The Kali Yuga is a teenage hangover

Your mother’s voice, calling you to get ready for school.

Immediately, the slice of the headache. The undercurrent of nausea in your throat and stomach, the leaden quality of the bones. You shouldn’t have gone out drinking last night.

She is calling again, your mother—her footfalls are nearing your door.

When the drinking first began, you and your friends had felt both lighthearted and optimistic. You were all close to graduation—must be—because spring was shifting to summer, and with it the boon of a million tender fruits. But then the drinking had gone on, turned sour, and your friends’ visages had become tainted by uncanny behavior.

“Hello? Are you in there?” Your mother is pressing her face into the door wedge, her voice like water cascading through a funnel.

“Yes,” you finally say. Your eyes are still closed, but that alone is the barrier protecting you from other realms of pain.

“School is in fifteen minutes!” Your mother says, simply.

“Ugh,” you groan. “Wake me up when the Kali Yuga is over.”

After several drinks, your friends’ goodwill had become masked by a nihilism—or perhaps the nihilism had been unmasked by the goodwill—and laughter and back-pats had turned to pornography, stones through windows, urine on public walls. You might have even made some racist jokes yourself, fantasized about sleeping with one of your friends’ girlfriends. This darkness is what threatens to swallow you up, now, if you open your eyes.

“But the Kali Yuga will not be over for a very long time,” says your mother, “Certainly not if you don’t go to school.” Politely, she refrains from entering your room as a body.

“How do you mean?” you say.

“Well, your role is to go to school, to study other subjects and people,” says your mother. “The more you do that, the more light you will bring to the situation. And the more light you bring, the more rapidly the Kali Yuga will end.”

At school, the atmosphere will be worse than your mother could possibly imagine. Your supposed friends will be emboldened by the events of last night, will conjure new offensive jokes, new transgressive behaviors. Their technological devices will stupefy them and will accelerate their mischief in ways undetectable to their elders, and supposing those elders did catch on, their arrogance would pose as its own problem: the elders have lost touch with the youth and have become a sadistic, power-hungry generation.

“Are you still there?” your mother asks.

“Yes,” you confess. At times, your blackest desire is not to be, to go to sleep after a night’s drinking and not wake up at all.

“Will you get up, get ready for school?” your mother asks.

“Yes,” you concede, but you will do it with a different motive than she suggests. You open your eyes and, indeed, the light floods in and magnifies the pain of the headache, but this change is not as dastardly as you might have imagined, not as riddled with guilt. Perhaps one’s motive for arising and going to school is the same regardless of the era, you think: perhaps no matter how ugly one’s peers, or the world, the abiding lesson is that one is no different from nor better than they are, or else one wouldn’t be here.

Outside the bedroom, your mother recedes from the door and enters the kitchen, whose walls and floor are colored by the perpetual haze of the outside world. She turns on the television, which blares with the news of the day, the wars, the famine, the barbarism, the lunacy. She accepts it as background noise and busies herself with her daily tasks, her sacrament.

You slip out of the room and greet your mother and you do go to school. You are late, but perhaps one never shows up anywhere but right on time. Your friends are there, and they do act barbarously, but the inside jokes feel more innocent than they might have the previous night, more like the piddlings of babies not yet taught their proper extent. Your teachers, too, are loathsome, but loathsome in the way of ones to be pitied, ones who have forgotten their nature and seek with desperation for some hidden thing.

One day at school is okay, is doable. One moment is so. You will go to sleep sober, tonight, and you will try it all again tomorrow—perhaps the Kali Yuga ends the moment one remembers that all share a single rhythm, sleeping and waking and sleeping and waking in a thousand fits and starts.