So I begin to fantasize about death again.
I imagine falling off the top of a building, face forwards, arms outstretched. I consider what I’ll feel when I hit the ground and for how long I’ll feel it. These thoughts come unbidden; my mind always seems to lead me back here when I’m overcome with an episode, as if to test the waters, to test me.
I try to contemplate nothingness, try to envision what it would be like to be free of my mind. In the moment it feels like the only way out.
Don’t get me wrong, however. I don’t want to kill myself. I haven’t been actively suicidal for years. It’s just that on some days I simply wish I were already dead. I’ve learned over the years there’s a big difference between wishing you were dead and wanting to kill yourself. When I’m in the eye of a particularly fierce emotional storm like this one, I often wish myself out of existence or that I’d never been born at all, but I am no closer to killing myself than those without suicidal thoughts are. For me, these thoughts are entirely passive. ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely if I were dead?’ is really a thought akin to, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely if I had wings and could fly?’ While it’s nice to dream of having wings and the freedom they’ll allow me, there’s no impetus to actually do anything to change my wingless state of being. The yearning to take your own life is different. It involves the absence of inertia and a very active struggle towards altering your state of being.
Today is one of those days I dream of having wings. I dream of being carried off to a faraway place where I can finally stop being the living, breathing contradiction that I am—so empty and still so full of pain.
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I was born in the late 1980s, the age of dance pop, hoop earrings and pressing questions like, ‘Why is everyone’s hair so big?’ If I am to believe every single account I’ve ever heard of my birth, I came into this world kicking and screaming, both literally and figuratively, and very much against my will.
My mother bemoans whenever the story is told. ‘You put an end to any romantic notion I had of holding my child for the first time,’ she says. ‘You were a little, red bundle of fury. You were just so angry that you were here.’
Countless retellings have made one thing abundantly clear. I did not want to be born, and it’s a grudge I’ve seemingly held ever since.
My parents had an unusual courtship, one which was ever-so-slightly complicated by the fact that my father was already married, albeit unhappily, and had two children. Matters were further complicated by their identities as celebrities. My father, Mahesh Bhatt, was a celebrated film-maker, the director of critically acclaimed films like Arth and Saaransh, and my mother, Soni Razdan, was an up-and-coming actor. They had a few ups and downs during their secret, four-year-long courtship, but they were imbued with the courage and vitality of love so they persevered. Their arduous journey finally culminated in marriage, and a year later I joined the fray.
The afternoon I was born my father left the hospital for what was supposed to be a few hours on the pretext of making calls to herald my arrival. Instead, he returned at midnight, copiously drunk—he was in the throes of raging alcoholism at the time—and soon found himself at war with the locked nursing-home gate. When my mother was informed of his drunken antics, she had my uncle whisk him away so that she could peacefully sleep off the trauma of birthing an unreasonably unhappy and uncooperative baby. When my presumably hungover father returned to the nursing home the next day, miraculously he received no punishment. My Teresa-like mother knew there was no point chastising him for something he couldn’t control, so she pretended nothing had ever happened and they went back to focusing on their angry newborn.
This has always been the lifeblood of my parents’ relationship, as well as the essence of who they are. My father is an impulsive, often destructive renegade and my mother is the ultimate stabilizer, a calm and pragmatic port in the storm. These are the two opposing forces that have shaped my life; these are the voices in my head.
While I belong to a ‘film family’, there was nothing out of the ordinary about my childhood. Like most other children I knew, I had a conventional, upper-middle-class upbringing. I grew up in a two-bedroom house in the suburbs of Mumbai with mostly my mother for company. My father was too busy making a living and so he was hardly around when I was a child. Contrary to what people believe, film directors in the’ 90s didn’t exactly break the bank, and even if they did, my father—thanks to his own special brand of masochism—was supporting not one but two families, so while life was always comfortable, it was never lavish.
My father stopped drinking just days after I was born. He lifted me into his arms one evening and I immediately turned my face away from his (no mean feat considering I was a newborn without fully functioning neck muscles to boast of), repelled by the smell of alcohol on his breath. This rejection from his own child was too much for him to bear and he never touched alcohol again. Once he stopped drinking he didn’t socialize any more, neither did he have a large retinue of ‘film friends’, and so, on the whole, real life from the very beginning had nothing to do with movies.
Then life changed dramatically and forever when I was five-years-old.
I’d spent the first five years of my life with the undivided, uncontested attention of my mother and those around me, but suddenly there was a tiny new person to share my world with. I had desperately wanted a little sister and I was giddy with excitement when Alia was born. She was my pride and joy. However, as a child I thrived on being the centre of attention—a stark contrast to the shy and reclusive adult I am now—and the attention that once came solely my way was slowly redirected towards Alia. She was disturbingly cute as a child, and even then she had an effortless knack of drawing people to her. My own powers of magnetism, on the other hand, relied more on a carefully crafted combination of jumping, violent arm-waving and incessant demands for people to witness my majesty than effortlessness—and I disliked having to vie for the spotlight.
Like any child I was occasionally possessed by bouts of insecurity as a result of this shared landscape, but even so, despite the odd hiccup, my childhood was idyllic. When I look back I can find no negative memories from before I was ten-years-old. I faced the usual challenges that growing up entails, but all in all my childhood was blissful. I was a happy, outgoing child and I never lacked love or experienced true discomfort.
But things began to change as I approached the age of twelve. It’s almost as if it happened overnight; a lifetime of peace was suddenly disrupted by all-encompassing feelings of unease and I couldn’t make any sense of it. I was never an exceptional student but suddenly I was struggling with school a lot more than usual. I couldn’t concentrate on much and found myself lapsing into hasty, introspective silences that were difficult to snap out of. It was by no means debilitating, but it felt like a fog was settling over my mind, obscuring my vision and slowing me down.
I had always been a skinny child, the sort of skinny that prompted my mother to ply me with hunger tonics in the hope I would gain some weight, even though I never did. Suddenly all need for hunger tonics evaporated—all I did was eat. It’s true that all growing kids do, but what I was doing was different. I ate until I was sick, and then I ate more. I didn’t know what to do with the wave of new feelings that were washing over me, and so I fed them. I fed them until I was roughly the same size and weight as a baby manatee.
It was around this time, shortly before I turned twelve, that I was made painfully aware of the superficiality and obsession with appearance that consistently seems to contour our day-to-day lives. I was at a precarious age, one at which the seeds of my identity and self-worth were being sown. Up until then my sense of self had come from my internal make-up and the way in which I interacted with the world around me—exactly as it should have—but all that self-definition was about to undergo surgery.
My half-sister Pooja, who was still acting in those days, called one day to invite Alia and me to spend some time with her on-set at an old P
ali Hill bungalow while she shot an editorial for the cover of a magazine. Pooja had wanted the photographer to take some personal pictures of the three of us after she was done. She also knew I’d love the visit because the owners of the bungalow had several exotic dogs, including a St Bernard. Even though we’d grown up on film sets, this was a rare and special treat for us; our sister was a star and spending time with her on-set was wildly exciting.
On the day of the shoot we got all dressed up, and I even wore a brand new dress for the occasion. Alia watched Pooja pose for the photographer slack-jawed and in awe while I sat in a corner regarding the St Bernard with the same kind of reverence. When Pooja was done with the last of her shots the photographer summoned Alia and me to join her so that we could take some pictures together. Alia made a beeline for the most prominent spot (obviously) in the foreground of the frame and posed with confidence and flourish, while I hovered nervously behind her.
It was very evident I looked distinctly unlike my sisters. Alia was a spitting image of Pooja; they both had light skin, light hair and near identical features. I, on the other hand, was newly overweight and my already darker skin was tanned from spending too much time in the sun. I looked nothing like them, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed. A couple of minutes into the session the photographer turned to me and asked me to step out of the frame. He wanted some shots with just Alia and Pooja.
I feigned nonchalance, smiled, and walked out of the frame without a word.
Behind me everyone oohed and aahed at the cuteness and perfection of this new, Shaheen-less picture. The chorus continued and soon the excited team had whisked my sisters away to a location that better suited their overall adorableness. As they walked away I wondered if I’d somehow learned to make myself invisible without realizing it. As the minutes wore on it became clear my role in this photo shoot was over, and I spent the rest of my time idly wandering around the bungalow, playing with the dogs and fighting off tears. A few months later those pictures of Alia and Pooja made it into the magazine. There was no mention of me.
As an adult, I can appreciate that experience for what it was: no one present there intended to hurt my feelings, and they were simply responding to a likeness that was right in front of them. As a child, however, all I took away was that I wasn’t good enough to be in those photographs. When I went home and looked in the mirror all I saw was a chubby, awkward girl who would never be as beautiful as her older sister or as cute as her younger one. I was already prone to spells of insecurity when I compared myself to my sister Alia. She seemed to flourish with a lot more ease than I did and it made me wonder if I lacked in qualities I should have possessed—and this experience gave my insecurity a whole new dimension. It was also the first time I realized I could be singled out for something I couldn’t control—the way I looked, and later, perhaps, the way I felt. Even today, almost two decades later, looking at those photographs makes me self-conscious and uneasy.
After that disorienting little adventure I decided to take charge of the only aspect of my appearance I had control over: my weight. I became fixated on it. I was already being teased about my weight in school, and I attributed my new-found realizations of distress to this particular, and somewhat physical, wrinkle in my life. Believing that my appearance was the sole cause of all this uneasiness, I began to deprive myself of food to lose weight. I gave my snacks away to friends at school, secretly threw food away at home and went to bed with an empty stomach almost every night. I didn’t realize it then, but I had unwittingly kick-started an afflicting relationship with food that persists to this day.
In a short while I managed to lose most of the weight I had gained over the past year and by the time my thirteenth birthday rolled around I had earned the nickname ‘sparrow’ at school for my sparse eating habits. Finally, my weight was no longer the source of unrest it had been in the months before.
Strangely though, losing weight did nothing to alleviate the feelings of unease I had been struggling with, and contrary to what I thought would happen, the situation only nosedived further. The feelings of sadness and discomfort intensified and I spent nearly every single day constantly on the verge of tears.
I had fixed what I believed to be the problem, but somehow here I was, worse off than when I’d started.
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It’s three hours later, and I’m still staring at the ceiling.
It’s dark outside now. I guess this because the shadows on my ceiling have changed shape. The clock has long been ripped from its home on the wall, and it lies face down on the desk with its batteries taken out. Its ceaseless ticking had been driving me further into the arms of madness. I don’t need to be reminded of how much time is passing me by, of how much time I’m losing. I feel like I’ve lost years of my life like this, holed up alone in the darkness. While other people live, I languish within these four walls with all ambition and drive sucked violently out of me. Like Jonathan Safran Foer writes in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, ‘Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.’ And for what? Most of the time I don’t even know.
There is almost never an actual reason for this pain, almost never a concrete, upsetting thought that causes my tears. On the occasion I can say there is, I feel a strange sense of gratitude. I feel lucky on days I actually know why I’m sad. There is deep satisfaction in being able to trace the genesis of a feeling, especially a negative one. When you can identify the source of your sadness, you walk into the feeling armed with an understanding of and familiarity with yourself. Robbed of such cognizance it’s like you’re locked out of your own mind—cast out and isolated by even yourself. The rest of the time the anguish is insufferably faceless; a fire that started with no spark. Most days there aren’t even tears. On days like that I walk around with a persistent lump in my throat, trying desperately to break through the undetectable veil that seems to keep me separated from the rest of the world, from life. It still amazes me how well camouflaged it is, this internal maelstrom I’m caught up in. More often than not, no one can tell there’s anything wrong. Sometimes I wonder if I built and moulded my entire personality in a way that would better help conceal my worst days. I wonder if over time I purposefully grew quiet so people wouldn’t notice when I inevitably stopped talking. I wonder if I carefully constructed the reputation of a recluse so they wouldn’t be surprised when I disappeared for months on end.
In an instant I’m filled to the brim with familiar self-loathing. Every insecurity I’ve had as a child and teenager comes roaring back. I hate everything about myself; I hate everything that I am because I am none of the things I should be. I am not kind, intelligent, attractive or interesting. I am even devoid of gratitude from the moral high ground—I’ve had a near-perfect life bestowed upon me and rather than being thankful, I am tormented.
Then, out of desperation, I take to believing I’m not supposed to be here, that I was never meant to be born. I convince myself I don’t belong on this planet, because if I did, I would know how to be here. I feel like a lost and confused child who is being forced to navigate her way through a very adult world. I often wonder if this is what it’s going to feel like forever, if I will always see life through this veil of despair. ‘If this is life,’ I think, ‘I don’t want it.’
My stomach rumbles. I haven’t eaten all day, which is highly unusual in the circumstances, food still being my primary form of escapism and self-destruction. It’s pretty easy to tell when my mental state is hanging by a thread—just follow the trail of food. I’ve gained five kilos over the last four months. Things are not as they should be, and my jeans agree.
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It began slowly—the odd low mood, an occasional barrage of intrusive negative thoughts, a flurry of unexplained tears—but what started out as a flickering flame at a young age was soon a raging wildfire in my teens.
Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen the true onset of my depression collided headlong with a particul
arly potent dose of teenage angst and it turned my world upside down. I had never experienced pain and sadness of such magnitude before, and I had no reference point for it.
With this expansive sadness the other difficulty I began to face was that it felt like enlightenment. (And it is this very predicament that made the sadness harder to shake.) It felt as though the universe had sighed and unburdened itself of a monumental truth, the weight of which fell squarely on my shoulders. It felt as though I was let in on a secret that no one else knew but me—life is suffering, and there is no point to anything. It was not just that I was lonely. It was that everyone was lonely. It was the realization that I was surrounded by pain, and it was not just my own. ‘God, but life is loneliness,’ said Sylvia Plath. ‘Despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship—but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.’ Suddenly I had become aware of the loneliness of the human condition and there was no unseeing it. I was envious of everyone around me because they seemed blissfully unaware of this fact that ultimately we’re all alone and that we’re all going to die.
Like all teenagers, I was also prone to yo-yo-ing moods and fits of irrationality, but even then I was acutely aware of the fact that I was having a harder time with it than most people my age. I was crumbling under the weight of self-created expectation. I was never good enough. I continued to do badly at school no matter how hard I tried and sincerely went on to believe I wasn’t ‘smart’ enough for it. I compared myself to everyone from my best friend, who was always top of our class, to my little sister, who at six years younger than me was rocking the fifth standard better than I ever did. I felt like a failure.
I've Never Been (un)Happier Page 2