On dying and living

Image from Wix

The earliest memory of loss is of a sudden absence. We shifted houses when I was four. Before that, my father, mother, sister, grandmother and I used to live in a two-bedroom apartment in a different part of Kolkata. I have quite a few memories from when we used to live there. One of them was of my mother sending me downstairs to one of our neighbours: the neighbour, who was an elderly lady with two children, had a daughter who used to "teach" me. I carried my picture books, or probably we looked through children's books that she had and my mother would give me peeled pomegranates in a white and red tiffin box held together by rubber bands. Perhaps there were more snacks but all I remember are pomegranates peeled, red, slightly acidic in my mouth and one of my least favourite fruits, I decided quite early on. I remember my teacher telling me we will take a break and asking me to eat my snacks. And I remember one day my mother telling me that I cannot go downstairs anymore since she had died. I did not really understand death, not as if I really do now, but I knew it meant not being there. It was strange seeing her brother and mother and not her. She was quite young and one day suddenly she was gone. Somewhere floated the rumour to my ears that she had killed herself--if then or later, I can't know for certain. But she was my first introduction to suicide and sadly, not the last.

Perhaps a little over a decade later, one of my grandmother's sisters, K-, decided to take her own life. She used to be one of my favourite grandmothers--she had taught me songs she had learnt from her time at some ashram, how to do the prayer to the Sun, and she would give us bibhuti after her prayers. She used to have so many stories, mostly of her travels and when she would come over, my grandmother would become a different person too. Everyone loved her. But sadness had its claws deep and she succeeded in ending her life one day. After her death, there were only murmurs as if ripples running through. Children are always left out of these conversations but from here and there, snippets: enough to know the depth of K-;s sadness and how it would haunt her partner whom she left behind, who came back to find her dead and eventually came to spend some of his last days at our house, living in the room that I had claimed as mine, before a painful death took him too.

Not too many years after, a second of my grandmother's sisters tried taking her own life. The night before that, she called our house. I was the one who received her call, talking quickly and perfunctorily, asking her how she was and if I needed to tell my parents something. My parents were away and I was alone with some much desired and precious few moments of time alone. I remember I was watching TV, a show that I would never be able to watch in peace if my sister were there. I was hungry and watching when the call came and I picked it up in annoyance. My grandmother was bedridden; I was the messenger. What should I tell my parents, I asked. Just that I called, she said. Okay, said I. Take care, you too. Done and free to return to my TV show. I inform my mother of the call after she returns home. Next morning there's a commotion of some sort and as I go up, my mother is standing with one of my other extended grandfathers. She tells me that P- has taken her life. Rather, she tried to but her heart gave way. I'm shocked. She says ours was the last house she had called. I'm processing. She says you could have asked her to come and stay at our house. I swallow the immense hurt and weight that sentence delivers. Even in that moment I'm aware of the untruth of that sentence and the weight that my mother unthinkingly has meted out to me. But I'm not strong enough to believe in my own awareness and so over the years the question comes back to haunt me: could I have said a different sentence, could I have been softer, could I have said the right set of words that would have stopped her from trying to take her own life?

Over the years I lose parts of myself as I am brought by life and my own choices dangerously close to people who are suicidal and who threaten suicide when I try to leave. Friends, intimate partners struggling with a feeling that I've been familiar with personally for a long time. I have known what it feels like to want to end your life, every day for years. I have known what it feels like in moments, what ideating is like, how alienating and cruel the world can seem. On top of that, I had my mother's careless gift which she could never take back and the suicides in my family weighing down on me. I stay much longer than I should around people who hurt me and I lose a lot. Over many years. And I learn, infinitely slowly but I learn the truth. Once someone makes up their mind to kill themselves, there is little standing between them and death. I scour internet forums, I read Schopenhauer's essay, I find Jesse Bering's phenomenal work on suicide and its impact on those left behind, I follow bloggers who lose their loved ones to suicide and it becomes clearer and clearer. Little to nothing between any of us and death. Except, perhaps chance.

Two years ago, who I was moves to Mumbai. I try settling in the mad rush of the city, a new work and workplace, while also trying to lengthen the life of a dead relationship at the cost of my own slow death. I move from the living room of one friend's house to another, sleeping deeply and fitfully before travelling through Mumbai's notorious traffic to get to work, where I of course have begun my life by arguing over my contract. My energy runs low, work is demanding, the fight around what-should-be-my-rights are demanding and at the end of the day, I have no privacy. In those moments, I didn't even think about privacy. I was too exhausted to think and crashed as soon as my head would hit the mattress.

At one point, I lived in an apartment with four men-- one of my friends and three of his flatmates. All incredibly kind and accommodating, just like my other friend and his partner. But Mumbai is a new kind of hell, a hell that some like living in. Real estate rent price is through the roof generally and God forbid you look for a room for yourself; you should be willing to part with a significant amount of whatever you earn. And if you are a single woman who has male friends or visitors, or are non-vegetarian, you can be certain of being met with judgment at the least and enforcements of different sorts at the most. I found these all at once during my first month in Mumbai. Amid all this, on some other end was someone close to me going through something terrible and ending some of their days disappearing from contact or telling me that they could not live like this any longer. There was great physical distance between us and yet, they confided in me and I became their personal advocate, drafting letters and constructing arguments for their battles. My fire was incredibly low and there was nobody to fuel it. I couldn't even see it myself until it was too late. Sometime close to the end of the year, a month after I had lived like this, I found a house and a room for myself. The time and peace brought on by reduced commute, a room to myself, and a whole apartment when my flatmate was away, which she often was, brought out the impact of everything I had gone through and not felt. Walking to work became a fit, crossing a road became an every day nightmare that I somehow managed to live through every day and coming back to the apartment I would be flooded with fear and longing. Eventually over the days of not taking care of myself since I could not figure out how, suicidal thoughts started surfacing. Since they were not new, I felt I could endure them. If I worked and did everything else I had to do, make my art, write, they would get covered by something else. But I began to find myself unable to write, painting became strained and sporadic and living alone became a battle of one part of myself against another: one wanted to live, one wanted to die.

For different people, at different times, why they want to commit suicide is different. It is an incredibly nuanced topic, like all human experiences are if they are looked at. So, my desire to end myself at that point came from seeing no way out of my fear and the inevitability of death. I was incredibly obsessed and afraid of death, and on the other hand, I could not bear the weight of my own existence and suffering only to have it end in what I feared. Emotions disappeared and logic led me to suicide as being the way out. Friends came over during that time; sometimes it helped, sometimes it made me feel an even stronger desire to kill myself. Nobody saw me, nobody understood and I was exhausted from burning. 31st December, 2019, two of my friends were over. One of them had come over after I had called him to say that I felt incredibly suicidal. I had never called anyone in all these years during the pit of my suicidal moments. But that day, the clarity of thought was inhuman and criminal in its existence. I needed help and was in no position to think about a therapist, so a friend. He helped tide the night and the next day, I told both of them rather matter-of-factly that we needed to play ninja, one of my favourite games from theatre practice. It had movement, it was fun and I felt certain that it would be enough to make my brain behave a little better. It wasn't and I was almost out of ways to save myself. Trusting a stranger, no matter how well trained, or letting anyone in at that point was unthinkable. I was coldly aware of how far my friends were, how little of an impact any of their words or actions had on me. Little stood between me and death. Except chance.

As chance would have it, I had joined a workplace where there was a piano at work. A beautiful piano that one could play and a few did. A piano that had apparently been the founder's but he had brought it into the workplace to make work a place you would want to be at. He had really succeeded. That area was where many of my office interactions took place and where, I realized in some deep part of me, I got saved. One of my colleagues, J-, a stranger at first and then someone I got to know a little, would come by like clockwork every afternoon after lunch and play Midwayer. Another, D-. would come and play just for those of us who liked singing. I started singing and eventually plucked up the courage to ask another colleague, D2- to teach me how to play the piano. She did and was my first practical introduction to the beauty the instrument is. D- enthusiastically gave me some basics, drawing something that I only perfunctorily went back to. I knew even then that I would learn the piano but my way. I did need to see others' ways though. All my childhood limitations kept popping up as to why I should not invest in a keyboard for myself. Thankfully, I ignored them and ordered a keyboard for myself and it arrived, on 31st December, 2019. And it saved me and brought me back from somewhere nobody else could have, I believe. And it did so many times over in the next few months as I lived alone at the start of the pandemic with the ghosts of past selves and regrets and memories.

Through losing others and parts of myself, I have learnt how incredibly powerful and powerless I am when it comes to both life and death. I can choose many things as to how I want to live my life and who I want to, but I can choose those things within the limitations of my potential, life experiences, present endurance. And then there's death... not death by choice but just death. So intimate that it's a part of my body. I die as I write, I die as I breathe and no matter how magnificent I become or try to be or perhaps am, I am nothing to its sudden desire to manifest itself wholly. In life, I am but camphor waiting to be lit by the fire of death.

One of my friends had taken a photo of me with the keyboard upon its arrival. As I wrote about it before in a different place: Worship, medicine, saving grace, relief. I am almost entirely certain I would not be here without it.