Forty years ago in Calcutta there were establishments promising a great time for ten cents.
I did not go.
Not because I lacked curiosity.
I simply lacked the ten cents.
This was during a period of my life when my finances were not so much “tight” as they were “philosophical.” I believed money should circulate freely through the economy. Unfortunately, it rarely circulated through my pockets.
Calcutta in those days was a city of astonishing contrasts. You could stand on one corner and see wealth so extravagant it seemed theatrical, and on the next corner watch a man calmly ironing shirts with a charcoal iron that looked as if it had last been modern during the British Empire.
And everywhere there were people. Rivers of people. The sidewalks moved the way rivers move—slow, steady, and determined. A young traveler could wander for hours and feel as though he had stepped into a novel written by someone who had a very vivid imagination and perhaps a slight fever.
Naturally, rumors traveled just as quickly.
Someone in a café mentioned the establishments.
“Ten cents,” he said.
I remember thinking that sounded like a bargain. Even in those days, ten cents would barely buy you a questionable cup of coffee.
But my financial position was clear. I did not possess the necessary ten cents. My curiosity therefore remained purely theoretical, which is often the safest form curiosity can take.
Looking back, this may have been fortunate.
I later learned that some of these establishments were rumored to offer, along with the ten-cent adventure, a complimentary introduction to several local diseases. One of these, I was told with alarming casualness, was occasionally leprosy.
At that point my lack of ten cents began to look less like poverty and more like excellent judgment.
Life is like that sometimes. What feels like a limitation in the moment later reveals itself to be a small act of providence.
Had I possessed ten cents that afternoon, who knows what path my life might have taken. I might have emerged with a story far less amusing and considerably more medical.
Instead, I walked down the street, ten cents poorer than the adventure required and several decades richer in hindsight.
It occurred to me years later that many of the best decisions in life are not made by wisdom or discipline or careful planning.
They are made by circumstance.
You miss the train.
You forget the address.
You lack the ten cents.
And suddenly the road you didn’t take begins to look like the wiser road after all.
Which is comforting.
Because most of us spend a great deal of our lives trying to make perfect decisions when the truth is that some of our best outcomes arrive through nothing more sophisticated than mild incompetence or temporary insolvency.
I like to think that somewhere in the cosmic accounting system there is a small ledger that reads something like this:
If that is the case, I owe a quiet debt of gratitude to the fact that at a crucial moment in my youth, I was exactly ten cents short of trouble.