If I Had to Tell It Again

by Gayathri Prabhu

  And identifying it is never easy. A certain corner of the scale becomes the defining criteria: Will you cause bodily harm to self and/or others? Are you curled up in bed all day? Have you lost appetite, sleep, laughter? This means that the ones who are walking around with some semblance of functionality and productivity, even though they are racked by the devastating illness, will take forever to accept that they need help, and even longer to seek it.

  What if you had a broken hand or tuberculosis? I ask the young friend slumped in a chair in front of me, the one who begs for anonymity, and no intervention. Would you want to be treated?

  Yes.

  Then why the hell are we not talking to the whole damn world, to anybody who cares to listen, anybody who can help you with this constant despair that is likely to kill you? – But I cannot say it like that. I try to find other words, the somewhat okay words, the somewhat okay tone.

  The biggest hurdle is that the mind that is unwell and needs treatment will do its best to talk you out of it. No other organ in your body is capable of this – the failed kidney will not articulate its denial. But the mind, even when it is rapidly sinking, will convince you at regular intervals that it is actually not so ill and that it is capable of recovery without intervention. The story of long-term depression often swings between these poles – denial and relapse.

  Please promise me that nobody will know.

  I promise.

  This conversation about depression has happened many times and the range of symptoms is staggering – from feeling listless to wanting to harm oneself – and I try to pour my heart out to the students who walk into my office. I want them to know that it can be survived, that the bottomless pit of darkness can be climbed. It is a precarious process – not to seem patronizing, not to seem self-obsessed, not to push for pharmacological solutions, not to canvas the talking cure, not to do too much, not to do too little.

  When one has been somewhere in the vicinity of deep despair, one learns to spy its shape in others, like inhabitants of the same island. There is a community to be sought and built. Till then, this recognition is a tentative citizenship, and one big wave might wash someone away.

  We agree. One has to have walked this land to appreciate the terrors of its topography – the unrelenting isolation, thoughts that spin in concentric circles, a listlessness that descends on every thought and situation, and a mind that is perfecting the art of naysaying and self-loathing. It feels as if there is nothing one can do to either escape or endure this.

  Trying to help a depressed person is like trying to stop being depressed – it cannot be done, it can only be lived, while all the time hoping to surmount its invisibility.

  My father drank to make it visible. And he still would not acknowledge it as depression, and he never wanted it treated. This is the nature of the illness. Like a giant coiled python that nobody can see but you, crushing your bones, swallowing you whole, and then melting you down to nothing. This is how it was for me, for three years in my thirties, but one never thinks of it as over, only as receded, and it doesn’t matter what medical science has to say about it.

  That is why, to be silent, I tell myself, would be to collude with the collective denial and discomfort about mental illness. I learnt this about child abuse as well – the most valuable advice is to talk about it, to tell someone, and even though the telling is just a start, it is needed. Otherwise, the shame is muted and the muted stays shameful, slowly snuffing out one’s spirit. This is why one writes a memoir. This is why one tells strangers. We carry the invisible, and perhaps the telling can honour it, make it real and seen.

  The Long Dying

  When one has a nearly thirteen-year-old arthritic Labrador under one’s care, ageing visibly by the day, health problems and visits to the vet increasing in frequency, death is but one long stride away. The symptoms were disquieting, but not much different from other symptoms over the past year. It took two days to even realize that this was not another bout of the regular ageing troubles that took us to the vet so often. And it took yet another day for the vet to diagnose that it was acute renal failure. Chinna was dying.

  It was like the ghost of my father had turned up in the house.

  Blood-stained stools, blood in sputum, and complete inability to eat – Chinna had all the symptoms SGM did in the weeks leading to his death, seventeen months earlier, and I tried not to think of this as a sign. I knew that Chinna had stayed with me as long as she could, that I had learnt nothing about death by turning up to touch the feet of my father’s corpse and donating it to the medical college, and that this was going to be about my own mortality.

  Years ago, Chinna had kept me in the world, with every ounce of canine resolution she could muster. It was into her furry shoulders that I had sobbed my pain over the loss of two pregnancies, children I was not fated to have, when she had let me curl up on the floor beside her, not moving for hours, as I bled, big chunks of me dissolving into wordless, lightless burrows.

  She had watched over me day and night, sitting by my bedside while I tossed alone on the high seas of depression in an empty house. She had followed me each time to the balcony of the high-rise apartment as if she knew I wanted to jump. And then that one unforgettable night with all those pills, that night when I was perfectly aligned with death, when all it meant was release from an infernal fatigue, she had fought me with all her might.

  And now it was my turn to fight for her. Perhaps, if SGM had listened to us, taken adequate action at the right time, medical science could have offered him some way to live long enough to experience old age. But there was nothing veterinary science could do, one was told, to help Chinna at that stage of her illness.

  It had been three years since N had moved in to live with Chinna and me, and we had completed a circle of love I had not imagined would ever come my way. The only regret we had about getting married in a temple was that we could not take Chinna with us, but she had been waiting at the door when we had returned, our excitement reflected in her eyes. It was the ripening of the arduous journey that Chinna and I had made towards happiness, even as we knew she would not be with us for long.

  N and I talked about it. Chinna had always been a very stoic and patient dog, and now she seemed to have braced herself for the full impact of this last crisis. We wanted to be brave for her, draw from her strength. We encircled her. Isn’t this how dying happened in the old days, we told each other, long before ambulances turned up to whisk people off to intensive care units? People got old, they stopped eating as their organs slowed down, turned so weak that they were confined to their beds and slowly ebbed away into lifelessness. This was how one died of old age, while loved ones extended care and sat in vigil. The dying and the living had to make the transition together, and it was a one-way passage – things would change for all of us irreversibly.

  Chinna stopped eating entirely. Drinking water too was becoming difficult. For a dog always clamouring to eat, who loved to clean up every crumb, whether on the floor or her bowl, it was unthinkable, this long starvation. Her kidneys were shutting down. She could no longer pee. She retched the blood and phlegm that gurgled in her throat. She had to poop often, but what was coming out was her innards, dense bloody pieces. She lost weight every single day, her black fur hung loose around her, her eyes watery and sad. She got very little sleep and we stayed up with her, day and night, N and I. Every day I thought, this is the day, she is going to die today, but Chinna was a resilient dog and she wanted to be around us. Late in the nights, after painful bouts of vomiting blood, she would totter to my side of the bed and I would sit on the floor beside her. She put her head in my lap, and I sang to her for hours while she drew shallow breaths. With every note I felt wave after wave of love pour over her, pour out of her. She lay still, listening, my tears lapping us both.

  If dogs have a sense of death and dying, how must it be? The previous year, I had failed SGM in the last weeks of his life, turned my heart away from acknowledging his fears of
dying. I could not possibly do the same again with Chinna – I would be there till the end, with all my energies focused on her, about that I was determined.

  Chinna had loved poetry, our daily prayer, any kind of rhythmic chanting, responding each time to cadence in words. That week that she lay dying, there were no boundaries of time, neither of sun nor of moon, nor the inching of clocks. We stayed around her, took turns to read to her, recited stories and poems about dogs, shared long passages from our prayer books and from ancient texts that had sustained us. We took turns to read and Chinna always listened intently. Was she in pain? One vet said yes, the other said no. I only trusted my instincts – I had mothered her for long years, and my heart said she wanted to still be with me, that the suffering was still manageable, that she was not ready to leave. For five days, we formed a close circle – I sang, read poetry, caressing her, talking to her about love, and finally understanding something of how low and long the spirit stretches for the dying of a beloved.

  G the writer thought of the name Chinna because it was an endearment in Kannada, because it reminded her of her distant home during those years in Delhi where they first met. Chinna was just about eight weeks old, and G was trying to salvage her first marriage with a dog, the way she had known others to do by having a child, for she had always loved dogs and the idea seemed to cheer up a husband stressed at work. G had visited many dog owners and considered many pups, all Labradors, for she was sure of the breed, but none of them had felt like hers. But Chinna shared a birthday, 21 December, with the grandmother that G adored, and Chinna did the choosing. G had settled down on the floor to watch two puppies play so that a choice could be made, and Chinna came straight to her, climbed into her lap and showed no inclination to move, while the other puppy frolicked around. It was decided.

  Chinna was a dog of calm. She did not bark at all in the first year of her life, and after that just a bark or two every year. Following a brief puppyhood of separation anxieties and the usual puppy mischief, she settled into an expansive sagaciousness. She was threatened by nobody – not other snarling dogs, nor mocking cats. She would not hurt an ant, if she could help it, and she looked at every creature, every person in her path, as a friend. Contained, patient, sensitive to sorrow in others, Chinna was the perfect writer’s dog, content to sit near a busy keyboard for hours, turning silence into art.

  G was with Chinna for the first three years of her nearly thirteen years’ lifetime, and then again for the last four years. In between, they were apart, and even though Chinna was with family and well cared for, the separation was excruciating. It must have broken both their hearts, those six years, but G felt certain she had no other option. If G had not walked out, G would have died – that was a fact.

  And Chinna wanted G to live. She taught her to live, to love, as only she could love, with the kind of enveloping, arabesque devotion that rises like incense smoke.

  Their friend said he had never known two beings that kept each other at the centre of their awareness as these two did. Chinna knew every emotion that inched its way across G even before the latter could give it a name, noticing even the slightest change in the tone of her voice or the pace of her breath, and G thought she heard the softest of doggy thought. A beautiful pairing.

  Then came trouble. G had turned thirty that year. She felt mismatched with her partner – it was like endless walking through arid shifting dunes – but she had her work, and she was spending hours at the National Archives trying to understand an eighteenth-century world she wanted to write about. Routine kept the marriage, like all other things, going from one weekend to the next. But in a matter of a few weeks, the wheel overturned. An unexpected pregnancy, chaos in the relationship, the tides rising as high as the skies and no anchoring whatsoever, plus a deep sense of abandonment. Even with the benefit of distance, it is hard to tell what came first, whether the black tide was the cause or the effect of those crucial decisions that had to be taken.

  It was a monolith solitude, completely impenetrable.

  There was a monstrous weight in her, banging against her bones, her sinews, imploding, screaming to be let out. There was a man around her saying, I never want to be a father, I never want to be a father. I don’t want this father, I don’t want this father, she heard a voice implore repeatedly. I never wanted you, I never wanted you, she heard her father tell a little sister.

  There is no harder decision. It was no decision at all, just the dots that turned up to be joined, a line, a circuit, when all else had dissolved. Lying on her back on a hard surface, the lights of the hospital in her eyes, she heard a voice enunciate in her consciousness, I am going to have an exceptional life. Unannounced, in that moment of abject desolation, Life had turned up to whisper an encouragement. And then, it fell silent again.

  It was a free fall, and there were no nets, no harnesses – only a blur of doctors, hospital beds, cold implements, colder stares, and that big haemorrhaging hole that she had turned into. As life bled out of her, a black sticky tar was replacing it, filling up rapidly, sometimes violently spinning for hours. It was getting harder to sleep or stop crying or sit up or get out of bed. At one point, it felt impossible to breathe.

  The man was there, he was gone, he was back – one lost track of time. Just a large empty apartment with strange slants of light, dark memories that lurked in corners, and a self-loathing that was like a flooding tub, claiming every inch of dry space. She watched television as much as she could, she walked the dog, she ate and drank, she perfected the art of lying in bed for hours and hours without sleeping. There was no sleep at all, just brief snatches of hallucinatory wanderings of the mind. She learnt to hate herself in as many shades as it was possible to hate.

  She stood, one foot lifted, on a road that did not loop, and she knew it. The phone had become a prehistoric instrument, completely obsolete – it never rang and she did not call anyone. She had learnt that people she knew judged more viciously than strangers, but maybe they were never friends, just judgements. A few years later she would emerge from the horror, she would recover, she would learn to live in her skin, she would figure out how to meet people of her tribe, how to build a new community, how to believe in the miracles of survival. But at that point, there was just Chinna, and G was tottering at the edge of the precipice.

  There is nothing to keep me in the world, she thought. I hesitate to swat flies or roaches, but I gorged out what was dearest to me. There never was any childhood space to retreat into, and now I am told to be undeserving of motherhood. And I feel undeserving of everything. Why stay? Nobody needs me.

  Except …

  There was a two-year-old black dog right by the bed, her snout a few inches away from G’s face, watching, with melting mustard-coloured eyes. Chinna’s puppyhood was over, her face turned sapient. There was nobody in the house but the two of them. Chinna learnt to sleep when G slept, woke the instant she did, licked her face when she cried, shadowed her every step, countering human bleakness with animal warmth. She willed G to life.

  They made it through those days, one week, one month, and then a few more.

  Nothing was larger than guilt, only hope, and it made G scramble for another chance, perhaps to fix it all somehow. There was an intrepid wind of possibilities around them, some prospect of return.

  Chinna was there at the door of the bathroom when the home pregnancy kit showed up positive again. G’s sister was going to have her first baby as well, and the air was celebratory, with much talk of new beginnings. The benevolence of the universe was palpable, just the possibility that one could forget, start all over again. We are being given another chance, G whispered in Chinna’s ears, but some mornings later she woke up to heavy bleeding, again. And again, it was just the two of them in the house. G called a friend who drove her to the hospital. After the doctor was done, G cried in the car all the way home, called the family to let them know.

  God is punishing you, said G’s mother.

  True, G felt punished.<
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  You are unlucky, like me, said her father.

  Undeserving, unworthy, unlovable, unwanted, unwell.

  She had been on a hormonal roller coaster, twice within the span of a few months. Dizzying. The mind survives by embalming the body. The body becomes loathsome, and the mind wanders in that cavernous enclosed space, talking to itself, talking incessantly. Inside was sure dying, but outside was talk in strange undecipherable tongues, and nothing was worth the trouble any more. This time there was shrill silence, no pounding at her bones, no obsessive thoughts, no leap of faith to take. G was being picked up and lowered deftly into a much more sinister space, a box with limited air supply, and the lid calmly sealed off. No plummeting this time, just slow suffocation.

  One suffers depression, but one calls it by many names, traces it from many angles. However there is always a moment of recognition, a moment when the mind knows and calls itself ill, depressed. The illness gazes back.

  After staying for days in the apartment, lying down most of the time, the only alternative that emerged was a return to work, to write one’s way to sanity. I took a flight to Mysore, to the family, with Chinna sedated in a carrier in the cargo of the plane, bravely making this journey with me – both of us trying to look suitably recovered to family. Chinna rested under SGM’s care, while I made day trips through the Mysore countryside, scrutinizing anything that was associated with Tipu Sultan, whose last war was the subject of my new book project, most often to Srirangapatna, an island wrapped by the river Kaveri. I was there one afternoon, almost evening, standing on a narrow bridge, and looking down at the rocky bed of a summer-scorched river. There it was, that strong urge to leap, a very fluid sensation, as if it were the most logical thing to do. The urge was tangible, like an object, and I held it tight for elastic moments.