Opinion

The last time I spoke to her, we were gushing over the aesthetic blue walls of a heritage structure, the kind you find strewn all around the northern precincts of Calcutta, places that we admired, loved, and belonged to, or at least we thought we did. We met in one such heritage building, the college where I teach and where she was a student. She graduated and left college but we remained in touch till one day another of my students texted to give me the ‘bad news’ that she was no more. She chose to end it all. I don’t know how she felt. Or maybe I do because I had come awfully close.   As a society we are forever geared towards being ‘okay’. Wherever you see, people are posting happy photos, perfect relationships, well behaved children, exciting jobs, and travel destinations. One begins to wonder about the chaos and the mess. It is certainly there, it has to be, but we choose to invisibilize it. It has potentially damaging effects for us and for the people who are watching us. I...

A gentleman in is his late 70s keeps telling his daughter that he wants to go home, to his mother. When asked where his mother is, he says that she is in Patna. He then starts to speak of his naughtiness and how his mother scolds him. He has a tabla teacher, he says, and the teacher will be arriving soon, so he has to be home, or else his mother will scold him. He speaks as if it is in the present.   Another lady in her 80s is upset and begins to cry. When asked what is troubling her, she says that she is unable to find her mother.. When she is asked about her mother, she begins to speak of her parents, of her brothers running about, climbing trees, catching fish- all the events being set in her village.     Mashima kept repeating the same thing over and over again. In her conversations, she had no sense of time and place. She could not remember whether she had eaten or not, or, what she had eaten.  These people are not making up stories, their stories are ...