A fucking tower

So here’s a fucking tower—sketched from Pinterest and greased with the graphic naked, obscene vacuum in my thoughts I feel sometimes when I spiral into a depression. So yes my fucking tower—a concrete thrust shamelessly into the blistering Calcutta sun like some alien phallus raised by an architect hellbent on Freudian revenge. As if we didn’t have enough symbols of man’s ceaseless obsession with size. It’s squat, graceless, decidedly austere without even the ironic charm. Look at the staircase—a twisted iron atrocity, a metal waffle whose sole existential purpose seems to be to provide shin injuries. I mean, how the hell do you climb that thing sober without whispering blasphemous invocations or praying for Darwinian mercy? I mean you don’t, you can’t, it’s trapped in two dimension, like I am in three. I need to throw up—don’t like it when I get too close to the center, I get fast, I get dizzy and one day I know I’ll get dead.

Nature’s desperately climbing its flanks—ivy creeps upward like hungry tongues licking at urban sins. This audacious shrubbery, probably unwanted flora that refused to die in a city choking on diesel and melodrama, slowly devours the tower like verdant cancer, like hope corrupting despair, like poetry corroding bureaucracy. I see death as a good thing now. Then, see—those fucking cartoon windows, vacant eye sockets staring blankly into oblivion, reminding you, yes YOU, that behind every geometric monstrosity lies an abyss of purposelessness. They gape open like silent screams in Munch’s nightmares, portals of darkness through which only mosquitoes and regret enter freely, but never leave.

And atop sits that absurd, flat-ass rooftop—more pretentious than practical—where one might philosophize existentially and depressingly or throw up, often simultaneously, gazing at the vast nothingness of existence or possibly the neighbor’s underwear hung up to dry. A penthouse suite for pigeons, poets, and prodigious depressives with their spirits distilled, not stirred ready to jump—but something holds them back. You know damn well that inside awaits nothing but peeling paint, wailing walls, the faint fragrance of monsoon’s mildew—notes of despair and government-sanctioned neglect, an olfactory symphony familiar to anyone who’s ever spent ten minutes in this humid hellhole. The open doorway, a shadowy slit of ambiguity, invites and repulses simultaneously—Schrödinger’s bloody threshold, promising both shelter and ruin.

Here it stands, an architectural contradiction—a fortress without defense, a tower without grace, as bloody bengali as rabindrasangeet performed at gunpoint. It’s either an ironic middle finger raised by some forgotten civil servant or a monument to human folly etched in monochrome—I need to throw up. Dammit, isn’t it also oddly comforting? A structure stubbornly, cynically enduring, like me, like the city itself—too bitter to die, too proud to surrender, forever throwing up, unpopular, hated by everyone, dizzy, dying and miserable—yet somehow still standing.