At the heart of this disarray is me. My hair is unkempt, my lips are chapped, and I’m huddled up on the floor of my shower cabinet crying hysterically.
The shower cabinet is a strange place to take refuge, I know, but it’s something I’ve done since I was a teenager. Maybe it’s a leftover reflex from when I shared a bedroom with my sister and the bathroom was the only place I found any privacy. Maybe—in direct contradiction to my claustrophobia—small spaces make me feel safe when I’m upset. Whatever the reason, I’m here, and it’s the longest I’ve spent out of bed in three days.
My breath comes in gasps as I rock back and forth, heaving with sobs. The tightness in my chest does nothing to deter the deep, guttural sounds that escape from me against my will. It’s as if my senses are seamlessly swaying between being heightened and dulled: my puffy, leaden eyes are blinded by the bathroom lights, my vision is hazy, I’m awash in noise that jangles my nerves but it all seems to be coming from far, far away. Even the tiled floor feels stony and jagged against my unnaturally sensitive skin. In this moment of physical discomfort my insides match my outsides. My body may be at war with my surroundings but it’s oddly welcome, distracting me from the other invisible war being waged in my mind.
I clutch my knees and cry until the tears no longer come, until my body is as spent as my mind, then I slowly peel myself off the floor and return to the bowels of my bed. On some days this bed is my home, on other days it is more like my captor. I’m unable to tear myself away from it, unable to even sit upright. Each time I muster the will and energy to lift myself up, I’m pulled back into its depths by some overpowering magnetic force.
I lie in bed and stare unseeingly at the ceiling. I’m exhausted and in pain.It’s been the same for days: emptiness peppered with unexplained torment. For the most part I feel hollow and lifeless, like I will never experience another positive emotion again, like I must go through the rest of my life with ice for insides. Then, the pain comes. It comes in waves; it wells up inside me without warning, and suddenly it’s as if the anguish of every living thing in the world is being fed directly into my mind. I can’t stop feeling it, can’t stop thinking about how much pain there is in the world—how much suffering, how many sad, unfulfilled, lonely, grieving, dying people there are. But this is just what torments me today. Yesterday, I was treated to a highlight reel of every negative and damaging moment in my own life, and it played on without pause until I was convinced I did not deserve to be alive.
So I begin to fantasize about death again.
I imagine falling off the top of a building, face forwards, arms outstretched. I consider what I’ll feel when I hit the ground and for how long I’ll feel it. These thoughts come unbidden; my mind always seems to lead me back here when I’m overcome with an episode, as if to test the waters, to test me. ‘Maybe this time will be the time,’ it says. ‘Maybe this time it will finally all be too much.’
I try to contemplate nothingness, try to envision what it would be like to be free of my mind. In the moment it feels like the only way out.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I don’t want to kill myself. I haven’t been actively suicidal for years. It’s just that on some days I simply wish I were already dead. I’ve learned over the years there’s a big difference between wishing you were dead and wanting to kill yourself. When I’m in the eye of a particularly fierce emotional storm like this one, I often wish myself out of existence or that I’d never been born at all, but today, I am no closer to killing myself than those without suicidal thoughts are. For me, these thoughts are entirely passive. ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely if I were dead?’ is really a thought akin to, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely if I had wings and could fly?’ While it’s nice to dream of having wings and the freedom they’d allow me, there’s absolutely no impetus to actually do anything to change my wing-less state of being.
As Andrew Solomon suggests in The Noonday Demon, yearning to actually take your own life is different. It involves the absence of inertia and a very active struggle towards altering your state of being.
Today is one of those days I dream of having wings. I dream of being carried off to a faraway place where I can finally stop being the living, breathing contradiction that I am—so empty and still so full of pain.
Yesterday
I was born in the late 1980s, the age of dance pop, hoop earrings and pressing questions like, ‘Why is everyone’s hair so big?’ If I am to believe every single account I’ve ever heard of my birth, I came into this world kicking and screaming, both literally and figuratively, and very much against my will.
My mother laments whenever the story is told. ‘You put an end to any romantic notion I had of holding my child for the first time,’ she says. ‘You were a little, red bundle of fury. You were just so angry that you were here.’
Countless retellings have made one thing abundantly clear. I did not want to be born, and it’s a grudge I’ve seemingly held ever since.
My parents had an unusual courtship, one which was ever-so-slightly complicated by the fact that my father was already married, albeit unhappily, and had two children, my half-siblings Pooja and Rahul. Matters were further complicated by their identities as celebrities. My father, Mahesh Bhatt, was a celebrated film-maker, the director of critically acclaimed films like Arth and Saaransh, and my mother, Soni Razdan, was an up-and-coming actor. They had a few ups and downs during their secret, four-year-long courtship, but they were imbued with the courage and vitality of love so they persevered. Their arduous journey finally culminated in marriage, and a year later I joined the fray.
The afternoon I was born my father left the hospital for what was supposed to be a few hours on the pretext of making calls to herald my arrival. Instead, he returned at midnight, copiously drunk—he was in the throes of raging alcoholism at the time—and soon found himself at war with the locked nursing home gate. When my mother was informed of his drunken antics, she furiously had my uncle pack him off and get him out of her hair so that she could peacefully sleep off the trauma of birthing an unreasonably unhappy and very uncooperative baby. When my presumably hung-over father returned to the nursing home the next day, miraculously he received no punishment. My Teresa-like mother knew there was no point chastising him for something he couldn’t control, so she pretended nothing had ever happened and they went back to focusing on their unusually angry newborn.
This has always been the lifeblood of my parents’ relationship as well as the essence of who they are. My father is an impulsive, often destructive renegade and my mother is the ultimate stabilizer, a calm and pragmatic port in the storm. These are the two opposing forces that have shaped my life; these are the voices in my head.
Even though I belong to a ‘film family’ (a rather delightful colloquialism we only seem to use in Bollywood to refer to families who make movies together) there was nothing out of the ordinary about my childhood. Like most other children I knew, I had a conventional, upper-middle-class upbringing. I grew up in a two-bedroom house in the sleepy, tree-lined suburbs of Mumbai with mostly my mother for company. My father was too busy making a living and so he was hardly around when I was a child. Contrary to what people believe, film directors in the ’90s didn’t exactly break the bank, and even if they did, my father—thanks to his own special brand of masochism—was supporting not one but two families; so while life was always comfortable, it was never lavish.
My father stopped drinking a few days after I was born. He lifted me into his arms one evening and I immediately turned my face away from his (no mean feat considering I was a newborn without fully functioning neck muscles to boast of), repelled by the smell of alcohol on his breath. This rejection from his own child was too much for him to bear and he never touched alcohol again. Once he stopped drinking he didn’t really ‘socialize’ much anymore, neither did he have a large retinue of industry friends, and so, on the whole, my real life (time not spent on movie sets watching him work) from the very beginning had nothing to d
o with movies.
Despite his newfound sobriety and the overnight annihilation of his social life, my father was still wholly occupied with work. In fact, now, perhaps even more so. He threw himself into his work with even greater gusto and over time, replaced his addiction to alcohol with an addiction to work. So, in these early years, owing to my father’s unavoidable absence, my mother and I were a unit. Most of who I was—my blossoming personality, my embryonic worldview—was primarily shaped by her. My father, while hugely influential throughout my later childhood years, was hampered by the limited time he had to spend with me during that period. A lot of the time I had with him was spent on film sets or in music sittings and edit rooms watching him make movies.
Despite all this time spent in close proximity to the film-making process and the odd ‘film-child’ (heh) friend I had, I was shielded from the Bollywood world.
The fuzzy memories I have of early childhood are all happy ones. I began my education at a small Montessori school not far from home, and once my mother and I made it through a harrowing first week involving a lot of tears, broken promises and her having to sit around directly in Baby Shaheen’s eyeline for hours at a time—it was smooth-sailing. Well, for the most part. There was one hysterical temper-tantrum (tiny balled up fists being beaten on the ground, screaming, sobbing, hiccups, the works) thrown in the aisles of a busy supermarket because I was denied a box of crackers, but my mother assures me that that was a one off and not a regular occurrence or some sort of dramatic foreshadowing of things to come.
And then, when I was five years old life changed in an instant, dramatically and forever.
So far, I’d spent my entire life with the undivided, uncontested attention of my mother and those around me, but suddenly there was a tiny new person to share my world with. My sister Alia came into the world during the turbulent 1993 Bombay riots and from the first second I saw her pink, mousey face, life was never the same.
I had desperately wanted a little sister and I was giddy with excitement when Alia was born. She was my pride and joy. Every spare second I had was spent watching over her and playing with her—I soon became so possessive of her that I refused to let anyone else touch her.
Still, adjusting to life with a new sibling is challenging for any young child. As a five-year-old I thrived on being the centre of attention—a stark contrast to the shy and reclusive adult I am now—but the attention that once came solely my way was slowly redirected towards Alia. She was disturbingly cute as a child, and even then she had an effortless knack of drawing people to her. Always the natural performer, most evenings at home involved a spirited performance by Alia to her favourite song of the week, irrespective of whether anyone was watching or not.
My own powers of magnetism, on the other hand, relied more on a carefully crafted combination of jumping, violent arm-waving and incessant demands for people to witness my majesty than effortless charm—and I disliked having to vie for the spotlight.
The contrast in our personalities wasn’t as immediately evident when we were younger as it is now, but even though we were both happy, outgoing kids, there were still glimmers of our dissimilarity. Even at that age, Alia was more emotionally self-sufficient than I was. Where I would weep and cry when my mother left me at school or somewhere foreign, Alia would cheerfully wave goodbye without so much as a backward glance. Where I was anxious, restless and seldom able to sit still, Alia was calm and serene. Where I was needy and insecure, she was self-assured and self-contained. This dissimilitude would get more pronounced as we got older.
Like any child, I was occasionally possessed by bouts of insecurity as a result of this shared landscape, and Alia placidly endured the intermittent bouts of bullying that were borne of that insecurity. I couldn’t control the attention that was redirected from me to her, so I controlled her instead, bossing her around like older siblings often do. Sit here, don’t sit there, eat your food, give me that, stop singing, say thank you, say please. To this day, a stern, big-sister voice still escapes me if she forgets to say please or thank you to someone while I’m around, and just as she did when she was younger, she serenely and good-naturedly corrects herself.
I loved my sister dearly though and these odd hiccups aside, our childhood was idyllic.
I faced the usual challenges that growing up entails, but all in all, I was a happy, outgoing child and I never lacked love or experienced true discomfort.
But discomfort did come for me, as it unavoidably does in those teenage years.
The aches and pains of growing up began to slowly creep up on me as I got older and steadily became more conscious. But at the start, that’s all it really was—discomfort.
My mother always worried that if I went to a posh suburban school I would grow up to be a spoiled, entitled brat (let’s just say I was born with a taste for acquisition and the finer things in life. Okay, there was an incident with a Barbie duvet cover in the front of a shop window and some stolen bubblegum, but that’s all I am willing to tell), and so when I was eight years old she transferred me to a small Bohri Muslim school in the bustling bylanes of Marol. My school was nothing like the schools the rest of my Juhu friends went to. We wore salwar-kameezes for uniforms, had single divisions with thirty kids to a class (most of whom came from modest backgrounds) and just as it should have been, no one at my school cared what my father did for a living.
For the most part, I truly enjoyed going to school. I was sociable, had a lot of friends, loved my teachers and looked forward to school almost every day. I didn’t excel at schoolwork—I had always been a restless and energetic child and focusing on things was a constant challenge—but I did reasonably for my age and I was never really stressed out by school at the start.
The first bouts of discomfort I experienced as a ten year old were caused by run-of-the-mill ‘growing up stuff’. It was all a part of the rite of passage we all go through without exception. Doubt and insecurity began to pepper my life. I was suddenly more concerned with the way I looked. I started to compare myself to my peers and worried about my performance at school—all things that were distressing, sure, but not unusual.
But things began to change more profoundly as I approached the age of twelve. I wish I could say there was a specific moment, an instant when everything changed. I rack my mind for the memory of a definitive trigger, the sudden flip of a switch, an inciting incident that led me down this strange emotional path, but there wasn’t one. Sometimes I feel as though the change happened overnight, but I know that wasn’t the case. I didn’t just wake up one morning with my mind fundamentally altered. For me, it happened slowly. It crept up on me one tiny, disconcerting feeling after the other; a lifetime of peace was slowly but still abruptly disrupted by all-encompassing feelings of unease and I couldn’t make any sense of it. I was never an exceptional student but suddenly I was struggling at school, a lot more than usual. I couldn’t concentrate on much and found myself lapsing into hasty, introspective silences that were difficult to snap out of. It was by no means debilitating, but it felt like a fog was settling over my mind, obscuring my vision and slowing me down.
I had always been a skinny child, the sort of skinny that prompted my mother to ply me with hunger tonics in the hope that I would gain some weight, even though I never did. Suddenly all need for hunger tonics evaporated—all I did was eat. It’s true that all growing kids do that, but what I was doing was different. I ate until I was sick, and then I ate more. I would come home from school every day, pile my plate up with a mound of rice and dahi, and eat until I was physically incapable of eating any more. I didn’t know what to do with the wave of new feelings that were washing over me, and so I fed them. I fed them until I was roughly the same size and weight as a baby manatee.
It was also around this time, shortly before I turned twelve, that I was made painfully aware of the superficiality and obsession with appearance that consistently seems to contour our day-to-day lives. I was at a precarious age, one at which the seeds
of my identity and self-worth were being sown. Up until then, my sense of self had come from my internal make-up and the way in which I interacted with the world around me—exactly as it should have—but all that self-definition was about to undergo surgery.
My half-sister Pooja, who was acting in those days, called one day to invite Alia and me to spend some time with her on-set at an old Pali Hill bungalow while she shot an editorial for the cover of a magazine. Pooja had wanted the photographer to take some personal pictures of the three of us after she was done. She also knew I’d love the visit because the owners of the bungalow had several exotic dogs, including a St Bernard. Even though we’d grown up on film sets, this was a rare and special treat for us; our sister was a star and spending time with her on-set was wildly exciting.
On the day of the shoot we got all dressed up, and I even wore a brand new dress for the occasion. Alia watched Pooja pose for the photographer slack-jawed and in awe while I sat in a corner regarding the St Bernard with the same kind of reverence. When Pooja was done with the last of her shots the photographer summoned Alia and me to join her so that we could take some pictures together. Alia made a beeline for the most prominent spot (obviously) in the foreground of the frame and posed with confidence and flourish, while I hovered nervously and awkwardly behind her.
It was evident I looked distinctly unlike my sisters. Alia was a spitting image of Pooja; they both had light skin, light hair and near-identical features. I, on the other hand, was newly overweight and my already darker skin was tanned from spending too much time in the sun. I looked nothing like them, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed. A couple of minutes into the session the photographer turned to me and asked me to step out of the frame. He wanted some shots with just Alia and Pooja.
I feigned nonchalance, smiled, and walked out of the frame without a word.
I've Never Been (Un) Happier Page 2
