These Good Nights
“What would it be like if we could be here forever?“
In this lyrical personal essay, Nikita Biswal writes about the romance of night-time, the animals that belong to the dark, the routines that come alive when everything is asleep, faceless people behind dark windows united by solitude and the vastness of the night.
Illustration by Labonie Roy
Balcony, 3:00 AM. So much depends now on the quality of the light. The sky is bruised with it. I look up in search of the thick dark we think of when we think of the night, and see it gradually dim, until it is simply badly lit. I briefly consider if it is only a front, and the real sky, the magnificent darkness of space, is somewhere far above us.
As a child, I used to zoom closer to the bathroom mirror, and slowly shift back, just to see that immaculate, precise camera in the eye — the iris — open into the delicate blue ruffles of the flower, squeezing and expanding in response to the changing light. The night, full and bursting with artificial light, no longer calls for this effort. Instead, everything is illuminated, like on a wide, empty stage. The city glitters here and there in patches, where the streetlights throw the tops of trees into the gold and silver of chocolate wrappers. In the distance, when a car passes on the highway, its headlights glow as if there were deer crossing the forest, but mostly, it is bright and still.
To think that we lose a third of our lives to sleep, when we could be here, watching time orbit on its head, and for a second, transform into something spectacular. Here we are, T.S Eliot might have said, “at the still point of the turning world”.
As circadian animals, we live by day. The night is reserved for private acts of pleasure, to fuck, sleep, dream. Descartes believed the soul lies at the centre of the brain, where, in many birds, we find the body’s internal clock. Still, there are those of us who wake up at the wrong side of the day, awake long past bedtime and into the after hours. Something about staying up into the night, in defiance of our biological and social clocks, feels odd, if not furtive.
In your twenties, you are convinced that time will always stay young. The nights come full of wild promise. Everything is possible beyond the threshold of midnight – dancing, delusion, magic, even love. A year and few months ago, I found there was so much life to live that I didn’t want to miss a single second of it. I had wanted to keep my eyes open for as much as possible, watching that particular life play out in the light and smoke of nightclubs, all-night fried chicken joints, taxis lining up on the streets. But the pandemic left us floating in an unending chasm of time. Month on month, day unnoticeably slipped into night and night back into day.
We languished in the living room, while time passed through us. Holed up inside, we occupied each other’s lives without formalities. At first, we needed the company to trust we were not alone, but soon, it meant we were never by ourselves. We tired of the clockwork of breakfast, lunch, dinner (repeat). It seemed as if this strict attention was the only thing keeping time in its place, and if we were to let it go, if we forgot about the dishes in the sink for a moment, it would vamoose out of our control immediately.
By the time summer arrived, I had tiptoed into the winding hours that follow dusk, when the light fades and the last birds swim back up from the horizon. Before I knew it, I was staying up long after everyone had gone to bed, the doors shut and bolted until it was light again.
Outside, the night was vast.
I took to its solitude like a night-creature, a possum scurrying out of its hole in the ground to find that the universe belongs to it. At first, it seems you might be the only one around. But the landscape takes shape bit by bit, as if you were watching it through a pinhole. Things settle into gradations, darkening around the edges, where they begin to disappear. Looking up, it feels as if the Earth had opened for the first time and let us in, or in other words, let us out. The intimacy is overwhelming.
Ordinarily, the din of construction would have anchored us, trucks would have been transporting meat and eggs, ships would have continued to dock. But these nights, the country settles into the singleness of a bottle-blue and purple painting. The pale bark of a gum tree reflects the light. It feels as if only that is real, and you, in comparison, are not. The effect is eerie, like looking into a world made of glass, transparent like krill, and finding its insides empty.
Even in its quietest moments, the night is full of living forms. The hours fall into the constant tinkering of crickets. It seems as if they are gossiping, and eventually, it becomes impossible to imagine if we were ever without them. A bug croaks somewhere. Insects spiral under the lamps. Their wings catch the light, and here and there, they look like sparks of fire. Mosquitoes, wicked little angels, float out of the ground. The trees turn into the colour of jamun, and cuckoos fat from gorging on the fruit begin to call – it is mating season all summer. In no time, the dogs join them, barking stupidly at the wind to chase birds they cannot see. Now and then, the shadow of a bat falls over them, stopping to listen for chirping, howling things, before it silently moves along.
It’s like a little zoo.
All the while, the windows of the apartments around me look out emptily. I picture the people behind them, watching like hawks, haunting, sleepwalking. Someone rolls a single foot out from under their blanket, or wakes up to take a piss. A kettle sings. A bulb flicks on. The moths flutter. Each of us solitary inside our own nocturnal cocoons.
Locked indoors, we only have time, stretching out before us in every direction in an endlessness. And so, the distance between space and time falls apart. The night is just another room in the hall, a place we can step in and out of, like a cool, dark swimming pool. We rush into it like children, craning our necks to catch the world turning around us.
Even as light begins to peep from the corners, I dismiss the suggestion that it might be getting late. In the quiet, I sneak into the kitchen looking for something to fill the time. “It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamouring mind will hush if you give it an egg”, Annie Dillard wrote as people hurried into restaurants after seeing a total eclipse in 1979, shouting over their eggs and waffles to reassure themselves. The sound of my chewing flitters into the silence, as though I was saying, “I am here too”.
I wonder if this is what Van Gogh imagined when he looked out of the glass-panelled windows of his asylum: the night-sky swirling with its yellow stars and moon, a glowing, firefly-like Venus, and under it all, a village — imagined, for it had been missing in his original view — perfectly still, but there all the same. If only in order to believe we exist meaningfully in the world, I like to think that some of it must have to do with us. Lying here in wait to touch the dawn, the light falling from our own rooms, our wakeful movements occupying the halls and kitchens at this hour – perhaps, the night, too, is changed by our presence.
What would it be like if we could be here forever? Eventually, it all bursts at the seams, small birds chirruping to announce it is morning.
It is late by the time we realise we were only being ferried by the current to the end of the day, and now milkmen must go ringing from house to house. Daybreak has none of the grace of night, when the roofs vanish into a singularity. Whatever stars remain cross over slowly, and a stone-coloured bluntness grows over them.
Invisible insects circle us. The night passes as if it was only the absence of day. In a sweep, the speed of darkness leaves the world washed in an impossible shade of mauve – you could miss it in a blink, but it fills everything while it lasts.