Deliverance from evil

I wrote in a previous post about mental midgets and about leaving ugliness behind and often without a second glance. This post is elaborating upon that in some measure. Life is not always beautiful or like a sweet dream. Some parts are nothing short of nightmares – no matter where one is born – and it’s necessary indeed to take a good look at what make up one’s nightmares and leave the ugliness behind and not let the bad breath, talons and claws get a grip on one’s insides.

I got to know about mental midgets, about ugliness in its various hues, shapes and sizes and about the ‘what-not-to-be’ vis-à-vis my blood family. I was born in the mental gutters. I cut off relations with my blood family and my relatives when I was 33. I regret only the fact that I didn’t do it years sooner – as soon as I was completely financially free and had paid back (in money and kind) that which I was sure I had owed them.

I had sensed for years and years that there was something wrong about the family into which I was born. Yet I know now that I was rather reticent about speaking about this or even about voicing out my own thoughts too much. I know now that I have for as long as I have had thought in me been a person who has sorted and sifted through various impressions and experiences and memories and filed an almost instantaneous intuitive response which says ‘to be avoided’, ‘neutral’, ‘interesting’ and so on regarding people and it’s been the same in regard to other responses regarding various other intense thoughts, feelings, ideas. I can say at 40 that I have been right more often than wrong about (what and) who matters and doesn't. Once I discarded what I did – I used to think that the same didn’t need more elaboration because ugliness is not something pleasant. It’s easier to dismiss it than to write about it. But I know that it’s necessary for me to write about ugliness. 

I was born in a family which was mentally vacant, and vapid and vulgar otherwise. 

It was about the age when I was 8 or 9 that I remember my parents and brother sitting around and my mother saying with restrained pride that yes, our family was important in the neighbourhood. As my brother had pointed out: we were the only family which had a T.V, a fridge and a car. She added for good measure that of course that wasn’t ‘important’ in itself but still it was true indeed that it was something to consider – there was ‘status’ that we had. I cannot remember the rest of the conversation. I only remember the sick feeling of terrible shame, humiliation and dejection. Back then, I didn’t even know why I felt thus. I had merely felt that living did not mean just having a T.V, fridge and car surely. I had not opened my mouth but had slithered out of that dining room space.

I was a terrible student in Class III. I was scolded, humiliated or received a few whacks on the palm by the class teacher for being thus. I didn’t think any of it was unjustified. One day I was sharing the bench with a girl whom I actually liked back then and whom I considered a friend. For some reason (I don’t know why) she suddenly screamed out  saying that I was cheating. Now it is important to mention that the assignment was a handwriting assignment. The teacher hauled me up. I think that she too had some unstated anger against me. She humiliated me in front of the class and added quite out-of-context and sarcastically about my being ‘from England’. I argued. That one day, I argued. I said I couldn’t cheat on a handwriting assignment, could I? I certainly had not cheated. It was a day of all days that my mother had come over to the school and to the classroom to check on me. I had joined the school in Class II and had not received any rave reviews and my parents had the habit of checking on what I did and would talk with the teachers about my failures. I remember that while I’d been punished by being told to sit on the podium I had wretchedly thought that at least it was a good thing that none of my parents had traipsed over to the school that day. There was a knock on the door. And I remember just having the feeling that it was my mother’s knock. Someone opened the door. I remember the teacher letting out one long tirade of what a disgusting child I was and how I’d been cheating. I had argued again. It was a handwriting assignment. Why would I cheat? HOW would I cheat? I don’t remember anything else. Back in the house there was a long lecture and a terrible scolding about what a wretched creature I was. I said again and again that I hadn’t cheated. The point made from the other side was that I was despicable for having argued with the teacher. For having yelled. She was a teacher after all. I should learn, should I not – when to keep quiet and accept what is said. I argued still but I had been shaking with anger and a sense of injustice inside. Over a tiff with another girl over a pencil however, when the teacher wrote to my parents reporting the incident my parents had written a long and detailed note to the teacher and had pointed out that the pencil was mine even though another girl had claimed the pencil as hers. The other girl’s parents had stated that they didn’t really care whose pencil it was; it was only a pencil – the other girl, whoever it was, was welcome to it. The same teacher had said with righteousness that I could take the pencil.

I’d been some 8 years old when I heard my parents giggling with great mirth and saying that I was stupid. They repeated that over and over and in various ways. I know and still remember what I heard and had thought at that point about what made me stupid/boka. This was at an age when I could read poems a few times and rattle them off. This was at an age when I’d read about the grand encounter between Alexander and Porus and been utterly enchanted by it although I’d read different kinds of books by then. This was at an age when I’d read about Kabir but had been not that fascinated and couldn’t understand what ‘God’ he’d been singing about although the fact that he had been an orphan made me wonder. I think though that most children do have an imagination, a sense of wonder and glee, a curiosity and a manner of seeing reality and through the façades of reality.

During Parents'-Teachers' meetings – my mother would go and sometimes my parents would go and talk with the teachers. They believed that it was necessary to talk with teachers to find out how their children were doing in school. Every time my mother would tell the teacher that I was stupid and slow in different and very colourful ways. It was a litany I would endure. On two occasions however, two teachers rather firmly told my mother that she was mistaken. One teacher told her sharply that I was not stupid and that I was quite above-average intelligence and that I wrote well but was very careless. Another teacher told my mother that the only reason I made mistakes was because my mind traveled faster than I could write. I don’t know why these two teachers defended me in school but they did. Both used to teach English in middle-school and one of them had a very clipped and very good accent and one of them had given me a (completely justified) 4/25 in Economics once. My mother was not pleased when these two teachers did not fall into line with her complaints about me. A woman tutor of Maths when she heard my mother’s tales about me said that she was most ashamed and disgusted about having me as a pupil for she had earlier thought I was different. And the woman private tutor, I know, never quite liked me even remotely after that. Not much of any loss. I was much to my relief able to attend private tuition in Maths conducted by a very good and stern Maths tutor for a year, at least.

My relations with my brother – the only sibling I had was not something to write home about. He bullied me and tried to butter me up sometimes but truth be told I did not like him. It was more like not knowing who this person was and not even wanting to know the person at all. I felt the same way with my parents but at a different level. I think they treated me – all of them – much like a puppy or dog which is simultaneously coochie-cooed and then bullied. I think many siblings fight and argue and then band up against the parents on common grounds – and that happened too. That is not what bothered me. When I’d written a poem about a playground at about 9/10 and I was pleased with the poem for it had a story to it and also a feeling of loneliness and even rhymed – I showed it to my brother. He asked me whether I could recite it. I actually did recite it although I was very worried about whether I could. He then told me off saying I could not have written the poem. With great intelligence the matter was discussed later with all the people of the family: nobody who wrote a poem could actually recite it from memory. My parents dismissed me. I stood on the sides like a dumb child. Needless to say I didn’t show anything I wrote to any of my family after that. Whatever physical fights that I had with my brother- I bore and fended off the punches and slaps and all until I was 12 or so. After that I gave as good as I got. I would hit hard – and that message was sent out clearly. After I was 13 my brother did not lay a finger on me because he knew I would spill blood. My parents only slapped me around and yanked my hair and pinched me hard a few times during my young years and adolescent years – especially my mother. Apart from that it was a good thing that there was no touching in the family. I was known as ‘gaaye pora’ for trying to hug people from the family and relatives and sniggering comments were made regarding the same but I didn’t know what these meant until I was decades older. When I was molested a few times by different men (the same male did not try to molest me a second time; I knew how to physically take care of myself as best as I could) and my mother got to know from a neighbourhood friend – I was sternly told that that is what came of being ‘gaaye pora’. My father knew too. Yet the people who had molested me were never disallowed from coming to the house nor were told off. I had been about 9/10 back then. For years I had actually believed that I had been cuddled and petted when I was a baby and yet given my memory about certain aspects of life – I could never really remember any affectionate hugs. The memories come from old photographs. In photographs, especially when I was less than 3 and a ½. As a child whenever I had in a moment of weakness told anything to anybody in confidence – about a terrible fear or an unaccountable dream or a thought – it would be shared with everybody at the dinner table and I would be laughed at.

At round about 13, I used to write letters to quite a few friends during the holidays and to a distant mama. He used to write as well and I got along with him quite well. He wasn’t the dodgy sort but used go for walks on summer breaks and converse with me but did not talk down to me. In that rather rotten and awkward life among family and relatives that mama and another mama were people who seemed to treat me more or less like a human being. Those relations wouldn't have survived for long anyway but back then I enjoyed their company and a few of the conversations. Talking about surveillance – one of the inland letters that I wrote to one mama was discovered in a book or a notepad when I was in Class VII and then taken out, opened and read and then I was humiliated for ending off the letter with ‘love, hugs and kisses’. My father berated me and my mother told me that such things were vulgar and improper with a mama. Was I vulgar? I didn’t think I was vulgar at all but in private I remember all the feelings I had had, and feeling very disoriented had merely fulminated. In college, my diaries would sometimes be read without permission and I would be hauled up. I didn’t care by then. I merely told everybody concerned that they wouldn’t know what I was talking about or writing about. I had my thoughts and if they thought that there was something wrong with me because of that – that was their problem, not mine.

Relations are not born out of thin and ephemeral air or any meaningless attachments. I know people might indeed argue with me and say: how can you deny blood relations and relatives and family. Well, I do and have. 

I did get gifts now and then through my childhood years and adolescent years and a few clothes every year and I certainly was not abused physically and my birthdays were celebrated with great pomp and when I was a baby and child I certainly was given medicines when I used to fall frequently ill and they would sometimes talk with me as though I were at least halfway human but the truth is from the time I was a little past 3 years of age (I remember this because there was a geographical shift) – they liked me less and less as a person. I do not think however that they were ever obliged to like me. I was a contrary and increasingly more and more of an awkward, ungainly character with a peculiar gruffness about me and grew up to be more and more ugly in just simple physical terms too (which also drew taunts). And I disturbed them as a person with my likes and dislikes and even conversations which they sometimes overheard. Why couldn’t I be more like my charming and lovely cousins who were so ‘mature’ (and those cousins I must say were charming and lovely). Couldn’t I see how intelligent and brainy and clever and loving most of my friends were? I was seen as being stubborn and also as being submissive. My mother once told a roomful of people while giggling and laughing that I was so boka that if I were told to stand on one foot – I would simply do that. My father once told me that I was stupid for while my friend had very intelligent things to say I only had one word to say, ‘Ya, ya. Ya, ya.’ Even through my school years they would keep telling me that of course they did love me. I was sometimes indulged and sometimes simply verbally abused. And there was no other motivation other than to humiliate me as a person because I was unlike them.

The best thing however was that I was ignored as a simpleton and never mollycoddled. This gave me a certain kind of mental space or maybe I was simply born with this peculiar trait from birth. This mental space, among other things, allowed me to choose and almost without thought what and who were worth fighting over and where it was best to try to keep one’s mouth shut. I had more physical freedom than most of my friends did. This is a fact. And I could go out on my cycle or foot or by bus here and there. I used to go swimming in summer and I used to go out in the late afternoons or during holidays. Sometimes my parents also let me visit other friends who lived quite far away and dropped me off too. There would have been hell to pay if I had ever had a boyfriend during that time – either I would have been humiliated beyond reckoning or worse, the boy would have been but this was not a problem for me. Boys were not interested in me and I didn’t have any usual teenage affair. I used to participate in school skits and plays and whatever extra-curricular program I could from class VII onward. I enjoyed and even loved acting on stage for the little skits a group of us would put up through the school year and we often did not even have a script – which was good because the actors could make up the lines as they went along. Even this was looked down upon generally speaking by my parents and I was scolded but they didn’t know every time that I was participating. Our class used to win prizes too every now and then and there was a nice moment for me when our class won the prize for presenting a one-act play on The Gift of the Magi and I had been Jim. There were other times too. Nothing that interested my family and I didn’t even want to share any of this. The only times they seemed to be really interested was if there was some certificate that I won and that happened only once in a blue moon. Then it was proudly displayed for some godforsaken reason.

In terms of knowledge and ideas – there was nothing to be discussed in the family circles. They all read books though – my parents had read Bengali books and even my brother used to read and they listened to music and songs too. But there was no talk of anything. Nor were any ideas discussed seriously. So I grew up knowing that people who read some or had a smattering of ideas of what Tagore had written or Sarat Chandra or Bankim – didn’t become ‘better’ people. The only thing I was scolded for not reading was the newspaper. I didn’t actually read it. Not during my school-years unless there was something particular that caught my interest. But I was allowed to read books. Of all sorts. My brother had once tried to complain to my parents that I was reading ‘trash’ – that was the occasion that my parents had said that I could read what I wanted to. So my brother’s plan to expose me didn’t work. I don’t know what I would have done if I had not been allowed to read or write or have some degree of the physical space and freedom that I did…maybe I’d have become mad a lot sooner. Much later when I was in college and after a lot of water had flowed under the bridge – my parents kept elevating me to great standards. Such-and-such person had said I was ‘brilliant and that I was a ‘genius’ even. So-and-so had said that I was ‘lonely’. They even tried to tell me that they hadn’t really understood me. I had had to shut them up and very quietly then. It wasn’t about what they were saying anymore. I sensed why they were saying what they were although it would take me years to understand and more years to actually articulate the thoughts. It was out of some instinctive and perverse biological reaction. I was their ‘blood’. They were not about to let go of whatever hold they had over me. And their views changed rapidly. Anytime I objected to what they were saying after 22 - I could be dismissed as being 'clinically mad' or as being 'unreasonably angry'. They swung from saying that it was 'all their fault' to saying that I was sick and insane. My father once told me that if anybody had the right to kill me it was they the parents because they had given birth to me. My mother if and when I liked anybody deeply would either try to tell him/her what a disgusting person I was or try to humiliate me about the person whom I liked deeply. I certainly didn’t keep quiet at all times. I told them what I thought of them for saying what they did and was told that I was oshobhyo (coarse/vulgar/uncivilized) and worse. 

I did all sorts of household chores from a very early age. They themselves had had hard childhoods – I knew this and I felt a huge guilt all along and so I did whatever I could. And by the time I was 18 since the maid came half of the month – my general chores included getting the milk early in the morning, doing groceries, sweeping, mopping the house, cleaning the bathroom, doing laundry, making basic lunch, going to the bank, taking relatives/friends to the whatever clinic or doctor, making and cancelling train reservations and so on. I didn’t think twice about these chores. I used to think back then that most of the people in college did the same. Even if others didn't or some did even more - I didn't think that doing chores were a bad thing at all. Somehow when I did fairly well in my high-school exams. and got into a reputed college – after my parents were done with feeling very proud in terms of their status, my ‘achievement’ was flung back on my face: bhalo result korechhish, Presidency-te admission peyechish boley mone korechhish onek kichu korey felechhish?!’ (you seem to think that just because you've done well in your exams and gotten through Presidency that you've achieved something?!) I didn’t think that I had ‘achieved’ anything anyway. I had simply felt relieved and happy back then when I’d been able to get through a college I had wanted to in Calcutta. My mother after some months had moved to Calcutta with a job in a hospital and my father stayed in Durgapur and visited during the weekends. I was made to feel as though my mother had come over ‘just for me’, that she had made some great 'sacrifice' by coming over to Calcutta and that I didn’t do enough to show my gratitude. I quite honestly didn’t know what else I could do but still just kept to doing what I could for a couple of years at least. Even before I applied to the US much later for higher studies I had been working for over a year and putting all the money into a joint account. I hadn’t really used much of that money and yet when the question for money for the application fees to the universities came about they said they would pay. I got a fellowship to Purdue, which came with a stipend. Some years later I got to know that they were going around telling people that they had spent 'a lot of money' on me but they never told people what I had paid back to them within even the first year and then two of being a graduate student. I didn't either to correct their tales because I'd forgotten till a couple of years ago.

Homilies they had aplenty. That fortune favours the brave. That it was very important to be honest, courageous and always sincere. That it was very important to do one’s work well and that it was bad to be selfish. That one had to be ‘mature’ and ‘believe in God’, and about ‘suffering’ they had many more things that they said. But the thing is I could see them for what they really were - sickos. People can pretend to be wise and kind and generous and charming and more. I’m sure they fooled a lot of people. But by the time I was in college I was sure that I didn’t like them. I had felt the shame while younger and had sometimes guiltily felt that it was my own shortcoming but by college I knew. They had no concerns outside the gaari-baari-biletey thaka (a house, a car, staying in England/staying in the west), a false sense of status, duty, security, being ‘settled in life’. They might have pretended otherwise but they were trivial, common and cheap people. People I would not have hobnobbed with nor would have wanted to know. People who disgusted me and repulsed me. I do not dismiss and have never dismissed the importance of money in life but I am sure now that the fact that I saw my parents arguing and quarreling most violently about money and over money and when they weren’t exactly poor (both were doctors with secure government jobs) and having a violent physical fight over 1 rupee when I was 13 or 14 made me see that it wasn’t the presence of some bits of money and secure jobs that made for people being decent – just decent – in a meaningful way. I can provide other examples of the kind of 'people' they were but this will do.

Lots of times by my parents, brother, relatives and erstwhile friends I was rebuked, ‘do you think you are perfect? People have shortcomings; families have shortcomings. Nobody is all good. Nobody is all bad. Why do you have to make such a big deal? Nobody has a perfect family, childhood or youth. You got your freedom. What about when you were ill? They/we took care of you. You were allowed to roam around and do lots of things that other people were not able to.’ There are plenty of other things that I had been told. Plenty of other experiences I have not broached upon here. Plenty of stuff that I engaged with, that I pursued, that I experimented with and that which happened especially after I was 21 and after I’d done well in examinations and external stuff. But when I, with all the depth of my being started asking questions within – it broke the delusion. That broke the genuine delusion of whatever normalcy I had tried to cling to while developing my mind and being. After that whatever happened and didn’t happen, whatever I did and wasn’t able to do, whatever I broke and lost, whatever transpired in sudden dreams meeting reality, whatever loneliness I barely stumbled through on grey unbroken landscapes, whatever glorious bits of reality that I experienced, whatever I failed at miserably and whatever I flew through miraculously, and whatever uncertainty I have gone through, whatever and whoever I cherish – those are other matters. What I did see and what I knew is that I did not have a meaningful family. I could see too that not many people had meaningful or loving families. The only difference is that I got to see, know and full well realize what and who matter and what and who don’t in very real and also concrete terms. Then my choice was crystal clear. Yes, I was born in the mental gutters. The thing is I didn’t like it or the people nor wanted to be liked by the people who liked the same and were very comfortable about the same. It was like being enveloped in a sick ugliness where I tried to gush sentimentally about my family's ‘goodness’ but it didn’t last. I saw what the family was and very clearly and over and over again. I knew I was right even when others said I was wrong, back in my early youth. Later, I had the language with which to articulate the reasons too. My family disgusted me not only for whatever it wanted to extract from me whether that was just in the form of mean and callous laughs and tittering at my expense but also for the kind of common, cheap, dirty and repulsive people they were. The rest of the blood relatives were no better or worse. And I had had enough. Yes, I knew when I was in my twenties that people with my kinds of 'sickness' that I had at 21 are often simply kept like locked vegetables inside the house or reduced to the same. I can thank my guardian angel/Holy Spirit for not letting that happen back then.

I was taken out of the gutters which pollute the mind, heart...and the inner realms. I know this. I was 23 then. And I know just what a blessing it was and is. I can even list reasons and I actually have sometimes. Maybe in the end the poet was right and ‘sagacity’ will have to go. There is certainly something ineffable too that defies intellectual and rational explanations and goes 'beyond reason'. That is fine. I shall not dispute that. But I also know exactly why there was only one thing that Willie Garvin was scared of and why he feared only one thing. Only a person who has been taken out of the gutters – and not always the physical gutters – by another can ever truly sense or know, leave alone realize, what he felt and why. I do.

My identity has never come from being a biological daughter and a sister or from any biological relations anyway. This I knew and had felt viscerally within when I was 5 or thereabouts and played the ‘who I am’ game in a sleepy town thousands of miles west. It took me decades to understand, in part at least, that fundamental realization. The Shiva stotra states what God is while saying all He is not and for me, much of life has been seeing what is not ‘neti, neti…’ (not this-not this) and what I will not engage in or dabble in even if it means I go through the fundamentally surreal and the uncanny sometimes or walk alone for stretches without knowing what is to be or whether I'll truly make good. I do not know what the future will bring but I know what the past has brought and I know exactly the points which light up the path of the journey and give it meaning...