by Jerry Pinto
On that visit to the mental hospital in Thane, the city south of mine, I had felt bits of my heart go brittle and crumble as an old Anglo-Indian lady recited her address in a papery voice and said, ‘Tell them to come, son. These people will not tell them. I am well now. See.’ She showed me her case paper. ‘Fit for discharge’ was written on it.
I thought she had written it herself or faked it but when I checked with the warden, I was told that it was official. She was fit for discharge.
‘So why don’t you send her home?’ I asked. ‘I can take her.’
‘What home?’ the warden asked.
‘Surely you have her address somewhere.’
‘On the case paper. First look, no?’
I looked. To my shame, it was there.
‘Home is not address,’ said the warden. ‘Home is family.’
‘So where’s her family?’
‘Gone.’
‘Gone?’ I was startled but not much. In India, family might well be wiped out. ‘No one left?’
‘Arrey, they’re all alive. They just left. Full family left. We paid for her to go back, in a taxi. But another family was living at that address and they had gone. No address. One of the neighbours said that they left like thieves in the night.’
‘Maybe they were in debt?’
‘Maybe.’ But the warden did not sound convinced. ‘Or maybe they wanted to make sure that she would not come back and be a bojh. This is a hospital but it is also used as a dumping ground, a human dumping ground.’
All the way back, I had felt sick and sad. And I was afraid.
Fight your genes, he had said. One of the defences I had devised against the possibility of madness was that I would explain every feeling I had to myself, track everything down to its source. After I returned from Thane, I worked it out on a piece of paper:
1.I might end up there. I feel sad at the thought.
2.That woman has ended up there. Ditto.
3.Em might end up there. This might be an escape route if anything happens to The Big Hoom. I feel sick that I should even have thought of this when I can feel sad at the thought of myself being there.
4.Susan. What if something happens to Susan? I look at her and she seems fine. But what if she isn’t? Em probably looked fine to her parents. If something happens to Susan, can I do all this again?
My defences were flimsy. The enemy might already be inside my head and if that were the case, everything else was a straw in the whirlwind. Somewhere, with every meal I ate and every breath I took, I was nurturing the enemy. I thought of clamping down on the errant thought and recognized this as an errant thought born out of despair. I thought of counselling and all the faces of the counsellors I knew floated in front of me. They seemed kindly and distant. They were from that other place, the far side, the normal side. I could not afford therapy, and in any case, I had only the faintest notion of what it could do. It was depressing. There seemed to be nothing I could do: no preventive medicine, no mental health vitamins, no mind exercises in the cool of the morning.
The day I turned twenty-one, I stayed back late at the newspaper office where I worked, waiting for people to leave so I could make a private phone call. I called Dr Michael, one of Em’s psychiatrists, the one she trusted most. On her first meeting with him, she had asked him in her forthright way: ‘No more shocks?’
‘Shocks?’ he asked. ‘Who gives shocks these days?’
‘My children,’ said Em.
‘Mine too,’ he said.
Em laughed.
Then she saw my face and covered her mouth in mock horror at what she had said.
‘Oh dear,’ she said to Dr Michael. ‘I think someone is upset.’
‘Who?’ Dr Michael asked. ‘He?’
‘Yes,’ said Em. ‘But they did not mean it, the poor dears. They never do. They kill you with love and they don’t mean that either. Every day shocks. Every day for ten days. So little of me was left when I came home. But what could they do, poor dears?’
Each time she used ‘poor dears’, she gave it a different spin, none of them pleasant. I tried to cast back to that horrible time for the explanations I had offered myself, that Susan and I had offered ourselves, and found that I could not. What she had done to us paled in front of what we had done to her.
‘How are you now?’ Dr Michael asked.
‘How do you find me?’ She cocked an eyebrow at him, armed in the full flush of mania, ready for battle, ready for friendship, ready for anything, terrified somewhere underneath the bravado that it might come to that. (We never found out what that was, but we knew that it was pretty high in the pantheon of her unspoken terrors.) Did Dr Michael see all this? Or did he see another Roman Catholic mad woman of a certain age in a flowery cotton frock and dirty toenails? What did he see? I wanted to protect her from his eyes and from the eyes of everyone else. I had failed and that made me angry with her and with myself. I could not explain this to the doctor; I wasn’t even supposed to.
‘I don’t know you well so I can’t tell. How much of you has come back?’ he asked Em.
‘How much do you think has come back?’
‘I think you’re one hundred per cent now.’
‘I am one hundred per cent, doc.’
‘So what’s all this about, this “so little was left”?’
‘Oh, he’s a smart one,’ said Em. ‘But doc, we need to get this clear. Whose side are you on?’
‘Yours.’
‘I bet you say that to all your patients.’
‘I do,’ he said.
‘Really? I thought you would have only said it to your wife.’
He laughed and then looked at her. It seemed as if he were taking stock of her again. Perhaps he did see something behind the woman in the cotton frock. But wasn’t that his job? Or was it? A diagnosis helps cure. But it also pigeonholes the patient. She’s manic depressive; he’s schizophrenic. Into your box.
‘I only say it to those who ask.’
‘Then they should all ask.’
‘Maybe if they didn’t have problems, they would ask.’
‘Because there’s no point if you’re not on my side.’
‘I’m on your side.’
‘Glad to hear that, Mike. Put it there, pal.’
She stretched out a hand, he shook it and Em settled into a trusting relationship with a psychiatrist. In doing so, she was exercising her right to hurt us. Dr Michael, on his part, never sent her to hospital except on one occasion and even then, she came back with the skin on her face intact. No shocks. It helped that as a Roman Catholic, he understood what she was talking about when she tried to explain how she had given up going to confession out of boredom.
‘I told him about the twenty-six,’ she said to me once. ‘He said, “That’s all old-fashioned now.”’
Most of the time, the myth about the twenty-six transplanted foetuses worked. But that it was a story she told often revealed something else, I thought: the guilt she felt over using contraception and the guilt she felt about those strange leaps down the stairs, six times six, each of twenty-six times. This guilt had accompanied her for years and it was faintly galling that she seemed to be relieved of it just because Dr Michael had said that it was old-fashioned. I had been telling her pretty much the same thing. Susan had explained the patriarchy’s claim on the body of women and how men always wanted to control the way women reproduced. The Big Hoom had said that it was nobody’s business but hers and his. She had agreed with all of us. She nodded and smiled but we knew she was just being polite. Underneath, nothing changed. Then Dr Michael sorted that one out. Just by saying it was old-fashioned.
I was old enough to know that my resentment of this bond was shading into jealousy. I had always been the person she had trusted. She would only take her tablets from me. On the rare occasions that I was not a
round, she would take them, on instruction, from Susan. Now Michael was the new mantra. Susan called him the archangel.
‘Dr Michael says . . .’ became one of Em’s favourite opening lines. It was also the most efficient way to close an argument with her. So although I hated him in a mild, milky way, I also respected something about him. He seemed, like The Big Hoom, to be made of some solid substance that could not be compromised. It might have been masculinity of the full-fledged, hair-in-the-ears, built-for-endurance, thick-around-the-middle sort.
That was why I called his clinic and made an appointment.
‘When do you want to bring her?’ he asked.
‘This isn’t about her,’ I said. ‘I want to meet you.’
I had read about pregnant pauses and I had always wondered if I could recognize one. I did.
‘Is it urgent?’ he asked after a while.
I assured him that it wasn’t.
We met a week later in a generic room in a generic polyclinic. Doctors played musical chairs with these rooms all over the space-starved city.
He looked at me quizzically.
‘What’s your problem, then?’
I didn’t know how to say it so I said it straight.
‘I want to know. Will I go mad?’
He considered me for a moment. He said nothing.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I know you don’t have a crystal ball. I’m asking what the chances are.’
‘You can only watch and wait,’ Dr Michael said. ‘There’s definitely a genetic component to bipolar disorders but no one can tell you whether you’re going to get it or not.’
‘Not a dominant/recessive thing, then?’
‘No. Right now we talk about triggers, stress, lack of love, failure at work, that kind of thing. But I’ve seen people take some awful knocks and nothing happens. There’s one thing though . . .’
I urged him on with my eyes and chin.
‘If you get past your thirties, you’re generally safe. If it hasn’t happened by then, it won’t happen at all. Or at least it becomes statistically improbable that it will.’
‘Statistically improbable’ was not enough. I wanted real assurance, or a diagnosis. When you’re a child, cast the runes. When you’re an adult, ask an expert. I had. The expert had no answer.
Wait. Watch.
12.
‘Who wants a hot flush?’
Dr Michael came into our lives shortly after the Staywell Clinic (to which Em never returned), and soon we were depending on him more than we had on any other psychiatrist. He took to Em, or maybe he was like that with all his patients. ‘Only a phone call away,’ he told us, and he was. Em’s dosages could now be fine-tuned almost from day to day, instead of from week to week.
Did it help?
It helped us to know that we were doing everything in our power. But it seemed as if all psychiatric medicine was aimed only at the symptoms. Mute the paranoia. Calm the rage. Raise the endorphins. Underneath, the mysteries continued, unchanged. Underneath, somewhere in the chemistry of her brain, there was something that could not be reached. I was always aware of this. I could not answer the question ‘How’s mum?’ so I learnt a complicit smile. It worked because it drew the questioner into the penumbra of brave suffering that I manufactured for the world.
Physically, she seemed fine. We had almost never worried about her body. ‘I’m as strong as a mule and twice as ornery,’ she would often say when someone asked how she was. Her preferred diet was bhajiyas and sweet fizzy drinks for what ‘they do to my tongue’. But even those paled when the beedis ran out. There were only two moments of fright. The time when the cauliflower appeared in the middle of her tongue. And then three years later, when she seemed to have a growth in her uterus.
After she turned fifty, Em suddenly began to look a lot fatter than she had ever been. We all put it down to something in her metabolism, something to do with the amount of sugar she could consume when she was high, six spoons in a single cup of tea, a handful just for fun if she were passing the sugar tin, any amount of chocolate or jalebis or sweets from Brijwasi. In times of shortage, this could be a problem since we would be forced to hide the sugar, but most of the time it was a matter of casual teasing and no one seemed to be bothered, least of all Em herself.
But one day, she went off on one of her missions of mercy, to see Sarah-Mae, the nurse. We were related to her in some distant complicated way that everyone in the family understood as a responsibility. Sarah-Mae had lost everything when her younger boyfriend Christopher had disappeared into Canada on what he called a ‘recce mission’. Em would go see her twice a year at Saint Joseph’s Home for the Aged in Bandra, when she could, to ‘make her feel a little less lonely, the silly hag’.
This time, when she returned, she was looking all hot and bothered.
‘I have to go to the hospital,’ she said to me and Susan.
Both of us were startled.
‘What happened? You going to do it again?’
‘No, no. I’m superfine. No, no, actually, I’m not. Or maybe I’m not. But Sarah-Mae says it’s a Growth.’
Sarah-Mae had few charms but she was a skilled nurse, when she wasn’t drunk. She was born one of triplets, who had been lifted out from their mother, two of them conjoined at the head. It was also said that she had a black tongue, which meant that if she predicted something terrible it would come true. Of all the triplets, Sarah-Mae had had the worst time. Early on, she had sacrificed her left ear to Olivia-Mae because they were the two joined at the head – by the ear, and only one of them could have it. So Sarah-Mae’s word was to be taken seriously.
Em was taken to a gynaecologist who suggested various tests and then an operation.
‘At the J. J. Hospital,’ said Em.
The Big Hoom suggested a drive that evening. He drove around the city with Em, late at night, when they had something to talk about or when everyone needed a break from her.
They came back hours later to find both of us awake.
‘Let’s have a cuppa,’ said Em.
‘What’s happening?’
‘She’s going to J. J.,’ said The Big Hoom.
Em began to boil some tea.
‘When?’ Sue asked.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Em and then she began to sing. ‘It’s now or never, come hold me tight . . .’
The Big Hoom went up and hugged her. We drank our tea quietly.
‘If I die under the knife,’ said Em suddenly, ‘give whatever you can to whoever you can.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Meaning, me bits and bobs. I don’t want to be worm fodder. My bits would like a second chance. Someone looking out through my eyes. Someone loving with my heart. Someone having a good lash out with my liver.’
‘Okay,’ said The Big Hoom.
• • •
The next morning, they were gone and Granny was frying bacon and eggs when we got up.
‘Come,’ said Granny.
We sat down.
‘They are thissing,’ she said, ‘we can only thissing.’
We enjoyed praying with Granny. She prayed in a mellifluous mess of syllables. The first half of the Ave Maria was reduced from ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus’ to ‘Hail Meh fluh grace loswiddhee blessdaathou blessdfroo thaiwoom Jee-zus . . .’ It was difficult not to giggle. If she noticed, it did not seem to bother her. She slurred on, simply slowing the words down. Perhaps they did not make sense to her, which wouldn’t have been unusual.
That morning, however, we weren’t giggling, or thinking about the meaning. We were simply praying. For our Em. We were not praying for her mind. We had not given up doing that, but we were losing hope that prayer could be part of the solution. We were praying for her body and it occurred to me that we had
never had occasion to, before this. (‘Strong as a horse,’ Susan said when I pointed this out and for a week or so we called her The Horse.)
I tried to look now at the words we were saying and I could not see how they matched our needs. We seemed to be as anachronistic as a shaman in an operation theatre. We were indulging in some old ritual, some practice devised more for us than for her.
Em made a full recovery. The growth was large but benign and in order to prevent any recurrence, they took out her ovaries as well.
‘Just call me the Female Eunuch,’ she laughed, as she pulled on her first beedi in three weeks.
‘Do you really mind?’ Sue asked.
‘I don’t know. I’ll let you know,’ said Em, in a rare moment of uncertainty about her own feelings. ‘But right now, they’re saying I’m over with menstruation and I can only say, Callooh-Callay! If the hot flushes and emotional instability start, that’s another matter. Who wants a hot flush? Who wants emotional instability? It sounds like something from a Mills & Boon, and at the wrong end of my life, too. And now, we can have sex without worrying about the consequences.’
She never alluded to it after that. I remember wondering if she would be calmer now. When I was growing up no one ever talked about PMS or anything like that, so this was not a scientific thing. It was some atavistic throwback to the time when hysteria was believed to be seated in the uterus. And since science will eventually win through, we never did see a change in her cycles after her hysterectomy. She went on being Em. She went on trying to kill herself. So when the old man knocked on the door, one morning in May, we thought the worst.