I am almost free. And it frightens me.

Although I have tried to order my life by an extraordinarily strict self-imposed routine (you know I never took a jamaishasthi break in 25 years of married life, lest I should miss some classes?), and passed most of the years of my active adult life that way, it amazes me how life has nevertheless taken its own obdurate course, like a river in flood, eroding mountains, breaking banks, changing course again and again as it rushes towards the sea. So I have passed through several distinct stages, which I can see clearly see now, as one on a hilltop, looking down at the plains below through which he has trudged and from which he has climbed for so long.

First was that quiet and oppressive childhood, where my only pleasures were reading and the occasional company of my grandfather, and terror of living under my father’s mercurial tyranny. That changed when I first fell in love, and started wandering unfettered around town on my bicycle, and started smoking and drinking on the sly – early tastes of freedom, and, constricted and limited as it was, it still felt heavenly. The next stage was moving to the great city; first income, almost enough to look after myself, some exposure to the world of important affairs via print, a host of carnal and romantic affairs, encounters with harsh and sudden violence, multifarious scholarly quests, introduction to politics, travels on my own, being evicted from home for a few years – more taste of adulthood (many of my contemporaries acquired that much varied experience, I have discovered, long after thirty, and some never at all). There was a sharp jolt again when I gave up the newspaper job and university life very suddenly to return to Durgapur, and took up the schoolmaster’s job, and went abroad. A few years down the line, after staying away from my parents for a couple of years, getting married and becoming a father. The next big thing, starting the new century with a bang as it were, was quitting the job to fend for myself, all on my own. Eleven years after that, my wife and daughter leaving the hearth I had built. It was too tremendous a shock for me to have fully recovered yet, but I soldiered on, partly because I had to, too many worldly burdens to shoulder alone, and partly because I was sure that if I gave up I would go to pieces, partly because I still enjoyed it and couldn’t imagine anything better to do. And so for another eight years, while my daughter grew up, till the pandemic struck, and I had to adjust dazedly, painfully, to so many students quitting, ‘teaching online’, occasional breaks when I could resume regular classes again, only to lock down again… and that is how a year and a half has passed till the time of writing.

I begin to sense that another phase is dawning, probably the last. As with every great changeover, it has left me confused, disoriented, not entirely sure what is happening far less how best to handle it, unable even to imagine with much clarity what lies ahead, or guess how long this phase would be. Looking at it from a positive-minded perspective (which, I suppose, is always the best thing to do if at all it is possible), I am a very lucky man, for I have reached a stage where I am finally almost free – as free as a man in this world can be, largely free even of family obligations – and at the same time adult, solvent though far from rich, unconstrained by custom and superstition, and largely in possession of my native powers. Not everyone reaches this blessed state before it is time to pass on. I can at last turn my mind towards doing things I had always longed to do, but could never find the time and resources for till now.

And this very realization keeps very disturbingly drawing me back to one of the most influential books in my life, Fear of Freedom, by the great psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. The essence of his thesis was that the vast majority of human beings, though they declare their love of and desire for freedom so continuously and clamorously, are actually terrified of the reality of freedom, because (except in very rare situations, like wishing to be free of some sort of unbearable tyranny as one wishes to be free of toothache) freedom entails responsibility, and the imperative of making choices, and the necessity for hard decisions – the need to examine one’s own mind and make up one’s own mind, than which no task in this world is harder. What kind of freedom would I really enjoy for any length of time? What do I really want hereafter?

For now, I have been seeking solace in returning to books with a vengeance. This may sound strange to those who know me really well, because they are aware that I have been an avid reader virtually all my life. True enough, but the fact is that reading had been 90% of my life between ages four and sixteen, and I used to be able to get literally, happily lost in books during that time of my life, and I haven’t been able to read in that absorbed way ever since then. For too many worldly cares interrupted too often and too insistently. Until now. So now, I am trying to go back to a place which I left behind a very long time ago. But no matter how engrossing, reading cannot be, at my age, the whole of life. What do I want to do with the rest of it? From suicide to seeking God in all earnest, I have not yet been able to make up my mind.