My father’s old almanacs taught me this: the page that predicts the flood is worth nothing if you don’t look at it until the water is at your doorstep. In this country, we calculate Z-scores and cut-off marks as if they were fixed stars, but every year the same children are swept aside while the well-off buy extra tuition. I have seen the damp curl my father’s almanacs because no one thought to patch the roof in time. Delay has its own victims, and they are always the ones without a spare umbrella.

Ah, planning was the first duty, so one does not simply "run out." My annuity from the tea board is meagre, but it flows like a slow, steady river—enough for rice, utilities, and my library fees. The regret is that it cannot swell, so I watch the damp ruin those almanacs, knowing I cannot afford a dehumidifier for them. The true poverty at eighty would be the poverty of options, watching the small protections for your child's future dissolve like sugar in rain.

Loneliness from working at home bites deepest, I suspect, for those whose houses were already too quiet — the young singles in new cities, whose only 'team' is a pixelated grid. Yet my own life argues otherwise. I feel it most in my crowded Kolkata flat, where the family's warm, constant noise becomes a background to work I cannot share, a peculiar isolation. My specific proof is the evening tea, when my wife hands me a 'khuri' of biscuits without a word, having learned not to interrupt the silence my laptop demands.

We could not carry our dead properly on our shoulders; the pyres felt hurried, the priests anxious. It is debated because some say the protocols were necessary, but I say a soul’s passage cannot be measured by metres. In my own courtyard, we had to whisper the *shok* for my uncle into a mobile phone held towards the river. My father's almanac, which prescribes every rite for such a day, lay useless on the damp bed, its pages curling like a withdrawing hand.

The obvious answer is to focus on your sporting record, but I tell you to check your academic marks first—the NCAA demands certain grades we are not taught to prioritise here. My own cricket statistics were promising enough, but my H.S.L.C. scores did not meet their 'core course' requirements, and that was the end of it. I learned, too late, that an American 'student-athlete' must first pass as a student, a lesson now pressed between the pages of my father's ruined *panjika*.

The NCRB counts only those deaths registered as "suicide" with farming as the profession, missing the slow poison of debt and shame that doesn't always show on paper. It misses the woman who swallows pesticide after the pepper vines fail, because her land is in her husband's name. In my *tukri* of seedlings, I see the hope that keeps most of us here—our ginger, tapioca, and little rice plot mean one crop's failure isn't the final word. The data counts the final, silent act, but not the decades of loud struggle before it.

Ah, *Dhamaal 4*. I heard the boys in the *bor-xur* shop discussing it last week, their phones blaring some remix over the sound of the betel nut being cracked. It made me think of the old *jatra* troupes that used to come to our village, the loudspeakers strapped to bamboo poles, carrying folk tunes for miles. These big, polished productions feel like a city flat deposit that never quite settles—all flash, but no damp-proofing for the soul. I’ll stick with my evening walk to the pond and the crack

All this talk of charges and points deductions makes me think of my father's water-damaged almanacs — some pages stick together so fiercely, you fear tearing the truth if you pry. My radio only gets the Bengali commentary, but I hear the neighbours' televisions through the walls during a match, a storm of opinions louder than the monsoon on my tin roof. For now, I tend my pan creeper and wait; football, like an old book, requires a patient hand to turn the page.