If I Had to Tell It Again

by Gayathri Prabhu

  To make things harder, the divorce proceedings had started in Delhi in my absence, and I spoke to the judge on Skype. Sure, I have no objection. The lawyer authorized to sign for me had been found by the husband who wanted the divorce and I had asked for nothing.

  You should sue for emotional trauma, said my father. He consulted some lawyer and apparently I had a case.

  There is nothing in the world that could possibly compensate for what I went through, I don’t care, I said. Maybe if he could give Chinna back to me?

  The answer to that was a no, because she was now with his aged parents who had grown very attached to her.

  Any email now from the man was an aggravation of an intense kind.

  Fine, let us get on with the paperwork. Legal paperwork, those insufferable signatures and attestations and notaries and powers of attorneys, journeys to the Indian consulate in London and back, the spirit being wrung dry. So finally when the judge said, madam, please tell us if you have any objections, what could I say? That I did not deserve to have suffered so much? That the marriage had died long ago for me, and this was just a courtroom setting him free from any legal obligations to me? And anyway, what did legal obligations mean when one had failed morally? Yes, this divorce was acceptable to me.

  I shut the computer, stood up and looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was growing out in strange ways, a straggly bush, and long streaks of grey had emerged where there were none the previous month. I had weathered in days. Whatever reserves of energy had been gathered and drawn from sparingly were steadily depleting.

  B came visiting. He had taken over the protective watch from Chinna, mostly through daily communication across continents, and I kept no secrets from him. He waited patiently as I sobbed inconsolably for hours, then announced in his usual kind but firm way that this needed taking care of immediately. The Gujarati doctor on the local NHS (National Health Service) circuit looked deeply disappointed that a young Indian woman had mental health difficulties, and that an older American man accompanied her.

  Indians are tough, they adjust anywhere, and finding some way to be part of the local Indian community would cure of me these blues, he was sure of that.

  Just write me a reference to a psychiatrist, I said. I was a veteran now, and it was clear I had to get back on the SSRI pills.

  Like nearly everyone else I know who has dealt with anxieties or depression, I resisted and disliked taking these anti-depressants. I fought against medication as much as I could when it was first mentioned to me. One feels as if one has admitted to weakness or defeat when one takes medicines to fix some strange sounding chemicals in the brain that can miraculously cause or stop our suffering. Even as one is taking the medicines, the first few weeks are wretched – there is very little benefit and plenty of side effects, not easy when one is already feeling like a trash can. Then one notices that the weepy bouts are much reduced, and there is some semblance of a sleep cycle, and perhaps the pills are finally helping the body cope. One also notices that just as plunging sorrows are getting removed from one’s system, soaring joys are also gone, and all emotions now fall in a narrow, albeit stable band in the middle. One struggles to find the right word to describe that medicated space – not quite numbness, almost wooliness, and the awareness that one is not quite oneself, like the gap we are told to mind between the train and the platform. Yet, this thin middling band in an emotional quagmire becomes the first step towards sanity.

  Getting on the medication was easier than getting a therapist on the NHS. I was told the waiting list was too long. I couldn’t go back to my previous therapist, trying the Skype route, because after ending our professional relationship, I had asked for us to be friends and she had agreed with some reservations. We did not talk about the therapy sessions and it was a friendship that I wanted very much to keep. So now I found myself directed to an NHS website that had put together CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) modules for beginners. I was no beginner at this but I was willing to do whatever it takes. I was as weary of relapses as of the illness itself. I printed booklets and workbooks from the website, some of which felt like elementary platitudes, but I knew they were working away at something, at old ways of thinking, encouraging new survival skills, and I did the exercises obsessively, day after day.

  I had learnt my lesson and was not going to take chances with the medication, and the CBT taught me something – a happier life was already within my orbit of possibilities. I just had to go about it in certain other ways. I could be anything I wanted to be. All words of self-deprecation and self-loathing in one’s head were entirely a perspective, a trick of light. One has to simply change that, look at it all a little differently, talk back to that negative voice with verve, and the wheel starts to turn in ways that sync with our best selves. But it was agonizingly slow – I cannot lie. And there were too many moments of doubts and despair. It was yet another long slog through yet another long curved tunnel.

  Just as there is the moment of recognition, when the self defines the mental illness, there is such a thing as an awareness of recovery. It would take two more years, of medication and CBT, I would have moved to yet another continent, and even though there were equally stressful life events to handle then, I found myself in the direction of recovery. I have no explanation for why this did not happen before or why it was happening then. This was at the end of 2008. And there hasn’t been a relapse since.

  Depression or not, productivity was never a problem for her. Work always got done, almost always ahead of time. Sometimes she felt she wrote her best in the deepest trough of the depression, almost as if to keep moving through the days. The idea of dying and leaving behind an incomplete manuscript haunted her. She hurried to finish, worked like a maniac, barely slept.

  Her academic journey in the UK had to be shorter than planned, and she moved, with the incomplete manuscript and the pills, to the United States, where she had received a teaching assistantship for a doctoral degree. This would turn out to be the space for her new anchoring, but in her was a growing craving for the heat, the colour, the chaos of distant home.

  I want to quit, go back, I do not belong here, she said to the Graduate Chair in the first weeks at the university.

  Look at this pile here, he said, all these people applied, did not make it here, but you got through. Think about it, he said.

  Maybe she should stay. But could she get done sooner, leave before her five years of assistantship was over?

  Yes, if all the work was done, why not?

  She was now teaching classes regularly to undergraduates, as energetic and fraught as only young adults can be, and in the compassion she felt for them, she also found some compassion for her own broken younger self. It was the beginning of her first Midwest winter, the first layers of snowfall quietly settling in for long frozen grey months, and in her palm was the last pill she would take. She had run out of her stock of medicines and the only way to get more was to find a new doctor in a new country. She decided to go off the medication, join yoga classes, surround herself with every book she could find on the science of happiness, listen to every talk on positive psychology by leading experts.

  What depression meant to her grandfather, and what it meant to her father – not an illness, not a terminology, only a cluster of despairings and untimely deaths – was not going to be what it meant to her. By now she was looking at her depression as if it were a fellow traveller in an adjoining berth on a long train journey – they sized each other up, they talked tentatively, they stayed wary and affable at the same time. She felt its breath on her nape when she took long walks through the tall grass prairie, when she was cooking elaborate feasts entirely for herself in her little kitchen, when she learnt to dance the tango, when she sang in languages nobody around her could understand. Between her and depression were the kinds of boundaries that lovers in new relationships valiantly try to put in place.

  Even an unavoidable surgery in a foreign country, without any caregivers or famil
y support, except for kind visiting friends, was a reminder that one was grateful for life. She discovered pleasure in work, gathered courage to open her heart, learnt the art of friendship, slowly grew into her skin, in a way for the first time. She was even inhaling and exhaling differently – or maybe the winds had changed direction. An excerpt of her dissertation manuscript won an award for creative writing although its real triumph had been to keep her afloat when large parts of her were dying, and the department thought she deserved an award for teaching too. The days felt delicately bountiful. It was time to go home.

  The real reward was to come a few months after her return. Chinna was now nine years old, and even though G had not seen her since she had walked out of that apartment six years ago, she had never given up hope that they would be reunited. The ex-husband was getting married again – good luck to them – and his parents wanted someone else to take care of Chinna in her old age.

  Of course, I will take her. Yes, yes, yes.

  The date was fixed to receive Chinna. G had no home of her own and her parents had to agree to the plan. SGM, who could not bear to see any animal suffer and was the patron saint of all canines in his neighbourhood, worried about how she would manage the care of a big old dog when her plans were still in flux, but he agreed.

  Chinna is yours. You should take her back. But the price of this loving is too great, it is heartbreaking, think about it, he proclaimed in a gloom-laden tone.

  In the recent past, he had found a white Labrador on his usual walk in the colony. The dog had been abandoned to die. Nobody knew who had left it there and its state was pitiful. SGM brought it home, called the vet who confirmed the dog’s kidneys had collapsed and that there was nothing left to do, but SGM would not give up. He kept the dog at home, nursed it for over a week, paid for expensive medicines, fervently hoped for a recovery. When the dog died, he mourned and buried it in a nearby patch of land. This nameless dying dog had been deeply loved just before its death. Perhaps I had some unsettled accounts and debts with him in a previous birth, SGM said, wiping his tears.

  SGM fed street dogs for years, he gave them names, called the SPCA when they needed help, made donations for their treatment when he could, played with their puppies, made stories about them to tell everyone. There were too many tragedies as well – dogs that were poisoned or mortally wounded, or puppies that drowned in gutters. Sooner or later, nearly all his dogs were prematurely dead somehow. It is too much to bear, he often moaned to G on the phone. His own Gracy, the one who lived to be nineteen, grew a tumour and had to be put to sleep not so long ago. Gracy was buried in the garden and every day SGM missed her. He never called her his dog, always his youngest daughter, took her with him everywhere he went. Life, he found, became hardest to manage after Gracy died.

  They are sending Chinna back to you as she is ageing, SGM said to G on a walk. Look how I suffered when the dogs died – is it worth it?

  Yes, absolutely worth it. G would not want it any other way.

  Once Chinna had dragged G back from the edge and stayed with her in the slow crawl back to life. Now it was G’s turn to walk with Chinna into her old age, to stay with her through the long dying. Chinna would be the most important priority in her life for whatever doggy years she had left – some debts were too large to be repaid, but one had to try nonetheless.

  The reunion was hard. Chinna jumped out of the car and ran into the house, a house that she had visited before, that clearly brought back a flood of memories. She ran to G’s mother, made quick visits to all the rooms, stayed close to the people who were dropping her off, but she would not look at G who sat on the floor calling her – Chinna, Chinna. Was it a shock for Chinna to see G again after six years? Or was she angry at how G had walked out of her life and was now letting it be known? G felt wretched, her heart burst open with tears – I am sorry, I am very sorry – but Chinna would not come, and when the people who came with her left, she let out a long whine, as if she knew her life was changing course again. Perhaps she worried G would leave her again.

  Walk, walk, G said the magic words as she clipped the collar to a leash, and Chinna ran out, dragging G into the grass. Their feet synced. This was familiar. Like a lost dream conjured again.

  G stayed with Chinna through many days, hardly ever letting her out of sight. The reconnecting had to happen as if they were meeting for the first time, and this time the choosing, the wooing would have be done by G. In a couple of days after returning to her, Chinna looked less anxious and more settled, especially around SGM whom she happily anointed the pack leader and followed around. Groom her, said the vet, that is the best way to bond. And that is what G did, brushing Chinna’s fur, bathing her, cleaning her ears and teeth, going on long walks. Soon it was time to move away so that they could be a family again, just the two of them, to a small rented house in Bangalore where they stayed over eight months.

  The first few days in Bangalore were hard. G and Chinna were cooped up in a small space, and it was clear that Chinna was anxious, and it appeared that she was missing her previous home with the ex-husband’s family very much. G worked from home and stayed with Chinna nearly all the time, but Chinna would get visibly restless, would whine to herself. It was too hard for G. I should not be selfish, she thought – if Chinna does not want to be with me any more, I should return her. Just like Chinna once wanted me to be happy, I want the same for her now.

  Even though every cell in her body protested, for Chinna’s sake, she wrote to the other family – would they take the dog back?

  No. That was the simple answer, and the explanations tagged to it did not matter.

  It is going to be just us, old girl, G told Chinna. And we will make it work. It will be okay.

  G’s sister came to their rescue again. There were now two young ones in the family – a niece and a nephew – and they all lived not far from G and Chinna. The children doted on Chinna and she was happy to let them fuss on her, climb on her, tug at her. She slipped into her old age effortlessly, became a doting grandmother to the kids.

  There was no more anxiety or whining. They were finally together for whatever lay ahead.

  The geriatric challenges had already begun – first arthritis, then incontinence. Chinna asked to be taken out in the middle of the night and every couple of hours, an ordeal for her and everyone, till a suitable medication was found. G lost a lot of weight for no apparent reason, and a few months later had to contend with the first sign of spondylitis. They were back to taking care of each other, strangely content in knowing they were going to wear out together. It was as if they were back to 2003 when Chinna was a pup that never let G out of her sight or sphere of awareness. It was just like that.

  G knew there would not be much time with Chinna, and that the ageing would occur rapidly now. She, a habitual traveller, lost all desire to go anywhere or to visit anyone – anything that would take her away from Chinna was to be avoided. She did not want Chinna to ever feel abandoned by her. I will never leave you, she promised several times. G knew Chinna had just one more move in her, and it would have to be to a place where G had a livelihood, and they would set up a home together.

  They moved to a little coastal town, to work for a university, not far from where G was born, and not far from the villages where her parents were born. It was the land that had formed SGM, the roots that he felt so conflicted about, where his daughter now chose to live with her dog. A dog-loving couple had kindly agreed to rent their beautiful lake view apartment to G and Chinna. This university town would be their last stop together, where Chinna would be buried.

  N and I were now keeping vigil as Chinna lay dying. Even as she stopped many daily activities – eating, drinking, rolling around on the carpet for pettings – she tried her best to muster enough energy for small walks, hobbling through the overgrown grass of the vacant land next to our house, smelling earth and other creatures, lifting her nose up to catch the wind and the sunlight. She continued to keep her eye on us, wanting as
always to be in the same room as us, even when she had trouble moving.

  The day of the blood test, we found out that the symptoms were not due to a recurrent anal infection, or the usual indigestion, but because her kidneys were failing. We lifted and held her on the vet’s table. He attached a saline water drip to her and she endured it, too weak to protest. I could see her unhappiness about being in that space, about having that liquid forced into her, and she was violently sick in the car on the way back.

  The vomiting would not stop that night. I held her between the heaves, and she slept a little in the early hours of the morning. What on earth were we going to do? Yes, we had decided to stay away from work and spend all our time with her, offer the best palliative care we could at home, but we knew nothing about waiting for death, about the anguish of watching helplessly while a loved one bled.

  This was Tuesday and by Thursday evening, we could tell that neither was the suffering going to abate, nor was she going to die soon. She was showing every sign of lingering, of going the excruciatingly slow, painful way. Even drinking water was becoming difficult, but she would look at our pleading eyes and take little licks from the bowl we held out. Were we being selfish in wanting to keep her with us as long as possible, wishing a natural death for her? I remember driving desperately to the house of a friend who loved dogs, banging on her gate, hoping for advice, and then calling up a doctor who had many animals under her care, who came to the rescue if any dog was in distress. What should we do? What should we do?