This one is about beer, dark circles, and the cost of choice.
The day began with a modest, reasonable, thoroughly adult request: I wanted a quiet place in Mumbai where I could eat well, have a drink and still hear the person sitting across the table.
No loud music, please.
Mumbai, of course, does not really offer silence. At best, it briefly rents it to you between two honks. Still, I found a place, found the draught beer and, somewhere between good conversation and poor mathematics, drank around three or four litres of it.
Three or four litres of draught beer is not “having a drink.” It is a minor irrigation project.
I finally slept around two in the morning at my uncle’s place. My father was there too. This detail is important because older people possess a biological gift that science has not adequately studied: they can wake up at five in the morning regardless of when anyone else went to sleep.
By six, my father and uncle had begun the heartiest conversation of their lives.
Not a whispered exchange. Not the gentle clinking of teacups. A full parliamentary session with no adjournment, no headphones and apparently no concern for the citizen sleeping nearby.
My father also has an extraordinary ability to find fault with every available version of reality.
If the sun is out: “Too much sun.”
If it rains: “Why is it raining so much?”
If there is traffic: “Why are there so many cars?”
If there is no traffic: “Where is everyone? Why are people not coming out?”
This is not pessimism. It is quality control.
At seven in the morning, after approximately four hours of sleep, I was travelling from Santacruz to Bhandup West. I had taken my Thyronorm and was carrying the fragile hope that a good breakfast and a short nap at my sister’s house might restore me to respectable human form before an evening engagement.
I did not have a hangover. I was very clear about this.
I merely wanted to know how to remove the alcohol from my system, recover my energy, erase the dark circles under my eyes and look as though I had spent the previous evening reading philosophy instead of personally assisting a brewery with its inventory problem.
There is an important distinction.
At some point during this sleep-deprived journey, an advertisement informed me that a new Brezza was available for ₹7.39 lakh. Naturally, I began wondering whether it came in CNG automatic.
This is what insufficient sleep does to a man. He begins the morning trying to remove alcohol from his bloodstream and, before breakfast, is considering alternate-fuel vehicle configurations.
The Man I Could Become
Later, I looked at photographs from the family function. I was the man in black: smiling, broad, bearded and carrying beneath his eyes a faithful written record of the previous night.
I wondered what I would look like if I became thin, reached ten per cent body fat and somehow recovered a full head of hair. Artificial intelligence produced the answer: a lean, athletic gentleman with a sharp jawline, well-fitted clothes and the peaceful expression of someone who has never missed a morning walk or had a matter unexpectedly called out in court.
Then came the Mediterranean-diet version of me who was healthy, rested, strong and standing in golden morning light. This man appeared to have slept eight hours every night since 2007. He looked like he understood portion control, respected carbohydrates and had never once asked whether beer could be flushed out of the body with coconut water.
I liked him.
But the dark circles in my actual photographs bothered me. Perhaps because they were not merely cosmetic. They were evidence: of a long night, a loud morning, ageing, work, weight, health and all the small negotiations the body conducts while the mind is busy pretending it is still twenty-five.
We often think transformation means becoming someone else. A sharper face. A thinner waist. More hair. Better clothes. Yet perhaps our “best version” is not the most photogenic one. Perhaps it is simply the version that sleeps enough, laughs more easily, takes its medicines on time and does not need three litres of draught beer to declare an evening successful.
Admittedly, that version may still have a beer. He is improved, not unbearable.
What We Carry Home
At the airport, my attention shifted to gifts. What could I take for my son? More importantly, what could I take for my wife that would not merely say, “I passed a shop while walking to the gate,” but, “I missed you while I was away”?
Airport romance is a strange category. It is love translated into retail under time pressure.
I considered bags and accessories from DailyObjects. Eventually, I chose a British Rose gift box from The Body Shop. It felt soft, affectionate and sufficiently deliberate. The gift itself was not a grand declaration. But marriage is rarely sustained by grand declarations. More often, it survives through small acts that say: even amid the noise, the drinking, the travelling and the gate announcements, you occurred to me.
For my son, the obvious candidate was a toy aeroplane. A toy aeroplane is not merely a toy when a father brings it home after a flight. It becomes evidence that Papa went somewhere beyond the clouds and remembered to return.
There is a peculiar kind of reflection that becomes possible only when you are exhausted, mildly dehydrated and trapped in a terminal with nowhere urgent left to go. The mind, deprived of useful employment, begins opening old cupboards.
The Hugs That Change
We grow up.
Let me correct that: if we are fortunate enough to dodge the hundreds of things that could kill us young, we all grow up.
But we do not grow in the same place, at the same speed or in the same direction. Some remain in the town where everyone knows the story behind their nickname. Some move to cities where nobody knows their father’s name. Some build families. Some build careers. Some build walls and call them boundaries. Life moves us into different rooms and then acts surprised when we can no longer hear one another clearly.
We meet again, often at weddings, engagements and funerals. We smile. We exchange updates. We hug.
Yet the hugs that once felt instinctive sometimes begin to feel like half-hearted attempts to hold on to what used to be a strong bond.
You wonder whether it is you or them.
The uncomfortable truth is that it is all of us.
Distance rearranges affection. Time gives people new loyalties, new wounds, new habits and newer people who understand references we were not present to witness. This does not necessarily mean the old love was false. A relationship does not become fraudulent merely because it could not remain unchanged.
Sometimes growing apart does not erase love; it only changes its shape.
Perhaps the problem is not that the hug has become half-hearted. Perhaps the problem is our belief that it owes us the warmth it once contained. Entitlement is particularly dangerous when disguised as nostalgia.
Choice is usually presented as wisdom: know what you want, decide firmly and move forward.
But every choice is also an exclusion. Every “yes” leaves a quiet row of “noes” behind it. We exclude not only the things we do not choose, but also the people we might have become had we chosen differently.
A bird may believe that the sky belongs to it. It chooses to fly for miles, crossing rivers, cities and forests. Yet every forest it passes is also a home it chooses not to inhabit. Somewhere below, a jungle holds the sky like a blanket and waits for the bird to descend and lend its song to the trees.
The tree may love the bird. But a tree cannot hold a bird back merely because it loves it.
Love may offer a branch, shade and a place for a nest. It cannot clip wings. A bird may choose a tree as its home, but a home remains a home only for as long as staying remains a choice. The moment the branches become a cage, love destroys the very thing it was trying to preserve.
Perhaps this is true of friendships, families and every relationship we carry from one age into another. We want people to remain where we last understood them. We call it loyalty. Sometimes it is only our discomfort with their freedom.
The bird is not cruel for flying. The tree is not foolish for waiting. But neither can demand that the other stop being what it is.
A Quiet Place?
So what can be done when the hugs change, the flight is delayed and the people we love become people we no longer completely understand?
Be kind especially to change.
Be happy whenever happiness is available. Carry empathy. Keep a sense of humour. Put entitlement in the back seat preferably beside my father, who will immediately ask why there is so much traffic, or why there is none.
Maybe the loud conversations at six in the morning are also a kind of love. Maybe older people talk so loudly because they are reassuring themselves that everyone is still there. Perhaps one day we will be the old men discussing the weather at dawn while some younger relative, recovering from a questionable quantity of draught beer, curses us from the next room.
If we are lucky enough to grow old, we may even earn the right to complain about both the sun and the rain.
The quiet place I was looking for was never really a restaurant in Mumbai. Quiet is not the absence of music, traffic, family or announcements about delayed flights. It is the moment we stop demanding that life sound exactly as it once did.
We cannot have every road, every forest, every version of ourselves or every person in the form in which we first loved them. We get this flight, this delay, this family, this evening and whatever time remains after we finally arrive.
Perhaps wisdom is not choosing perfectly. Perhaps it is treating with kindness everything and everyone our choices leave behind.
And then, when the flight eventually lands, carrying the British Rose gift box home.
Later.
PS it took me 7 drafts to write this. May be I should read more philosophy.
