Somewhere in the last two years, I began the project of becoming myself again, and I have kept a ledger of it in the notes app.It is unglamorous because unlearning produces no evidence. A man who has lost eleven kilos can be photographed. A man who has spent four months getting smaller in ways that do not show has nothing to hold up. There is no certificate for the sentence you deleted, no medal for the version of yourself you stopped performing in March and which nobody has noticed is missing, including, most days, you. We are also short of vocabulary. Men my age are not given a word for this. We are given slowing down, settling, letting go, each of them a decline in a clean shirt, and so we attempt the thing in the disguise of a hobby, which is why so many men in their fifties are learning the guitar badly and calling it a journey.I should confess, since the exercise is worthless otherwise, that I said yes to the panel discussion in Gurgaon in five minutes. Faster than I answer my mother, not for the fee (which was a goody hamper of artisanal tea) and not for the audience, five rows of whom will be on their phones while the panel speaks.I said yes because an old friend asked and because the invitation was addressed to a man still considered worth inviting, and at 7:40 on a Tuesday evening I did not want to find out what happens when that stops. I have watched it happen to others. A man realises he has moved from the panel to the audience, and from the audience to the mailing list, and his face takes on the expression of one who has bitten into a rosogolla and found a lightly sweetened turnip.Two days later, my friend rang to say they would like me to moderate instead. I said yes to that as well, because I am not yet the man this piece is pretending to be. Moderating is what a conference gives a man once it decides he is senior. It is called anchoring the conversation and it is a promotion in the way that carrying everyone’s bags to the car is a promotion. The moderator reads the material, writes the questions, keeps the time, and absorbs the silence when the second speaker discovers he has nothing further to say about the future of anything. He is thanked warmly from the stage and quoted by nobody.What I had not accounted for was the egos. There is a species of ego now that does not want the room, it wants the running order. It is uninterested in what will be said and deeply interested in who is placed where, in what sequence, with what adjective, and whether the man asking the questions might, by the act of asking them, appear to be the senior person present. It reads the invite copy the way lawyers read a lease. It never objects. It is far too evolved to object. It simply becomes unavailable for a day and lets that do the objecting.The calls began on the day of the event, four hours before I was due to leave, by which time I had read everything, written the questions, and prepared an opening joke that I still believe would have worked. My friend, who had spent a fortnight doing what our industry calls stakeholder management and what is in fact the diplomacy of seating, said that after some discussion they were humbly requesting that I go back on the panel as a speaker. Then the head of the organisation came on another follow-up call — humbly. Finest word I have heard all year. A demotion, formally, with four hours’ notice. I put the phone down with the quiet satisfaction of a man asked to leave a wedding he never wanted to attend who finds, on reaching the pavement, his taxi already there with the engine running. No clock to watch. No gentleman in row three who does not have a question but does have a position. Four sentences and out by nine.This is what the genre leaves out. Saying no is a luxury good. It requires a steady supply of people asking, and the terror underneath the midlife performance is not that we say yes too often, it is that the asking has a shelf life and nobody publishes the expiry date. Occasionally, somebody else’s ego says the no on your behalf, humbly, four hours before kick-off, and you keep the evening, the joke and the story.On the subject of luxury goods, the internet has decided to instruct me. Five things worth paying for, in the tone of a man who has read half of one book and is now available for mentorship. Business class above eight hours. Tailoring that actually fits. A monthly hair spa, consider it maintenance. A really good mattress, game changer. And personal training, because investing in yourself always pays off.I examined the list at 11:40 at night while not sleeping, and I regret to report that four of the five are correct, a better strike rate than most editorials. Here’s that list:
- Business class above eight hours is not indulgence, it is the difference between arriving as a person and arriving as a claim under warranty. A man who has spent nine hours upright in 34B with the gentleman in 34A asleep on his shoulder in an attitude of complete trust does not land. He is unloaded.
- Bespoke tailoring, yes, though not for the reason given. It is not that the clothes fit. It is that in Connaught Place there is an establishment that made suits for my grandfather in the sixties and now has my measure, updates it without comment, and has never once lied to me about my waist, which places it some distance above most of my professional acquaintances. Three generations of that family have seen three generations of ours undressed, which is a longer and more candid relationship than I have with my bank.
- The mattress with memory foam, and I will take on my in-laws here. They come from people who held that a firm bed builds character, that a soft one is the first step towards jazz and ruin, and that a plank with a bedsheet on it was not merely adequate but morally instructive. I slept on that theory for the early years of my marriage. My spine has filed its report and is not kind.
- Personal training I accept with one correction. It is not investing in yourself, it is hiring an intermediary. The boy arrives, calls you sir in a manner both respectful and devastating, and stands between you and the elaborate case you have prepared for why today is not the day. He is paid to disbelieve you. Finest service available in the National Capital Region.
- Which leaves the hair spa, monthly, consider it maintenance. Maintenance of what? I have studied the matter closely, in the bathroom, under the good light, from three angles, and what is up there is not an asset requiring upkeep. It is a legacy position being wound down with dignity. You cannot service a departure. You can only wave.
Then there is moving through the world without needing anybody to stand between you and it, which, as the trainer demonstrates, I have not renounced. I was raised in an architecture of intermediaries. The uncle who knew a man at the passport office. The colleague who made the awkward call. The aunt who could not book a train ticket but could produce, from a handbag of no great size, an acquaintance who could help. This was not corruption, or not only corruption. It was how affection was expressed in a country where the counter was closed most of the time (folks my generation or older remember banking hours restricted to half a day on a weekday, railway counters being open for a few hours). To become yourself here is to dismantle a system that loved you and to notice that some of the people you are removing from between you and the world had no other role, and will now simply be people you know.As for the self I am meant to be returning to, he is seventeen, newly arrived on the Presidency steps, holding views on Godard of a firmness rarely seen outside the Old Testament, none of the films having been watched, smoking cigarettes that belonged in every case to somebody else. I have been sentimental about him for thirty years and it is time to say plainly that he was not better than me. He was cheaper to run. No dependants, no reputation, no direct reports, no sunk costs, and the courage I keep crediting him with was mostly the absence of anything to lose. I do not want him back. I want the interest rate he was getting on his convictions.
The ledger, then.
Unlearned: two, one already relearned.Said no to: a WhatsApp group, muted rather than exited, because in Bengali families you do not leave the room, you merely stop hearing it.Panels accepted: one.Moderations accepted and then withdrawn, humbly, by the grace of somebody else’s ego: one.Upgrades endorsed: four.Upgrades declined on the grounds that the asset no longer exists: one.Net movement towards authentic selfhood: negligible.Offset only by this: that I now drink coffee at nine in the evening without asking the room whether it is too late for coffee, and I sleep badly, though better than I used to, on a mattress my grandmother would have considered the beginning of the end.
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own.