diwali

20.10.2025

Once, his friend had read his writing. And told him that he had never read anything so alienated and jaded. But, he had explained to his friend, life is really like that. Life really was like that.

Again, it was Diwali. Diwali would always come. India had a religiosity that was irrepressible. In this Diwali, he suffered.

For three years, he had been chasing love all over London. He had travelled everywhere, been to everything, met literally hundreds of people. His phone was absolutely full of numbers of those that he had been after. But it was Diwali and he was still completely alone. He had to spend the evening by himself. He had to get into that bed by himself.

When he had been walking out in London, he had thought to himself how nice it would have been to collapse crying in the street as a piece of wreckage adrift in the storm of life. How nice it would have been to have the people pretending to ignore him as he cried, to be a performer of tears for that little shabby part of London in the dark and cold and wind and rain.

And then, when he had finished working all day at his two jobs, well into the night, when he had finally arrived at the local tube station for the local bus home, he had heard the explosions of fireworks in the night. But he couldn’t see the fireworks. That was the thing. That was what life was. Fireworks going off all around you and not even being able to see them. All there was: frustration, obstruction, missing out.

There was never going to be connection with the fireworks, with the thing.

Yesterday, when he had been buying drinks in the pub, a blonde woman wearing a skimpy outfit had approached him in his pink blazer. She had asked him if she could try it on. She had modelled his blazer to her friend, striking poses and then pulling his spectacles out of the pocket and then putting them on her face to get some photographs. Curiously, he had watched her. Why was she imitating him? Why did she want to wear his clothes? Why did she want to be him? She had handed back the clothes and glasses and then gone back to her party with her friends. Other people, he did not understand. You just watched them walk off.

It would be nice just to pack everything in. All those activities that he went to to try and meet people. Just pack them all in. Give up completely. Stop working. Forget about everything and not do anything. What was the point of doing anything? It did not give you love. What was the point of work when you got no love for it? He only worked for love. He was not getting it. Nothing he was doing was getting him love.

What would it actually feel like to be loved for once?