by Nahid Husain
“Tie your shoelaces, Shayana!” Lisa yells as she walks away.
I look at my set of trailing shoelaces. I like ’em like this, I think to myself. For some reason, the incident triggers off a strange feeling in me. I walk home, a trifle uncomfortably. I can’t shake the feeling off.
Late at night, as I study Organic Chemistry, my eyes stray away from the fluorescent lightings and I casually look over from the paintings on the wall to the single photograph on my dresser. And suddenly, a memory flashes by me.
“Nans! Your shoelaces are untied again.”
“Yeah, I know, Munazzah, I like them that way.”
“What nonsense. Do you know how badly you’ll fall if you trip over one of them? But you are so stubborn that you won’t tie them until you fall. I guess I just have to tie them for you since you’ll never do it yourself.”
The hint of a tear threatens my eye, but this time, I don’t cry. I think about the things that the robot, in the last few months, hadn’t. All the thoughts for so many things that don’t really matter anymore. And I’m glad when I finish. Because now I can work on being perfect again.
One Cup of Coffee
For Naani, For Coffee and Cake
“Naani, I’ve come to see you. Salaam-u-alaikum.”
“Alaikum-us-salaam,” she said in her stunning poise. “Did you go see your psychotherapist?” As chairperson of one of the leading healthcare brands in the UAE, the only Indian Muslim woman in the top 100 of the Middle-East Forbes entrepreneur list, and my grandmother, Naani could wow anyone with her focused, Tauran personality.
I think I am her pet project. I don’t mind. I am actually glad. As a paranoid schizophrenic, I didn’t mind seeing my psychotherapist to ‘enhance the quality of my life’. After ten years and three suicide attempts, I didn’t mind doing something that would explicate why God says ‘Only disbelievers despair’ or ‘God doesn’t task you beyond your scope’. I even thought of assisted suicide in Ohio, which made my mother so neurotic, that she refused to allow me anywhere outside alone. For a short while, Naani had sent me to NIMH, or the National Institutes of Mental Health, in Washington DC to ‘enhance the quality of my life’. The 12-room closed unit there made me want to escape many times. I paced the corridors to the locked double doors many, many times, but they never did open. The nurses were convinced that I surreptitiously wanted to get into one of the boys’ rooms at night.
One time, I did escape. One of the nurses was taking us downstairs for a cooking session and when the elevator briefly opened on one of the floors to let someone in, I dashed out and got back into another. I pressed a random button and when the elevator opened again, I ran out and for the first time, I saw what the NIMH building actually looked like. I ran through the corridors, into arbitrary rooms, looking inside them, and I took a nap in one of them. I then went downstairs across the exhibition hallway to the molecular structures and paintings by various patients. By that time, the hospital had called code Yellow and I was nowhere to be found. I finally tried to escape from the building. I don’t know where I thought I was going in temperatures below 0o C in Washington DC, where I didn’t even know anybody outside my floor. Sometimes, I think I didn’t want to escape after all, that I wanted to be caught.
So I finally decided to run out through the large glass doors at the back. A police van was standing outside with a huge policeman in front of it. “And where do you think you’re going, ma’am?” he asked. I felt afraid of the giant man. Alone at night, I thought it wasn’t such a good idea to run after all. I went back through the doors with him. My unit seemed calm when I finally got back with the policeman. I never escaped after that.
* * *
“So did you see your psychotherapist?”
“Yes, I did, Naani.”
“What did she say?”
“I have to do cognition exercises and balance my mood swings.”
Cognition exercises meant finding my mom’s car in the huge Area 3 parking lot. This didn’t require cognition, just some coherence.
“You must see your psychotherapist twice a week.”
“Yes, Naani.”
“Do you want coffee?”
She rang up Coffee and Cake, the high-end hospital café for more privileged patients.
I looked at the ‘Dr. Zayna Daud’ metal plinth on her desk. Many times, when I sat opposite her across her oak wood desk, I thought it was amazing that I could tell her about my problems and converse with her on grave issues – Islam, Urdu poetry and also family. Something the entire hospital staff was covetous of.
I remember attempting suicide the first time.
I was in depression. An overdose of Zyprexa, the anti-depressant I was taking at that time, seemed like the thing to do. I opened up my drawer and tore open the silver paper that my tablets were wrapped in. I emptied 20 tablets and got myself a bottle of water. I took the tablets two at a time, almost throwing up each time, as I drank the water. I woke up at midnight and found myself bathed in sweat and urine. Mom and Dad were knocking at my locked door. Then the sound of a tool on my door, the lock giving way and three people rushing in. I don’t remember after that.
Mom says that I was taken to the hospital and they flushed out the Zyprexa from my body.
*
Naani had said that I should go see my psychotherapist.
“So how are the voices?”
“Better.”
“I have a mood schedule. Every day, when you do an activity, you have to write if you are happy or sad next to it. This will let you know how you feel when you do specific things. You should do the things that make you happy more often. Let’s do a relaxation exercise.” She had me lie down on a patient examination couch next to her on a roll of tissue paper. “What is your favorite memory?”
“I don’t have one.”
*
“You need to have a schedule.” I remembered my psychotherapist’s words. I would wake up early. My circadian rhythms were capricious though. I slept usually from 12 am at night to 12 pm in the afternoon. I thought I should wake up at 5:30 am in the morning and pray like I used to.
So waking up at 5:30 am in the morning is easier said than done.
“Slowly. Slowly,” Naani told me.
Okay. I am not a ‘slowly, slowly’ person. I am a ‘now’ person and a focused person. I didn’t need motivation to wake up. I needed an addiction.
I would treat myself to mocaccino from Coffee and Cake every day that I woke up at 5:30 am.
*
Coffee and Cake – ‘Your café to pause and ponder’, the big poster in the hospital lobby said. I walked up to the barista,
“One mochaccino, please. Take-away.” I sat on one of the grey upholstered sofas that were arranged in threes or fours with a cute glass table between them with red flowers in the center.
One of the waiters brought the coffee to me. I got up and went to pay at the cashier.
“You don’t have to pay, ma’am.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because we like you.”
“No, seriously, how much?”
“No much. Thank you very much.”
The perks of being Dr. Zayna’s great-niece and being schizophrenic. Everybody knows you.
*
I began to drink my coffee as I went up to work.
*
Home after NIMH. I remember sitting on the bed downstairs in the guest bedroom and vomiting out my medication, then hunting for my medication in the vomit and swallowing it again because I felt so guilty that I had vomited out such expensive medication. Back from a mental hospital.
“The psychotherapist says you need more medication.”
“I’m already taking 400 mg of Clozapine.”
“It’s not enough.”
“Excessive medication can have catastrophic side effects, Naani.”
“If you want to stop the screaming and the crying, you need more.”
“Okay, I will increase the tablets.”
&
nbsp; “Coffee, my naanu?”
“Sure, Naani.”
I never increased the tablets.
*
Got my sleeping schedule down to 5:30 am. By now, I had coffee and whatever else I wanted from Coffee and Cake.
I would wake up in the morning, pray and get to work at 9:00 am. I looked forward to my morning coffee.
“So, you really don’t believe in God?”
*
“Who knows,” he said.
“You don’t believe in one being that knows all your thoughts, knows all you words, whether secret or hidden?”
“I don’t know.”
“There has to be a being that creates, that pulses through your body, that floats through your mind, makes you happy or sad.”
“There is nothing. We create, we are the most superior reality, we walk on earth, exultant.”
“If there is no God, how can we believe that things will get better, that after every hardship, there is relief?”
“Humans don’t require being created.”
“Or humans are mutinying against their creator.”
*
“My naanu is here again.” I was visiting Naani again.
“Salaam-u-alaikum, Naani.”
“So how’s everything going?”
“Fine.”
“Are you going to your psychotherapist regularly?”
“Yes.”
“Are you taking your medicine?”
“Yes.”
“What else?”
“Naani, I want to be transferred.”
“You don’t like your department?”
“I don’t mind it. But I want to do something I like.”
“What do you like?”
“Medical coding, if I can.”
“A job in medicine is a job with a big responsibility. Can you do it together with your illness?”
“I will try, Naani.”
“I need to take a course and then give an exam and then work.”
“Alright, take the course and we will see.”
“Thank you.”
“Coffee?”
“Always, Naani.”
*
I never cease to have coffee at Coffee and Cake every morning. It is still my favorite coffee. Ever.
Naani still offers me coffee every time I visit her, which is not that frequent because I’m working hard where I like.
