I sit on the sofa. Boss is immersed in a sheaf of papers. I am shaking my legs and every other second look at the walls to see if anything has come on it. The Traumafinder is standing in peace in the middle. I am eagerly waiting for the Boss to start. She makes some notes and then raises her head.

‘Let’s start. Traumafinder.’

The movements start. It is like watching a film in fast forward. Seeing all those images move around gives me an impression that I am in the eye of a gristmill where my life is being churned and refined. There is a red signal and the Boss asks the Traumafinder to go slow.

There I am reading a mathematical formula. The words have started moving around. I feel my brain would come out of my body. I am forcing myself to concentrate that hard. My body is stressed. I am in the school library. ‘Mujhe raat din bas mujhe chhahti ho, kaho na kaho mujhko sab kuchh pata hai,’is playing in my mind. I can hear the song clearly. I feel many different streams of thoughts flowing around in my mind, one of which is the solution to the mathematical question. My mind would wander into some other stream and I would say ‘hmm’ and come back to the problem. Without knowing, I am writing strange things on the back of my copy until I realize it and come back to the mathematical problem. In the middle of it, I also daydream about topping in the physics Olympiads and getting accolades from my principal. It is as if I am not solving a problem but I am a part of a world in which the problem is one small thing. The Boss stops the Traumafinder and asks me.

““Which class was it?”

“Class 9th. Would have been 14.”

“What do you think is happening?”

“Trying to focus on the problem but find it difficult. Preparing for the Olympiad.”

“Anything else?”

“The song. Heard it for the first time.”

“Yes. You started witnessing musical hallucinations. And continue to do it.”

“What about the other streams of thoughts?”

“You get distracted by unnecessary thoughts. You are finding it difficult to focus. You have started daydreaming. There is good deal of stress on you because of academic expectation and the condition in your family.”

“I was suffering then?”

“Yes, my dear, look at your eyes when you talk. Look at your eyes when you walk. Traumafinder.”

The scenes move slowly. I see that my eyes are moving anxiously and I have stopped looking people in the eye. In the fear that people will notice this, I have started walking with my head down, looking into the ground as if I want the ground to open up and consume me. I keep sitting on the slab at the crossing near the house and stare at the stars for hours. I would hardly talk to my parents at home. When I am with friends, I am mostly silent. I have gone inwards. Something inside my mind has consumed me. Something is eating me up.

In those days, I would keep sitting on my chair and study table for hours and hours without getting up. I would spend a great deal of time on the chair immersed in my books. My family thought that I had been studying hard for the school exams and Olympiads. In a way, I was. But I was also thinking a lot. In an hour of study, my attention to the problem at hand would be about 15-20 minutes. Rest of the times I would start thinking about something else, anything under the sun.

Sometimes I was a lethal fast bowler for my country. I would take a long run up and bowl the last over where the Pakistan team has to get six runs. I bowl the first batsman with a Yorker. The second bowl goes for a four. Everybody is tense. I bowl a bouncer next which is a dot ball. The next ball is hit hard but Mohammed Azharuddin dives in to save a single. The next one is a Yorker and hits the middle stump. My teammates hug me and pat me on the back. They need two runs on the last ball. I adjust the fielding in the right position. It’s definitely going to be on the toes. I want to break his toes and win it for my team. I run fast and it’s a perfect Yorker. The batsman gets his toes out of the way and the ball hits the leg stump. The crowd rejoices. All my teammates pick me up. I am a champion. I get the Man of the Match. Then I would move on the next match with some other team and my laurels would continue.

Another major theme of my daydreams was films. I used to watch Hindi movies then. We had cable television at our home. Salman Khan was my favorite actor. Ram Gopal Varma was my favourite director. When I would daydream of films, I would always be a director. I never dreamt of being a hero. Always the talented director who gives hits after hits and is in love with Madhuri Dixit. I would sit on my chair and think of film stories in great detail fleshing them out. I could see actors and actresses and make them do things. One day, I daydreamt straight for three hours to complete a film story. When I met a friend in the evening and tell him about it, he falls down from his bicycle laughing.

There are other things I would dream too. Like politics and business. I would take hours to shit or take a bath when I was immersed in a story. There was no one stopping me from doing this. I was escaping from the troubles in my family in my own way. The troubles gave me anxiety and this was my way out. And it was getting to be a very important part of my life.

‘There is nothing wrong in day dreaming. Most people day dream. But we can see you are doing it excessively. Creating imaginary lives to get away from your real life. And you show some of your earlier signs, for example your inability to look straight into the eyes of a person. Traumafinder move to the first year of his PhD.’

The Traumafinder moves to my first year in PhD. I was having facial tics while reading and saliva was coming out of my mouth, dripping on the floor. I was daydreaming too without being able to focus. My eyes would not lock eyes with other people.

‘Still do this, with my eyes?’

‘Oh yes, sometimes. You need to look people straight in the eye when you talk. Nobody can notice anything if you look them in the eye. That’s a sign of a healthy and confident person.’

‘Will try.’

‘We can see that you were suppressing your inner anxieties and taking solace in day dreaming. You had not been taught to understand your feelings and talk about it to somebody. Or deal with it in any other way. Instead of realizing and expressing your anxieties, you went inwards, suppressing them inside you. Our education system does not encourage students to develop emotionally. That role is left to the family which if dysfunctional can give the child a lot of problems. This is your case. You have to learn to identify the feelings in you and then take a call on what to do with them. It is a natural process in any normal person. Start with writing down a list of your emotional states at the end of each day. See if there is anything wrong. Talk about it either to a friend, a confidant, or a professional, if needed. Learn to realize your emotions.’

‘Would a doctor have helped me?’

‘That’s a debatable point. Children, nowadays, at a very young age are being taken to doctors and prescribed medications. They get all kinds of diagnosis. It is still not clear if this is the right thing. If you are labeled mentally ill, it is terrible for your growth. Your self-confidence deteriorates. You face stigma in society. Sometimes you get so dependent on these medications that they become a lifelong partner with their side effects. Look at the experiences you had in school and in college. Do you think you would have had those experiences if you were labeled mentally ill?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You learnt certain coping strategies which you are still using now to get out of this problem. It is true that if things get out of hand, like it did for you in your first episode, you should take professional help. Your medicines are helping you and you will need them until you recover. But going to a psychiatrist is not a one stop solution. Children should be taught to cope up. Developing emotional intelligence should be a part of school curriculum. It would have helped you immensely had you known about the issues tormenting you. Therapy helps too. But people differ. They have an idea of normalcy and anybody who does not fit their idea needs to see a doctor. As if pills are magic wands which would grant you the wish of a healthy life. The jury is still out on this.’

‘Will read about emotional intelligence.’

‘You should. We will end it today. I will see you tomorrow.’

As I enter the hotel, the man behind the desk calls me. He tells me that I have to pay the bill in advance for the number of days I am going to stay. He is a thin lanky man with big eyes staring straight at you. He has grey eyes and almost nonexistent eyelids. His stare is fixed as if a nail has been inserted into a wall. I think for a while that my stare would get him uncomfortable. Nothing like that happened. I have no idea how long I am going to stay so I pay him an advance for another week.

I smoke standing at the window of my room. I had met so many people since I started showing symptoms. Friends, teachers, colleagues, family members. No one ever thought I was sick! This sounded strange to me. I had heard my friends calling me angry young man in college. Some of them used to tell me that I was different, that I was lost most of the times. In their jokes, I would be the thinking silent man who never spoke. I smile a little as their speaking face pass through my mind. It would have been good had I just been lost and angry. This label of schizophrenia feels heavy. As if it is the punishment of kalapani.

For a long time since my episode, I have not done pooja. I didn’t believe it had helped me. The voices would get agitated whenever I would do it. The spirit which is soothed and purified during worship had disintegrated in me. Mantras were not meant to soothe them rather they enticed them into greater frenzy. I am in two minds on what to do. A little tension is running through me. Then I decide against it. A cover of peace settles over me.

  How would it have been in old times when there was no scientific understanding, whatever of it we have now, about schizophrenia? I was in my village once. We had a tantric place close by and one day there was a troupe of tantriks who were visiting. Everyone in the village had come to see their performance. I would have been very young, around eight years of age.

They were a group of mostly men and a few women seated around a fire in the center chanting mantras. The men had long hairs and thick flowing beards and were only wearing a dhoti. The women had long open hairs and wore a sari that came down till their ankle, without any blouses. Both the men and women were covered with red vermillion on all parts of their body. Their bodies in the light of the fire looked like pieces of modern art.

They started rising with the mantras getting amplified. The men, except one man, moved around with log of fire in their hands as if they were shooing away a wild animal. The one who hadn’t stood up, had his eyes closed and was in a deep meditation while he chanted in the loudest voice. The women stood with their hands shivering, raised to the sky. Overtime one of these women started shouting. She was shouting to no one in particular. I was afraid of her. She talked in different voices and moved around. Except the meditative man, everyone focused on her. She moved her head, stretched her eyes, took her tongue out, hit the dirt, and talked all the while. I could not get what she was talking about and who she was talking to. The only thing I got was that she was asking somebody to leave because she would repeatedly say go go go.

Her frenzy increased overtime. She spoke faster and now she was fighting. Fighting in the air. Punching, hitting with the legs, slapping someone, speaking all the time. Sometimes she would pull her hairs and challenge someone. Other times she would take the calm demeanor of the idols we see in Durga Pooja. Nobody spoke except her and the chanting man. Finally, the man rose up, came to her, put a line of vermillion on her forehead. She hugged him and kept speaking. Her voice was slowing now. And in a few minutes, she was muttering. The man took her to the center, made her cross over the fire, and then she sat calm and quiet.

The villagers went to her one by one to touch her feet and pay some money. My mother took me to her as well. I was so afraid I touched her toe and ran away. Later I asked my mother what it was all about. She told me that goddess had come into the woman and she was fighting the demons that had entered the village. She would have scared the demons away and now we can sleep in peace.

I know now what was happening to the woman. I wonder whether I would have been happier in my village with all its beliefs and reverences. The modern world thinks I am ill and should be sidelined. I discuss this with my voices. Dinner arrives. I take my pills after dinner and go to sleep