Strangers to Ourselves, page 9
The Upanishads, a collection of texts foundational to Hinduism, describe a person who has achieved transcendence as one who has lost all individuality: she is like a lump of salt in water, dissolving. Bapu felt she might achieve a similar state if only she could rid herself of her longing for her children. “The love of a child does not spare anyone,” she wrote. “Only a mother will know.” “My sweet ones!” she went on. “Is it my mistake to have left you? I did not leave your playground and come of my own volition!” It was the work of the gods, she said. “But the blame is on me.”
* * *
WHEN CHELLAMMAL LEARNED how her daughter was living—Bapu occasionally sent letters—she arranged for Bapu to live in a small room at Elite Lodge, a hotel for pilgrims a short walk from Guruvayur Temple. Bapu’s room was on the first floor, under a stairwell. There was just enough space for her to lie on the floor.
Bapu wrote on any scrap of paper she could find: calendars, the backs of newspapers and old photographs, and several notebooks, each nearly four hundred pages. When she reflected on her misgivings, her handwriting was symmetrical, but it became sloppy and wild as she wrote about Krishna. She titled one of her notebooks “Mohana Ramayana,” a reference to the Sanskrit epic Ramayana. Mohanam means “enchanting” in Tamil; in Sanskrit it means “mentally confusing.” Perhaps Bapu was aware of how another person might see her project: the chronicle of an unsettled mind.
Bapu refers to herself as a madwoman or a lunatic more than a dozen times in her journals, but only sometimes with despair. She saw her alienation from society as proof of her insight. Her inner world had come to feel more substantial than the reality to which her family was bound. The saints she admired had also ruptured ties with family and devoted their lives to phenomena that others could neither see nor touch. Ramakrishna, a nineteenth-century mystic, told his devotees that madness was a mark of devotion and should never be mocked. “A perfect knower of God and a perfect idiot have the same outer signs,” he wrote. The eighteenth-century Hindu poet and saint Ramprasad promised, “In heaven there is a fair of lunatics.”
* * *
A man with schizophrenia named Thomas, whom I corresponded with for several years, once told me that he had tried to cultivate a kind of “genius for homelessness.” He lived on the streets in Chicago in the early 2000s. “I was able to survive even in the cold with an almost feral sense of what to do,” he wrote me. He assumed that, if he was thoughtful enough, he could find a way to make homelessness empowering. “Like what the Buddhists do,” he said. “Walk around meditating—without a house, or possessions. They are able to invest their lives with meaning outside of the normal conventions of ownership.” But he couldn’t fully divert his attention from the reality that he was suffering. “The fact that I was not able to do that for myself was one of the things that showed me I had an illness,” he wrote.
The metrics by which Bapu assessed her own state of mind were murkier, because she drew from a rich tradition that gave her anguish purpose and structure. She studied the lives of mystics, and understood that their stories were not about seeking God and then victoriously finding him. Their conviction often flagged. They lamented that they had given everything away for a vision, an experience of oneness with the divine, that they could never attain. Bapu’s favorite saint, Mirabai, had dramatized this state of mind: Mirabai wrote that she was “deprived of the sight of the beloved, a lonely and lost soul,” who is “sad every moment of the day.”
Bapu had rejected the idea that her path could be explained by mental illness, but the stories that defined Mirabai and other saints could feel self-fulfilling and chronic, too. Bapu said that her legs were sore from running behind Krishna, constantly chasing him. She felt like a “fruit that will not ripen,” a “hollow sack,” a “dead tree,” a “misfortunate worm,” an “abandoned house.” But she also wondered, “Is this difficulty I am facing the lesson of total surrender?”
At some point in the midseventies—Bapu did not date these journal entries—she was forbidden from participating in a religious festival that her guru, Nambudiri, was holding, a seven-day recitation of the Bhagavata Purana, a holy text. She assumed that her guru was “disgusted with me because I am poor.” When they had first met, she was a handsome, wealthy woman who wore silk saris and was driven to temples in Western cars. Eight years later, she was scavenging for food in the compost pile behind the temple.
“The promises you made to me—have they become a delusion?” she wrote to Krishna. “Why did I leave all my loving relatives behind and come to you?”
The complexity of Bapu’s early poems gave way to a plain, lamenting style. At times, it is difficult to tell whether she is directing her questions toward Krishna, her husband, or her guru—her attention shifts between the three men around whom she had structured her life. “Did you think I was an ugly old woman?” she asked. “Is this why you forgot and abandoned me?”
* * *
ONE NIGHT IN 1978, Peter Fernandez, the psychiatrist who had treated Bapu at his clinic in Chennai, drove four hundred miles to Guruvayur. Acting at Bapu’s mother’s request, he and two attendants showed up at the Elite Lodge and opened the door of Bapu’s room. “She was ugly,” Fernandez told me. “She was living like a witch, and looking like a witch.” Fernandez gave Bapu an injection of Valium and lifted her into his car.
“Was she scared?” I asked him.
“We never bother with schizophrenics being scared,” he replied. “I was scared.” He told me, “She could not even reason. Her thinking was illogical. She cannot be a normal person.” He drove her to a private hospital in Chennai, and she was admitted there against her will. “In the fifty years of my service, it was one of the worst cases of schizophrenia I’ve seen,” he said.
The philosopher Miranda Fricker describes a species of inequality called “epistemic injustice,” which is a “wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” At the hospital, Bapu was not treated as a credible witness to her own experiences, not only because of her status as a patient but also because of colonial notions about the irrationality of Indian religions. When patients come to see Fernandez, who now runs a different hospital where fifty patients with schizophrenia live, they often wear amulets around their wrists or necks. But Fernandez, a devout Catholic, told me, “I take the amulets off them when they come here,” a practice he has maintained for decades. In his desk drawer, he keeps a plastic bag full of his patients’ talismans, mostly silver tubes in which a small piece of paper or palm leaf has been inscribed with verses meant to protect them. The fact that his patients are still sick, he told me, is the proof that these charms have not worked.
Bapu stayed at Fernandez’s hospital for several weeks. She would linger near the windows and sing devotional songs loudly. Trained in Indian Carnatic music, a genre developed around the fifteenth century, Bapu had a lovely, melodious voice. When the staff told her to be quiet—she was disturbing other patients, they said—she sang louder. Fernandez described Bapu as “a very insistent woman, a very sticky woman.”
Karthik, who was then fourteen, visited frequently. Once, he arrived as his mother was being wheeled out of her room on a stretcher. Karthik followed as she was pushed into a small room with a machine that delivered electroconvulsive shocks. He watched his mother through a small window on the door.
At the time, electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, was the standard treatment for Indian psychiatric patients, regardless of their diagnosis. (In America and Europe, it was more often limited to those with severe depression.) The procedure, which causes a brief seizure, appears to stimulate the release of hormones by the hypothalamus and pituitary gland, but the precise action in the brain has never been fully understood. India at that time had fewer than two thousand psychiatrists for half a billion people, and ECT could be administered to dozens of patients in an hour, often without anesthesia or muscle relaxants. Fernandez said that in the late sixties he gave electroconvulsive therapy to about fifty patients each day. “I was thirty-five, full of energy,” he told me. “The boys would hold down the patients’ arms.” He clenched his teeth and then imitated the sound of the machine. “Zick, zick,” he said cheerfully.
Karthik watched as two attendants put a piece of wood in his mother’s mouth, to prevent her from biting her tongue. An electrical current was applied to her head. Karthik heard a dull buzzing noise. His mother’s body spasmed. Karthik immediately began sobbing.
Once Bapu was wheeled back to her own room, she opened her eyes and saw that her son was distraught. Karthik said that she told him, “Don’t worry. These things will only make me stronger.” Karthik concluded that the procedure was “just a very faint echo—not a sound she was paying attention to. She had already surrendered and nothing was touching her physically.”
* * *
AFTER BAPU WAS discharged from the clinic, she “skipped town,” Karthik said. “No one knew her whereabouts.” He called the Elite Lodge to see if she had returned to Guruvayur. Her belongings were still in her room, but no one had seen her and she’d provided no forwarding address. Karthik said that for a long time his mother “was torn between these two forces—the pull of the family and the pull of the divine—but from then on it was a straight path.”
Karthik had become accustomed to people reporting sightings of his mother at her favorite temples, but months passed with no news. He blamed his grandmother for essentially arranging his mother’s abduction. “That’s what hastened everything,” he said. “She lost the little faith she had in her people. If there had been one arm of support, her life would have been different.” (Dr. Fernandez, who is now eighty-nine, disagreed, saying that after he treated Bapu “she became perfectly normal. When she left, she was very happy, the family was very happy, the family thanked me,” but he also acknowledged that he never followed up.)
After she had been gone for a year, Bapu’s family stopped mentioning her at all. By then, Bhargavi and Karthik were in high school. “I don’t think any of us had the words to talk about it,” Bhargavi said. “There was the guilt that we were living in her house while she could be living on the streets. Who fed her? Who gave her clothes? Did someone rape her? Those questions have never left me.” In her spare time, Bhargavi wrote melancholy poems: “It seems / eternity is finite / it waits / upon a rotten memory.”
Karthik said that eventually, “it was almost as if she didn’t exist.” Once, he eavesdropped on his father and uncles saying that Bapu was dead.
Karthik began using his dad’s camera to take photos of his cousins as well as birds, rare plants, and snakes. To save money, he rarely printed the photos; instead, he paid a man one rupee to process the film and then projected the images on the wall at night. Sometimes he took shots when there wasn’t any film in his camera. “I don’t think he had many thoughts except that he had to compulsively take pictures,” Bhargavi said. “It was the fact of his life.” She guessed that photography was her brother’s way of keeping himself at a remove—of “living on the balcony, just watching.”
Bhargavi had her own form of detachment. After graduating from high school, she studied philosophy at a college in Chennai. She was drawn to the discipline because it “insulated me from my inner emotions and self,” she said. She rejected her “haunted childhood,” as she described it, by becoming an atheist. “It was raining gods in my house—in every nook and corner—and I hated them.” She gravitated toward European philosophers like Habermas, Sartre, and Camus. “I dealt with my problems by being a total rationalist,” she told me. “What I hear, what I smell, what I touch—these are the only things that are true.”
* * *
Srirangam, a temple town with some fifty shrines, rests on an islet formed by two rivers in southeast India. The temple is believed to be the birthplace of the ninth-century female mystic and poet Andal, about whom Bapu had once written a book. Most of the pages of the book, which was never published, have been lost. Only a few lines remain: “If we think of our Andal,” Bapu wrote, “will not all the illnesses that bother the body simply melt like snow?”
Andal is famous not only for her devotion to Krishna but for her determination to actually marry him. “So great is my desire / To unite with the lord,” she wrote, “that emotion chokes my breath.” One day, Andal dressed like a bride, walked into the Srirangam temple, and embraced the feet of the idol, Ranganatha—an incarnation of the god Vishnu, of whom Krishna is an avatar. Then she disappeared. She was never seen again. The union was celebrated as the ultimate merging of a devotee with God.
“Am I Andal?” Bapu wrote in her journal. “Oh Lord, reply straight away.”
In 1982, one of Bapu’s old friends, a former classmate, saw a woman who resembled Bapu on the thoroughfare leading to the main temple of Srirangam. It had been more than five years since her family had any news about her. The classmate stared at the woman, who was among a group of people begging for food. The woman wore a torn sari and looked emaciated. The classmate kept walking, but later she called Bapu’s mother. When Karthik learned of the sighting, he took a cab two hundred miles to Srirangam. “I spotted my mother instantly,” Karthik told me. Bapu was sitting on the curb of a street lined with tourist vans, taxis, food vendors, and hundreds of people streaming toward the temple.
She was with a group of women who lived in a choultry, a hall for pilgrims with no bedding or running water, near the temple. Her hair was greasy and knotted, and she had sores on her body. Karthik explained who he was, and a few of the women urged Bapu to go home with him. When Karthik approached her, he said, “she seemed gone. The past was gone.”
Karthik’s heart pounded as he led his mother to his cab. “It was the same tension from childhood,” he said. “How am I going to take her back? Will my dad let her in?” Bapu was so weak she could barely talk. He lay her across the back seat of the car. “She seemed to somewhat recollect me—somewhat,” he said. “Then something stirred in her, and she told me, ‘You’ve grown so tall.’”
* * *
IN AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL play titled “The Fugitive,” Bhargavi dramatized her mother’s homecoming. “Her blouse is badly stitched, loose and hanging immodestly on her,” she wrote. “She is preoccupied, smiling to herself, sometimes giggling in an inhibited way, closing her mouth with her hand and looking at the others to see if they noticed.” Her husband finds her intolerable. “Why don’t you do something about that wife of mine?” he tells a psychiatrist. “Increase the dosage or something.” At other times, though, he doubts whether she’s even ill. “Her madness is just a facade behind which she hides,” he says, “so that she can do what she wants, and live as she wills.”
Karthik and Bhargavi, who were both living at home while going to college in Chennai, found their mother a new psychiatrist, one who was willing to visit Bapu at home and talk with the whole family. “He was a wave of fresh air,” Bhargavi said. “He didn’t just look at her and say, ‘Schizophrenia—here’s some pills,’ and then walk away.” He prescribed antipsychotic medications, but he also told the family that Bapu felt isolated and encouraged them to talk with her about her experiences at healing temples. Bhargavi struggled to fulfill her end of the conversation. “I don’t think I was prepared to listen,” she told me. When her mother spoke about her relationship with gods, Bhargavi said, “I felt like I was being choked, like someone was strangling me.”
After four years living with her mother, Bhargavi moved away. She went to Mumbai to get a PhD in philosophy at the Indian Institute of Technology, where she focused on the problem of how we know what we claim to know about human behavior—where to draw the line between knowledge and belief. In her dissertation, she wrote, “One wants to know whether synthetic knowledge pertaining to the human mind … is possible,” given its status as “science and culture, as truth and metaphor.” She asked “whether the search for a scientific rationality, particularly in terms of causal laws, is a threat to autonomy,” and how to make “such a science respond to a society’s needs.”
In another paper, she called for a revival of the phenomenological tradition to which Roland Kuhn had belonged. “A ‘depressive’ does not just enact the symptoms,” she wrote. “She experiences the world differently. She uses language differently. She experiences emotions differently.” By ignoring these sorts of experiences—the “unclassified residuum,” as William James called it—doctors risk misunderstanding why mental illness can be so isolating, altering people’s lives in ways that cannot be captured only by symptoms. “These experiences of ill-health determine the way we look at the world, and at ourselves,” Bhargavi wrote. The lives of the mentally ill had been erased from the public record, she went on, but “in the writing of history and personal stories, we make ourselves present.”
* * *
WHILE BHARGAVI WAS away studying, a willowy twenty- year-old woman named Nandini was introduced to Karthik as a potential bride. Nandini knew that Karthik, who was working as an industrial photographer, had a tainted family history, but her marketability was complicated, too. She had never learned to cook or to wash clothes, her brother was chronically ill, and her family could not afford a dowry. When Nandini visited Karthik’s house the first time, Bapu was sitting on the stone parapet of her veranda. “Her face was so baby-like, approachable, easy,” Nandini said. “She asked me, ‘Do you like me? Do you want to come and live with us? Do you like my son?’ I was so moved. Nobody will ask these questions. Even Karthik never asked.”
They got married in Karthik’s photography studio. Nandini moved into Bapu’s house and became a kind of de facto nurse, watching over Bapu without judgment. The antipsychotic medications that Bapu had rejected in a hospital setting she now accepted when Nandini handed them to her. The pills seemed to make Bapu less restless and inflexible. Although she continued to write devotional songs and poems, she no longer addressed them to Krishna. “She knew that her devotion to Krishna pulls her out of the family, and she did not want to do that,” Nandini told me. Instead, she wrote to Murugan, the Hindu god of war. She had arthritis in her hands, so Nandini transcribed her words. At Bapu’s direction, Nandini sent the poetry to the governing bodies of temples where Bapu had once lived. “Sometimes her letters bounced back, but I respected her feelings, and I kept writing, writing, writing,” Nandini said.
