No straight thing was ever made

When I am 10 years old, I sombrely inform my mother, “I’ll talk to you less and less as I grow older, okay?” She thinks about it for a second. “No,” she says, “No, I think we’ll get closer.”

How does one stay angry at one’s family? What does it take away from us? My friends and I talk about family in India. We nurse our grudges close to the chest. We exchange notes, late in the night, about how our parents still make us feel small and disempowered. We crave the soft contours of forgiveness. We pick up small presents for them in the places we visit. We fold into those gestures all that is difficult to articulate. We are the ones who glue our families back together. Our parents didn’t learn the shortest way to apologise is to say the words. We don’t speak the same language as our parents.

I watch one of my friends pull her mother’s cheeks after a huge row and say, “my tantrum-throwing child.” The argument washes away. I watch another pack food for her sibling every time we go out. Another drops her mother every week to the airport. This is what we have. In the red-eyed clearing after a bad fight, we consider throwing it all away. In the light that descends day after day, we hold it tightly. Not because there is only one family to be had in this life, but because their broken ways are our own. Because, as Kant said, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” How desperately we long for our families to be straight.

When I first fall ill in 2013, I have just arrived in graduate school in England. It is a windy town half-an-hour from the coast. I sob so hard at the end of my first full day, my body shakes as I lie in the sheets of the Bed & Breakfast on Earlham Road. My mother, who has come to drop me off, asks, “What is it? Do you miss your boyfriend? Is it the cold? Tell me. How can I leave you here when you are like this?” We decide I am just overwhelmed and she goes home to India. An old friend visits. When she leaves, she sees my face fall through the glass as her bus rolls away from me. She doesn’t tell me this for three years. When she does, it breaks my heart. I hate that story because it is the story of that entire year.

I have a room of my own because my parents want that for me. They’ve put in their hard-earned savings to send me for an MA in creative writing. I am given the life that had never been available to them. My window overlooks a garden with rabbits. My library looks directly onto a lake. I try not to sound sad on the phone. What they do not say is, “How can you be so ungrateful for the opportunity you have been given?” What I do not say is, “Why don’t you come get me?” My younger sister says, “You are ruining my chances of being sent abroad for my education.” When I can’t muster a smile in my voice, I don’t call home.

In December, I can’t stop my teeth from clattering. I ask to come for Christmas. When I do, they say I look completely fine and what was I talking about on the phone from England? What I don’t say is that I struggle to write. I struggle to read. My professors suggest too many Andrews, Johns and Emilys to read and I connect with none of them. I am so anxious I can’t hit ‘send’ on assignments I have completed. I walk the lit campus path near the lake at night. I sleep till noon. Why didn’t you come to get me?

A friend at university says I should see a doctor. The doctor has me fill out a form. I have never seen a medical test like this. When my sister and I were little and we asked, “What does this word mean?”, our mother always replied, “Look it up in the dictionary.” In our home, a word means what it means. When the doctor says “major depression”, my family hears: “very sad but fixable”. It infuriates me when I hear them tell me to try and be happy. But in the stillness of my room, where no one is listening, it’s what I say to myself too. Being ill is lonely. Saying this isn’t my way of asking people to hold me. Being ill is lonely. But nothing is lonelier than the first year(s) of trying to explain your illness to people close to you. Once they have understood, it can sit comfortably in silence.

In 2014, when I move to Mumbai to work, my family has gotten more used to the idea. But they still have the most rudimentary of support and advice to offer. I feel incredibly let down. Why couldn’t they have read up? Why didn’t care packages arrive in the mail, like they did for my friends? Why did other people’s parents call every day? I am too upset to admit I would have hated daily calls.

The TV show The Affair shows how different the same memory can be for two people. In my memory, I text my mother saying I don’t know how I will last another three months at a stressful job. In my memory, my mother texts back, “Think positively”, and we don’t speak again for weeks. In her memory, the text conversation is a blur. She was busy, she replied with the advice she had at hand. She sent what she knew halfway across the country. When I didn’t reply, she didn’t pursue. She didn’t notice that we didn’t speak because there are lots of times when I am busy. In my memory, that night almost breaks me. In her memory, it is a one-sentence text message.

Enter a dark room and your instincts have to guide you. Do you walk with your arms spread out in front of you? What if you knock something over? If you have nothing but a cache of horror movies you have watched to guide you, how do you navigate the unknown? Don’t open the door, Jane, we whisper to the heroine creeping down the stairs to check out that suspicious noise. But Jane doesn’t have a helicopter view of the situation. She’s in it and she must act fast. And sometimes you see a door and you hear a knock, and you can’t help opening it. Every time I think why the hell did my parents not do better? But, over time, I have found myself thinking that sometimes your instincts aren’t good enough. That’s why some people die in horror movies.

A few months later, in 2015, I make a breakthrough in my mental health journey. An unhappy relationship dissolves. I find a young, hilarious therapist in Mumbai. I pierce my nose (something my ex expressly discouraged me from doing). I get a tattoo, and both my friend and I almost faint during the process. I post these developments on Facebook in a long note about my struggles with mental illness. The response is immense and unexpected. Old teachers, writers I admire, and my friends all comment to applaud “my courage”. It’s amazing how many people believe it’s brave to tell the truth. My parents comment saying they are proud of me and support me. But offline they ask, “Are you sure you want people to know? Won’t people judge you? Aren’t you afraid of the stigma? What if it affects your chances of being employed the next time around?”

Slowly my parents turned into people who talk about mental health at dinner parties. They themselves are proud of me when I write about my mental health journey and circulate the article in their close circle of friends and family — many of whom would have judged their parenting for my mental health issues. It opens a larger conversation within my extended family that allows cousins, aunts, uncles and more to come out with their own problems and seek medical help. My sister apologises for not being there for me and for saying that she thought my illness was holding us both back. It’s been a whole journey over the last four years for my entire family. When I point out how differently they viewed my illness in the beginning, they say honestly, “We didn’t know, okay? We didn’t know.” Sometimes, it’s hard to discern whether my pride in my family has wiped away the hurt.

In this apartment, perched at the top of the building, I am less lonely than anywhere else in the world. In the hallway, my family noisily let me know their proximity. Each of them has an identifiable footstep and pace. I went to university with a girl who said, “I have a good life back home, but I don’t want to return to it. I want to move on to something better.” I nodded, even on the inside. When I moved back to this house in 2016, I wondered if it was possible to return and to move forward in the same step.

Our families’ splintered ways of hurting each other mirror their splintered ways of loving one another. I don’t know if people can fundamentally change. But even in their fifties, my parents expanded. They learned. Does that make it all forgiveable? I don’t know. I have only learned to make the questions smaller, my heart a little bigger.

Urvashi Bahuguna is a poet living in Delhi

COMMENT NOW