If I Had to Tell It Again

by Gayathri Prabhu

  He continued to hope. Every astrologer who had been shown my horoscope had promised my parents that the conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury while Venus ascends in the first house of my natal chart was something to celebrate. Their first daughter was born for fame – she would bring much glory to the family name. More than one soothsayer asserted that it would happen through a compulsion to communicate, a proclivity to language, through writing. Even though my father claimed he did not care for astrology, these predictions aligned with his own hopes. He saw me as a successful television journalist who he could watch on screen each night and who would be envied by the world. He imagined me a writer winning hefty international awards, interviewed in every newspaper. He did not care about wealth, not a whit, for what truly mattered was that I be celebrated, and that the warmth of it spread to his bones.

  Sometimes he would murmur, in my hearing, maybe her next book will do it. The reference was to a manuscript that had taken me over a decade to write and looked increasingly like it would be shelved. He had not seen a word of it, but he told himself it was good – good enough for some public acclaim. He also said, I wonder if I will be around to see it.

  He died before the book was published. I was Siddhartha the Prince gone wrong. No prophecies were coming true in his lifetime.

  In his last years, he continued to talk about my faded glories – awards and prizes that I had won decades ago, stray jobs with celebrities, the only recent bragging point being that I had gone abroad to get a doctoral degree on an assistantship. But none of this was anywhere in the league of the meteoric fame that had been promised.

  I too might have tried harder or been apologetic, had not I met a man in my early thirties, around the time I broke away from my father’s dream. A man who told me I had no rung to clamber to, that I was already accomplished and that he was proud of me. Not having to wander in search of another’s notion of success, I felt complete and beautiful. I had been unknotted from the paternal yoke.

  But being unknotted is not the same as learning to catch the wind currents as one migrates with the seasons. Mine was to be a slow expedition.

  SGM saw himself as morally upright, incorruptible in his work ethic, a wide-chested canal that cuts deep furrows and nourishes flocks. To others he credited fine virtues and the best intentions. What I encountered in the world as I travelled through it was completely different from what his words had painted for me.

  When both his daughters wanted to leave home, in the name of higher studies, to distant cities, SGM was keen for us to go. We were in Mysore then and I moved back to Delhi, and four years later my sister went to Chennai. He sent us whatever money he could spare – it was barely enough to get through the month – and unfailingly with it came a little note crammed with bold writing. The scrap of paper expressed his great desire to see us succeed – it urged me to fly in a tone that pleaded a return to him.

  I did return to his hearth when I could, but my heart was turned away, and he tried to understand why he had been knocked off the pedestal. Why did I not idolize him any more, like I did when I was a little girl? Why did I look like I had secrets behind my eyes that I did not want him to know? Why was I self-effacing and embarrassed when he wanted me to perform in front of his friends or when he bragged about me to them?

  It was because while he was talking about me, I was not me. My twenty-one-year-old self already felt miles away from the nineteen-year-old who had lived under his roof. Stop, stop, stop, I wanted to say, but he was obdurate, a potter grown attached to the clay spinning on the wheel, so close to its desired form.

  After every vacation, I returned to the big city, and the big city swallowed me. It did not matter that I had won awards in my small city. All I had was a colonial library on my side – every Victorian novel and Elizabethan sonnet stacked in my brain – but time had stopped in the early twentieth century in the Maharaja’s College library, and the creatures of the big city were ahead by decades. The shock of the deficiency was immediate. I was now in a reputed Masters programme, hundreds of miles of independence between me and family, but there was no bridge between a strained upbringing and the crustiness of that social world.

  Things began to unspool in my head. The more candid I became, the more dubious I must have seemed to my peers. Did I even have a personality to claim? Angular edges stuck out, the authentic parts felt pretend, the pretend parts seemed more likely to find acceptance. I scrambled to find alternate personas, to be whatever might seem normal or could spin a cocoon of intimacy. Love was both a compulsion and something to escape. I had not yet figured how to ask for and seek the solace of solitude. Those around me stepped away, as one does when a life starts to unspool, and there was nothing to do but accept what that implied. Perhaps they saw the confusion, the mess, which had grown roots in my head.

  The only world that had felt complete till then was the one constructed by my father, and even though I had some idea that his thoughts and experiences were like film reels that could not sync voice and picture, I now had to encounter the enormity of what lay ahead of me. I did not have sufficient life tools to deal with any crisis, and the parents at home had none too. My father’s best coping mechanism was to moan and long for death.

  A vast continent of ice, and a little icepick in my hand.

  A relationship happened and fell apart, and it exhumed demonic shadows of childhood nights.

  I had to admit that though suppression had proved a dependable coping strategy for years, it had run its last lap. The memories poured out in volcanic waves. At the first threshold of adulthood, a wounded childhood had to be nursed – there was no other way.

  Someone recommended K who headed an NGO for women in distress, and I first heard her voice over a public telephone that was clutched too tight. Hello? My ears and my tongue did not work together. Please?

  Within a minute, K had given me an appointment. Another day. The journey to her office felt longer than it was, every moment leaden, first a bus ride, then a walk down the busy South Delhi market, standing outside her door on the street, the road disappearing under my feet, wishing to flee, but unable to do anything but drag one foot and then another up a steep stairway. In front of K, what appeared catastrophic in my head, a tidal wave, turned into a puddle, for the words were again showing up as feeble, staccato, inadequate. In over a decade, it was the first time I would tell someone what had happened – about the time I started sleepwalking, the time I lost my handwriting, my frontiers breached in more ways than one. Separated from K by a big table, I felt the utter futility of the disclosure. But as the memories dropped, with tears that would not stop no matter how quickly I mopped them, my biological family ceased to be the keepers of my past.

  A few meetings later it was suggested that I attend the afternoon group sessions at the NGO. I tried to join in even though I was like a baby tortoise growing a shell, but learning how brittle it turns with each recollection.

  She is the only one in the group who is not interested in sharing her stories with the others. She knits, and knits constantly, her eyes on the moving needles at all times. Other women in the circle look at each other, take turns to speak, but she does not look at us, not even when we are sharing brutal stories. She is rounded, her shoulders are aged mountains, her face broad and inscrutable. I have chosen to remember little of those afternoons, almost none of those heart-rending stories, no other faces that I met in that office – only her.

  It is finally her turn to speak. Her eyes mostly stay on the needles, but between words there are furtive glances at her audience. The story is told curtly. She was married to a reputed doctor and lived in the US with their children. She found out that her husband was sexually abusing their daughter, then three or four years old. As soon as she found out, she returned to India with her children and filed for divorce and custody. She had a traditional upbringing in a conservative Punjabi family, her marriage was considered a sparkling success, and she had never held a job. Nothing in her life had prepared her to
deal with a situation like this, nor did anyone around her fully comprehend what was happening. Some in the family even wondered if she was imagining things and suggested she return to the marriage. Her husband says she is mistaken but she has seen the look in her daughter’s eyes and knows the truth. She has to do the right thing by the little girl, but what is the right thing? No matter where she looks, it is an unknown horizon.

  Her voice is a monotone, not a shred of emotion. Only once does the veneer crack. And this is at the end of the session. She looks up at me and has only one question. It is the only time she has met someone’s gaze that afternoon and the only time her voice changes. This is when I know she paid close attention to my story – her little girl was someday going to be a woman, like me.

  After all these years (after what happened, she means), are you normal?

  In three years, all my possessions had migrated with me eleven times – different shelters, different base camps. These were my postgraduate years in Delhi. I was encountering a city that could be ruthless to a young single woman, an outsider, living on minimal resources, easily wounded, trained to be a foot soldier at all costs.

  The sessions at the NGO stopped as abruptly as they started. I could not bring myself to go and sit in that circle of women, not after the woman with the knitting had spoken.

  The rapid pace of the city and the course, the wide range of experiences that living on one’s own meant – all these were very hard to communicate to a family when one had neither a cellphone nor a computer, only a postal service that could just about carry snatches of life, edited summaries, customary assurances.

  … I am healthy, enjoying my course, missing all of you …

  One kept difficult things from a father that one knew was anguished about life’s difficulties. His idealism (at that time my idealism too) versus the self-preservation that one learnt on the streets – the entanglements, extrications, negotiations, constant and gruelling. I was completely out of my depth, but never told him. What was the point?

  But when there was trouble that found its way to the newspapers, I was forced to tell SGM about it. I was sharing a rented house with my classmates, and a harassment episode in the neighbourhood forced us to abandon the house in the middle of the night. The event turned into a police case, taken up by women’s rights groups, even raised in Parliament. Some parents, relatives and teachers were of the opinion that it was best not to make an issue of it, to withdraw calmly. Some of the roommates did that.

  Idealism or self-preservation? He and I talked on the phone and I followed it up with a detailed letter. What should I do?

  I knew he was terrified about a daughter in her early twenties getting into permanently damaging trouble in the big city. It felt as if I was testing him for the first time. And I was. I needed to know if he would stand by the speeches he had made for all the years I had known him – about not putting up with injustice, being fearless about voicing opinion, putting loyalty above self-interest.

  Idealism or self-preservation?

  He did not miss a beat: Do what your heart tells you is right. Stand with your friends.

  I did what felt right then, and I am glad. That was the last time he and I were in complete solidarity about something abstract and concrete at the same time, and his approval would gradually count less than my hunger for adventure and new experiences. The rest of the months in Delhi that followed did not make for easier living, but I felt contiguous with my father. I was aware he had planted and nurtured some qualities in me, and I had not known if they meant anything in real-world situations, whether they would endure, whether I would be able to play that role and still retain my own voice. I knew the answer when I chose my first job after graduation – a four-month assignment as an assistant director in a movie. SGM received a letter from me, not requesting permission, but candidly informing him of a decision I had already taken on my own. For the first time, telling, not asking.

  I had some inkling, as did he, that this was the prologue for my life ahead, and his acceptance, or non-acceptance, was going to be my rite of passage. Just like I’d never take any money or help from him after that job, I’d never ask for approval again.

  I received a stoic letter wishing me luck. He wanted to show he could stand by my uncertainties, and I wanted to break away, defy his imagination of me. Neither of us could have fathomed what lay ahead, but we had locked gazes. Who would blink first?

  He received long letters with updates. There I was, lugging my bags through remote villages of the Himalayas, travelling with strangers, no contact details given; months later, submerged somewhere in the crowds of Mumbai, working on the production team of a Bollywood film; onwards to another city, churning out videos for a daily television show. Some friends came together to register a media house, my name on the dotted line too – a company that struggled, functioned for a while, then shut down for good. I returned to freelance projects but devoted several months to a fledgling novel till it became a full-time obsession. Then a return to academics, research and teaching, an imminent migration across three continents. It had been ten years since my first job. I had learnt from every fork in the road, loved the richness of its curves, but SGM was slowly tiring of the vagaries of a restless child, tiring of hope. Perhaps if it were just about nomadism or a broken marriage, he would have stood by me. But when I landed in the labyrinth of sadness that he had walked most of his adult life, it was more than he could take, it was hard to hold my gaze. He blinked.

  I sit to write. A million eyes watch. Faces materialize as I type. Some distant aunt, a curious student, a relative by marriage, an acquaintance in this coastal town – almost paralysing, these future readers. And I know why there are such few memoirs being written in this country about the sort of suffering that only families can inflict and endure. The rhetoric of duty, sacrifice and family honour turns ceaselessly like a giant oil press.

  On more occasions than I can count, I had said that I would never write a memoir. Life had been eventful, the sort that has to be ingested and distilled in private recesses. But, even though I had been expecting SGM to die exactly as he did, suddenly and ahead of his peers, it was like an unfinished narrative. He was a bright and extraordinary man, and we had shared an illness that had claimed him, while I had survived. No deliberation was needed – the writing tumbled out within a couple of months after his death. But the tears did not tumble, not even a drop. It was as if only writing could tackle the work of grieving.

  Then, nearly eight months after SGM died, after having breakfasted with visiting family, I saw many missed calls from my mother on my phone – an unusual occurrence. The whole world went still. Time overturned. My mind slid to that night when the men accompanying my dying father, my dead father, had desperately tried to call me from his mobile phone, several times, but my phone’s battery had stayed depleted. Unreachable.

  My hands shook as I called my mother, first on her mobile phone, no response, then on the landline, no response. My fingers pressed numbers again and again till she picked up the phone. She was fine, she said apologetically, it was some small matter she needed to talk about, but my heart would not stop quaking.

  There was a roar between my ears as I stumbled to the bathroom, locked the door, looked at my face, his face, in the mirror.

  Alone, in the bathroom, I finally cried my heart out. I am sorry, it took me eight months to shed tears for you.

  I cried for the loss of a talented life, for the loss of a father, for the years he and we would never have.

  What choice was there but to write? He was the easiest man to approach but not an easy man to have a conversation with when we disagreed. He could be abrasive, unreasonable, and there was so much I had never told him. Even now I cannot reveal much of my life, especially the details he was not told but deserved to know. Then there are all those adventures I have had as part of my nomadism, something bequeathed by his life patterns, but none of those are relevant to a story about my father. What frames us togethe
r in this literary snapshot remains an illness and a love beyond measure, and so there I stand now.

  Depression is negative thinking, my mother insists, and one should always ‘be positive’. If one believes in God and thinks positive, there can be no depression. She really believes that. Admirable. But not true, I tell her. It is a dreadful affliction. Her husband died of it. She looks unconvinced.

  My sister calls me when the film star Deepika Padukone goes on a television chat show to share her experience of depression. It must have been so hard for you, Akka, when you were ill, she says. What new thing has she learnt, I wonder, and watch a recording of the show on YouTube.

  My sister turned up at the watch post through my depression storms because of her love for me, maybe even a sense of duty, maybe because the psychic wounds were festering openly, but this particular tenor of acknowledgement is different. Something else has made itself known after the film star spoke – the medical condition is severed clean from its emotional morass, with only its pathology remaining visible.

  Why? It is always the first question depression sparks – where did this come from? Not asked from a diagnostic mood, but in avoidance or curiosity or habit. No doubt the wrong question each time. If it is here, if it is in our midst, we need to ask what needs to be done.

  Such is the illness that it seems to warrant silent suffering, as much as the silent moving on. If you were supine on a hospital bed, if your limb was in a cast, if you had a large bandage around your head, if you walked around with warts all over your body, you could claim illness, pain, suffering. With depression, all you have is a clinical diagnosis, some pills and a few words to describe the indescribable, all of which evaporate rapidly in the face of ‘be positive’, ‘get exercise’, ‘be strong’, ‘move on’ and the unspoken urgings to act like it never happened. The appearance of normality becomes crucial. No matter where depression starts, whether in the caverns of relationships or in the crevice of the brain or in the runnels of the heart, the visible signs of the illness are slow to emerge. At first nothing, and then the sort of symptoms that families are happy to attribute to something else, anything else, anything but this.