The Year When Nothing Happened

800 words and 6 photographs from 2023

On the outside, I feel like nothing much happened this year. I spent most of it in the bedroom I grew up in. I spoke to my parents more than anyone else, all of us feeling like we’re back to square one. I wore the same clothes, which began hanging more loosely over my shoulders because of the weight I lost. The longest I was out of the city was nine days, and by Day 7, I was itching to return. Toasting in the autumn sunlight on a terrace facing the green Himalayan foothills, I was thinking about my sunmica desk in clusterfucked Bombay—how I would sit there in an old t-shirt and edit Google Docs to make what I consider small amounts of money.

Inside, there was a rumbling. Not a jumbled one, where I couldn’t separate the sources of the sound. I heard it like an intricately constructed background score—low hum, droning buzz, a crescendo with a clash of cymbals and drums. When I jogged on the beach on a good low-tide day, all these sounds mixed with the sitars and synths on the earpods to make me forget my thin arms and knobbly knees and narrow shoulders. A goddess in her tavern, lightly buzzed and a little bit in love, was directing this part of my life. When I snapped out of the spell, the goddess was replaced. But I enjoyed being conductor of this inner orchestra, less ashamed about the things I feel, more sure about the time I afford myself to think.

This year, I got hung up on plot. I lost interest in vignettes, in scraps, in fragments. I sought out a narrative spine in everything. Give me an epic sweeping thing and take me from Point A to Point B. But later, in the dark or during a solitary commute, I ended up dwelling only on moments—cannonballs shattering the ice in a battle scene in Napoleon, my father trying to thread a needle on a smoggy morning, my mother pausing for a breath on the stairs, N’s kind eyes as they shared a last stock of Samahan with me.

The preoccupation with plot doesn’t mean I stopped caring at the sentence-level. Asymmetry bothered me—and abruptness. One of the most satisfying parts of my day job is to write up connectors. Even for a ghostwritten article for a finance industry publication, I agonised over finding the right transition sentences to close one paragraph and open the next. I didn’t expect a corporate client to validate this kind of work, but it released a knot in my back. That’s how I know I want to work with sentences forever.

Yet, it’s what kept me from writing on this Substack. There were a lot of thoughts, but I couldn’t tame them into some kind of narrative order. I wanted to tell stories that were internally consistent, where one thing follows another. I’d scribble a few lines and then lose the thread. Some reasons for this: imaginative leaps were too convenient, it was easier to trawl the internet, I wasn’t buying into my own characters. The only character I am convinced of is myself, but I don’t rate the life story enough to believe that even a thinly veiled version is valuable. Like I said, nothing much happened in my life, and I was in a phase of only valuing stories where things happened.

Like years past, I took some photographs this year. I didn’t mean for these glimpses of the outside life to always say something profound about the inner soundtrack. For better to worse, social media has rewired my brain into the 1:1 aspect ratio. If I can’t say it in a perfect square, I don’t feel like saying it. I felt a workman’s sense of pride in two rows of squares in the Favourites section on my phone. I know the images don’t have any artistic value. But there’s something I like about seeing a frame with the naked eye, as if it were a photograph, and only then drawing the imaginary boundary around it with the touch of a screen.

So that was this year. Complete lack of plot (though I did write a story that tried to have one), but the moments, despite my efforts to let them pass, were very nice to marinate in. There’s a lot more I want to say but can’t for various reasons: can’t articulate it, don’t want to jinx it, could mislead or upset people, want to publish today i.e. 31 December. Most of my reasons have something to do with fear. You don’t even have to peel away the layers to sniff the fear. That’s the case with so many of us. When will we transcend it? Next year, duh!

And to whoever is reading this—hope you had a wonderful year and wish you a happy and satisfying 2024.