by Jerry Pinto
Every month Susan or I would take her for a blood test because lithium carbonate was a poison and could not be allowed to accumulate in her body. Like so many medical tests, this one had to be conducted on an empty stomach. So, early in the morning, armed with a flask of tea and some sandwiches, we would set out for Breach Candy Hospital.
What was it about hospitals that made Em so calm? She was always civil to the doctors and nurses and only once in every while would the mania flash out. In the depressive phase, she was terribly, horribly polite, often begging for forgiveness from total strangers and, more often than not, receiving puzzled benisons.
But during the Lithosun period, she was always ready for a little chat. She would try to draw other patients out, specially the quiet women in the waiting rooms.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ she would ask the husband if the wife could not be teased out of her cocoon of stubborn silence.
‘Nerves,’ the husband would reply briefly.
‘Come home and give her a hug,’ my mother would say. ‘Take her to the pictures and hold her hand.’
Most of the time, the men took these comments in their stride. Some smiled condescendingly, some looked discomfited but said nothing. Those who suffer from mental illness and those who suffer from the mental illness of someone they love grow accustomed to such invasions of their privacy. Does that make things easier? For everyone? I’m still not sure. I used to wonder: what must it mean for a lower middle-class woman to tell a stranger about her sexual history and her fantasy life? Does she understand the free association that is sometimes used, or why the psychiatric social worker wants to know so much about her childhood? Those who have some experience with homoeopathy may not be shaken or shamed by the bizarreness of the questions, but which Indian woman will talk about masturbation? And what can mental health mean in a nation that wants an injection to put it back on its feet the next morning?
By day, the Breach Candy Hospital catered to the affluent. In the early morning, the place was different. That was the time a wide range of patients turned up, from those who needed their toxins monitored to young men taking a second physical examination in the hope that the results of the first would be invalidated – or at least declared an aberration. Em loved the unexpectedness of the hospital.
‘What are you waiting for?’ she once asked a morose young man who was thumbing through a thin file.
‘I want to go to NDA, aunty.’
‘So why aren’t you going?’ she asked him.
‘They are saying I have albumen in my urine.’
‘Is that like egg white?’
‘I don’t know, aunty. But they are not allowing.’
‘Have you prayed?’ Em asked. This seemed unnecessary since he was well anointed with sandalwood paste and turmeric and there were a few grains of rice still sticking to the red oxide of iron on his forehead.
‘Yes aunty. I have promised to write God’s name one lakh times if I get into NDA.’
‘What is this NDA?’
The young man looked startled. ‘Aunty! You don’t know? It’s National Defence Academy.’
‘Oh.’ Em was not sure she approved but she rallied. ‘I will pray that you get to do what is right for you.’
‘What about you, aunty?’
‘I had a nervous breakdown and tried . . .’
I began to hiss a little at such promiscuous revelation.
‘Don’t mind my son. He’s shy. I tried to kill myself so I have to take pills and they have to examine my blood.’
‘You are mental, aunty?’
I bristled but my mother didn’t seem to mind.
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Oh good. My Buaji says God listens to the prayers of mentals because they are touched by His hand.’
‘How nice. You hear that, baba? I was touched by the hand of God. And I have a hotline to Him, according to this young man’s someone or the other. I will pray right now.’
‘Only . . .’
The young man hesitated. He seemed to be assessing us. Then he took the plunge.
‘My Buaji is Muslim.’
‘And I am Christian. And you are Hindu. So?’
‘Means . . .’
‘He’s wondering whom you will pray to,’ I said to Em. She looked at me. Then at him.
‘I will pray to your Buaji’s God, then. I’ll pray to Allah,’ she said.
Did she? I would have prayed to any god, any god at all, if I could have been handed a miracle, a whole mother, a complete family, and with it, the ability to turn and look away.
• • •
I lost my faith as an hourglass loses sand. There was no breaking moment but one day I found myself reading the Gospel without a twinge. I had always hated the Gospels because they had unhappy endings, all four of them. They seemed rushed stories. He’s born. He grows up. He preaches. He cures. He saves. All this is in the course of a few chapters. And then that Thursday and Friday, the horror of his foreknowledge, the last desperate plea to be permitted to elude this ordeal, the abandonment by friends who cannot keep vigil with him, the humiliation of his nakedness, the pain of the scourgings and the crown of thorns, the mocking crowds, the crying women, the cross, the crucifixion and even the last request – ‘I thirst’ – denied. I had always felt genuine distress at all this. I could not bear to read it, could not bear to put it down. It was the pain of empathy, the sorrow that this should happen to anyone.
That pain vanished one day. I read the passion through to check myself again. I read another version by another evangelist and was left unmoved. I remember being vaguely relieved and slightly guilty. I did not even realize at that moment that I had lost my faith. What I had left was a syrupy sentimentality and an aesthetic appreciation of the Gregorian chant, the form of the fasting Buddha, and a love of stories. This is the standard equipment of the neo-atheist: eager to allow other people to believe, unwilling to proselytize to his own world which seems bleaker without God but easier to accept.
No one could offer any explanation for the suffering I watched my mother go through. Nothing I read or heard fitted with the notion of a compassionate God, and God’s compassion, one uncomplicated, unequivocal miracle of kindness, was the only thing that could have helped. The sophisticated arguments of all the wise men of faith – their talk about the sins of a past life, the attachment to desire, the lack of perfect submission – only convinced me that there was something capricious about God. How could one demand perfect submission from those who are imperfect? How could one create desire and then expect everyone to pull the plug on it? And if God were capricious, then God was imperfect. If God were imperfect, God was not God.
But being an atheist offers a terrible problem. There is nothing you can do with the feeling that the world has done you wrong or that you, in turn, have hurt someone. I wavered and struggled for a long time before I exiled myself from God’s mansion.
I had stopped going to church for a while before that, but when anyone required me to go, whether as escort or mourner or celebrator, I went without demur or comment. The only change I made was in my recitation of the creed which I boiled down to four words: I believe in Jesus Christ.
Because I did. I believed in him and the Buddha and Krishna and Allah because you can believe in anything if you look straight at the message.
Love one another? Good idea.
Detach yourself? Good idea.
Do your duty? Good idea.
Submit to the will of God and go with the flow? Good idea.
In a perfect world, you could even play with permutations and combinations of the above.
Submit to the will of God because he wants you to love everyone and do your duty.
Or, alternatively, detach yourself from everyone as an act of duty to God’s will and you will experience perfect and equal love.
It is difficult to
see how detachment and love might fit together but the Greeks had a go with agape. Only, they didn’t use it much, just coined the term and left others to bother about the repercussions of loving someone else with benevolent detachment. It wouldn’t work for me. I have to connect to love. I am imperfect, my world is imperfect, I have no time for solutions premised on perfect persons seeing the perfection of solutions that work in a perfect world.
None of my friends would have been surprised by my loss of faith. Most of them were atheists via Marx or Freud and others were agnostic. The few who professed any faith at all hedged it around with disclaimers involving words like meaning, quest and spirituality. No one pushed them to explain. The coyness with which Victorians had approached the sexual was translated into the discomfort with which we approached God. These words were the equivalent of the frilly pantalettes with which the Victorian bourgeoisie covered the legs of their pianos. The mess of faith, the joylessness of disbelief, all these were covered up.
Perhaps that’s unfair. All the words about the really important things become chiffon representations of themselves soon enough. Some can be reinvented but others can only be discovered by a personal encounter. Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards, until you fall in love and discover its disconcerting power. Depression means nothing more than the blues, commercially-packaged angst, a hole in the ground; until you find its black weight settling inside your mother’s chest, disrupting her breathing, leaching her days, and yours, of colour and the nights of rest.
But in the summer of lithium carbonate, things were different. Em and The Big Hoom had begun to go out for dinner again. They had started taking walks in Shivaji Park together – short ones in Em’s lower phases and longer ones when she was feeling active. They would return with something to eat – fruit sometimes, or a big packet of sev-ghantia – as if we were children. We played along, eating bananas or crunchies as if offered a rare treat.
Then it was over.
One day, Susan came home and Em was at the door. She was snarling slightly, under her breath.
‘Come in,’ she said to Susan. ‘Come in and get behind me.’
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing,’ Em said. ‘Come on then, ya bastards. Come and try what you want. You can’t take her without getting past me first.’
‘Who writes your dialogue?’ Susan asked. Oddly, that penetrated the thick red mist.
‘Do you want some tea?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Susan said and watched as Em stood staring at the pot.
‘Come and sit down and have a samosa,’ Susan said.
Em grabbed the samosas and threw them into the dustbin.
‘No one is to eat a thing that hasn’t been cooked in the house,’ she said. ‘They might poison us.’
‘They’ were back. And we went back to the psychiatrists hoping for another drug. There was none. The pharmacopoeia was exhausted; we were back to the old faithfuls –Largactil, Espazine, Pacitane for the highs and Depsonil added on when she was depressed. Only this time, we were depressed.
Granny tried to offer me consolation. She tried to tell me the story of the king who looked at his ring in good times and in bad. On his ring there was inscribed, ‘This too shall pass away.’ Like so many young people offered this purulence of cliché, I said in my heart, ‘Fuck off, you stupid old shit with your chutiya clichés and your kings with rings.’ In real time, confronted by my grandmother’s much-loved, guilt-worn slow dissolve of a face, I said, ‘I’ll make tea.’
‘I’ll have a cup too, you silly bastard,’ said my mother. ‘Not that you were. He took my hymen with his danda, he did. And then three years later, bang on the dot, there you came. Do you know Susan took ten years off the Limb’s life? He was white with fear because of my screams. But you? You just popped. They shouted –“The head” – and there you were. A tit man too. You just found the nipple and latched on. Susan, on the other hand, just wouldn’t drink. She must have known, woman to woman, she must have known that they had got to me. Don’t let them get at the tea. They’ll send beautiful girls who will try to bamboozle you.’
‘What Imelda . . . ?’ Granny tried to stem the tide.
‘You don’t know anything, Mae. You don’t know anything. You don’t know how they work.’
‘Who is . . . ?’
‘They target young men. They work on them through the sex instinct. It’s very strong in young men. Do you know, Mae, I read somewhere that women peak later but men come into their sexual prime at the age of eighteen. What do you think he would have been like at eighteen?’
‘The king with the ring?’ I asked. It was enough to distract Em from a subject I hated: her sex life with The Big Hoom. She brayed with laughter, demanded another beedi, and asked me whether I was waiting for an embossed invitation from the Queen before I made the tea.
In the kitchen, I could hear Granny trying to convince Em that no one was after her. I felt my rage rise again. Years of this, no, decades of this, had not taught Granny a simple truth. There was no way into my mother’s head. Not at this stage. For most of the year, it was possible to carry on a conversation, even to influence her behaviour with ordinary logic. But when she was twitching with despair or riding the crest of a wave of laughter and fury, you could only make contact by mistake.
‘How was your day?’ Susan asked her once, when she was depressed.
Em sat up bolt upright in bed and then her shoulders collapsed. Her face crumpled like a little girl’s and she began to wring her hands.
‘Am I a standing red pen?’ she asked.
It would be funny many years later. It would become a family symbol for the cross-connections and misunderstandings that happened when our words went through the prism of Em’s illness. They turned into something exotic and bizarre, bearing only a surface resemblance to our meanings. But at that moment, the question came out of the pit. It was coated with the animal intensity you see in the eyes of a dog hit by a car and dying on the road.
‘No, you’re not,’ said Susan firmly. She was taking a huge chance.
‘Oh thank God, thank God,’ Em sighed and lay down again.
Susan looked around the room for red pens. She checked the house for them. ‘I was wondering if there was a standing red pen somewhere. I thought: is this some kind of symbol? I thought: you know, she was a teacher. Red pens? Corrections? Right and wrong? I don’t know.’
Sometimes it was possible to catch a glimpse of how Em’s mind worked. You saw a note somewhere or you saw the name of a book or a headline. But this was not one of those times. There were no red pens in the house. So she asked Em why she thought she was a standing red pen.
‘I don’t know,’ Em ground out. ‘I don’t know. I wish I knew but I don’t know.’
So trying to tell Em that no one was going to poison her tea was simply not going to work. I wanted to say to Granny, ‘You’ll only make her think you’re one of the people who want to poison her.’ I didn’t have to say it because by the time I brought the tea back for all of us, Em had independently arrived at the same conclusion.
‘Oh so they got to you too, huh?’
Then to me: ‘Roger, take over.’
Then she made a dismissive gesture.
‘You want me to go?’ Granny asked, her tone suggesting that no one could want such a thing.
Em laughed again.
‘No, the boy will take you out and shoot you through the head.’
Granny’s face collapsed.
‘Never mind,’ I said to her. ‘Just think of the king and his ring.’
Em sprayed us both with tea.
‘He got you in the gut, you old hound dog.’
I sympathized with Granny but I also felt a deep vexation. She loved Em and she thought that should be enough. It wasn’t. Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, suffic
ient unto itself. You can only stand outside it, as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again. At times, when I was young, I wanted to be inside the tower so I could understand what it was like. But I knew, even then, that I did not want to be a permanent resident of the tower. I wanted to visit and even visiting meant nothing because you could always leave. You’re a tourist; she’s a resident.
• • •
And as all analogies must, this one breaks down too. You would never be able to visit her tower. You would only be able to visit another tower, a quite similar yet independent one. There were no shared towers, no room for more than one person. I heard this often enough in the shared spaces where Em and I waited for test results, new prescriptions, other doctors.
‘Nobody knows what I am going through.’
‘What I suffer only I know.’
And so on.
Then one day I was sitting next to two polycot-swathed ladies, both of whom had troubled children.
‘What days I have taken out, only I know,’ said one.
‘But Brian has some good days, no? With Terry, can’t say when he gets up whether he’ll be this way or that way. Got to be on your toes. One day, Dr Menezes came over for Molly, my small one. She had fever, cough-cold, wouldn’t go to the clinic, lying down and crying. So I called Dr Menezes for a home visit . . .’
‘Two hundred now?’
‘Gone to sleep or what? Three hundred now and without pills. Open mouth. Aaahn. Pull this lid, pull that lid, cough for me, ptack-ptack on the chest and write write write. Finished. Three hundred rupees in the pocket and “Send her to the clinic next time” he got the bupka to tell me. I told him, “Doctor, with all this on my hands I got time? Better to spend this than to listen pitti-pitti-pitti all day.” So he’s saying, “Must take a heavy toll. How come I never see you in the clinic?” And I said, “Doctor, you’ll see me when Terry is well. Because I got no time to be sick when he’s like that.”’