I watched him walk out to join me in the gated outdoor area. He was wearing the same lightly printed hospital gown as me. Broad-shouldered, thick, curling brown hair, he grinned at me like we’d met a time or two before. I stopped chewing my sandwich, two slices of Wonder Bread fused with lemon-yellow American cheese. He hesitated before pointing at the only fixture in the concrete yard, the green bench I sat on. I swallowed, then nodded. Leaving a thoughtful amount of space between us, he sat down at the other end. Warmth radiated from his cinnamon skin. He raised his face to the sun.
Yes, I concluded rationally, it all adds up. This must be god.
When he looked over at me, I found I could only peek back, now shy. Having nothing else to give, I offered him the other half of my sandwich. He took it. In silence, we sat, and we ate. Feet swinging, eyes pinned to a blue sky cut by rusted bars, I decided everything I’d been through in the last few months had been worth it if it meant I could sit here on a park bench with god.
When I finished my half of the sandwich, I glanced over to find him watching me. Dazzling white teeth, canines sharp. Flecks of gold set in light brown eyes. Seeing he had my attention, he tapped his cheek with his first and second fingers. A kiss, of course. How sweet of a creator to ask. Without a moment’s hesitation, I slid down the length of the bench and pressed my lips to his pocked skin. He laughed in surprise. I smiled back, wide.
I always knew god had a wicked sense of humor.
Psychosis is a slippery thing to explain. It’s not like you wake up one morning, and snap, you’ve crossed over. For me, psychosis was more like a basement that floods after weeks of ceaseless rain. The weather hasn’t been good for a long time, so you’re not too surprised to find water seeping in. Still, you never thought your basement would be submerged. All your life, you’d been under the impression it was sealed tight, kept in sparkling mint condition, so much better than all the other basements in the world. Only too late have you found your surety to be a flimsy trick built on shifting sands. Following its own inscrutable timeline, Nature has come knocking to lay your silly arrogance bare.
I spent the summer before my first psychotic episode conducting fieldwork in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Between the moldering government buildings and the lithe, rustling coconut trees, an outright deluge opened above me. That summer, my depression took on a startlingly ruthless tenor. I woke every morning, paralyzed. Body thick and unwieldy, I’d limp the twenty feet to the bathroom and hang my head heavy above the marble sink. Exhausted from washing my face and brushing my teeth, I’d throw myself back onto the hard pallet, staying there, curled, until there was somewhere I absolutely needed to be.
In my waking hours, I ached. Colors and sounds grew unbearable in their vibrancy. I moved through red clay mud. At night, I found no succor. The heat leaving me restless, I’d stare at the ceiling for hours, watching the blue light play between the fan’s blades. I didn’t have a single night’s rest.
As the weeks slipped through my fingers, the strain took its toll. The few photographs of me at the time reveal a sickly young woman with sharp bones, sunken eyes, skin stretched tight. A young woman who had no idea where she was about to go.
There were, of course, reasons for my depression. My first year of graduate school had been an exhausting, illusion-shattering affair. Readings were either shockingly outdated and anti-black, or impenetrable and oblique. Poorly facilitated discussions left contentiousness to spread like weeds. Classes would occasionally end with someone driven to tears.
Meetings to discuss my research with faculty proved to be just as disheartening. One professor scoffed at my idea of conducting research on gender norms in Kerala before British colonization. Why did British colonialism matter when history was rife with instances where one group imposed their rule over another? Another professor questioned my capability to conduct such work as an Indian American. How could I ever know enough about my people when I had migrated and so thoroughly ‘integrated’ here? Yet another begged me to forgive her in case she accidentally called me by another Indian graduate student’s name.
To cap it off, one of the few close friendships I’d established in Los Angeles tripped a fuse in May. I realized too late that we had completely different takes on our relationship, that I embarrassingly thought of it as much more. When it ended, I was confused, hurt, and ashamed. The pain sat next to my heart for months, tender and sore.
Far weightier than all this was the sudden passing of Ammachi, my maternal grandmother. Her death was complicated for my family. Decades back, my mother, a Syrian Christian, married my father, a Hindu Ezhava. My mother’s family disowned her for marrying outside of religion, and far worse, below her caste. Ammachi had been particularly vitriolic in her condemnation at the time, and even as the years passed and grandchildren came, she held fast to her prejudices. My Ammachi was a stubborn woman just like me.
The sweet thing, though, is that human relationships hold an ever-present potential for change. In 2015, when I won a Fulbright to conduct research in Kerala, I made a trip to stay with my maternal grandparents for a week. Though we never talked about their ill treatment of my family, a détente was somehow reached. I have often wondered what tipped the scale. Was it my uncanny resemblance to my mother, a ghost returned for her birthright? Had it meant so much to them that a granddaughter cared enough to come searching? Or did I, in my unwavering, wholehearted presence, awaken a wistfulness for the years they had thoughtlessly squandered away? I cannot say. Sometimes we just recognize a second chance when it hops off a train.
Whatever the reason, that year, Ammachi turned liquid butter. A few months after my visit, she made the trip down to Thiruvananthapuram to celebrate my birthday, unprompted. For the very first time, she broke bread with my paternal grandmother, a woman she’d last seen twenty-five years ago when she’d travelled all the way from Cochin to hurl insults and level threats against the mother of a daughter-stealer. But that was then; this was now. My birthday passed like a hum and a song, my two grandmothers gathered under the same roof. And it didn’t stop there. In the years after, Ammachi would invite my father’s family to her home, plying them with appams and dosas, sticky cakes and iced drinks. She began to treat my father with what approximated to affection. Most moving, when she died, she wore a small gold cross my father had gifted her the year before.
In her final years, had Ammachi made up for all the pain and anguish she had put my family through? No; neither could she recover the time she had lost. But in the end, what mattered most was that she changed. And I loved her most dearly for that.
I had been looking forward to taking the train from Thiruvananthapuram to Cochin again that summer, but a month before I arrived in Kerala, Ammachi died. Her death burrowed deep in my bones. In the brief time I’d spent with her, I’d learned how much of her blood ran through my veins. Her boundless energy, her fighting spirit, her nosy curiosity, her sharp tongue, her sweet tooth: all these I carried within me. I mourned the loss of a nascent friendship between two kindred souls.
Enveloped in my grief was a tense worry for my mother, who’d learned of her mother’s illness too late to reach her deathbed. See, years ago, after my brother’s birth, my mother had dealt with post-partum depression. Cut off from her family, an immigrant without a support network, the depression had been severe. It had lasted years. It had scared me. With Ammachi’s sudden passing, I was afraid my mother would relapse. My childhood fear came roaring back: who will take care of Amma? With her already fragile health, what if the stress were too great? What if she too died? How would any of us bear it?
Graduate school, the loss of a friend, the death of a grandmother, my fear for my mother – this is what lay twisted in my head when I arrived in Thiruvananthapuram that summer. Over the next three months I would add anguish over my paternal grandmother’s loneliness, the quiet shock of learning the history of slavery entwined in my family lines, rage that gender, caste, and religion continued to divide, and the trauma shared by my research participants. The depression that lay over me deepened and darkened until I forgot if there had ever been a point to life. The world turned mustard yellow. I’d stare at my feet for hours, wishing they would grow into trees.
This was how, steadily, steadily, my foundations were breached.
Originally posted on a now defunct personal blogging website.
