Non-Fiction
Of Love and Insanity
It took me 17 years, give or take a few months, to arrive at the first indubitable truth of my life, that I am a born loser, of which lunatic possessed by genie, misfit, eccentric, freak, artistic, queer, loner, genius, nuts, philosopher, outsider, and existentialist are some of the synonyms my family, relatives, friends, and acquaintances used to describe or label me with. Even sharing this conviction with the young lady I was then neck-deep in an, the only, obsessive and one-sided calf love proved yet another losing experience as I slipped a number of notches down her measure of respect. "Don't you indulge in self-pity," she said in a tone of admonition with an undercurrent of mild disgust, which she could as I was 17 and she 24. I met her first a few weeks after my first and last sincere attempt at suicide, inspired by a combination of a depressive combination/indigestion of Einstein's theory of relativity, a complete loss of faith in ego, self and all forms of religion, the recent suicide of a near-moronic maternal uncle in his mid-twenties, the conviction that the above suicide was but a subtle psycho-social execution of an unwanted member by his family with my mother playing the role of chief prosecutor, the contempt I had for my mother, and for her family for committing this senseless assassination, all of it wrapped-up in the smell of rotten bodies wafted by evening breezes from Azimpur Graveyard. All this, and more, drove me towards what seemed like a tranquil void called death, but instead I woke up from a five-day coma in a Dhaka Medical College Hospital ward. I immediately tottered out of the stinking place and fell asleep outside on a footpath, under a eucalyptus tree. A friend noticed me there and brought me to our dormitory in a rickshaw. Two days later, my roommate burst into the room and shouted, "What have you started, huh?" He blamed me for his dearest chhoto mama, a vagabond with an unfulfilled dream of becoming a great poet, copying my suicidal act, which luckily had ended in abject failure. It was the failure at killing myself that made me decide to dedicate the rest of my life, spurned even by death, to the welfare of fellow humanity. I joined the cultural front of a Marxist political outfit. That is where I met my love. During our first one-to-one conversation at her home, where we gathered on the pretext of co-authoring a drama script, I broke the ice, or rather kindled the hellfire as I realized much later, by blurting out, "I want you to know that I hate sex and I have no such intention towards you." Both statements were spontaneous lies. I lied because I was too eager to gain her confidence and knew that I, being a first-year student of higher secondary school, and she already having her first university degree and my lower-middle-class family being totally incompatible with her comparatively elite one, there was no hope of striking a love affair. So I wanted at least to win her friendship, which would ensure her company and proximity. But, in time, those lies proved too costly and heavy to bear. Eventually a day came when I had to blurt out again, this time the truth, that I was madly in love with her and that it would be impossible for me to live without her. The admission cost me the relationship. It also did kill me in a way, throwing me into a paralyzing schizophrenia for 10 long years and a numbing depression that still continues. Yet, the couple of years I had acted out my part as a devoted-friend-cum-younger-brother-she-never had was a piece of paradise that I am eternally grateful for. To be near her was all that I desired and needed to be the happiest boy in the world. It also taught me, after the long journey I had to take through hell, the love of all life forms including so-called inert matter, and empathy for everyone in pain, in one way or another. Anyway, during that first intimate conversation, in response to my lies, she opened up her heart and bared its wounds to me. She too had her calf love, with a cousin, ever since she had been a student of Class IX. In 1971, her cousin joined the liberation war and turned into quite a hero. After the war, he became one of the many liberation war veterans, frustrated and furious at the turn of political scenario, who rebelled in deeply disturbing ways considered criminal by the authorities then in power. So, to save his skin, his family sent him off to the USA. He did not know that among others he was also leaving behind an embryo in his cousin's belly, who for some reasons, including pride, did not mention it to anyone. A few months after his departure, it was her mother who first noticed her pregnancy. Scandal, gossip, and shame followed; family pressure finally forced her to have an abortion. It hurt awfully. And how she missed that baby that had never been born! Even more than the cousin who meanwhile had fallen in love and married an American girl. That could be the routine end of a love story. Except it was not. After eight years, her cousin and his American wife were divorced, and he discovered that he still loved the brown, bonny girl he had so brazenly and selfishly ditched. As the changed time and tide in politics did not pose a threat anymore, one fine day lover boy returned home and claimed her love again, throwing her into an emotional hurricane. Four years before this, I had made that maddening confession of my love and then dived deep into insanity. I became so withdrawn that it was tough even to utter a word, let alone speak coherently. People, including my own family, thought I would not live much long. Nobody cared. No one arranged any treatment for me. They just ignored me and treated me as if I did not exist or, at best, treated me like the pariah that hangs around the house. During that time, on one winter night, I found my equal in life, a puppy which evidently had lost its mother, whimpering outside the gate of our house. I brought it to the veranda I used to live in then and held it to my bosom throughout the night to provide it with some warmth, while it sucked my nipples to appease its hunger. I did not mind. I was beyond gender by then. After a long time, that night I prayed to God, who or whatever that meant, to let it live and felt a definite affinity between it and me. Ultimately, it was music that helped me come out of the burning darkness. I persuaded my mother, whom I hated the most, to buy a second-hand violin for me. She did, may be out of pity. For 13 years playing violin was my only occupation, except when I slept from dawn to noon and the time when I read whatever book I could manage. I also wrote poems that I would burn in a pile after regular intervals. It was in such a state that one day I received a letter from her, requesting me to meet her immediately. The effect was uncannily therapeutic. I regained a part of my lost humanity and was less afraid of people. The way to her house was so familiar that I could, and probably still can, walk to it blindfolded. When I arrived and knocked on her door, the old housemaid opened the door and ushered me in to her bedroom. She was sitting surrounded by friends, all wearing yellow dresses. Being mad and disoriented, I could not understand that it was her gaye halood ceremony. She leapt up from the floor and led me by the hand to another room. There she bared her heart once again to me. I listened in silence. She was tormented by a dilemma. She did not love her cousin any more, at least not as much as in her teenage days. But, both the families wanted them to get married -- hers probably to wipe off the shame of the abortion, because however secret they might had kept it so far, it did gnaw at their peace, and his probably to see their boy to settle down with a girl of his own kind, especially as their past love affair was no secret to any of their relatives. That was not all - a part of her also hated him for abandoning her, for the loss of her baby, for the guilt she had to bear all those years, and also for the marriage he had in the States. She hated the States too. She would never agree to go there. And she really did not. She asked my advice about what to do. Oh the joke of it all - asking advice from a madman whom no one considered a man any more. The only thing I could manage to say was, "If you want, you can come and live with me. I will provide for you." Someone called her and she left the room. Then her cousin entered. He said he had heard of me a lot, he knew I too loved her in a way, and that he could not go on living without her, and so on. He even wept like a child. I liked him for being or acting so innocent. She came back and the three of us shared a ciggie. Then I took my leave. They did marry. But it did not work out. She never agreed to go to the States to live with him. So, after some years, they got divorced. She later married a businessman and eventually gave birth to three children. She seems at last to have settled down to a respectable and stable middle-class family life. Stories in real life end in such prosaic ways that one wonders what is the meaning or purpose of all the heart-rending, foolish happiness and sufferings that precedes them. Why do we get entangled in the cobwebs of lunacy called love, when the endings are almost always so mundane?
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