There's light at the end of the tunnel.
There absolutely is.
That light, though,
isn't a search party,
the sun,
the flame of a candle,
or the enlightenment of a firefly;
it is the headlight
of a derailed freight train
with failed brakes.
It isn't coming to save you.
It's coming to go straight through you.
The chains are softer now.
They come with passwords,
paydays,
and biometric doors
that open just wide enough
to forget they lock.
What was once called slavery
is now a starting salary.
With growth potential.
And a Friday pizza party.
You can decorate your cubicle.
Pick your flavour of burnout.
Even choose your own wallpaper
for the prison wall.
Until the company chooses something for you.
A meeting.
A calendar invite.
A “quick chat.”
Then your password stops working.
They call it “restructuring.”
You call it “a mutual divorce.”
Your mortgage calls it "a flight risk".
And life?
Life is a con job
that sells curd and calls it yogurt.
Existence is algorithmic now.
Identities binary.
The only affordable nuance
comes with a dropdown menu
at a fine dine gourmet restaurant.
“One for the pictures,”
you say,
posing beside
a mural of a freedom fighter
sponsored by a soft-drink brand.
The company calls it patriotism.
The algorithm calls it engagement.
The country omits your voting rights,
because your father's name was misspelled.
History moves on at the speed of scrolls.
Your debts pile on like browser cache.
You grew up poor.
So you chased comfort.
Now you hoard it.
Call it ambition.
Call it legacy.
Call it economic evolution.
But don’t call it innocence
when the maid’s ten-year-old daughter
asks why your six-year-old son
has two beds,
and you say,
“He’s earned it.”
Her mother has earned
every rupee for the bed
she still cannot afford to buy.
That’s why
she gets paid
to sleep under.
In a world that masturbates to the idea of rags-to-riches
while making sure the rags stay rags
and the riches get richer,
the story of the underdog
is the oldest known pornography.
The audience does not want equality.
It wants someone
to crawl out of the gutter
so it can applaud
without having to clean it.
A world
fellatioed by fiction
needs its imaginary underdogs
from time to time.
And he was the apt fit.
He sold the story.
He looked the part.
A remote village
in a state long acquainted
with unrest
made the perfect prologue.
Poverty. Conflict. Integrity.
The holy trinity of the inspirational biography.
Intelligence came later.
It was merely useful.
He did not sell the story of a winner.
No.
That was too easy.
Too neat.
He sold the fiction of an eternal hustle.
A man
caught between a world
where ideals were sold
for the price of kidneys
and an integrity
that, apparently,
would not let him sell out.
At least, that was the story.
And stories have always been
forgiving of inconsistencies.
The truth was never half as nuanced.
His fiction simply was not selling as well as he thought.
So he improvised.
According to the audience.
Sometimes his principles were the chain around his throat.
Sometimes the world was cruel.
Sometimes selfish bastards were to blame.
Sometimes it was the unforgivable audacity of a woman who had said no.
The villains changed.
His innocence did not.
He had a surprisingly stable moral universe
for a man whose enemies kept changing shape.
He told stories of being a recovering addict
while remaining on a monthly ration of intoxication.
The bottle remained faithful. The fable did not.
He knew the alchemy.
A mistake became a wound.
A wound became a lesson.
A lesson became a personality.
A personality became a reason.
And a reason, repeated often enough, became innocence.
He knew when contradiction
was hypocrisy
and when it was complexity.
When failure was his fault
and when it was evidence of a cruel world.
When an apology was necessary
and when looking sufficiently wounded would do.
He sold his skin just to remain relevant.
Not famous. Not loved.
Remembered.
There is a peculiar hunger in wanting to be remembered.
It makes ordinary obscurity feel like death.
So he kept writing himself.
Every room received a different version.
Not necessarily a false one.
That would have been easier.
Just a different one.
And somewhere between the versions,
there was always a forest.
He never called it that.
There was simply something in the trees.
Something dangerous.
Something cruel.
Something that had done something.
Something that might do something again.
Something that needed to be feared.
Something that needed to be believed.
By the end of the story, it was always a wolf.
Sometimes the wolf was in the woods.
Sometimes it was at the door.
Sometimes it was already inside.
He became very good at knowing when to howl.
And people came running.
Of course they did.
A wounded helpless creature makes the purest sound.
But wolves,
as old stories know,
are rarely invited
into the house
looking like wolves.
So he came softly.
Head lowered.
Tail between his legs.
He accepted the hand that fed him.
The blanket.
The room by the fire.
He slept at the foot of the bed
like something domesticated.
And for a while, he was.
Then one tooth appeared.
Not enough to frighten anyone.
A glint.
A warning.
Something easily mistaken for an accident.
Then another.
A little more hunger.
A little less gratitude.
A bite small enough to explain.
A scratch small enough to forgive.
And when someone
finally looked closely and said,
"There are teeth in this animal",
he did what he had always done.
He found another door.
Another hearth.
Another pair of hands
willing to stroke the wounded thing.
And there he was again.
Quiet.
Grateful.
Almost tame.
Until the next tooth.
Then the next cry.
The wolf was always elsewhere.
The stories changed faster
than one could finish
the terms and conditions
of a life insurance policy
printed in a font
designed to discourage reading.
But the shape remained.
A wounded man.
A forest.
A wolf.
And someone willing to listen.
He became very good at pointing.
Look.
There. That one.
Not me. That one.
And people looked.
Why wouldn't they?
The wolf had been named.
The forest was dark.
The man was crying.
That was usually enough.
He understood something
the old storytellers knew
long before anyone invented social media:
people do not always remember what happened; they remember who told them what happened.
So he kept talking.
About the wolves.
About the forest.
About the wounds.
About himself.
And the more he talked,
the more the story began to resemble truth.
Not everything was false.
Some of it was true.
Some of it was terribly true.
He had suffered.
He had failed.
He had been hurt.
He had hurt others.
He had been treated unfairly.
He had also been treated exactly as he deserved.
The problem
was never
the existence of the truth.
The problem
was that truth
had become only one ingredient.
The rest was folklore.
And folklore,
unlike truth,
knows how to dress.
Then life did something terribly impolite.
It stopped behaving like fiction.
Some call it coincidence.
Some call it consequence.
I call it
the day the forest stopped listening.
There were two wolves.
Actual wolves, two of them.
One on either side.
No symbolism.
No allegory.
No convenient villain waiting politely for his turn.
Two wolves.
Hungry.
And suddenly,
all those years of knowing
exactly where to point
became useless.
He tried to explain.
The wolves were not interested.
He tried to point.
There was nowhere to point.
He tried to make himself the wounded thing.
For once, the forest was hauntingly silent.
He tried to scream.
The wolves took his voice first.
Almost elegant.
Almost cruel enough to be funny.
The man who had spent his life
surviving through stories
had finally encountered something
that refused to become one.
The rest was merely grammatical.
Blood replaced adjectives.
Teeth replaced arguments.
Silence replaced context.
And the versions of him
began falling away.
The principled man.
The addict.
The intellectual.
The victim.
The good man in a bad world.
Gone.
Not disproved.
Not redeemed.
Just eaten.
The people who might once
have come running
had already gone home.
Some had believed him.
Some had not.
Some probably still did.
It hardly mattered.
They had their own forests.
Their own wolves.
Their own reasons to get home before dark.
And perhaps that was the cruelest part.
He had spent his life trying to become unforgettable.
He succeeded.
Someone would remember the village.
The poverty. The struggle. The principles.
The addiction. The women. The wolves.
Someone would tell the story
of the remarkable man
who came from nowhere,
fought the world, and nearly won.
Someone would call him an underdog.
Someone would call him brave.
Someone would call him misunderstood.
Someone would call him inspirational.
And someone would get it beautifully, tragically, completely wrong.
Which was perhaps the closest thing
he ever had to a happy ending.
Because the story would survive.
The man would not.
And years later,
when someone would ask,
“What actually happened to him?”
There would be a pause.
Someone would shrug.
“I heard there were wolves.”
And that would be enough.
Because by then,
nobody remembered
which wolf was real.
Nobody remembered
which story was true.
Nobody remembered
which version
had been his.
They remembered
the wolf.
They always remember the wolf.
They rarely remember who was holding the microphone.
And somewhere deep in the forest,
long after the fires had gone cold,
there was no man crying wolf anymore.
No wounded creature.
No audience.
No story.
Only the animal
that had been hiding
inside every version of him.
Waiting.
And eventually,
even the wolf became a story.
Because that is the oldest trick of all.
Give a creature a name,
give it a villain,
give it a victim,
give it a voice,
and sooner or later
someone will forget to ask
who was wearing the fur.
Unspoken. Unsaid.
People use them like twins.
They are not.
One has no anatomy.
The other is a headless corpse.
That is the difference.
Unspoken is a thought
still looking for language.
A pressure behind the ribs.
A fist.
A funeral before the coffin.
A child knowing something is wrong
long before anyone gives it a name.
Unspoken is innocent.
Unsaid is not.
Unsaid has vocabulary.
Unsaid knows the sentence.
Unsaid has rehearsed it
in the shower,
in the car,
in the courtroom
of the skull
at three in the morning.
Unsaid has punctuation.
It has considered the consequences.
Then it decided to shut the fuck up.
That is not silence.
That is a decision.
We have beautiful names for decisions like that.
Restraint.
Maturity.
Professionalism.
Keeping the peace.
Being the bigger person.
Human beings are astonishing.
We can turn cowardice into etiquette
if we give it a nice enough word.
So the sentence waits.
Not in the mouth.
Somewhere between
the thought
and the tongue,
there is security check.
Every truth arrives with luggage.
What are you carrying?
A confession.
Declare it.
I love you.
Anything else?
I am angry.
Anything else?
I never forgave you.
Anything else?
I was never happy here.
Anything else?
No. Of course not.
We are very good at emptying our pockets
before the truth gets searched.
And that little country
between unspoken and unsaid
is where we do it.
That is where the murder weapon goes.
That is where the apology loses its spine.
That is where love is stripped of its vowels and sent back to the factory.
That is where a person learns the difference between "I can't say it" and "I won't".
The first is a wound.
The second is architecture.
Give it enough years
and the architecture becomes a house.
Give it a family
and it becomes tradition.
Give it a country
and it becomes culture.
Give it generations
and nobody remembers
there was ever anything to say.
That is the frightening part.
The unspoken can become unsaid.
The unsaid can become normal.
Normal can become invisible.
And invisible things are the easiest things to inherit.
Ask any family what happened.
Watch them look at one another.
Nobody knows.
Everybody knows.
There it is.
The oldest language we have.
A room full of people speaking fluently without saying the sentence.
We call this peace.
Sometimes it is a war with good manners.
Sometimes the thing between two people is not distance.
It is a word both of them know
and neither of them is willing to own.
Sometimes it is a name.
Sometimes a truth.
Sometimes a goodbye postponed so long, it becomes a personality.
And sometimes
it is simply
"no".
The smallest word.
The most expensive.
No, I don't love you.
No, you didn't deserve that.
No, I am not okay.
No, I don't forgive you.
No, I don't want to be the person you made me.
No.
Two letters.
A life can fit inside them.
A marriage can die between them.
A child can become an adult
trying to earn permission to say them.
And perhaps that is what lives between the two words.
Not silence.
Not absence.
A border.
On one side, the thing
you have not yet found the courage to name.
On the other, the thing
you named perfectly and buried anyway.
Between them stands a person
holding a sentence in both hands
like a loaded gun, calling it
peace.
I am losing my hair.
Not enough to be interesting.
I am not bald.
I am simply experiencing
a slow administrative reduction
in the population above my eyebrows.
There are still plenty of them.
That is how I know this is serious.
If they were all gone,
I could at least call it something.
Baldness.
A condition. A noun.
A problem with paperwork.
But this is thinning.
A verb.
Something happening
while I am trying to get somewhere else.
Every morning I find them.
On the pillow.
In the sink.
Caught in the collar of yesterday's shirt.
They have started turning up in places
where I don't remember inviting them.
I pick them out and throw them away.
Sometimes I count.
Not because
I expect the number to tell me anything.
Because counting
makes disappearance look measurable.
I have always been surprisingly calm around statistics.
It is the ones still attached to me that bother me.
They are thinner now.
Some of them have become so fine
that I have to tilt my head under the bathroom light
to confirm they are still hair.
A few look like nature's way of saying, "technically, still hair".
I have changed shampoos.
I have read articles
by men with suspiciously full heads of hair
telling me not to worry.
I worried.
Quietly. With citations.
But the more I watched the hair disappear,
the more, a question began bothering me.
Which one was the last?
Not the last hair I will ever have.
That is easy.
I can probably predict
the general direction of this negotiation.
I mean the last good one.
The last thick one.
The last one
that belonged to the version of my head
I never thought I would have to miss.
There must have been one.
It fell somewhere.
A pillow. A drain.
My shoulder.
The back of a black shirt.
Maybe I brushed it away without looking.
Maybe I was late for work.
Maybe I was thinking about money.
Maybe I was in love.
Maybe I was miserable.
Maybe I was happy.
It doesn't matter.
I didn't know.
That is the part I cannot forgive.
Not the hair.
The ignorance.
We imagine endings as events.
A door closing.
A train leaving.
Someone saying “I think we should talk.”
A final kiss.
A final photograph.
A final breath.
We like our endings with subtitles.
But most things do not leave like that.
They thin. That is all.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing anyone would interrupt dinner for.
Just less.
Then less again.
Then one day you look at the thing
you have been looking at your entire life
and discover
you no longer remember when it was whole.
That frightens me more than death.
Death has the decency to arrive with its name tag.
This is worse.
This is a disappearance
that asks you to keep calling it present.
So I have started looking at my hair
like an idiot.
Not checking whether I am bald.
Checking whether I am still me.
As though the answer
might be hiding between two strands.
As though one of them might still remember
the exact shape of my head
before everything started becoming less.
And sometimes I catch myself
searching old photographs.
Not for my face. For the hair.
There it is. Thicker. Stupider.
Completely unaware
that one day
I would enlarge the photograph
to inspect it like evidence.
Look at that.
Look how much I had.
Look how little I knew.
That is the real cruelty.
You never know which ordinary thing is about to become a memory.
You don't know which morning will be the last morning you get to have without knowing it.
You don't know.
Because if you did,
you would behave differently.
You would look longer.
Listen harder.
Stay five more minutes.
You would understand
that ordinary
is not the opposite of precious.
It is how precious things usually leave.
Quietly. Without announcement. Without witnesses.
Without giving you the smallest courtesy of knowing you should remember.
And perhaps that is why
I keep thinking about that last good hair.
I want to know where it fell.
I want to know whether I noticed.
I want to know whether I touched it.
I want to know whether,
for one stupid second,
I held the last piece of something
I would spend years trying to keep
and threw it away.
I will never know.
Because the last hair did not know it was the last hair.
And I did not know I was losing it.
We keep waiting for goodbyes to become visible.
They never do.
One day something is still here.
The next day it isn't.
And somewhere between those two days
you were supposed to notice.
I didn't.
I am still not bald.
There is still hair on my head.
There is still time.
There are still people I can call.
Still rooms I can return to.
Still things I can say.
Which is why, tomorrow morning,
I will probably stand in the bathroom
and complain about the hair in the sink.
I will pick it up.
Count it.
Throw it away.
And never once ask
whether I am holding the last thing
I will ever get to lose
without knowing
I was saying goodbye.
Everything that's hurled at me
will have to earn its keep.
The insult.
The envy.
The humiliation.
The things I cannot forgive.
The things I cannot forget.
Nothing gets to wound me
and leave empty-handed.
I will not make meaning
out of suffering.
Meaning is too generous.
I will grind it all into black ink,
wring the bitterness
until it gives me something useful,
and fling it at the page
until the page remembers what it cost me.
I will not turn pain into wisdom.
That would be such a waste.
Wisdom is
what people make out of suffering
when they want to forgive it.
I don't.
I will keep the wound exactly as ugly as it was.
Then I will give it a punchline.
I will give the humiliation a microphone.
I will give the insult better grammar.
I will give the people who hurt me the immortality they never asked for.
Not as heroes. Not as villains. As ingredients.
Everything gets recycled.
Some things become compost.
Some become autopsies.
Some become satire.
I suppose I have always had a weakness for black.
