A Deal to Heal

A new day, a new week, a new morning, a new beginning. A newspaper with a cup of tea. A couch with comfy cushions. A quick glance at the headlines. Page 4 : Metro. Crimes, a little expression of disgust at their magnitude. Rapes. Murders. Robbery. Superficial sympathy doled out to the victims. No one talks of suicide. Ever. Why would they? When the killer is herself the victim, justice has already been done. What is there to discuss?

A typical day at 314, Pale street. Monotonous routine where everything is taken for granted. The cup of tea, the newspaper, the news in it, the loss of lives. By virtue of their frequency and velocity of occurrence, they hardly manage to capture the attention of the man, whose work (which simply translates into a mode of earning) and clients (who are also concerned with amassing large fortunes) have won this competition of attention.

16Th july hardly makes any difference to the man with the cup of tea at 314, Pale Street, despite the fact that it caused an infernal fury in their immediate neighbourhood.

Even if he remembers anything from that day a year before, it would be the interview he gave to the equally apathetic reporter, clarifying that his neighbours were like kindred (even though they only had conversations just enough to make mere recognition possible), and that they couln't be responsible for the gruesome event at their house. He certainly couldn't have cared less.

This was his way to deal with life, even if meant not being able to heal the fractures that the distance from his daughter and wife has inflicted. The fractures have hardened, ceasing to give the pain they did. Even though he manages to fill up the vacancy in the house with IKEA furniture, he fails to fill the vacuum in his heart. But he was too proud of and immersed in his money-making to bring another dimension by accommodating sentiments in it. He has taken the dealing with healing upon him selves, and he shall do as he so wishes.

* * * * *

10 Days before...

"What, in the name of Christ, has happened to me? Never before had I been this way! And I just can’t figure out how this could happen to as devoted a reader and follower of self-help literature as myself! The stack of self-help books, which were once a companion to my optimism and never-say-die demeanor, now in their unattended, rugged state are a testimony to all that was, worsening my despair. Now, it all appears useless. A wasted life. A hollow existence. A rudderless ship. And I am not even being metaphorical or figurative.

Outside I feel I am wearing a skin that ceases to be mine any longer.

Inside, my soul is shrouded by countless layers of robes.

Outside, I laugh, dance, speak, listen, shout, clap, fall.

Inside, not an echo of any word I say or sound I make is audible.

Outside, tasks are being carried on, organized and lucid.

Inside, a phantasmagoria of emptiness and hollowness followed by chaotic inundation of emotions dominates.

But both inside and outside, I feel trapped, fettered and bondaged.

No self-help book seems cordial or amiable. Certainly not the way it used to do, no, not in any way.

I have no idea why I am the way I am. Life and living make no sense. The helplessness and desperation is overpowering.

The past is on a nagging spree, the future a quagmire.

People may comment there are faults in my stars, choosing to differ, I opine there are more faults than stars in my case. I even take the privilege of doubting the very existence of stars.

And I don't see any point in living on medicines, those ugly doses of lithium, and regular visits to Ms Nair.

The cure I need is certainly not this, where I churn out an existence at the mercy of some concocted-lithium-laced tablets. I need a greater cure. And I am giving the cure to myself. A cure that will heal all pain, all suffering and liberate me from this leased existence. There's no point in existing, I had wanted to live! I can't think of any other way to deal with this, to heal myself.

The world will never accept me, and this morbid existence is worse than death. So, I gift myself the better option...."

She couldn't muster the courage to read anymore! Kiara’s diary makes her lachrymose. A tear trickles down her cheeks, leaving behind the legacy of distorted kohl, which speak volumes about the pain she feels.

The poignancy of these trickling words is insurmountable for her heart, the agony only aggravated by the fact that she has seen her suffer through all this. She has seen the transmogrification of a vivacious girl in love with life, into an acrid girl who lived in her own stratosphere, wherein she befriends euphoria at one moment and embraces morbid suicidal thoughts the very next!

To see her change from someone who harbors commendable appreciation for the gift that life is into a self-loathing human was perhaps the most excruciating hardship!

Post her sister’s untimely demise back in 2009, Kiara had become a social leper. Her self-imposed seclusion was viewed as being normal in the aftermath of this tragedy, and it was believed that she would snap out of it. Who could have conjectured or surmised in the direst of dreams that it was, in fact, the onset of something she’d carry with herself for a whole lifetime. That you do NOT just snap out of it.

Her descent into oblivion was especially exacerbating for Bianca, her childhood friend and the sole reader of her diary. They used to joke among themselves that god did not make them sisters because one mom could not have handled them both, and burst out in puerile laughter.

Never once did Bianca abandon her, even though there must have been a hundred times when she felt like killing herself and then her. But she stood by her even when the family was tired of caring for her. Sometimes, Bianca wondered if they would have reacted in the same manner had it been a case of some road accident.

Now, Kiara had left her. Forever.

Not just 313, Pail Street.

But this whole goddamn world.

* * * * *

Turning the calendar every morning is a daily ritual. But today, the date has made my heart skip a beat. The fourteenth of July. My last rendezvous with her still tears me apart.

Ten months after she was diagnosed with bipolar, I took her to a social gathering thinking that the change in the environs would charge her sordid self-confidence with sanguinity. But people started outcasting her from every circle. Some whispered loud enough to be heard, “Why did she get out of hospital? Crazy people best be with others like them. She is not fit to stay with us normal people.”

After being despised and chided by over six acquaintances, she burst out not in tears but in words laced with wrath. She used expletives to no end. People ended up ostracizing her for the fear of not just her maniac orientation, but also fearing being treated with a volley of cuss words.

The fact that many great artists and writers like Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, even her favourite poet Sylvia Plath had suffered from Bipolar didn’t help. Yes, that is how most people attending you would blurt out words of consolation. What they fail to mention is that these people had a creative advantage. Kiara, on the other hand, had been on the trough ever since her diagnosis.

Disgusted by the insouciance of people, I marched out of the hotel and drove her back home.

And that was that. Our last meeting. I remember her telling me not to use the word last, and substitute it with “the most recent” instead. And even though it had meant using three words in place of one, and minding my words as I speak, I had given in to her demand, not to appease her, but because I loved her for this very reason: the little things she did or said which reeked of her optimism. I still do, only that now, bereft of her, I don't have anything new to add to the list.

I digress.

It was our last meeting. Last. And here I can't even substitute the word last. I think I was mad at her too. Had she not made an unabashed exhibition of profanity, we could have avoided creating a scene or at least would have had fewer curt glances. People poured out their disgust in the form of cursory glances. Could she have done something to trigger that?

Contemplating a satisfactory answer to this question has made of me what has been made of me.

I still remember that day. Two days after our mortifying meeting. I was grooming myself for an interview thinking to myself that I might at last find my calling if I get selected for this job. This has been an incessant problem with me. I have never known what I am supposed to do next. So, while I was still wishing myself luck in my quest for a destination, Kiara called me. It was all fine until I picked up the phone and realized that it was not Kiara but Bianca. She said something, and then I went numb, all her following words were gibberish to me. I should have been there. With her. She should have been in my embrace when she breathed her last. I should have watched over her, every moment.

And then the revelation befell. I made sense of that gibberish. Bianca told me (although she was herself sobbing uncontrollably) that Kiara has slit her wrists. Maybe, if I were there, she wouldn't have done this at all. I should have stood by her. I should have been there. Dammit. I should have told her how much I love her. Alas, I should have...

Just when I think I might not be able to replay the proceedings that followed, I have reached the door of my office.

Carved on the door is my name:

Dr. E. Smith

Psychologist

Yeah, I finally found my true calling. Bianca says Kiara called herself a rudderless ship in a letter, I beg to differ. That rudderless ship was me, and Kiara gave me my true calling. I can never thank her enough, love her enough, revere her enough. All I can do is hope that by helping people with bipolar, I am able to tell her that I have given my life for her. I live, but living is nothing more than a dire attempt to fill the vacancy she has left. This, I opine is the best way I could do it.

A patient enters, narrates how he is recovering with the help of lithium, how ECT has been a boon.

I do my job.

But all his discussions signal at a stigma that his old friends harbour, which stops them from talking to him like before.

I do my job again.

I catch up with his friend, brainstorm him, even to the extent of sounding didactic.

I hope he just didn't nod in acceptance so as to get rid of me, I hope he understood all that I said about bipolar people needing love and affection to deal with reality.

As a psychologist myself, I fail to understand what have they done to deserve our contempt? Haven’t we too tried to insulate ourselves from the harsh realities while creating a reality of our own? Haven’t we often yielded unmindfully to the gentle influence of fantasies or been moonstruck? Haven’t we been in depression, felt isolation, and even though it was minuscule compared to what bipolar feel, didn’t we feel an excruciating agony? We know we could, perhaps, as well be in their place. Mental disorder can strike anyone! It knows no age limits, economic status, race, creed or color.

And yet we set those people at naught, for no mistake of theirs...

This is the life I choose. And this is the best life I can get. And this is how I have chosen to be dealing with the challenge of healing my wounds.

Because the only people for me are the apparently mad ones!