If I Had to Tell It Again

by Gayathri Prabhu

  The word ‘suicidal’ came to mind much later. At that time, it was as simple as taking one step forward – towards release, towards perfect freedom and stillness. More importantly, there was the knowledge that I would do it without hesitation.

  And yet, I hesitated, held back.

  What had turned up was the recognition, that I was not well, that this neatly formed thought of jumping was fatal. Helping myself and harming myself were now two identical, fused ideas.

  I came home that evening and called the husband. I felt ready to go, I said, and a decision was taken to return to Delhi, to get help – the thought of leaping, having once arrived, was refusing to fade. There was no denying that I needed a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist was sure that I needed a clinical psychologist as well. The misery now had a name – clinical depression.

  This was new, this starting to think in terms of pills, and of time framed by visits to the doctor, to the therapist, and the harder work of figuring out how best to mop up the mess. It was an unearthing, an extrication of some self, any self, with the potential to be healthy, with the best chances of survival. The process appeared to be a mystery to everyone but Chinna, who continued her watch over every shade of emotion as it washed over me. She was changing, growing with me. At one end was Chinna, at another end was a large-hearted sister whose loyalty had room for me even as she was going through a pregnancy that required rest, and at some other end was B, a new friend with an unconditional empathy that had no precedence for me. I dangled precariously from the strands of their love, from the belief that they wanted me around, even when I was ready to go.

  B said in that quiet, knowing way: You are the strongest woman I know.

  How? How? I blubbered into a fresh wave of crying. I am a weepy mess and have done everything wrong and now lie shattered in a million shards – what was possibly strong about that?

  B insisted with great confidence: There is nobody as tough as you, as gifted.

  Months later, when I met a wise woman up in the hills, she said that the strong ones struggle the most, maybe because they question, they resist the currents, almost always they put up a fight. It sounded right at that time. Was suicide an act of courage then? Few things had made such perfect sense to me as the right to choose one’s own death, but of course it could not be done under duress, or because there was no other option.

  The panorama of Himalayan peaks on the wall of the corridor leading to the clinical psychologist’s office always held my eye. I lingered, stealing minutes, before I entered. The sessions were expensive for someone who had turned a full-time writer and made no money, but the husband was paying, and I knew I would not be able to afford the sessions once the marriage folded. The support and direction I received in that room was incomparable. I always took my shoes off when I sat on the chair, legs folded under me, and there was finally a safe space, even if just for an hour, to think about the reasons I was tottering at the edge of the world, and not just be swallowed up by the tottering. The greatest fear, I was starting to see, was of having messed up, of being a failure – just the very thing that my father’s life, my entire childhood, had been about.

  But. I did not have to live my father’s life. That was a revelation. I did not have to succeed in anything the way he had wanted for me, winning neither public applause nor family approval. I would fail on my own watch, at my own beat, and that was fine. The immediate crisis was as much in my head as it was about my marriage.

  There were now two versions. The husband’s version, which he was entitled to, had several sympathetic listeners, including many in the family, while I had decided to keep my privacy, and not even my own parents were told what had transpired. I had chosen to marry this man and now the consequences were mine to bear. This present telling too is a tapestry of gaps, trying to stay with moments as I experienced them.

  I begged the psychologist to intervene. Controlling, critical personalities never see or accept that they are being controlling or critical, please tell him to stop.

  She agreed to see us together. There were too many words in that room that day, and I was feeling that unendurable fatigue again. He was explaining, and my gut was caving in – those same phrases, those same distances.

  At one point, we were asked, how is the marriage working for you?

  He thought it was great, said he would give it eight, maybe even nine, out of ten.

  I held up two digits of one hand.

  How was it possible that we were in the same marriage? This is so wrong, I thought.

  The treatment, a mix of antidepressants and therapy sessions, started in May or June 2005, and by September there was no doubt about what had to be done. So simple, so unassailable, and yet it had never occurred to me before – walk away from the hurtful, the unfair, walk towards the open spaces.

  But I had no strength to walk. Only a shell remained. Inside was a tempest of sorrows and regrets, and a drowning in tears that allowed no field of vision.

  I was all set for a quiet exit from life, unwilling to turn thirty-two, and I was entirely at peace with that knowledge. The medicines were dutifully taken, therapy sessions attended. But what stretched ahead were the endless minutes that made each day and night, the complete pointlessness and mockery of getting through those minutes too evident to ignore. Those days, weeks, are now a smear, and I can’t place things in chronological order with even the remotest surety. The pills that helped me sleep were addictive, but the sleep was not restful. The only thing that undid the constant knot in the chest was a drink in the evenings, but that was a terrible thing to mix with pills and made things worse. The days felt unbearably long, the nights even more so, and I felt trapped in a cage of skin and bones, constantly felt that I was the wrong person, wrong in every way.

  SGM, who had been self-medicating with alcohol, had not only perfected the art of denial, but was used to casting his illness in heroic terms. His drinking, his dark spells, had to be emblematic of his strong spirit that fought adverse events and endured destiny. This was how he talked about it. To then have a daughter with a diagnosis of depression, with any hint of mirroring his own situation, was tricky. For once, it was not about him, and why a capable child like me was floundering was an equal mystery. He preached on the phone about strength of mind, about suicide being entirely an act of cowardice. He said about himself, look at me, I am not a coward. Think positive, have faith in God, said my mother. These speeches remained all that my parents did for their depressed child that year. There was no question of visiting or caretaking, nor did I expect it – with no such precedent even in impressionable years, it could not happen now or ever.

  We all need something to live for, and what I had was Chinna and my writing, but even those could not balance out the daily slow dying, and I made my plan. I sent an email saying my goodbye to the husband who was then in another country, another time zone where I felt certain the mail would not be read for hours. The soul felt light, ready for flight.

  But the email had been read instantly, my sister contacted, and my brother-in-law was on a flight to get to our house before I was gone. I knew none of this, and was set – pills of various sizes gathered in a bowl and a drink on the dining table.

  And then Chinna started to jump at me, like she never had before or since, again and again. Jumping and pushing my arm, ignoring my rebukes, thrusting her paws on my chest, she fought me till the doorbell rang.

  One drastic act had to replace another, no matter how small it might be on the scale of things. A death wish had been set in motion and there was only one way to stop it. Perhaps an alternative of sorts, to mimic it in the least harmful way but make sure it hurts – sharp enough to leave an imprint.

  I want to cut my hair short, G told the psychiatrist, but I am afraid I will regret it.

  She had long hair, thick and cascading down to her thighs, almost to her knees. It was her pride, an important part of her self-image, of how she knew others saw her – the long-haired girl. Naturally, it ha
d to go now.

  The doctor looked up from his desk, puzzled. He had not even noticed that she had long hair, but he had taken the trouble to read her novel, and he always held her gaze intently, the look of true listening. Finding a good match with one’s psychiatrist and psychologist in this country where mental illness is woefully under-served is like winning the lottery, and G had been lucky with both.

  Your hair, your regret, the doctor said, shrugging. That sounded right to her. And soon she was with a hairstylist. The scissors at her nape, the crisp crunching of its blade on a thick cluster of hair, the fall, the lightness. It was over.

  Fresh starts don’t happen with hair, not really. Nothing changed. It was the same apartment, the same sense of worthlessness, only more unbearable with each passing day.

  They tried a holiday and took Chinna along, a long drive into the heights of Kumaon. There was a table by a window from where G could see a golden outline of snow-draped peaks. She tried to write about what happened, but the anxieties were returning with greater frequency, with higher intensity, and even the medicines were barely helping. Talking about mental illness with someone who stands outside its draining power is not just frustrating but further damaging. She coiled. There was beauty wherever one looked – tall cedar trees, meandering streams, a wild waterfall, and Chinna to share it all with. But the dog was starting to act worried. She never let G out of her sight, not if she could help it.

  Lying in a hammock, Chinna curled up below it, G tried to pretend there was no time before or after, just that windfall of quiet. She was alive and that was all there was to it. But all this only till the next wave of grief rose in her. The chest would turn into a hard knot, no air entering or escaping from it, and the heart would start to push out against the ribcage and push into the stomach, turning harder, darker, knottier. The anguish grew as high as those looming peaks and all felt bleak, especially when they returned to the plains, to the city, back to the apartment with its pale walls, pale floor and memories of deep injustice.

  G thought a lot about what it meant to desire life, and what the absence of that desire entailed. Where she stood in the tunnel, its deepest point, there was a curve and she could not see the lit circles at either end, not even dots of light. It did not help that one day, returning from a therapy session, her autorickshaw was in an accident, and the sharp pain in her neck turned out to be whiplash. She was back to being unable to take care of herself and whatever was expected in the house. She stopped reading or writing. She could not bear the sight of the double bed and slept on the couch. The television ran for hours. Chinna hovered obsessively again. Not a good sign.

  Akka, come home, I am sending you an air ticket, her sister said. First that doorbell, and now this ticket – her life was drawn back from the edge yet again.

  There was treatment and rest and loving care in her sister’s house in Bangalore. Nothing could possibly make G return to that apartment again, only Chinna, but then there would be a price to pay, perhaps the only one that really mattered, the one that was still beating in her chest. She lay down beside her pregnant sister, trying to feel the presence of the new life, wondering if it would be a niece or nephew, wondering if she would be around long enough to see it all happen.

  SGM came to visit – G’s parents had known nothing of what had happened, they believed marriages were meant to last – and a pointless conversation ensued. He tried to persuade her to go back to the husband, and she told him she would be dead if she did. He pottered around the garden in numbed silence and returned by the evening train to Mysore.

  SGM did not ask G to come home. He did not ask what she might need to get back on her feet. He just hoped that circumstances would force his daughter to return to her marriage. All these years of fathering a wilful child, shaping her in his ideals, his aspirations for her were entirely for professional fame, the personal assumed to be taking care of itself. The possibility that his child would end up with nothing, no profession and no family, was unthinkable. He had failed in his life yet again, or so he said as he sank into his rum.

  G declared there was no option but to walk away from the marriage, but there was still Chinna to think about. What could she do? She had no money or a roof to call her own, and a big dog needed its routine and care.

  Forgive me, G told Chinna, forgive me for leaving. But this will help me live, start again, and I know you want that. But Chinna was too engrossed in the new squeaky toys that G had brought her that evening to pay attention to what was happening. Two bags of clothes were packed, along with one box of books that G could not live without, the credit cards and house keys were put down on the table. She was ready to leave. All of her life reduced to two suitcases, very little money in the wallet and nothing in the bank – this would be her life for a long time but she did not know how long. There was no room to think or feel – one just had to act as if one were in a building on fire. A longer plan than heading for the exit was impossible, nor did it matter then.

  It was late in the evening. A friend came and took the box of books. The rest she hauled into an autorickshaw and went over to stay with another friend, but only for a few days. Soon, a small job in some office, a bed in a hostel space that was the size of her old closet, and that piercing ache for her beloved dog – it was trial by fire.

  She was told about this mud house in the foothills of the Dauladhar range, built by a maverick artist who needed someone to watch house and dog for a few weeks. G decided to go. She felt better, and she felt she was going to be well again. First the therapy sessions stopped, then the medication. There was some money coming in from a freelance writing job, and with no family home to return to, it felt right to burrow into the ageless hills, to recover among strangers. It was a gift from the heavens – she could take shelter in a beautiful little village in Himachal Pradesh, a short drive from Dharamshala, learn to feel the shape of the earth as she went on long walks, find pleasure again in cooking, in watching clouds, in gathering flowers for a little vase on a mud sill.

  It sounds idyllic, and it was, but depression knows no spatial boundaries, it resists naive notions of clean starts. The earth kept appearing and disappearing under G’s feet. She was writing when she could, and there were beautiful people around her, sublime moments in nature, another book at the printers, the possibility of returning to academics by going abroad the following year, the birth of an angelic niece, the freedom to rediscover forgotten pleasures. But the dark clots returned, spread. The horizon was joyless, dying slowly again. She resumed medication, tried homeopathy this time, and the body reacted in strange ways, like a buoy on choppy waters.

  Her body. She crawled in it. She had always hated it. It had a knack for looking ‘normal’ and she hated it even more for that. Till she was hurrying down the steps of a department store during a visit to the city, and her eyes stopped at a string of brightly coloured baby shoes, each clinging to its twin, awaiting tiny baby feet. Everything turned intensely black, all but the baby shoes. A fine blade was slicing her open, turning her inside out. A body crammed with childhood screams. It was a tidal wave straight from the marrow. She tumbled out of the store, and it was night.

  Back in the hills, people around her showered love and care that she accepted with gratitude, even loved back. Normal was easy again. There was so much to do – apply for a visa, move again to the plains, get everything organized. The body was slowing down, but the mind had to keep marching, and there was no time to think till one got to foreign shores. Perhaps the dark clouds would not migrate that far.

  Is suffering like this inherited? Or does one gather it along the way? I am in Wales, living a few yards away from the River Tawe that swirls in dense blue circles. It looks less like water to me, more like smeared oil paints, and late in the nights when I am crawling out of my skin, the river calls me, calls me to itself. I imagine what the sinking will feel like, the first contact with the water, the closing of those thick watery curtains over my head. I am tempted but I try to close my
eyes, each time I try not to listen to the river calling my name.

  What should I do? How could someone else comprehend if no river had spoken to them like this? I call home, and my father is not surprised by my questions.

  What was your father like? Was he conflicted, withdrawn into his own darkness? I had never met my grandfather – he had died of a stroke in his late forties or early fifties, and was known to be a man of few words and great temper.

  Yes.

  Do you think you are like your father?

  Yes.

  I don’t need to ask if I am like him. We have already been through that, several times over. My grandfather was distinct, I have been told, talented in many ways, and so was my father. Why aren’t we talking about that? We just don’t. My father is relieved the daughter is in foreign lands, getting more degrees – it is something he talks about to anyone who will listen. To me he says, forget the past, start afresh.

  There is no staying away from the river as I cycle against blustering winds to get to the university. All the Welsh I have known are effusively warm and it is an easy place to feel perennially loved, for even the checkout lady at the supermarket thinks your name is ‘luv’ or ‘lovely’ and you know something of that is genuinely meant. Everything is an enticing curve in the town – the river, the roads, the beach, the foliage. I understand what it means to be embedded in the landscape. The high cliffs of Pennard are like geological manifestations of my deepest desires, the air has the sweet scent of flowers, the hillside is dotted with the lush gold of daffodils that have only been a poem to me till then, and the rains sweep in from the bay with unmitigated passion. It is the finest place to feel the pulse of life beat in oneself, but the river was still calling my name, and this time it had nothing to do with marriage or death. There was the pain of parting from Chinna, but that was not it – something else was afoot. That inky tar that had earlier told me I was irreparably flawed and that life was not worth any of its troubles still had roots, still drew sustenance from unresolved nooks, and it was sprouting dark shoots.