Sweltering in My Own Sour Breath

I think of last September, when my professor came up to me and said to my face that there’s something wrong with me. You don’t listen! Your mind is racing! These accusations against me were axiomatic. I thought that my very presence was disruptive and I needed fixing. So, I went to see a psychiatrist.

I then slipped into the deep dark tunnel of antidepressants, prescribed to me by him. The quack doctor had promised me it would thrust a passion for life under my skin. However, all I could feel was nightmares budding and leafing darkly from my nerve endings, swinging and rustling in the black air of my grief.

When I told this to my psychiatrist, he simply laughed the matter off. He proclaimed with sage insight that the medicines would surely fix me up if only I gave them some time.

“But,” I muttered under my breath.

He then knit his brows and assumed a firm tone with me. “You must do as you’re told. I know what is best for you.”

Falling back into his chair, his expression gentled slightly, and the creases on his face smoothed out. And just like that he brushed it all aside: the palpitations, spasms, fears, bad dreams and insomnia — “minor side effects,” he called them. He wrote me a fresh prescription and upped my dosage. I looked at my father in the hope that he might intervene on my behalf. But he just sat there deep in his chair, with a certain air of admiration not for the psychiatrist’s lightning skill, rather for his tact and his methods. I feared my psychiatrist had found a supporter in my father, for both shared in common the vanity that they knew what was best for me.

On our way back from the hospital my father didn’t seem to notice me. I felt as if we inhabited two opposite continents, a vast ocean between us.

***

The next day my father flew back to Bhubaneswar, leaving me behind in my small flat in Hyderabad. Although I lived alone, I had no privacy in my room. The lidless third-eye of the doctor hovered over my head, constantly watching me.

Monthlong, I had to suffer under the suffocating vault of antidepressants, stewing in my own sour breath: the otherwise calm air rushing in and out like some maniac, forming furious eddies inside me. Restlessness burgeoned in me, buffeting me with a sea-fury. Like a series of tidal waves it battered my mind and body, leaving me bruised and forlorn like a shore. Exhausted, I would call my father.

“Stop snivelling,” he would growl at me over the phone, his words descending upon me like the brute sound of thunder. “Just take your medicines.”

I would then clench my teeth and gulp down the rage I didn’t realize I had been harbouring.

I tried reaching the doctor. But he wouldn’t take my calls. So, I tried to get hold of him through his secretary and left a message with her. The doctor didn’t ring me back for two days. And when he finally did, he said my illness was getting worse and he would again have to up my dosage. My mind blanked to an unearthly calm at his words, before breaking away into a thunderclap of defiance. I told him straight up, I would no longer go through with this.

The otherwise amiable doctor assumed a not-so-amiable tone with me. “Do as I tell you,” he said, sounding not quite so kind. “I am the doctor, not you.”

I then hung up on him.

The singeing fury subsided and sank in me like the setting sun.

That evening, a strange feeling of sadness crept into the air. The once-stoic sky groaned and wept, rain welling like tears. I felt desolate as the sudden rain came down hard with a resonant tone, the dull sound seeping into my heart.

Rather glum, I leaned back in my chair and took my tarot deck from the shelf. The deck was well-worn, well-thumbed, the cards frayed and yellow around the edges from frequent handling. I shuffled the cards until two cards fell out: the tower and the hanged man.

The images dropped in me like stones, sending ripples across me as if I were a black lake. The tower is a card of events. A card of mis-happenings. And the hanged man suggested a state of suspension. Together the cards intimated an unanticipated time of crisis. A period of interruption at the soul level.

***

Coming off medication was no child’s play. I felt trapped in a limbo: suspended between sleep and wakefulness, sanity slipping through my fingers like water.

True, the air was calm in comparison, going in and out without making a fuss like an obedient child, and the tidal waves of restlessness that had broken over me gradually receded over the span of a few days. But nothing could drag me out of myself, out of the void of despondency and torpor.

I had not slept for two days in a row. In spite of everything, I managed to take my end-of-semester exams. And with the vacation around the corner, I decided to visit home. Not that I had looked forward to a grand transformative experience, but I expected something, some meaningful gesture from my father to put things right between us.

***

I reached Bhubaneswar at 4 pm. When I emerged from the roar and bustle of the airport, the sky on the horizon was bleeding like a cut. I felt a sharp stinging pain shoot through me at a sudden acute awareness of my own wound.

My father was waiting by the entry gate. Half-expecting to meet his reproachful face, I was confused and surprised to see his mouth set in a grin. I don’t mean a rueful grin, but a grin of downright indifference, as if September had never occurred, as if I hadn’t made those late-night calls in the hope of hearing one kind word from him.

“We will act as if all this were a bad dream,” he said and turned his back on me. And that was that. At that moment, he seemed a colossus and I stood in his shadow. What I registered was his round face. His eyes. His lineaments that matched mine. I was his extension. His progeny. And he was my Creator. I became acutely aware of this fact. No retort came from my mouth. We made our way back home, the ocean of silence still between us.