyway.

When my tired mind, worn from living, asks, “Where does this living end?”, suddenly it strikes me: “Wait—I haven’t even begun to live yet!”