# The Back of Ten There is a curious thing about numbers. They hold within them the weight of worlds, the pressure of infinite meanings, yet they remain innocent—clean marks on paper, hollow sounds in air. The numeral ten: a one and a zero, simple as a closed door and an open eye. But what happens when you turn your back to it? When you cease to look at it as a fact to be known and begin instead to feel its substance, its burden, as if it were something you could climb upon? I have been thinking about this for some time now—not as mathematics, which would be a waste of numbers, but as a kind of philosophy of the back itself, that neglected side of things. We are always facing ten—facing it with recognition, respect, or dismissal. Ten fingers, ten commandments, ten thousand things. The Orientals understood this: that all multiplicity flows from the ten thousand. But what of the reverse? What if we were instead riding upon its back, carried forward without needing to comprehend it? There is a freedom in not-seeing, in moving through something rather than surveying it. When I was young, I would sit backwards on my bicycle, pedaling forward while facing what I had left behind. The world seemed deeper that way—not the world ahead, which I trusted my body to navigate, but the receding world, growing smaller and stranger with distance. My friends thought me foolish. Perhaps they were right. But I learned something then about the difference between knowing where you are and knowing where you have been. To sit on the back of ten is to surrender the need to comprehend it. The mathematician's ten is a clean thing, a unit of order. But the experiential ten—the ten that carries you—is wild. It is the ten of ten years passing, ten losses, ten moments of grace that cannot be arranged on a line. It is the ten that bends under your weight and does not break. It is the ten that asks nothing of you except that you hold on. There is a passage in one of the old books—I forget which, the mind of age is itself a ten thousand things scattered—where a sage sits backward on a donkey. The image haunted me because I understood it suddenly: not as eccentricity but as epistemology. To turn one's back is to make a choice about what matters. The view behind you is the view that made you; the view ahead is the view you imagine. But the view from the back of ten—the view available only when you are carried, when you are not controlling, when you have placed your trust in something you cannot fully see—that view is the only one worth having. I wonder if this is what it means to age. Not to lose faculties, though one does lose them—the eyes grow dim, the ears dull. But to turn gradually, almost without noticing, until one day you realize you have been riding backward all along. You are facing your own past. The future is something your body knows about but your eyes cannot reach. And this, strangely, feels like honesty. It feels like seeing truly for perhaps the first time. The back of ten has a texture. It is neither as smooth as a mathematical abstraction nor as jagged as the raw chaos of existence. It is worn, like a stone in a river, like a path walked by ten thousand feet. When you sit there, your palms grow warm from its substance. You become part of its wearing. And in that small abrasion, that exchange of pressure between your weight and its support, something like understanding occurs—not intellectual, but real. I do not recommend this way of traveling to everyone. Some people are meant to face forward, to push, to conquer the horizon. They are necessary. But for those of us who have grown tired of the view, who have seen enough of what lies ahead, there is grace in this other direction. The back of ten will carry you. It has carried millions before you, and it will carry millions after. You need not understand it. You need only trust it, and turn around.

1. On Facebook, small people write and say terrible things about great people—words that often never reach those great ones at all, or if they do reach them by some chance, they simply laugh them off. Yet these very small people flood Facebook with lavish praise of one another, around the clock. They absorb these tributes into their very being and walk about as though they've been anointed, conducting their entire lives on the fumes of such misplaced applause. I want to tell them: Brother, why don't you switch off the WiFi for a few days and see—what a life you've been living by mistake?

2. During the lockdown, many people have been thinking: Oh, I wish I hadn't argued with so-and-so that day; if I never get to see this other person again, how will they ever know that I love them? And those few people I owe money to—how on earth will I pay them back? I can't die with that debt unpaid! Once this situation passes, I swear to myself, I'll make an effort to be a better person, no matter what. But then there are others thinking: In a time like this, should I really go looking for love? Have I lost my mind? Better to save my own skin—that's what matters! The debts I've borrowed money for—thank God, at least for now I don't have to repay them during this corona crisis; that's something to celebrate! And there's no shortage of such shameless wretches. Then there's another lot altogether, thinking: Once this situation is over, let so-and-so see—they won't apologize to me! They'll face the music. If need be, I'll humiliate them in front of everyone. (Yes, such people have already decided that corona can't possibly take them.) Just let this crisis pass once, and I'll show them all—nobody can be worse than me!

3. Fall in love or befriend only those with whom your secrets remain entirely secret and safe. Keep a relationship only with someone in whose lap you can confess your mistakes without fear, someone's shoulder you can lean on and tell without hesitation your most private, most guarded secrets. This is why a relationship must be with someone whose mind is older than their body. Being able to trust someone matters more than being able to love them. When you cannot trust someone, or they cannot trust you, remaining in that relationship means inviting turmoil into every single moment of your life. A relationship with little love but much peace can endure just fine; but a relationship with much love and much discord—you might as well spend your time raising chickens instead. At least, come what may, you'll get some eggs now and then!

4. A person without envy is, by day's end, the most successful and the most at peace in their mind. The funny thing is, we don't even know how many tiny jealousies hide within us, and when they surface, we think: Why am I envious of their success or beauty? Ha ha... Such things happen every day, yet we refuse to admit that envy lives in our hearts. We don't acknowledge it, hunt it down, and think through how to root it out. So the jealousies keep multiplying, and we keep telling ourselves in silence: How strange—why am I not feeling happy at something so joyful?

5. If you tell one person “Don’t mention this thing to so-and-so,” rest assured: whatever else you two may be, you will certainly never be friends. You do not trust him, and he does not trust you; yet both of you go on pretending to be in a relationship of trust.

6. So long as you are strong and have time enough on your hands, if you keep delegating to others the tasks that are truly yours—washing your own clothes, ironing them, washing plates and glasses, sweeping the house, and all such small matters—then know this: long before old age arrives, you will find yourself physically dependent on someone, whether you like it or not.

7. Wasting food is a kind of addiction. Watch carefully: the person who wastes food tells himself he won’t do it again tomorrow, yet does it again tomorrow, and again the day after. Then there are those who think, “It’s my money, so if I waste the food I buy, what’s it to anyone?” I want to tell them: the money may be yours, but the food is not. It belongs to many. Because someone else, spending from their own pocket, might have eaten the food you threw away—and if you waste it, they lose that chance. The money is yours, but the resource is not. If we kept this in mind, there would be far less waste of gas, electricity, water, and so many other things.

8. We Bengalis fall behind others, among other reasons, because of one particular mindset: “I came first class first, so I know everything.” This encourages us to sling mud at one another. And yet, a man’s work can only be judged against his own standard, or that of someone in his own field. We engineers find fault with doctors’ work, doctors comment on lawyers’ practice, lawyers offer opinions on teaching—yet we don’t even do our own work properly, and we busy ourselves with matters about which we haven’t the faintest idea.

9. Parents are among the strangest creatures in the world. They may look at their child’s present conduct and become absolutely certain of this future: “My incompetent child will never amount to anything.” Yet in the end, they stand by that child. Let me give examples. Some boy wastes his days playing cards or sitting idle in company; some girl lies about all day chatting with friends, wandering aimlessly with this one and that, in love or some pretense of it, watching films—yet what do most parents think in such cases? They think, “One day he’ll understand everything properly, and become a truly good person.” And from among children of such parents, some do become good people, yes; but others—some endure insults from those very parents, or are beaten, and are forced to seek shelter elsewhere! It happens more often than you’d think: the young of a snake may never become human, but sometimes the young of humans grow up to be snakes.

10. They say that even a thief possesses at least one good quality, at least some principle. Yet around us there exist countless people who possess no principle whatsoever. As circumstances demand, they can adopt or discard any principle the world has to offer. Many of their deeds are far more abominable than theft. And yet, for propriety’s sake, we are forced to call them human beings rather than swine. (See how much one must compromise merely to survive. The person at whom you need only glance and the epithet “swine” springs unbidden from your very soul—and yet here I am, writing about him, compelled to use honorifics at every turn, the chandrabindu hovering over pronouns like a persistent shadow! Alas, life, alas! To breathe, one must show respect even to the offspring of pigs!)