One Bar Missing
A signal I heard forty years too late.
It’s always faint, maybe even 1 bar is missing, but sometimes I hear a signal. It’s an art to start listening to a new signal. It may be a skill, too, but I am more interested in the art. The skill can get you to a point, but if you want the new signals to change your life, it can’t be a pursuit.
I realize I have let myself get ahead of the story. I should explain how I know this. It all begins with sudden rain.
I. The storm
Out of nowhere, it started to rain, and she closed her laptop and looked out at the valley outside the cafe. I had been looking at her and had to hastily look elsewhere as I didn’t want to be seen as a lech. The rain had jumped from tiny drizzles to a rampaging mob of water outside our window. The wind had piped up, and it was threatening to bend the young tree just in front of us. I surreptitiously looked at the woman again; her sharp features and her dark skin had attracted me. It was surprising; I normally go for fairer people. I noticed that her nose was pierced, but she wasn’t wearing a nose ring, which gave her face a sense of wilful rebellion.
Just then, I realized that the torrent outside and the blazing wind seemed to echo what was going on inside me. The storm seemed to mirror the anxiety I was feeling inside me. Anxiety about nothing at all, and yet anxiety about everything.
It had been a scary month; I went through a health scare. Luckily, all was ok, but the long, intense burst of tests and doctor visits seemed to have taken a larger toll on me than I imagined. Outside the cafe, the light flickered in the sky, almost mirroring the random neurons firing in my brain. The evening light was slowly turning into dusk, and I glanced at the woman again. She had opened her laptop and seemed to be frowning at something. A call to stop remote work, maybe via email from her boss. The frown looked ugly but strangely attractive.
I couldn’t figure out which way the neurons in my brain were firing today. I thought deeply about the last month, spent in an ICU, a hospital, and with many doctors. It almost seemed like a passage through life’s rapids, and my health and I were the raft being pushed around in the crazy, frothy river of life. Right now, I was feeling like I had survived the rapids only to find myself on a beach, flat on my back, short of breath, and anxiety still spiked after those crazy rapids. I kept asking myself what was wrong, after all the rapids were over and I was on soft sand now. And then a silent voice from deep inside piped up: “Do you matter at all?” it said. “If you hadn’t appeared out of the rapids, would anyone care?”
But I was 62, and I had a lovely run with my body. Together, we ran over 15 marathons and over 50 treks, created a successful company, and with another body, fathered two daughters. What more would you want?
Somehow, the list of all I had done seemed to feel a little less important right now, as if it wasn’t the point of it all, as if I was missing something. Building a corporate career, successfully exiting a company, and creating large teams, none of it seemed to matter. The question kept asking whether anything of me had landed on another person or a place in a way that would outlast this body. I didn’t know how to answer this & I was frightened I would lose if I tried. The thunder outside reminded me of the weather inside me, and the question just kept getting larger & larger.
The questions didn’t seem to have easy answers. The rain pelted on, and the branch of a neighboring tree began to swing dangerously. I was reminded of the old radios, where you turned the knob and realized how many frequencies actually existed and how difficult it was to lock into any one. These questions, like some others, seemed to arrive on one of those hard-to-lock-in frequencies.
II. The interference
It’s funny, I do claim expertise about signals. I spent the last decade of my corporate life & the last 12 years as an entrepreneur separating the signal from the noise in reams of customer data. At Cequity, we built a business with signal spotting at its heart. I could help find a signal in a million rows of transaction data. And yet here I was in a cafe, unable to read any signals in a certain frequency band.
For many years, I have been marching to the tune of a very loud transmitter. The command at the end of most signals from this transmitter ended in pursuit!
That loud signal was actually my edge for many years. People came to me because of it, the relentlessness that solved problems, the dynamism that opened new opportunities. This was me & to reduce the intensity of that signal sounded like hara-kiri.
The real meaning of pursuit is pushy, almost violent. In fact, the French origins show it to be “a chase with hostile intent,” from Anglo-French purseute. Almost everything I have done has included pursuit. I would not go as far as the French in describing my philosophy, but chasing with intent has been a part of my story.
I was with the HR head of my company. We were talking about some of the changes in motion as we adopted new tech and were almost recreating the marketing function. As the conversation progressed, he suddenly said it almost as an aside, “Ajay, sometimes the peak is not important, but you chase everything like you are a commando behind enemy lines, with the brief: take the peak, leave no hostages.” That’s when I learned how close my relationship with pursuit really was.
A chase with hostile intent. The marathons, the company, the titles, the treks, all of them mattered. The signals I chose to listen to definitely made me who I am today, no apologies whatsoever. But listening to only one transmitter at full power drowns out other signals. You cannot hear a faint signal while you are in pursuit of that one overarching signal that floods you. Pursuit was my “go to” tool & it had also become the reason why I could hear nothing else.
III. The receptions
And yet, when I look honestly at the last few years, the signal has been getting through. Faintly and sometimes a little apologetically, a range of new signals have been popping up and reaching me, though static filled, in that screeching calibre of dial changes on that old radio.
Someone who really irritates me in my WhatsApp group, Chandan, suddenly came through as a lovely optimist with his morning message. “Good morning, guys, it’s another beautiful day today that we all are blessed to see. Have a happy week ahead”.
Nothing had changed in him. I had judged him long ago and filed him away as a canceled cheque. That morning, for once, I read the message instead of the man I had decided he was. Another beautiful day we are all blessed to see. It was nothing, and yet it got into my skin.
Not pushing yourself to listen changes the character of what you receive. You often get surprised. Pushing to listen is good because it helps you really concentrate on what the other person is saying. But even as you listen, judgments form from your own experiences, leading to a loss of signal. Listening as if nothing mattered, as if you would do nothing with what you learned, is a different level of the game.
And obviously, the moment I noticed this, I began my usual routine. I decided that I would look for weak signals like these and become skilful in receiving them, after all there was a target in front of me now, let your radio dial tune in double your original frequencies. This was how I laid my own trap and walked straight into it. Skill is made to order for pursuit, it gave me the old familiar hit, the small rush of having caught something. It was my game; I had played it close to perfection for a long time. But the art cannot be converted into a program. The art begins where the chasing stops, which is exactly where I have no experience.
My best teacher in the art turns out to live under my study table.
Scootch, my 7 year old labrador, was exactly where I had left her at breakfast, flat under the table, eyes shut, one paw moving periodically in service of some imaginary chase. I sat down on the floor next to her and said, “Wake up, Scootch, your whole life is going by, and you are sleeping straight through it.” She gave me a tirchi nazar without lifting her head. “I am not sleeping through it, yaar,” she said. “I am sleeping right in the middle of it.” I was not ready to let it go. “Don’t you want more than this, more than four walls and a nap?” Scootch let out a long breath through her nose, with a bored look. “Bro, you are the one chasing more. I already have all of it. I am just lying down while I have it.” I gave up and sat there with her a while, the room smelling of old paper and something warm and doggy, the quiet of someone who is comfortable not being in pursuit.
Scootch has no problem with multiple frequencies. She is my mirror opposite because the only signal that she gets is the one that lets her sleep. Her ambition lies in her sleep, except when she gets a ball, when pursuit kicks in, and even then, she forgets the ball mid-chase. She is the receiver of only one happy signal. And everything I am only now learning to pick up, the afternoon light, the rest, being looked at with affection for no reason, comes through for her all day, full bars.
And yet Scootch is not my opposite at all. She mirrors me. Both of us hear one band, that is all. Hers screams sleep, mine says chase, and the only difference is that she has made her peace with hers and I am still at war with mine. Who is better off, God knows. Some days her calm is what exposes me. I have only traded one chase for another, the man who collected titles now collecting signals across a wider band, still chasing. Other days, I think her one signal is enough for her, because it asks for so little, while mine has to carry the good years, the first job I mucked up, and the company I could not keep alive and had to close. Maybe her peace is just the peace of having less to hold on to. So I do not know what the work even is. To hear more, or to want less. To widen the band, or to rest in the one I was given. Opposite cures, and I cannot tell which one I came here for.
IV. The cloud
Back in the cafe, the rain was still coming down, the question still sitting across from me on its jarring frequency. Do you matter at all? I had no answer. My sixty years of answers were for different questions.
Suddenly, I looked up, yanking myself away from those thoughts, to see the woman on the table near me angrily slamming her laptop, closing it with an air of finality. It wasn’t a gentle close; the thump carried to me in that otherwise empty cafe. Yet her face was peaceful; none of the anger in her actions showed on it; in fact, she looked calm, almost angelic.
I was watching my own anxiety the way she had watched her laptop. The laptop of my body, it was alright to shut it with that same finality. I was larger than the thing I was so frightened of losing.
The woman, of course, did not know she had transmitted anything. I could not have asked her for it. I had been watching her, if I am honest, for reasons I am not proud of, and the clearest reception of my month came through exactly that unguarded, undefended attention.
There was nothing that suddenly calmed me inside; all the storms were still there. But faintly, a large, white, misshapen cloud had started to float in gently, majestically and yet temporarily. Almost encapsulating how I would float through this life, unattached to anything, depicting the Vedantic word Asanga almost.
The body that got the scare is going to keep fraying, slow or fast, either way. And that same body is tiring of the chase now, beginning to prefer the stillness. I cannot tell whether I am learning to hear a fainter band or simply slowing with age and calling the slowing wisdom. Maybe it is a new signal. Maybe it is just age. I do not know, and I am not going to pretend I do.
There is one frequency that went off the air forty years ago. Sujit, my childhood air force pilot friend, who died in a flying sortie in his early twenties. He was the hero, the boxer, and the footballer I could never match. We gave our tenth board exams together, and on the day the results went up, I had scored high in maths, and he had scored very low. We both read the board, and he absorbed it, and he broke down crying. The boxer, the hero, is crying in front of me. I wanted to put my arms around him. I did not. I stayed near him, and I kept my distance, my hands at my sides. He was sending me two signals that day, and I missed them both. That men can cry. That a man can hold a man who is crying. The first one he broke for me. The second one was mine to break, and I could not. My receiver wasn’t ready, and neither was my body. It still wasn’t ready for decades after he was gone. I am only hearing it now, with no one left on that frequency to tell. I have written about Sujit before, the boxer, the pilot, the friend I lost too young. But I have never written about my hands at my sides. Reaching out is yet another weak signal that has begun to change today. Would I hug Sujit if I were standing in front of that board now? I genuinely don’t know. But would I want to, badly? Yes, definitely.
The channel is open. One bar is missing. I am listening anyway.
(This piece was written with the company of the amazing Raju Tai and Vimal Chitra and other amazing writers who joined in the fun at 9 am everyday!)
I would highly recommend anyone who wants some creativity in their lives to join Raju & Vimal in June, details here:
