Prologue: More than one

In 1976, four years before I left New Delhi for America, I had a concussion and lost a few days of my memory, and not long after I lost most of my mind.

Everyone commiserated about my lost memory. They said, ‘Poor thing, but never mind, only a few days of memory she has lost, so much worse it could have been.’ Of course, there was no poor-thing-but-never-mind-so-much-worse-it-could-have-been about losing your mind. Nothing was worse than that.Mallika’s become mental, everyone would have said, had they known the truth. Mental meant mad, mental merited no excuse, better dead thanthat.

Now, had my mothers been different, they would have married me off, because – of course – marriage cured all ills. Marriage was more effective than any psychiatrist. A psychiatrist merely treated mental, whereas marriage cured mental. After marriage, crazy people became normal. Homosexuality became heterosexuality. Heavy periods became normal periods. Irregular periods became regular periods. Recalcitrant girls became adjustable girls. Even pimples disappeared after marriage!

But clearly the magical powers of matrimony failed to convince my mothers. Instead of marrying me off, they constructed a story about my illness, and they did a fantastic job of it. You see, the secret to a credible story is for the teller to believe it too. As my mothers told friends and neighbours what had happened to me, so persuaded were they by their own fabrication that everyone else was too. Ma and Shantamama were sisters, and they had practice creating stories from the time I was in Ma’s womb. If they could have reconstructed history for my sake, they would have somehow also accomplished that. As far as they were concerned, any lie you told to protect your loved ones was the truth. And when it came to telling stories, no one could beat my mothers, whether it was their versions of the Mahabharata or their versions of our lives.

In this case, their version of my life was that I had tuberculosis.

‘Haii! Poor thing!’ everyone said and kept their distance.

Thus, in one stroke my mothers achieved the impossible: they ensured complete sympathy and absolute isolation. No one visited me. No one called me mad, mental, lunatic, nuts, crazy, paagal, cracked, cuckoo. No one put a finger to their temple and moved it left and right to indicate a screw was loose in Mallika’s head, poor thing. After all, TB wasn’t your fault. How could you help it? Mental certainly was. Mental was entirely your fault, and so what if you were suffering through it, you had better suffer for it.

Not a soul knew that my mothers were taking me to that rare and ominous breed of doctors, a psychiatrist. Such a discovery would have demolished my future, including, of course, my marriage prospects. Which were abysmally low anyway since Ma was a widow without much money, I was ‘little-darker-than-wheat’ complexioned, and, worst of all, I was shy. Only one thing could have trumped the absence of a father, lack of money, and my little-darker-than-wheat complexion, and that was love. But I didn’t talk, so what chance was there of anyone noticing me, let alone being blinded by love for me? As Shantamama had once said, ‘You’d have been better off with a wart on your nose than with that shyness – at least with a wart you’d be noticed.’ When I had replied that I was fine not being noticed, Shantamama had snorted, ‘Modesty is one thing, but foolishness is another! My god, your answerreeks of foolishness.’

You see, shyness was almost as bad as mental. People had every word for shy except shy. In our colony, these were the words all the aunties, uncles and grandmothers had: such-a-good-girl, not-at-all-opinionated, not-at-all-Westernized-totally-Indian, modest, adjustable, sweet.

As for boys?

‘Boys think you’re snobbish or stupid,’ my friend Mahima informed me. That stung like hell. I said that Arnav had once talked to me for two hours; he wouldn’t do that if he thought I were a snob or stupid. ‘Huh! That was only because he was high,’ Mahima said.

Before I go on, I must make it clear that Mahima wasn’t being mean to me. She had a sharp tongue, and there was a hard edge to her beneath her soft and lovely countenan