BENGALURU: I am lying on a carpet on the floor in my sister’s guest bedroom, trying to sleep. I have given up on the bed; it has given me no respite. Radhika and Amanda come in to check on me at intervals. The next morning, I go down to my mother’s flat in the same family building, Piramal House, and spend my day cleaning and sorting piles of books. It keeps my body occupied without asking too much of my mind. When too many thoughts take over, I crouch in the guest bathroom and record them on my voice recorder, only to be deleted later. Mom, Radhika and Amit update each other on my progress through phone calls and taking turns to be with me. Back home, my mother-in-law, Aai, father-in-law, Baba, and Amit are taking care of the kids and the home. We are very fortunate with our household staff — each one has been with us for years and has a vital role in keeping the household going, whatever the weather. My maternal, rustic nanny, Champabai, and my versatile cook-and-housekeeper, Ramu, are particularly adept at managing the children in my absence and ensuring that their routine is not disturbed. Within a few days, I’ll be back.
There is no doubt that we are an unusual family! My parents Dilip and Gita are divorced. My father is remarried to Shalini and they have a young daughter, Priyadarshini. My sister Radhika is openly gay and has a wife, Amanda. And I am bipolar, married to Amit who, as I mentioned earlier, is from a different background.
But this is not what makes us unusual, in my opinion. What makes us — and our extended family — unusual is how we have embraced mental illness as a family. We have accepted it, evolved practices to negotiate it and learnt to not just live with it but to thrive with it, just like in the case of any other disease. This is what I call ‘love therapy’. To share how we got there, I would like to share perspectives from members of my immediate and extended family. It was not possible to interview everyone, especially the younger generation, but I have tried to include as many individuals as possible.
Amit is my best friend, philosopher and guide, as the expression goes. When we got married, our varied backgrounds led many to speculate that our marriage may not work. Living in a global city such as London for the first two years of our marriage, away from Mumbai’s social requirements, we found common ground, built a foundation for our marriage and really got to know each other.
Bipolarity has tested that partnership. Before our wedding, I described my mood swings to Amit in detail but it was not diagnosed as a disorder then. For the first few years, Amit associated my manic episodes with life circumstances rather than mental illness. He then realized, along with everyone else, that it was more than that.
He faced sleepless nights. Physical exhaustion. The irrationality of temporary insanity. Mood swings. Listening to your spouse tell you that she wants to break up with you. Managing young children with a demanding career. And he has been solid throughout. I am deeply grateful for his unconditional love and support. His innate stability and security ground me.
For Amit, ‘. . . the episodes for me initially were confusing because I didn’t know what suddenly changed you. There was sometimes anger because you had two little children and you were sometimes ignoring them. And I was worried because I felt you were interacting with the wrong people and you could have been taken for a ride. Also worried about what would be going through the kids’ minds. There was also sadness for you—you were just not the same person that I interacted with during normal times. There was tiredness; it’s not easy to keep this going for days together. I think there was a time once in 2018 when I didn’t sleep for a couple of days at a stretch...
‘First, I managed it by force. Taking away your phone, taking away your laptop, changing the passwords. But later when I realized that this was a disease, thanks to Dr Deshpande, I realised that all these are futile ways of dealing with the situation. At first, I was shocked but then I gravitated towards empathy and compassion,’ he says.
He relied on family support, especially Mom and Radhika, to help me get better. But as my spouse and primary caregiver, the mood swings have also left him with one important realization: ‘I am alone and others can only guide me. The impact of actions and the related consequences are entirely on me and our kids. So every step is like stepping on an eggshell. I have never felt so alone as during the episodes...
(Excerpted from Chemical Khichdi by Aparna Piramal Raje, published by Penguin Random House)