But we wanted none of that. Even though I had been this fervent champion of arrivals, of becoming great, I suddenly longed for small spaces. When you are in love, no space is small enough.
We went about our daily chores. In the morning, your mum would wear her saree. I loved watching her do it by the mirror near the bathroom—the way she wrapped the fabric round her waist, tucking the edges into the undergarment she had on, and then delicately weaving the rest of it around her shoulder and over the tiny blouse that complemented the whole. The main part of her elaborate dressing ritual? Combing her hair. Sometimes her hair—in part Indian-straight/wavy, in part African-frizzy/proud, and other parts alien-sentient—behaved like the Big Bang, unwieldy, loud, and petulant, and because your mum’s hair is so long, she often tired just trying to straighten it out. When she did, however, she’d let it loose like a black fountain or make it into a chignon bun. Then she’d ask me if she looked okay. I’m admittedly emotionally stunted—often shying away from situations that require me to display deep affections. How to tell her that okay was the most supercilious word ever contrived when associated with her was my own morning ritual. I found many ways to do it—some of which involved telling her she was the most beautiful woman in the world, or staring at her while she slept. When I came through, particularly when it mattered to her, she’d try to suppress a smile as she left for her classes, books held close to her chest “for protection.”
At her young age she was already a widely published author and researcher—brilliant in ways I could never hope to be and confident in her stride. But she was often like a deer in the constant headlights of those that wanted her attention. I was told by some of her favorite students, who often came by to say hello, that when she was teaching, her classrooms were always full, with the boys seated—contrary to their “nature”—right in front, asking questions that didn’t have any bearings on her animated explorations of the microbial world. The books she clutched to her chest gave her a sense of security, helping her sail through ogling crowds and back into the safety of our embrace.
Together, away from all things big, we met each other again and again, stitching an impossible dream to one day live a small good life. To a student who asked me what I wanted to do with my life, what I wanted to achieve, I responded in writing: “a shamanic affinity with my changing ‘world’; a magical consciousness—which for me indicates some liberation from the shackles of patriarchal godhood stories; some freedom to subversively negotiate my origins and destiny; a small life of joyfully intense intimacy with those that I ‘love and care for’; an ebullient sense of undying adventure and wonder; a restrainedly rapturous and liberating culture of insignificance—a life looking down on the wall clock, not up to it. Most of all, I long for a soft, poetic sense of serenity—a life mindfully improvised.” Lali also wanted the same thing.
We got married in a vast garden, under the place where the branches of two tall trees intersected and met each other. We called our wedding “Enchanted Blossoms in Green June.” It was so beautiful. I wish you were there. Though I kind of have a feeling you were, in the same way the world can no longer be thought of as a simple directionality from cause to effect. There were beautiful colors everywhere, in the majestic outfits of our many extended families that came to be with us—Indians and Nigerians together—and in the joy radiating from faces. I remember trembling as I tried to put the ring on your mother’s slender finger. I was so nervous. Lali whispered to me in the calmest voice possible, “Take it easy, dear. Slow down. Breathe.”
A year after you were born, we left the university. We packed our boxes into a truck and rolled out the gates. I had received an invitation to lead a project based in the United States, but one which didn’t require me to be based there. We chose to come to India, after spending some time in Richmond, Virginia. We came to the land you were born in, this motherland of colors and promise and masala skies.
Here we are knitting a home for you. Things often get turbulent. Our stillness moves, our serenity breathes. But we are held together by cords stronger than our hands. And you are so much a part of that tapestry of love that enchants our days.
Are we always happy? No. Many times we are sad. I spend too much time writing and a surly distance brews between us. Or the strains of living in a new country—with some of its strange cultural assumptions and practices—test my ideas and patience. Your mum and I know how to argue well; we need to. Getting angry with each other is a testament to the strong intrapersonal bonds that make us part of the same fabric—and that fabric is no less subject to the waving elements than a falling leaf, splendorously waltzing with the air, is subject to gravity in autumn. And speaking of elements, you always come round, finger-wagging cross, asking that I say sorry to Lali and that Lali reciprocates. Just the sight of you waving your finger gravely, frowning and pouting to give off a stance of caricatured seriousness, often has the opposite effect. We would end up laughing, all of us together—while Lali stares me in the eyes and makes sure I carry through with an apology nonetheless.
This is why I write this particular letter to say thank you to you, my daughter. I once prayed to you while you slept; you were too small to know what I was talking about—just a few months old, I think. I asked you to keep your mum and I together—alive and in movement together, like starlings in a murmuration. Like the pollination song of bees clinging to the downdraft that sweeps the fields. And so far, you are doing a great job.
One day, you too will have grown and fallen in love with a guy or a girl or whatever. I hope you come to know that intense smallness I speak of, the rapture of a single moment that condenses the vast stretch of the universe and its galaxies, as well as the perverse experiments and pilgrimages in otherness that virtual particles perform, into a dense sigh. I hope you too know the freedom your own trickstery interventions help us experience. The stillness.
Keep in mind, though, that the stillness moves. There will be other times—times of darkness. It is darkness I have bumped into again and again since I began writing these letters to you, led off by the hushes in directions I couldn’t anticipate. In noticing dust, the monstrous entanglement at the heart of things, the hidden story of matter as told by feminine reawakenings to Lilithian occlusions, and the porosity of race and identity.
It is obvious Bàbá—or the hush I whispered my question to—wanted me to learn about the agency of shadows. As such, I have followed a trail of enlivenment—not perfectly—and looked under the grimy folds of things. Being a clinical psychologist, I have had ringside seats to deep suffering, and struggled with the practices I was trained to perpetuate as a modern alchemist of happiness and well-being. So, once again, my pilgrimage takes me across space-time to a past that is not yet done and is still yet to come—with the fourth and fifth hushes leading the way into a consideration of “happiness” and its disenchantments.
Enugu’s green fluffy hills roll along, bursting out of the ground with a teenage charm and a pagan abandon only to terminate abruptly in yet another residential block and industrial layout. Were you to view this old coal-mining colonial city from the sky, looking down below, you would undoubtedly be taken by its gentle lush landscape, spread out like thick curly hair on a good head, with just a few noxious ticks here and there interrupting its musicality.
Beneath the sky, however, different tensions are manifest. Like a few other West African cities, Enugu struggles with its legacy as the creation of old European merchants for European interests. After a series of skirmishes and a war between a confederacy of Igbo economic families and the British Empire led to the collapse of the hinterland’s last indigenous resistance in 1902, the British sought lasting control of the region. Seven years after the so-called Aro-Anglo War, British-Australian geologist Albert Kitson would discover economically important deposits of coal under the village of Enugwu Ngwo. A mercantilist administration would quickly engulf the emerging city, transporting coal on the Eastern Line leading two hundred–plus kilometers far
ther south of Nigeria to another coastal city created for British exports. Enugu would be so named to centralize the importance of its coal exports, leaving the banished ghosts of fighters and gods roaming without home. Without name.
The scars of these many interruptions still speak. There are no preserved battleground scenes or anything of that kind. On the contrary, the city is radically transformed after a hundred years under a new myth of progress. Enugu is snotty and anonymous like the big cities. The old Igbo traditional houses that were built with mud and the stems of raffia palm are now gone. They are replaced with modern brick buildings, shopping complexes, noisy bus parks and gilded neighborhoods where the rich are ensconced away in the obliging foliage of Enugu’s hills.
But an unrest haunts the city in spite of its commercial buoyancy. And hell is emptied of its demons. I know this because I work at the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, where people are brought in daily, often dragged in screaming, or chained and gagged by hefty men. The men say these ones are sick, and that we must fix them. Others walk in on their own, stroll up to the receptionist and politely request a “wash-wash,” the street term for a round of electroconvulsive therapy, otherwise known as brain shock therapy. Brandishing a wad of cash, they say that there’s something eating away at their brains, clawing through their souls, and they need it out.
Outside the rusting red gates of my host’s house in New Haven, where I am presently domiciled for the duration of my clinical internship, there are not many cars on the road. Traffic is sparse. A few okada bikes fleet across the wet glistening highway that separates me from the hospital’s street. The air is sweet and delicate. Still sprinkled with the children of the overnight rain. Those among the Igbos that hold on to their traditions believe the dibia ịhammiri or rainmaker doctors can cause rain to fall using herbs, and the dibia ịchụmmiri or rain-dispellers can bring in the wind to drive away falling rain. Two mutually exclusive powers buried in particular relationships with soil and plant. Today, it is obvious that the rainmakers won the twilight battle.
I do not feel like walking today, so I hail a bike, offer him fifty naira, and point the way to the hospital. Even though I am a mere twenty-minute walk away, I am in haste. Today, I meet “Hope.” This is not her real name, dear—hence the inverted commas.
Yesterday, I suggested to my supervisor that I would like to adopt a different intervention plan after his favored cognitive behavioral therapy modalities didn’t seem to be yielding positive results with our in-patient. I wanted to try something that was more in line with gestalt therapy, something that was more honoring of the human being. He okayed my proposal without asking what I intended to do. I suppose this is a sign of trust.
As the bike pulls up by the gate, my heart beats a somber rhythm. I do this every morning: I arrive at the gate, and walk a few steps to the tiny office space that doubles as a consultation room. Just before I walk into the building, my eyes turn to greet some in-patients on my left. It’s a familiar sight, one that is now seared into my eyes’ eye: women and men walking around like zombies, disheveled hair and hunched backs, a vacant hollow gaze on their faces, their hands seemingly glued to their sides due to the numbing effects of Haldol. It is a vision of the human that is frightening and depressing. I often try to look away, but remind myself that I am here at this existential outpost to unravel the deepest secrets about human suffering.
Today, in the waiting area a few feet away from my office five male nurses and janitors are trying their very best to restrain a thick-jawed man with a neck that looks like the stump of a redwood tree. He is salivating, screaming at the top of his lungs with his eyes bulging out his head, insisting that he knows the Queen of England and needs to speak with her. I hear he was brought here by his family, and that his own mother made him mad when he walked through her door to visit her.
I will be meeting Hope in a few hours in our office—a makeshift room with paper-thin walls, a bare cement floor, and a working area no more than six feet wide and ten feet long. The office accommodates three persons: me, a colleague, and our supervisor. There are only four pieces of furniture in the room. A long table with drawers and three wooden upholstered chairs. And a calendar hung on the whitewashed wall. A large single window—spanning the length of the room—opens out into the psychiatric wards that are regularly manned by the more prestigious, white-robed, drug-dispensing, title-toting psychiatrists. On her lighter days, Hope has often appeared outside this window, her eyes ringed with a dark circles, pulling strange faces to make us three laugh. If tree rings track the annual growth of trees, the rings around Hope’s eyes track stories and experiences too tragic to be told.
I am the first to arrive today. Standing, I look out the window. The wild grass grows unperturbed behind the perforated brick walls of the wards. A pied crow, its white feathered neck glistening with the righteousness of its cause, alights momentarily to wrestle a small lizard to the ground. The lizard struggles but is no match for the bird. I turn to look at Hope’s open case file I left on the table the day before. I am no match for what is coming to me.
When Hope was eight, two of her uncles sexually molested her. They warned her not to speak of it to anyone, and threatened to kill her if she did. She didn’t tell anyone. Brought up in a dysfunctional family, she didn’t have the luxury of a father. Her mother remarried. Soon, her stepdad was making sexual advances, mocking her to her face that her mother wouldn’t believe her if she told her.
When she became a teenager, she was raped again by a trusted friend. She had almost gotten used to it by now, and began to think of herself as everyone’s trash—until she met Emeka. This was while she was in the university. Emeka loved her, and she loved him back—at first hesitantly, but later without reservation. She felt herself ready to dream again. They began planning for a life together. In the meantime, Emeka had to travel someplace. He promised he’d be back. You probably know where this is headed.
Emeka never came back. Hope’s sister came to her one day and told her Emeka had died “in December.” I remember Hope telling me that she “died immediately.”
But then she received a letter while she was serving as a cadet during the mandatory paramilitary service year for all Nigerian graduates. It was from Emeka. He had traveled abroad, and had married another woman, Hope’s friend. He was sorry about not telling her, and hoped she would forgive him and his new wife. Hope blanked out, and fell to the ground. She was rushed to the camp hospital, where she was administered pentazocine injections—a narcotic for treating pain. But her pain was the bottomless sort—a black hole glinting in the rays of black sun. She needed more and more of the drug, and developed an addiction to it.
Back at home, and now working, she did everything she could to obtain more pentazocine. Spending her earnings, selling her belongings, borrowing from co-workers. She would later tell me during an interview I conducted with her: “I sold off all my jewelries, my gold—I sold off everything. I sold some of my sisters’, and all of my mum’s. My mum’s own was worse off—I sold all her gold jewelries. They were worth five million naira. I’m not sure I sold them for up to about a million or five hundred thousand. Somehow it was—I felt like I was getting even with her.” She felt deep resentment for her mother for not sticking up for her, for not celebrating her first period (while celebrating her sister’s), and for turning the other way when her stepfather mistreated her.
When she stole and sold her mother’s jewelry, her mother, pained to her heart, fell ill, and became hospitalized. Hope didn’t get a chance to tell her mum she was sorry before she passed away.
I wasn’t there for her intake interview, after Hope checked herself in for rehab, but the first time I listened to Hope’s story, I didn’t quite believe it. How could one life be so consistently tragic? My colleagues actually felt there were factitious elements to her story, and toyed with the idea of making a diagnosis of Munchausen’s syndrome after some of her family members—her sister, to be specific—told us her story
was all made up, and that Hope had grown up with an excessive need to draw attention to herself. No one knew what to do with her. The psychiatrists might even have approved “wash-wash” for her, if Munchausen’s had biological indicators. Healing by frying one’s brains felt just as appropriate to me as trepanation, the ancient practice of drilling a hole in the head to let the headache and heartache spirits sail away.
Hope is now seated in front of me, smiling her endearing gap-toothed smile. My supervisor and my colleague in training are seated on the other creaky seats behind me. I lean forward and ask Hope how she is today. She is fine, she says. We talk about her stay at the facility, her family, and if she feels like she’s making progress. She has some complaints about the male nurses. Other than that, she is fine and looking forward to going home.
I tell her I’d like her to speak with someone that is important to her. And that this is probably the last time she’d get to do that. As such, she has a chance to say everything she wants to say. I promise the person will listen. I stand up from my seat, dust it, open the door to the office and gesture as if letting someone in.
“Your mother is now with us, Hope—in that very chair,” I say. Hope smiles. I wonder what my colleagues are thinking.
I had read in her file that she had a strong urge to duck or cover her head anytime she passed by her mum’s home or anything that brought her to mind. So I figured that if her past conflicts with her mother triggered psychosomatic reactions, I could facilitate a gestalt role-playing scenario that might help her confront her deep-seated feelings. Her mother was the principal caregiver she looked up to for support and during the possible traumatic events of her childhood. She didn’t get that support or the attention she needed. It was time for a meeting between the two.
The upholstered chair sits still before Hope. She just stares at it, smiling often, shifting her eyes to the unremarkable ceiling and then coming back to the object before her. I am leaning on the table. My colleagues are quiet.
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 26