Losing it. By Arshia Malik
We lost the pluralistic and secular fabric of Kashmiriyat, we lost Kashmir to Islamists factions and ideology, we are losing our natural waterways, lakes, forests and a whole ecology of the most exotic kind. We lost an idyllic way of life, our heritage of knowledge gathered over the centuries by enlightened men and women, poets and Sufis and Rishis; we lost a future as we clung to our past and are trying our best to lose our present as well
I watched my father ‘losing it’ since I was
6-years-old, I witnessed my mother ‘losing it’ when they finally separated. I
was devastated when my brilliant sister ‘lost it’ at a crucial time of her
medical internship. I have been terrified of ‘losing it’ ever since I was
diagnosed with post-partum depression and bipolar. This is the reason why I
live 300 kms away from my son in a different city because I do not want
him to suffer me ‘losing it’ – something I am constantly worried about
happening. And now I watch my husband ‘lose it’ slowly day by day, sometimes
progressing to normal in leaps and bounds, and some days, the setbacks piling
up, resulting in a lot of heartbreak and fatigue.
The Cambridge English
Dictionary describes ‘losing it’ as ‘to start to become crazy’. Kashmir is a
place where ‘crazy’, ‘lunatic’ (paagal in Hindi, suthhyana in Urdu, and mout and
bayakal in Kashmiri) are thrown around in casual conversations. It used to be a
happy-go-lucky place where people would come to escape from the madness of
civilization; to sit, lie, walk, fish, camp, or just plain be, in idyllic
pastures and crystal clear streams, beneath starry skies with the snowy
Himalayan peaks in the backdrop.
It was post-89 that
the real craziness began. The use of violence to achieve freedom.
This has
never made sense to me. It is compounded by the fact that we were all taught
the myths that to achieve something huge, it had to be passive resistance all
the way or what is famous in the Indian subcontinent as ‘non-violence’ or
‘Gandhi-giri’. As we grew older and wiser and were on the verge of adulthood
(before the Valley exploded) we were discovering the various non-violent
movements of Martin Luther King Jr of the Civil Rights Movement; the ‘hippie’
anti-war movements and the other violent Latin American revolutions such as
that of Che Guevara, coupled with the gruesome details of the Iran-Iraq war.
It took us over two
decades, over a lakh of our boys/men dead, disappeared, tortured, half that
number of widows or ‘half-widows, twice the number of orphans, and a society
increasingly ‘losing it’ to realise that the violence imported from our ever
helpful ‘neighbour’ Pakistan was just part of the unfinished business of
Partition in 1947 which saw the largest forced mass migration in history and
quadruple the number of people killed and displaced. Now if that ain’t crazy,
what is?
I am compelled to
fight for my sanity for the sake of my child. It terrifies me to think him
alone out there with the two of us gone in the wisps of time, and an
increasingly crazier world than the one we brought him into. I try to reach out
to anyone who is trying to find themselves in the labyrinth of their minds,
knowing how difficult it is to hope and believe that you are not crazy, just
because you think different or don’t conform to the standard craziness around
you – the insanity of bigotry, or patriarchy, or theocracy, or anything
authoritarian.
For women with mental
health issues, it becomes one more reason for the patriarchal system to exploit
or suppress them. This leads me to believe that the origins of dubbing a woman
‘witch’ in the dangerous medieval times must have had a lot to do with their
independent mindedness, open rebellion against authority and non-conformity to
the status quo. The same ‘witch’ was substituted in the lexicon and now has
colourful renderings such as ‘whore’ or ‘slut’ or ‘shameless’ or the inevitable
‘crazy’.
I recall a discussion
with my husband when we were going through a really bad phase and the topic was
‘madness’. In the midst of Freud, Foucault, and Robin Williams, he described
how madness had been stigmatised because we had very different perceptions of
‘normal’. It had become normal to see, hear or think violence. We took random
acts of terror, and daily transgressions of the body, the mind and space very
casually, the micro-aggressions and violations in our lives had redefined
normal for us so much that even the media used it to sell for ratings and many
people built careers out of it profiting from the confusion and doubts of so
many.
He further stunned me
when he said, “Think of the mad person as having gone silent. He or she has
seen the reality of the world and they are protesting with the only expression
they have – the madness of their mind. The occasional display of what we call
‘fits’ in the form of cursing loudly, roaming around naked, or pumping fists in
the air should be seen as the time when the insanity of the world interferes in
their chosen sane existence.”
I have for years
carried this description of an insane person’s state of mind with me like a
talisman. In moments of distress, or when the anxiety seems overwhelming, I
have tried to gauge the truth about what he told me all those years ago. And
today I can conclude that he was right. Losing it was a protest against the
insane noise of the people around who had accepted violence as a collateral
part of a means (martyrs/obfuscation, taqqiya meaning active deceit) to an
end (azadi).
I remember my father
showing symptoms of ‘losing it’ in 1984, after the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. It
was right after this time he started thinking of returning to Kashmir forever,
always mumbling. “Someday, they will come for the Muslims, someday, it will be
us.” My mother started losing it since the day we landed in a typical,
patriarchal, joint household of a Kashmiri Muslim family where the woman is
exploited to the hilt.
The Broken Middle (on the 30th anniversary of 1984)
The aftermath of those
7 years in a regressive culture, amidst misogynistic relations, surrounded by
superstitious, unread, illiterate, uneducated women and selfish, pampered,
obnoxious men with the starting signs of the turmoil of the 90s resulted in
their separation and the start of a lifetime of grief, struggle, hardships, and
alienation for my sister and me. Losing it had never been so educative,
strengthening, enlightening, formative in character building and stoic
attitudes!
It is a matter of
pride, the daily struggles of us two sisters amidst the insanity (with a little
help from medication since she is under treatment; I have relied on my
willpower and reading, awareness of what I have, as well as a combination of
diet, exercise, mindfulness and writing to keep it in check) to bring up our
sons and support our families and also act as parents to our parents in the
twilight of their lives. It is an ongoing struggle not to ‘lose it’, even for
those daily chaotic moments of madness that are part of a life – missed school
buses, screaming bosses, weather, government apathy, inflation, and the
‘normal’ acts of terror that keep streaming from the TV although we escaped
actual grenades and AK-47s from our native state long ago.
I think of what we are
really ‘losing’ in my reflections that occasionally come out on paper. We lost
the pluralistic and secular fabric of Kashmiriyat, we lost Kashmir to Islamists
factions and ideology, we are losing our natural waterways, lakes, forests and
a whole ecology of the most exotic kind. We lost an idyllic way of life, our
heritage of knowledge gathered over the centuries by enlightened men and women,
poets and Sufis and Rishis; we lost a future as we clung to our past and are
trying our best to lose our present as well. It saddens me to think it is
irrecoverable. But then the labyrinth of my mind is a living testimony to the
fact that what is lost can be found again. Maybe in a new place, in new
environs, amidst new cultures and new people.
Like Ariadne, I unwind
my ball of string and gingerly make my way through the labyrinth of the world.
It is terrifying and exhilarating at the same time and I don’t mind losing it!
https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/stepping-out/losing-it/
See also
Samar Halarnkar demands justice for the victims of Pathribal'
Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, CPI(M) MLA, J&K: ‘Serious dialogue need of the hour’
Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, CPI(M) MLA, J&K: ‘Serious dialogue need of the hour’
