The big baby O does not know what to do

The Big Baby O woke up for the last time at 4 a.m. and cursed loudly at the swarm of mosquitoes caroling around his bed. He turned on the lights and saw that he had left the windows open the previous evening, having fallen asleep while reading a book. "You idiot", he sighed and began to get up. Knowing that there was nothing that he could do about the mosquitoes, he thought of his mother who used to burn incense around the house every day before nightfall, fanning smoke into shady corners and meticulously closing each window after letting the mosquitoes out. As a child, he used to think that it was one of those things that adults did simply because they had nothing better to do. But perhaps more significantly, he refused to accept the banality of the whole matter: smoke in, mosquitoes out, every day. But poked and pricked, roused from sleep a thousand miles away from home in the wee hours of what he suspected would be a very long day, alone and terribly itchy, he knew at last that his mother did indeed chase mosquitoes out of the house every day of her married life and felt a strange mixture of gratitude, shame, and sadness welling up in him. "You are an idiot", he said to himself and closed the windows.


The room was not in complete disarray. Turning around, it pleased him momentarily to see that he had been successful so far in keeping the space clean and organized despite the crushing loneliness that had settled on all his things. Half the world was on lockdown at the moment in a desperate attempt to beat a deadly disease that had already killed thousands in every continent. Outside the confines of his little university, things were very grim. Each new day seemed worse than the one before. "But what to do.. what to do!" fumbled the Big Baby O every time he thought about the dismal situation. He could post something on social media but so much was happening all over the planet that one would need to post not one but a hundred articles to cover just a fraction of the whole situation. Besides, he had been so quiet on social media for so long that now he didn't know where to start. All the same, he huffed and puffed, raged and cursed seeing the ugliness of it all become ever more clear with each passing day. Like everyone else, he read about the countless stranded migrant workers making dangerous journeys across long distances on foot, heard very sad tales of hunger and poverty, and felt more deeply than ever the crooked nature of the system that he was a part of. And yet, whenever he thought of sharing opinions online, he could not imagine himself as anything other than a shabby doomsday prophet distributing pamphlets under a flyover. “This quarantine is turning out to be a real trip”, he chuckled, now pouring hot water into a cup noodles container and going over the arguments in his head one more time. He had been alone for weeks and yet he’d never felt so strongly tethered to the world.


He had tried to write as well but with very little success. No sooner did he fiddle with an opening than he fell into a quagmire of pure thought. The world which he’d known to be a fairly complex web of discourses and counter-discourses, complex yet re-presentable, revealed itself in those moments of reflection to be a much, much more omnifarious affair, an infinite singularity, containing all that had been, all that there was and ever would be. He could not settle for anything less than the world with its entire host of multiplicities. He often felt that a faithful representation of what went on in his head would be the same as transcribing a group discussion among an infinite number of participants, each of them beginning the discussion with a different topic, from a unique starting point, but turning, taking flight, running into other topics, and reaching completely new realms and discourses at various points in the infinitely long discussion. This or some such horseshit gave him brain damage every time he tried to write. "What to do", he said to himself, tossing the empty noodles cup into the dustbin. “What to do?”


An hour later, he got out of his hostel to take a walk. He strolled aimlessly around the campus and saw a few herds of peacocks and deer along the road. A cool breeze was blowing and in a different situation, it could well have been a pleasant morning. Before long, he was back on the road leading to his hostel. Looking at the cloudy sky with sunlight leaking through holes here and there and the enormous hostel buildings underneath, he felt that in the future, when he no longer lived in this place, he would find it difficult to believe that he had really experienced this moment once. He was sure of it because some parts of his own life seemed quite unreal to him now: moments, days, and weeks of aloneness in vast spaces that now seemed to have the same spectral quality as this morning, only he could not tell what it meant. For instance, two years earlier, he had spent a hot summer month in a different city, sleeping and waking at odd hours much like this period of quarantine that now had banished all routine from his life. In those few weeks, he spent several mornings reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden on the terrace, hours before the streets and buildings of the colony would burst into life with a kind of energy that his tired heart could neither understand nor imitate. He was alone and heartbroken and passed the time either by reading something or by thinking about the misfortune that had befallen him. The Big Baby O recalled those ghostly mornings now and did not at all feel that those were his own memories. "Maybe everything seems so unreal because I have been sleeping very badly", he thought weakly.


In truth, these moments that seemed to drift freely in time, these ghostly sensations, were not empty and ordinary. They were tokens from times of intense grief and had no place in the history that he had curated for himself, one that was full of mirth and contentment, one that only showed him the few good things that had happened to him in his life. “Oh shit”, positively alarmed, the Big Baby O began to walk faster toward his hostel as if to outrun the truth. All this thought about grief and ghostly memories, who knew what forgotten scandal was waiting to pay a visit next. He now began to worry that he might even like thinking about all this dreadful stuff, digging up things only to hurt and humiliate himself. After all, he had done it before.


"But what to do. What to do." He opened the door to his room, kept the keys on the table and crashed on the bed.