When madness is a mask in the Valley

"And I told you I am not a crystal gazer

But I see the bird in you.

But remember, even the birds don't find all the answers.

Stop looking, I said.

To myself."

This is a counter narrative. This is a story of imagined and fake madmen. I am writing this story to put the boogeyman to rest. Insanity is the minority of one.There are nightmares, and you have no choice in deciding where you will wander into when your are in the realm of dreams. This is the story of a nightmare in a curfewed town. But the nightmare stays true to the facts. I was a primary witness, and a participant, and an accused. For my part, I believed the madness was real. I was guilty of the crime of being gullible. This is also a story of exorcism.

I know of madmen. An uncle had once raged in his fury, a wooden stick in hand, and as children we had hid under the bed watching, and hearing, and hoping the storm would pass. It did. But not without its damage. Years later, he died. Alone. In his room. Now I know he heard voices in his head. I know he couldn't keep them at bay. He couldn't fight it anymore. It's okay. Or so I hope. Years later, I was still hoping the storm would pass. Except there was no storm. It existed only in the correspondence between a writer and a subject. The writer despairing at the thought of an impending suicide. The man on the other side carefully drafting yet another episode of insanity, referencing a repertoire of quotes from writers.

Writers obsess about stories. This isn't a disclaimer. It is a fact.

Sometimes, we end up chasing some stories to the point where they start affecting us. This was one such story. It was like being in a mental asylum except that there were no real mad people around. They were performing. There were unexplained disappearances, and the story was narrated in bits and parts, almost doled out as little rewards. It was all grand. There was the mention of a torture centre, and of serpentine roads, and of snow.

There were only the sellers of madness, and I was buying their stories of loss, and entitlement. I was also made to feel terrible for belonging to the other side. At least, in this particular story.

Madness is an excellent choice for an alibi, but a sad and selfish one.

It was in Kashmir, and I was told stories of deaths, and martyrdom. I believed everything. I was an outsider. I was challenged, and I was curious about the conflict. I wasn't the occupier, and yet I carried a misplaced sense of guilt, and made concessions for any discrepancies in the narrative.

For a year, I pursued stories here. I went there, and I spoke to people. Some were real people with real tragedies. Others were online contacts. Some were oppressed. Others used oppression as a tool. Kashmir is a surreal place. During my second visit, I was told to be careful. This place, the woman who hosted me said, is strange. Don't trust all the stories, she told. I disregarded. Not an unusual thing to do. The splendour of the story reckoned.

Facts were stacked against the imagined glory of some of these stories. And yet, I believed them. This is what we face everyday as humans, and writers. Empathy is our strength. It is also our bane. We are also curious, and fascinated. We sometimes forget to exercise our bullshit detectors. While researching stories on post traumatic stress disorders in conflict zones, we stumbled upon too many profiles shouting for attention. Conflict was used as a bait. We were unsuspecting. Madness is attractive. Normal is boring, as we all would like to believe. They said the conflict had rendered them insane. They were battling too many things. Despair was routine. They spoke of unfreedom, and how it wrecks the mind. They spoke of the unholy ghosts. They spoke about the curse of a place that rendered them insane. They were sad people. There was no way out but to burn in hell. They only spoke of hell and heaven.

As Anthony Hopkins said, “We are fascinated by the darkness in ourselves, we are fascinated by the shadow, we are fascinated by the boogeyman.”

And so I chased the boogeyman. I tried to be the saviour. But carrying the cross was never easy. We know that. I was only human.

***

Long ago, there used to be a girl who would sit on the roof, and by the moonlight, she would slash her wrists on some evenings, and then quietly went back to her room, and told stories about her sadness. I am sure she made them up, but the truth is she believed these stories, and repeated them over to herself. I tried to help, but later, I just sat there listening, and hoping it would all go away. There are things only children understand, and talk about. There were those conversations. She thought she wasn't wanted. She thought they brought her home from the streets where she had been left by her mother.

The future was now, she would say, and look away. The scars were too visible. Yet, she was unfazed. The cuts weren't deep enough. That's what I thought then.

And years later, I saw a prostitute cut herself in the red light district of Kamathipura, and I had gasped in horror. The gnashes were deep, and the skin erupted in bubbles. The police said you couldn't even look at her body in the daylight. Night was different. It played tricks with the eyesight. I had insisted on seeing, and I was repulsed, and wanted to throw up. And yet, I had stayed to know her story. She was a sad woman, and as she had sat against the wall, she had said she was dying anyways, and the cuts helped her feel alive sometimes. Perhaps next life would be kinder, she had whispered.

***

Not so long ago, I found myself in a place where there were men asking to be understood. They raged against the state, and they told stories of betrayals by the state, and recounted the horrors of torture by the army. These stories were detailed, and fantastical. They had the melancholy of a bloodied city, and its victimhood. It had the gold leaves, and the snowy mountains, and the flapping of the wings of the pigeons, and the wailing of the women. They had everything a writer seeks, and believes. You wouldn't want to doubt suffering. That would be the wrong side to choose.

In Kashmir, I was beginning to see ghosts. It began like that. Except these stories were manufactured, and sold to me. Me, who was a stranger to the conflict, and an outsider who was often tagged as an occupier. I write knowing fully well the dangers of being misunderstood, and being accused of stereotyping. But of all witnesses, if the writer is the primary witness, the story exists. And needs to be told. I tell this story for the sake of madness, and for those that suffer through their lives. Like my uncle. Lest they be misunderstood.

I came across angry posts about madness on social media. References to morphine, and prozac. But not everyone is Sylvia Plath, or William Styron. I came across hashtags, and descriptions about conflict, and bipolarity.

I felt bad for those that really suffer. I had a friend who was paranoid. He saw dead people, and it took him time to get used to reality. It is a thin line. You are living in a nightmare, and yet the space is so familiar, you want to own it.

You see, when we were children, we believed in boogeyman. The ordinary griefs were made extraordinary by the stories we imagined, and the darkness we feared, and yet craved, and wanted to believe in. I kept the journal of these griefs of madmen. I was witness to their institutionalisation. I was witness to a lot more than I am prepared to confess now. Confessionals must come in their installments. This story isn't about my uncle.

It is about a man who told me stories and as I began to question the facts, he told me he was bipolar. There was much sadness in the stories. I was challenged to leave my reason behind, and step into the world of creative storytelling. A fantasy world made up of demons, and exorcists. There was the story of a prison where a man was shackled and tortured, and lain to rest, and how his young son was left alone with a mourning mother, and a life of despair. The child who grew up to be a fantastical storyteller and a conman. His facts were mixed with fiction, and the story had seemed credible. Such places need to be understood, and not judged, I told myself. But as an editor once said, the facts are less glorious. It was said in a different context. The stories continued. He had researched his heroes, and his context. Except madness is chaos. Not so clinical. And suicide, an act of precise planning. A photo of a graveyard, or a bloodied note were not warning signs. I took them as such. I attributed everything to bipolarity. I hoped it was the disease.

Post traumatic disorders are common in conflict zones. I once spoke to a mental health expert, who was researching seasonal depression in Kashmir. He spoke of the merger of real and imagined online lives, and the pressures of living in a repressed society. Things were changing. With social media, the men and women were accessing each other, and conflict had become a strong selling point. Not for all. But for those that had no qualms in selling it to outsiders. Bipolarity, they say, is on rise. But bipolarity, a much misunderstood disease, is often used as it offers a licence for a whole lot of things – promiscuity, neglect, everything.

But those that are bipolar will tell you it is like living in hell. Insanity knocks at your doorstep, and you want to open the door, and put it all to rest. Many end up committing suicide. I am no expert on mental illness. I only write from experience. One experience is enough. Zooming in and out is the writer's choice.

The stories assumed fictional proportions. The person wrote to me about the prison. He spoke of himself in the third person sometimes, and he said he was a quiet child, who was deprived of love, and a normal life.

“In the alleys, they would speak in whispers about the curse of this place. It was somewhere in the mountains. The beautiful, majestic mountains that overlooked the Dal Lake. They call it paradise. But we speak about the inferno here. The one that was ensconced in these mountains with their beautiful Chinars, and Deodars,” he once wrote.

I didn't doubt any of this. He said he had forgotten to smile. The tragedy was too much, and later, he was diagnosed with bipolarity.

In the kingdom of gold leaves, and snow-capped mountains, and eerie silences, I filled my notebook. I had wandered in the dark, and only stopped to see the halo around the mountain where the saint lies buried.

I remembered his stories of walking in snow to look for ghosts, and his dreams of snow leopards and his father's grave. Graveyards are retreats for the dead. The dead must not be insulted.

I was compiling the notes. He told me about the scars, and the brutal scene of waves crashing against his sanity. He said he wouldn't live for long. Sometimes, we ignore facts in the face of such stories. We don't assume that stories of deaths can be manipulated too. But real life is stranger than fiction, and madness is an easy escape, and a tool.

As I saw the precise cuts on the man's wrists, I remembered sitting by the girl who slashed her wrists. Scars don't go away ever.

Over the years, I have learned to look at the scars carefully.

It is almost a cool thing to go to a psychiatrist or a therapist now. I went too. I was pronounced as sane. We discussed insanity. We talked about the incidence of bipolarity. We also spoke about such disorders being manipulated by those that use the symptoms to their end. For instance, it is easy to lie and cheat, and say you are bipolar. Promiscuity is one of the symptoms. Anybody can get away with it. We are more gullible, and vulnerable than we know. I have believed stories that I had no business believing. But we carry our own baggages. We make exceptions for insanity, or what we fall for.

But when madness is on display, and armed with an intention to dupe others, it is a disservice to those that suffer with it. Bipolarity is a serious mental illness. Writers have written about manic depression, and described the highs and the lows, and the episodes of madness where you are so done with it that you want to kill yourself to end the misery. Suicide isn't a joke. But as a writer who believes in encounters with all kinds of people, I have seen those that use disorders to abuse others. What is unfortunate is that as someone who witnessed the fury of madness, including a series of institutionalisations and an eventual death of someone we knew, I feel sad that madness can be used as a weapon for abuse. Madness isn't easy. But with social media, the ultimate enabler of disorders like narcissist personality disorder, cases of abuse are many.

Misery can't be on display. Not on social media.

I had asked to see their medical records. Instead, I got suicide notes.

I wanted to write then that the world will come to your rescue, ask you why, and how, and mumble they sympathies, and give way to your rage, and outbursts. They will tolerate the threats and the outbursts because of their own sense of guilt, and of belonging to the other side, and make themselves vulnerable to manufactured madness, and the sordid details of conflict.

But the occupation is real for those that have lost lives, and dignity. Many have suffered with depression. To use the truth of a conflict zone to abuse others emotionally and financially is a blasphemous act. It undermines a great suffering.

During my research, I came across many women who had been abused with such sordid tales of misery. A writer writes. Even if it is at the cost of being misunderstood. There's always that danger. But you write despite everything. As Susan Sontag once said that a writer pays attention to the world. We learn to listen, and we learn to empathise. But we can be victims too. I was duped, and conned. And although I suspected the facts, I was still unwilling to acknowledge the counter narrative because I believed in what they say "benefit of doubt".

Our instinct is to trust the stories of others. Nobody lies about their father being killed by the Army when in truth, he wasn't. You don't ask questions about death. You respect death. It is a loss that is a forever loss.

But evil is out there. It doesn't spare the scared facts of death even. To those that suffer with mental disorders and go through hell trying to keep insanity at bay, this is unfair.

***

I wanted to write to those performing madmen that it is always tempting to be the victim. It saves us from the battle of everyday. It is easy to blame everyone, tell them that you are ill, and put misery on display to prey on the vulnerable ones, and use a horrible truth of conflict. Those that truly suffer are haunted by the illness so much they don't exhibit it, and suffer in silence. We all have lost people to depression.

I wanted to write to him that Lucifer was a fallen angel. He wasn't an exhibitionist.

I know the solace of sympathy. Oh, how you seek it, I wrote, and yet I never sent the correspondence.In the end, the world will move on, and cut their losses with the lies. In the end, the display will become routine. After all, such madness is only entertainment for others, a glimpse into the world they have peeked into out of curiosity. They recoiled in horror when they found the truth. What we don't want ever is that we become so cynical that we begin to doubt even the truth of insanity, or conflict.

Madness is given to us not by our choice. It comes to us. Remember the night when you stared at the cloudless sky, and cried and asked for death because everything went horribly wrong. I remember it. Because it was me. But what did I do with the wish? I uttered it to the sky, and the lone star, and returned to my desk to write. We battle insanity everyday. Some of us succumb. Some of us fight it out. Not everyone is lucky. But a lot of us don't pretend to be mad because it is a horrible thing to lose sanity. That's all we have. That's all we guard so fiercely.

I am not an expert on insanity. I have only observed it. I have taken notes, and kept a journal.

I can poke a needle and squeeze out blood and write a sentence, and post it on social media. It makes for drama, and for a stellar story. But if you are updating social media, you are not in hell. Signals are lost is hell. At any rate, they aren't quite strong there where you are fighting to stay afloat.

As writers, we drift. From stories, and people, to more stories. A narrative can't have structure. It can only have experiences. I used to know a former street child who wanted to be an actor, and he fell through the cracks. He was on drugs, and became a victim of his own failed aspiration. He was depressed for a long time until someone found him, and asked him to fight it. He tried, and failed, and tried again. He is doing better now. I check on him sometimes.

Mental asylums are scary places. Nobody wishes to be there by choice.

Madness also casts its spell. It is like being in a fairy tale. We don't want to wake up from it. It is a fabulous story. It makes us liberals, and it frees us from the guilt of being who we are. It is poetic. We all want to be poets of misery. Of ourselves, and of others.

Looking back, I wouldn’t have written this story, but the ending came abruptly. I woke up one day, and I knew I had to write it, and punctuate the story with the less glorious facts. The devil beguiles us. We must perform our own exorcism.

I write this as an obituary.

Will we ever understand madness? No.

Do you ever see a madman ranting and wonder what he hallucinates about? No.

Do we ever find ourselves on the edge? Yes, many times.

As chroniclers, we rely on our experiences. Some encounters bring us more perspective than others. We are not here to judge. A singular experience must not belittle our faith, and yet we must tell stories of despair when the truth is just coldblooded dissection of madness to be used for personal gains.

Stories of martyrdom are sacred. Stories of madmen are sacred too.

We are all in confessional boxes. We write to be delivered from evil. We write to restore our faith in insanity, and to understand those that deal with madness.

Will we ever understand the motives? But selling of conflict which is a real and brutal everyday experience in a place that has been through much by its own people is a horrible thing. This is the other side of conflict. We, who wander in territories that are unknown, face the danger of betrayals, and of accusations.

A favorite writer once wrote in a book that made me sad about the fate of Nathan, the protagonist.

“Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.

The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?"

And the answer: "Where was man?”William Styron, Sophie's Choice

The other character in the book was a writer. He chronicled real madness. Writers are part of stories. They write despite everything. Because this is a story, too.