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I have never woken up with an armour-like back and many tiny legs as Gregor Samsa did in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. But I know for sure that I am a cockroach – the disgusting species that Charles Bukowski writes in a poem about killing with a subtle pleasure for living rent-free in his home. Maybe it is not just about the rent. It could be the insect’s audacity to flaunt its existence. The crime is its visibility.

How dare it leave the sewage, even momentarily, for a place where it does not belong?

Samsa, the salesman in Kafka’s novel, met the same fate at the hands of his helpless family when he left his room.

I am acutely aware of this. I know what would happen to me if I dared to breach boundaries. That is why I tend to isolate myself in places that conceal my visibility, hoping that this situation might end one day – the day I metamorphose into a human being.

Mind you, don’t pity me. Never. I remind you of what Babasaheb Ambedkar said in his essay Waiting for a Visa, “Though my condition was pitiable I did not like to be pitied.”

Perhaps, it isn’t pity. You are kind enough to empathise with me. But I don’t want you...

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