Rohit Kishan Ray

“When would you call someone mad? When? I mean, exactly what would you define to be madness?” Yoshi asked Mannu, her voice coming from afar.

Mannu struggled to find the reason behind the question. The steady beeping of monitors, the hushed murmurs of anxious relatives hovering over neighborhood beds, the smell of alcohol and medicine looming gloomily in the air, and the metallic clanging of instruments drowned whatever context the question carried. Mannu felt lost.

Mannu found Yoshi conscious just a little after Shyam went out with Ravi. The child had been with his mother since morning and was hungry. This was no place for children to linger, Mannu thought. She stood beside the blue-colored bed, anxiously looking at the woman lying on it. The metal frame was bare, its skeleton exposed, much like the woman resting on it. The paint peeling off of the rods of the bedframe unsettled her; it made her think, against her will, of something eroding, something left unprotected. She wondered, absurdly, whether paint existed to prevent decay the way reason protected the mind. The thought embarrassed her. She shook her head.

Yoshi opened her mouth, probably to speak again.

Mannu took her hand and said, “Stop saying these absurd things. Are you becoming mad or what?” Almost immediately, she realized she had uttered the wrong words.

Yoshi lay there, her face blank like a wiped-out chalkboard, her eyes fixed at a point beyond Mannu, beyond the ceiling fan, the cobweb, the ceiling, the walls, beyond the structure of the room itself. That look frightened Mannu. She felt suddenly vulnerable, seized by the thought that if Yoshi truly slipped into paranoia, she would be left alone with little Shyam. That thought terrified her more than anything else. She hated herself for thinking it.

Tears filled her eyes. For the first time that day, she cried.

Yoshi turned her head toward her. Her eyes remained distant. After a long pause—that seemed like forever, she spoke.

“You would think madness is not being normal,” she said slowly. “But what is normal? Is your normal in cohesion with other people’s normalcy, or would you cling to this hypocritical society and define normal as its moral boundary? What’s normal for the higher caste is brutal for the lower, Mannu, and what’s normal for the lower is barbaric to the higher. Do you think I am mad because I slit my wrist? Or because I burned the house? Or because I disowned my pride? I am mad because I am not normal. I am mad because I did things I was not supposed to do according to this rotten society. I am mad because I am mad. There you go—have your satisfaction. Yes, I am mad. I am mad because I wasn’t mad at the right time. I am mad, Mannu.”

She turned towards Mannu, and began to cry.

Mannu didn’t know what to do. She pulled Yoshi’s hand against her chest. Yoshi cried loudly, her nails clutching Mannu’s clothes, marking her pain into Mannu’s skin. Mannu cried too, though silently. Her tears fell steadily, warm and heavy.

One tear slid down Yoshi’s cheek and landed on her own hand, resting on Mannu’s, then another, and another, until the drops gathered into a thin river that crept along her skin, slowed, and met the mole on her forearm, hesitated, and split into two narrow paths, and she did not move or protest as she watched it happen, and something loosened, quietly, irreversibly, and punishment felt like peace, and peace felt deserved, and the river wandering over her skin carried her away from the bed and the room and the weight of Mannu’s arms and back into Baibhavi’s house, into the night when the lighter came with the news, into Sandhu’s touch where submission had been easier than resistance, until his skin under her gaze darkened and thickened and Sandhu’s shape warped and became Paras who laughed and pointed his long nails while the sky turned slate-grey over a yellow field and a great red door painted with skulls opened at the horizon and she screamed for help and heard her own voice fracture into echoes, and then everything stopped and she was sitting in a vast white room without corners or edges where a cradle stood beside her chair and inside it lay Shyam holding a book and a knife, his face turning into Sandhu’s, his eyes burning red, the knife writhing into a five-headed snake that struck her breast, and she tried to cry out but a long needle dropped from above and pinned her mouth shut, and Sandhu’s face on Shyam’s body swelled and burst apart into fragments that struck the walls and her lap and the cradle and her feet, and she was naked and her pubic hair grew and reached for the pieces, each strand cold and scaly like a snake slithering over her skin, glowing red and blue as the white walls began to bleed and the dripping shapes formed her brother beating her, his hands twisted in her hair, the pain unbearable, and on the other side an inverted vision of Paras above her appeared and the pain was the same, and she struck the floor and bricks broke loose and fell like rain and then like stones and then like boulders aimed only at her until a single black wall filled her vision and her limbs failed at the joints and she was in a well lit from below by glowing coal, vapors rising through the cracks, and she looked up to see a black abyss where hands shaped like her family reached down and pulled her inward as lava crawled up her legs, burning flesh and sealing breath, and she fell, deep, into darkness that pressed and weighed and stole consciousness and numbed her body into nothing.

Ravi entered the ward holding Shyam in one hand and a small bag of fruit in the other, then stopped at the doorway.

He saw the two women locked in each other’s arms, crying. For a moment, he took it for a private moment between sisters and thought of letting them be. He considered taking Shyam away for a while, showing him around, giving them space. But something did not sit right. This was not intimacy. What he mistook for a sisterly moment, in the dimness of the hospital ward, was in fact Mandeep’s cry for help. He saw her hands moving—shaking her sister’s head—her trembling voice frantically calling Yoshi’s name, as if reaching out to something slipping further and further away. Mandeep finally cried out for the nurse.

Ravi sprang into action. He remembered passing a nurse in the corridor and returned with her quickly. By the time they reached the bed, doctors and nurses were already closing in around it, bodies overlapping, hands moving with urgency.

Shyam stood frozen, his eyes wide.

A syringe appeared in a gloved hand. Yoshi cried out as the needle went in. Another followed. Her body stiffened and arched. Someone pressed her arm down. Someone else held her shoulder. Her mouth opened, but no word came out. One doctor flashed a torchlight into her eyes. A nurse quickly set up a blood pressure measurement, the bluish wire glowing vividly against Yoshi’s pale skin. Electrodes were placed against her body. A trolley was wheeled in, its screen lighting the side of her face. The monitor began to speak in numbers and lines.

Mandeep lifted Shyam into her lap and held him there, one arm tight around his back, her eyes fixed on her sister.

Yoshi’s crying faltered, then stopped. The rhythm on the screen steadied.

Her eyes opened.

She looked past the people standing over her and saw Shyam. Tears slid down the sides of her face. She reached for him.

As Shyam leaned forward, she screamed.

Mandeep pulled the child back from the bed. He struggled in her grip, reaching out.

Yoshi’s body convulsed. Her legs kicked violently apart, striking the mattress as if something were burning through them. Her back arched once, then again.

Ravi stood where he was, mute, incapable of action, watching as her body fought itself.

The line on the screen wavered, broke, and flattened.