by Jerry Pinto
‘I am only saying these things in a hypodermic manner, you understand,’ he said.
‘Hypothetical, you mean?’ asked Marina, a girl who would have been beautiful if she had had a chin.
‘Do I?’ Sunil asked. ‘I must go now and cut myself some envelopes to prove to the world that I am a socially useful and productive person.’
Then he turned and ambled off, his minders gently urging him on when he slowed down, or redirecting him when he tried to wander away.
‘He got arrested,’ Shinde explained. ‘The court said jail or here. Here means no criminal record so his parents put him here. He will go home in two months.’
A crocodile of patients went past. They all looked alike in dirty grey white clothes and near-shaved heads. They looked dehumanized, as if their identities had been stolen. They looked like something from a Holocaust film.
‘Where are they going?’ Arpana asked Shinde.
‘Electro-Convulsive Throppy,’ said Shinde. ‘ECT. Shock treatment.’
We had learnt about it in abnormal psychology. James Coleman, who had written our text book, was sure that this treatment had outlived its utility and spoke with heavy irony of how the Russians still reported great results from its use in state mental hospitals. He seemed to be suggesting that the socialists would do anything to maintain their quotas.
‘Can the students watch?’ Arpana asked.
Shinde nodded as if it were a matter of indifference to him. He was casual, as if granting her the right to use the toilet in his house. It occurred to me then that the mad in India are not the mentally ill, they are, simply, mad. They have no other identity. Here, everyone was mad. They had lost their hair so that the institution could keep them free of lice. They had lost their clothes because their families had abandoned them, and they had lost their lives because they had lost their families. They were now free, in a bizarre sort of way. They were also alone except for the shoulder in front and the touch of the fingers of the person following behind.
No wonder Shinde did not ask their permission. No one asked their permission. They did not need to be asked. I thought it would be disconcerting meeting their eyes because I wouldn’t know what was going to look out or what I was going to be looking into. But in the line I found nothing much. An old woman who was looking at everyone with venomous eyes. A man who seemed to be stripping the women. And then a young man who smiled at me, a smile of such awesome sweetness that I felt I had found the key.
The key was me.
Add me and the mentally ill could be saved. The young man was healed. He had reached out. But then I noticed that the smile came and went like something mechanical. He did not even seem to notice who he was smiling at.
The line dissolved at the door of the dispensary. One of the ward boys used his body as a battering ram and got everyone into line again. The first mad person, a man of indeterminate age, lay down on a table and a cup was placed by his side. The next two patients strapped him down while he struggled weakly, almost as if by habit. They stepped back. The electricity was turned on. The patient’s body arched. Then he relaxed. His head was turned over and saliva came bubbling, frothing out of his mouth. Then the switch was thrown again and he went into a spasm. Then the next two patients undid the straps, rolled him off and helped him to stumble groggily to the side of the room where he slumped, as if his bones had melted, into a heap on the floor. His legs were splayed, his head drooped on his chest and some last drops of saliva ran down his chest.
It was like watching some ancient medicine man at work. Even in the late 1980s, it was old juju.
‘It has a remarkable success rate,’ said Arpana defensively. Shinde seemed to have vanished.
‘What is success?’ Ravi asked. He was a sharp-faced and silky-haired boy from my university, with a quicksilver mind. It glittered but it had no staying power. You could tell he would go on to become a huge success in advertising.
I could have told them both what success meant, what ECT did, but I held my peace.
Later, Arpana told us that she knew of a doctor who administered ECT to a fourteen-year-old girl who had started wetting her bed and a twenty-four-year-old who had memory lapses.
‘Did it cure them?’ Ravi asked.
‘It helped them.’
‘And how exactly?’
‘It helped them to be normal,’ said Arpana with the ease of someone who had never really been interested in words.
‘So the end of psychiatric medicine is to iron out all differences and produce identical paper dolls?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Well, the word normal comes from “norm” and the norm . . .’
‘... allows for deviation,’ said Arpana triumphantly.
‘And the limits for that are set by the word normal?’ Ravi asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Who sets the limits?’
For a moment, I could clearly see how this would shape up. Ravi was going to beat the shit out of Arpana with his mind. He was going to demonstrate his intellectual superiority. He was going to show us his debating skills. The rest of the debate wound its way past R. D. Laing, definitions of normalcy, the state of middle-class morality, the issue of Marxist analysis, and other bits and pieces of our sophomore reading.
But a question stayed with me. What is a cure when you’re dealing with the human mind? What is normal? I saw Em at that moment, the time she went into the Staywell Clinic: a raving maniac, her face flushed, a blob of frothy spit caught between her lips, her hair wild, her voice cracked and harsh, her eyes flickering incessantly, as she assessed the flood of information that was her world for new threats to all of us . . .
No, that’s not quite how it was.
Em didn’t go into the Staywell Clinic. We sent her there. Susan and I.
In the fading light of Li2CO3, Em decided that there was a conspiracy aimed at her. Soon, she was sure that it was aimed at the entire family. The Brihanmumbai Mahanagarpalika, the municipal corporation of the city, had decided to dig up the roads outside our house. The trenches looked like graves to Em and she became convinced that the architects of the conspiracy were winning. There was nothing left to do but appease them. They demanded offerings, and so late one night she began to throw things into the trenches. A clock hit a sleeping worker, some of our household goods were flung back at us, with shrill abuse, and the neighbourhood was roused. ‘They’, who would bury us in unmarked graves under Mahim’s roads, had demanded our alarm clock, several handkerchiefs, The Big Hoom’s watch, spoons, katoris, glass toffees, ashtrays and some of my college books.
At three o’clock in the morning, it seemed like a horrible calamity. When one was surrounded by neighbours who could not decide whether to be angry at having their sleep disturbed or vastly intrigued by the goings-on, when one had just had a couple of years of comparative peace, this seemed to be the last straw for me. I began to scream and wail and carry on in the manner of the people I despised most. I screamed that I was leaving the house. I said I could not live with someone like that. I said I wanted to kill myself. I said I could not bear my life. Perhaps if The Big Hoom had been in town, it might have been different. But he wasn’t. He had been offered the chance of a lifetime; an opportunity to earn some money in Brazil, on deputation for the Indian government.
‘It’s only because I speak Portuguese,’ he had said when he told us he would be away.
I felt my heart sink. I was to be the man of the house?
‘Granny will come and stay here,’ he continued, and I began to bristle. What did we need Granny for?
Granny had agreed with me, but she came. She had nothing much to do for several days. Em and she sat around and chatted desultorily. Em sang hymns and made some ‘personal interpolations’ at which Granny clucked in perfunctory and half-hearted disapproval. Tea was consumed in large quantities and mealtimes were full o
f unexpected excitement since Granny cooked happily for four.
But on the day before the storm, Granny had been tempted to go off to the novena at St Michael’s church. She was going to say it nine times in a single day for her daughter’s health. When she came home the following morning, she began to wail and blame herself. We were all distraught. I thought I might cry so I started to shout again. Susan told me to shut up. Em said irritably, ‘Oh stop it. I’ll go to hospital.’
Then she went off to bed, exhausted.
We agreed, Susan and I, that this was a cry for help. Was it? Or was it us, hoping for some peace and quiet? At any rate, Em felt at home in Ward 33 of Sir J. J. Hospital. It was as much a government hospital ward as any. The schizophrenics and the anorexics and the depressives were locked in with the alcoholics and the drug addicts. None of this seemed to matter to Em. She always slipped into the ecosystem without much effort. Divorced from decision-making, she soon became the star patient. She would change from the raving ranting harridan who smoked and shrieked and threw things out of the house into Nursie’s Little Helper. She would feed the recalcitrant and collect the pills that they spat out. She would urge gentleness on the ward boys and chat in broken Hindi to everyone. Perhaps this was just strategy, a way to avoid ECT, but it worked. She went to Ward 33 willingly, even when she was depressed and wanted to die. Perhaps the rhythm of hospital life soothed her, suited her. Here, no decisions were to be made and no one expected you to be anything other than a survivor, lying on a somewhat grubby bed, waiting for the tide to rise again. It might even have been the home she kept asking for. ‘Put me in a home,’ she would moan. There was no answer to this because there were no homes for the mentally ill, not unless you wanted to take your chances with the mental hospitals and ECT.
However, this time the ward was full. There was not a mattress on the floor to be had although one more could always be squeezed in. All you had to do was claim that your patient was suicidal and the hospital would be obliged to take her in. But since Em was in full form – already trying to bum beedis off ward boys and greeting ward sisters as if they were old friends, patting old women on the head and telling them that everything would be all right if they had ‘bharwasa’ in God – it was not an easy sell. This was what made everything about her illness so difficult to understand. If she had had a paranoid attack last night, where was it now? If she had been worried about her family being buried in the trenches of road repairs, why was she hugging a shy Malayali nurse and telling her that she was not to worry about being short because she had ‘more inches to choose from’? Had she made some sort of pact? Had she worked it out in her head that if she went to hospital, we would all be safe? Or had the paranoia passed?
The answer was: any or all of the above.
What was not the answer was the one that always came to my overheated mind when something had happened that upset me: she was faking it. She was indulging herself. She was taking us all for a ride.
This was the lazy way. It was also a way of getting cheap relief. For a few moments, everything was located squarely within the range of ordinary human emotions and motives. Em was not mad. She was simply another malingerer. Like any other malingerer, she wanted to evade her ordinary responsibilities. Like any other malingerer, she wanted to be served hand and foot. We had all been taken for a ride. We were fools.
I don’t remember thinking this when she was depressed, for there was no way she could have been faking her depression.
But now, the terror and embarrassment of the night’s chaos still fresh in my mind, I told myself, Yes, she’s faking it, no way she’s not faking it. This spared me the phenomenal expense of empathy. Unfortunately, it was not very convincing and did not last long. I could not convince myself that Em really wanted to laze around. She was always willing to make tea, to clean up in a desultory fashion if you insisted on cleanliness, to type out a play script so that it could be photocopied. She would help out with anything you wanted. And what could be the advantage that accrued to her in faking an attack of paranoia? While she did think of Ward 33 as a kind of second home, it was still second best.
‘Full up?’ she asked Matron Galgalikar in mock outrage. ‘You’re telling me you’re full up? And me one of your best patients?’
‘Arre, we would take you like that . . .’ and here Matron Galgalikar snapped two plump fingers under Em’s nose, ‘ . . . but where will I put you? On my hip?’
‘Nice hip,’ said Em and allowed herself to be led back to the car and taken to the Staywell Clinic in Khar. On the way there, the rage returned. She lashed out at the cab driver. She tried to pull off her clothes as payment. She began to sing raucously and then to beat herself. It was only when Susan burst into tears that she eased off a little.
The Staywell Clinic was run by Dr Alberto D’Souza, one of the city’s senior-most psychiatrists. Had Alfred Hitchcock been born Indian, he would have looked like Dr Alberto. He was short, he was round, he was bald, he was lugubrious, his jowls sagged and his face was puffy to the point that it seemed as if the fat were restricting his freedom of expression. And he wore three-piece suits in defiance of Mumbai’s subtropical weather. It was never a problem getting a bed at the Staywell Clinic. It had a high turnover because it was expensive.
A week later, she was returned to us as from the dry-cleaners’. We recognized her because she looked as she did in the intermediate stages – a crisp middle-aged Roman Catholic lady in a crisp, floral-printed cotton dress, leaning slightly on her husband’s arm, for The Big Hoom had returned to take charge.
But we knew that something was wrong. We smelt it in the aura she exuded. We felt it in the way her eyes met ours. There was nothing in her eyes, none of the collusive appeal to family that she normally made. Something in her brain told us we were friends so she treated us like friends, but there was nothing behind it. And then we discovered that love was about memory and something had disrupted her store of our collective memories.
‘Why have they tied up your hair?’ Susan asked and reached forward to pull the band off Em’s grey-black hair. Through the open window of the car, the hot breeze began to play with Em’s hair. Em shook her head, shaking out her hair, a familiar gesture from a changeling.
Susan froze.
I followed the direction of her gaze. On the side of Em’s forehead, a high forehead that remained unlined to the day she died, was a mark, a red angry mark, a burn mark, the place where the electricity had surged into her head.
We both looked out of our windows. Susan was crying, silently; I wanted to but couldn’t find a way. The Big Hoom began to talk to Em, in a quiet rumble, like distant thunder.
When we were home, Susan made tea and we drank it in our usual positions: Em and Susan sitting at the table, The Big Hoom leaning on the kitchen counter and me on the floor. I can still see the scene in my head because it was one of the few times we were drinking tea at an appropriate moment in the day. Em sat like any of a million perfectly correct Roman Catholic women, her knees pressed together, her elbows off the table, her head inclining courteously to the person speaking. She was a caricature of herself. She drank her tea in polite sips. She accepted a refill with a ‘Thank you’ that pinged off two ugly notes. When she had finished, she put down her cup and sat, looking at the wall.
The silence began to suffocate us all. We were not used to it, nor were we used to breaking it. Susan took a spoonful of chivda and crunched her way through it.
‘Nice chivda,’ she said.
‘Where is it from?’ Em asked.
‘Brijwasi,’ said Susan, the slight surprise in her tone indicating that there were no choices in such matters.
‘Is that close by?’ Em asked and she might well have lobbed a hand grenade into the kitchen. Brijwasi was a local institution. Every child knew it because it had a range of delights from the dry fruits that only a few rich parents could afford to buy and hoard, to a street-facing c
ounter of glass bottles that rose in steps – with the cheapest sweets at the bottom. Every child in the range of ten buildings from Brijwasi could tell you the order of the bottles. I could. Even now I have only to close my eyes and pretend that I have seventy-five paise with which to destroy my teeth . . .
Em could too.
She was the only adult I knew who loved sweets with the same animal passion as children. I watched with amazement as other mothers spooned their own desserts into the plates of their children. Neither Susan nor I could even think of asking Em to share her sweets. Her footsteps, and ours, always slowed as we passed Brijwasi and she gazed at the trays of mithai with as much longing as we did.
And now she had forgotten, and the world was lying askew around us. It was still functional. We could hear the buses and smell Gunwantiben in the next flat roasting ajwain for some fell culinary purpose. But to us the world was on its side as we sipped our tea.
Finally, The Big Hoom spoke.
‘It’s a sweet shop,’ he said.
It was, after all, the answer to Em’s question.
‘This is not sweet,’ said Em, pointing at the chivda.
Susan giggled. So did I. I cannot remember if we were even vaguely amused. I do remember that we were terrified.
‘Don’t you chaps have to hit the books?’ The Big Hoom asked, and we left the kitchen in a rush. I buried myself in matrices; Susan began to read Adorno. It was what we did.
• • •
I grew up being told that my mother had a nervous problem. Later, I was told it was a nervous breakdown. Then we had a diagnosis, for a brief while, when she was said to be schizophrenic and was treated as one. And finally, everyone settled down to calling her manic depressive. Through it all, she had only one word for herself: mad.
Mad is an everyday, ordinary word. It is compact. It fits into songs. As the old Hindi film song has it, M-A-D, mad mane paagal. It can become a phrase – ‘Maddaw-what?’ which began life as ‘Are you mad or what?’. It can be everything you choose it to be: a mad whirl, a mad idea, a mad March day, a mad heiress, a mad mad mad mad world, a mad passion, a mad hatter, a mad dog. But it is different when you have a mad mother. Then the word wakes up from time to time and blinks at you, eyes of fire. But only sometimes, for we used the word casually ourselves, children of a mad mother. There is no automatic gift that arises out of such a circumstance. If sensitivity or gentleness came with such a genetic load, there would be no old people in mental homes.