9 February, 2017

I’m trying to be normal but it’s hard. I’m scared of all the psychiatrists. 

I write this and stop, my pen hovering over my journal. I don’t know what I’m feeling and I don’t want to excavate, like I had been. I leaf through the previous pages, more than thirty of them all filled from top to bottom in cursive handwriting, overflowing with my thoughts and musings. The words go over my head. I can’t understand those feelings, questions I posed to a nonexistent god and to myself — vignettes of everyday interactions and their dissections. Can’t grasp those complex turns of phrases, contradictions, rhetoric— language. I don’t know who the girl that wrote them was. She doesn’t exist anymore. All that comes out of me is these two feeble sentences. I stuff the journal in my cupboard under heaps of textbooks that are gonna lie there for weeks, just as indecipherable. 

***

18 February, 2017

Mi aaj aai barobar peeth malla. Mavshi shi bolle

I don’t know how the sentence comes out in Marathi, my mother tongue. I’ve never written in it before, only for mandatory school homework. But now here it is: I kneaded dough with mom. I talked to Auntie. There’s nothing to excavate. The sentence is full in itself and made of sunlight. After reading it to myself a few times, a contentedness spreads through me. It solidifies the action and its feeling in me. 

So I knead dough with Ma to make roti. Because there’s not much else I can do. I can’t read, study, write. I can’t watch movies because I’ve become a shell of a person, empty inside—unable to place myself in the worldly motivations and ambitions that drive the characters. The sticky dough is all over my hands. I press my fingers into it, mixing the contents into a homogenous slab. I’ve created something from nothing– an innocuous, salubrious thing for once, instead of creating hell out of words. What was it but a kind of masochism?

***

22 February, 2017

Aaj jevayla pithla ani bhaaji hoti *

Now when I sit down to study and the words make no sense to me, I bemoan to Ma. She says it doesn’t matter at the moment. It’s alright. You have your head in the clouds a lot. You only need to do physical work right now, and your brain will be back to normal on its own. You’ll see. 

This is the one time she’s not concerned about me falling back in school, maybe because the more pressing concern is me falling out of life altogether. 

My English and Marathi vocabulary was at the same level, last in third grade. Then the English words and phrases I knew kept expanding, while Marathi only grew so much. Throughout school, I’d studied all my subjects in English. But outside of it, with family and friends, shopkeepers, clerks in the bank, maids and watchmen, it was all Marathi. English was an internal business. It was all a conversation in my own head. Maybe in response to the books and writers I read and loved, but still in my head. Marathi doesn’t allow me anything except banal, everyday exchanges because my vocabulary in it is so limited. I don’t think in the language. When I’m having a conversation with someone in Marathi, it seldom becomes a channel for intimate confidences or private musings. When it veers in that direction with friends sometimes, English seeps in and provides the depth and nuance. 

Thinking and expressing myself in English– albeit mostly in my head or my diary–used to be exciting and stimulating because I had a wide range of words in my arsenal. If there wasn’t a problem, I could go ahead and invent it by the sheer scaffolding of words on top of each other. But with Marathi, I stayed on the surface and swam in the sunny shallow waters of everyday chitchat. I could not feel the core and acute sting of my pain if I wrote in Marathi, cause I didn’t have the words to fully realise its depth. It’s better that way, I now realise. 

I’m in my room when I hear Ma open the door for someone. I know by the voice that it’s my aunt. I resolve to stay in my room until I’m told to come out, which I hope is never. Ma calls me out and I have to go. I smile at my aunt and we exchange all the usual pleasantries. I never falter in my sentences, no word salad. One cleanly worded answer after another for every question. And I pass the test. 

After the word salad and countless colourful pills, the rich introspective internal life I had ceased to exist. On the inside, I felt like a big empty house that was gathering dust. My thoughts had become like a child’s crayon drawing– simple, happy, understandable by everyone but flat, shallow without any spice or substance. I wasn’t able to speak or think in English after that, unless I was absolutely required to. My language had become stilted. 

Speaking and having thoughts only in Marathi, impose a sense of normalcy and groundedness. As I shape the soft dough into small balls, I let the limited set of Marathi words and phrases I know mould my thoughts and occupations around them. My mind is populated now only with names of various recipes and ingredients that go into them, vegetables, kitchen appliances and utensils, birds. It forces me into simplicity and a quotidian existence. I’m stripped off the abstractions, the lofty, convoluted speculations and beliefs, the heavy existential thoughts that weigh me down. It slowly nudges me towards health. 

In the afternoon, a film of dust gathers over all the objects in the house. The powdery dust particles glisten gold in the hot afternoon sunlight. Ma is a cleanliness freak. All the floors and furniture always used to be spotless and immaculate. But since I started deteriorating, everything has been neglected; everything except me. Being restricted to only doing physical work, I start wiping up the furniture with a dry cloth and let school and books gather the dust for a while.  There’s realness here– things I can touch. No deceptions. There’s no crack for hallucinations to sprout in, no chance to get so enmeshed in words, their tangle, and arranging them in a specific way so as to lead to a word salad. I have to stay above the dust gathered on the furniture, the windowsills and tables. Stay in the aboveworld, not escape again into the shadows between objects. It will need sustained effort, like wiping the floors and furniture everyday to keep the dust off of them. 

I remember a summer day from three years ago, when I was playing a board game with a friend from my apartment building. It was just the three of us: Me, Anika and her younger sister. The other kids we usually played with had gone for a vacation with their families. Anika’s mom called her home for lunch and so I went home too. After an hour or so, I felt this urgent need to be with someone, talk to them– not about anything particular. I didn’t even like Anika that much but I rapped on her door thrice as though my sanity depended on it–and it did– even though I knew it was nap time for her mother. I was feeling myself sinking, out of this world and into some other place and I needed a buoy to stay afloat. 

She opened the door and I could hear her mom shouting from her bedroom, telling her to tell the visitor to not knock when it’s three in the afternoon. Anika said she’s just gonna sit in and watch TV. Upon that, I hovered in front of her barred door for a few seconds, almost pleading, until she shut the second door in my face. The only buoy had turned up its nose to me. My urgency had nowhere to land. 

I wasn’t fully conscious that something out of the ordinary was happening to me, but I also knew with an ominous certainty that I had to find someone and do a normal thing with them– talk, play a game or just ride the swings and chat. That way I could mirror their tone, gestures and facial expressions. Through it, I’d inhabit their headspace and leave mine which was getting increasingly fragmented and nonsensical, sucking me in. Only then would I stay afloat in this aboveworld; not sink into a reality of my own making, that would lead to my unmaking. 

The printed paper didn’t ease out of the printer’s opening for its coherence and clarity to be received by another person. There was no easy exchange. Instead, a suffocation – it got stuck inside the machine and crumpled in on itself, the neat words on it now distorted and unintelligible. 

* Translation: There was vegetable and curry for dinner today

                                                                              ***

12 March, 2017

Aaj mi pahilyanda baher gele*

I go to the grocery store and then the bank to run errands. This is the homework Ma gives me. I expect the people on the street to sneak a glance at me as if red marks have been scrawled on my body like on a homework assignment, singling me out. But not one of them does. I keep walking, still conscious, expectant. But it doesn’t come – even the slightest acknowledgement of difference. Only everyday exchanges. For the shopkeeper, I almost pass as just any other person on the street out to do their errands. But he could think– an odd time for her to be here; isn’t she supposed to be in school at eleven am on a Wednesday? I should time it better next time. The bank clerk is the same prosaic repetition of the shopkeeper and doesn’t give me what I’ve been expecting. 
I’ve succeeded. I’ve camouflaged. I’ve passed. I let myself believe it like all the other false things I believe.

*  Translation: I went out for the first time today

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Tara is a writer living in Wisconsin. Her essays and poetry have previously been recognized by Cambridge University and the Young Poets Network. She tweets at @knotsandcross