Not a Mad Man

It wasn’t until I saw Ravi in the mid-90s that I really knew what a ‘mad person’ looked like, or behaved, in real life. The most vivid memory I have of him from those times is that of a man clutching the top of a telephone pole and playing tomfoolery with passersby. People would call out to him, requesting him to climb down, but he would hurl abuses at them or taunt them by sliding down the pole and scaling up again, as they closed in to grab him.

He was as much an amusement to people in our area as he was a headache. There was always the danger of him falling from the pole, you see, and that kept people in the vicinity on tenterhooks for hours together. It was only when the local police arrived that the whole spectacle ended. I don’t remember if the cops took him with them for creating public nuisance or they let him free. Nevertheless, within ten days he would be back on the pole, drawing excited crowds again. They watched his antics as if he were performing in a circus show-with gasps, chortles, intrigue and sometimes with pity.

Although Ravi was then young and well-built, he was uneducated and poor, and, above all ‘mad’. Who would give him work in such circumstances, after all? So he spent most of his time gallivanting and providing unintended entertainment to the people.

Many a day I wondered why people had so ungenerously given him a madman’s tag. Was it because he was weird and funny? Was it because he had only expletives to speak whenever he opened his mouth? Was it because he often indulged in incoherent monologues?

Or was it because he was unlike any of us, and his world was vastly different from the one we were familiar with? Was it because from where we stood, we couldn’t see what transpired in his head, and whatever we saw about him, didn’t match with our reality?

I didn’t know then what made him behave the way he did, but I knew one thing for certain. He didn’t deserve to be called ‘praanthan Ravi’ (meaning mad man Ravi) which was how most people in the locality referred to him. He merely lived in a world inhabited by real or imagined people who probably provoked him to shower swearwords indiscriminately.

What kind of demons tormented him? What unspoken misery lay buried in his foggy realms? I didn’t know. It wasn’t easy to find answers to questions that most people didn’t even consider worth pondering. Ravi was a mad man. And madness didn’t have a cure. Period.

In early 1998, I relocated to the middle East. I didn’t think of Ravi till I went home for vacation a year later. I came to know from our maid that Ravi had stopped climbing poles. He had been away for a while, possibly receiving treatment, she said, and since then, he mostly stayed indoors and was relatively sober except on new moon and full moon days. As if to validate the popular myths surrounding the moon and madness, Ravi appeared boisterous the next full moon day, but this time around, there was no public curiosity around him. It was as though people in the neighbourhood had accepted his ‘madness’ and they let him be. He roamed the streets for a while handing out insults to his mysterious enemies and when he felt spent, he withdrew into his shelter, not to be seen for some days.

On days he was sober, he earned some money doing odd loading jobs for local stores. Who would have believed it then that he was disturbed and was fresh out of the asylum? I brought back vignettes of the man that the society shunned for most parts, and gave him a cameo in my debut novel, Sand Storms, Summer Rains.

Nearly two and half decades on, Ravi is still around in my native town. The last time I saw him in March during our visit home, he looked aged and worn. But little else had changed. He still swore bitterly, which confirmed that the demons had permanently settled in his mind. They continued to torment him, and he fought them with the only ammunition he had in plenty-cusswords. The only addition to his dishevelled appearance, apart from his grey hair, was a cane in the hand which he used to keep his phantom foes at bay. He was both the ruler and sentry of his unknown kingdom.

As for the people around, they have now stopped being bothered by him. It is as if he has merged with the landscape of the locality, like the banyan tree on the temple ground.

His demons had refused to leave his mental space, and he had probably learnt to live battling them all day. Or was he at peace with them? I can’t say. He was oblivious of what people thought of him, of the labels they put on him. He lived with gay abandon in his cloistered realm, neither accepting nor rejecting the world around him.

Ravi would never have been conscious of his condition; he never would have felt compelled to look normal. Nor would he have worried what people might say if they found out about the demons inside that turned his world topsy-turvy. He lived freely in it without the pretense of normalcy. To him, his world was reality.

I thought of Ravi all over again, as I popped my pills today.

Ravi isn’t ‘mad’, I reiterated to myself. He is merely sick at heart, like people who are ill with other things. It’s not him, it’s the chemistry of the brain that has been wreaking havoc for years on end, I carefully evaluate. No one ever mentioned it. But then again, how would they, when they themselves didn’t know? To them, he was a mad man, cut and dried.

Lunatic. Mad. Deranged. Insane. Demented. Crazy. Mental.

The words fell on me in a heap as I wondered, a tad nervously, ‘Is that how the world will brand me if I tell them that a psychiatrist has put me on anti-depressants for a while now? Will it acknowledge that depression is a medical condition like any other, beyond one’s control? Will it understand if I spoke about neuro transmitters and its role in our lives? Will it accept that the pills are to my brain what insulin is to the pancreas of a person suffering from diabetes? And will it be kind and make concessions for my random silences and abrupt disappearances as I navigate through this difficult phase?’

(Depression is not a sign of a weak personality, nor is it contrary to positivity. It is a condition that is triggered by certain life situations/incidents that have impacted a person’s brain and its working. The most forgotten fact about depression is that it can strike anybody. So, if someone you know is battling depression, be considerate without being judgmental or dismissive. Know that they are going through something tough, about which they may not reveal much. Give them time. With professional help, they can come out of it. Above all, don’t stop loving them.)

Some People Just Cannot Die

8th October, 2020

Dear Appa,

When was the last time I wrote a letter to you? If my memory is right, it was before the turn of the century; before the computer entered our lives. Do you remember how we used to write lengthy letters which took two weeks to reach, and by then, most of what we had to say had become stale news? Yet we indulged in that exercise with great delight, didn’t we, because we wrote not to exchange news, but to share our views. I think it was through those letters that you and I became friends. Till then, we were only father and daughter.

I have seldom written in the longhand after that, but you used that perfect stenographer hand for various things till the end–from making grocery lists to jotting daily expenses in your diary. You handwriting was distinct by its perfect strokes and silken slants, which I have tried to copy many times but failed miserably. You won’t believe how many of those tidbits carrying your impeccable hand are still lying around in our house. They materialize out of nowhere bringing a smile on my face and sinking feeling in my heart. Even when you fill my life with your mystic presence, the nagging pain of your physical absence refuses to abate.

But wait, why am I talking about your absence now? The purpose of this letter is not to discuss the distressing events of that night of October, 2016. Let me set it aside for another time, for it can’t be spoken of in a hurry. Sad memories are obstinate and draining, and I have no intention to indulge in them now.

You know, appa, I never believed you could ever go from the face of the earth. I know, it sounds bizarre for a full-grown adult to harbour illusions of immortality. But that’s how girls are. Ask anyone you may know. For us, our dads will live forever, even beyond the curtain of time. I don’t know who put the silly fallacy in my head that some people just can’t die. But you did, after all.

Initially, I didn’t accept that you had left forever. Not even after seeing you laying still and silent before they took you away. You couldn’t leave like that. You had so much left to do. We had so many more naadan chaya and parippu vada to have in the shacks in Kalady. We had so many more poor jokes to crack and double over. We hadn’t finished gallivanting the town. You and I made a great duo. Our outings were such fun. And there was no way you could chuck my company in favour of the celestial people. Hence, I was convinced that you had only temporarily departed and you would return with a new lease of life, soon.

And, lo and behold, you did!

You returned almost miraculously, night after night in my dreams. It was as if all that took place on this night four years ago was part of some ugly dream, and what I was seeing behind my eyes when I slept was the sweet reality.

It’s hard to explain, appa. You are as real as you can get in my sleep. It’s weird, I know, and I freaked out initially. For a long time, I remained disoriented, lurching between the joy of my dreams and the bitterness of the truth. Someone even made a dense remark that having dead people come in your dreams is an ominous sign. It didn’t augur well, in their view. It meant that the soul hadn’t rested in peace.

I believed it without the slightest amount of consternation. Funny, right?

I believed it because you returned in my dreams. What they said was true. You weren’t happy in heaven. You still wanted to be in our midst, you wanted to sip fresh orange juice and nannari sarbath with me in the blazing summer of Palakkad, you wanted to get into petty squabbles with amma, you wanted to visit Dubai once again and have some gala time with us. You had so much unfinished business that your return was inevitable.

‘Ashey…’ That endearing, long drawn out call still rings in my ear. It once again reminds me about the story behind my name. Asha, meaning hope or wish. As your first born, I was your wish fulfilled and your hope for the future, you said. I get goosebumps when I think about it even today.

I have one grouse against you, however. You left before I could write your biography. Remember I had wanted to document your life so that it might serve as a guide to an authentic life to me? I wanted to know the nitty-gritty of your life. How on earth could you maintain such equanimity? How could you find contentment so effortlessly? How could you laugh so easily? How could you so beautifully define life as ‘an innings in cricket that one must play on till he is given out by the umpire’?

How much I learned from you, appa, and how much more was left to learn!

Every now and then, I drop your name while coaching my students, bringing up your witticisms and wisdom quotes. ‘My dad says…’ is a refrain that I will never tire of saying. You aren’t my superhero. You are my simple appa. And that is enough for me.

If you are wondering what took me so long to write to you and what makes me write to you four years after that fateful event, let me explain.

Last night, when you came in my dream, I said to you, ‘Appa, it hurts very much,’ and you said, ‘release it and it won’t hurt, kondhe.’

I want to release my grief today by writing this letter to you. I have kept it bottled up for far too long and suffered immensely for it. I want to erase the dreadful memories of that night and begin to fix the belief that you are within me forever. I want to establish the fact that I may not see you in person ever again, but that in no way means you aren’t present in my life.

Also, I want to let you know that I can never refer to you in the past tense.

To me, you are, and you will be. Forever.

Some people just cannot die. Least of all, you.

(This piece was written on the 4th anniversary of my dad’s passing. I wrote it in one sitting as a stream of consciousness. I have not edited or revised it from the first draft, nor was any attention paid to literary tropes or style. It is raw, as it occurred in my mind.)

Glossary:

Naadan Chaya=Locally Brewed tea

Parippu Vada=Lentil Snack

Nannari Sarbath=A popular cool drink of Kerala

Kondhe=A fond way to address a child

How I became a self-published author and succeeded at it

'After the Rain' at Sharjah Book Fair

What sobers me the most when I spend time browsing in a large book store is the sheer number of authors that this world has produced and the amount of words and thought they have proffered to mankind through their works. It was the same humbling thought that came to me at the recently concluded Sharjah International Book Fair too.

Rows and rows of story-tellers from across the globe gawked from their book covers at browsers and buyers. Many of them popular authors backed by major publishing houses. And some, like me, self-published and less known.

Yes, I write.

I write stuff that scores of people find wholesome to read. I have a novel, a book of poems and a collection of stories to my name and I was an Opinion page columnist for many years. However, none of these credentials put me in the same segment as established authors because I am ‘self-published’. I used to cringe at that term for several years, secretly deriding me for not making the cut at the publisher’s table. For not being able to match their market-driven literary expectations. For not being sale-worthy in their estimation.

But now, I have broken free of that hopelessness. Not because I have received a signing amount from a publisher, but because I have realized that to be an author all one needs is high-quality writing and discerning readers who can appreciate it. All the fancy trappings of the publishing world are irrelevant. It is as if a dandelion seed has burst and the pappus have begun to fly in my head.

It is this positive mental stride I took after several failed attempts that gave me my breakthrough as an author. The learning didn’t come easily, though. I took some hard knocks, wasted loads of money wasted on vanity publishers and spent years writing persistently to get here – an independent author whose prospects do not rest on an editor’s power to accept or reject her manuscript, nor on hired promotional campaigns, but one whose success hinges on her unflinching faith in her work and perseverance.

What makes the tag of ‘independent author’ gratifying now is the fact that I have learned to get past even the vanity publishers. The ego boost that came with publishing a book that way wasn’t worth the money or the post-partum depression it induced. The day I decided I will not pay any money to get a book published was when I truly came of age.

It is not to say that the problems and pitfalls are over for me. Far from it. But with every hurdle on the way, with every stumbling block, I have learned lessons that will make me only better at my future endeavours.

Writers will know that ‘there is no greater agony than that of carrying an untold story’. The stories that we have inside us need to be released and for this we don’t need huge wherewithal. We don’t need to modulate our writing voice to suit the mass market or wait for acceptance letters to arrive.

What I have discovered is this. If, as an author, you can offer impeccable reading stuff, if you can invest every cell in your body into it, your book will be lapped up by readers aligned to your genre. It’s time for unrecognized writers of quality to step out of the shadows and make themselves count with their contribution to the literary world.

There is hope, if we look past the fences around us. And there is scope if we are prepared to go it alone, when no one else is willing to walk along.

I am reminded of Tagore’s song, ‘Ekla Chalo Re’ here. If there is no one responding to your call - then go on all alone.