In 1991, Hindi playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Swadesh Deepak wrote Court Martial, about an Army jawan under trial for murder. It was a critically acclaimed and popular play, but it had an unforeseen (if indirect) fallout: while in Kolkata for a performance of Court Martial, Swadesh Deepak met a woman who affected him intensely.
He was to refer to her later as ‘Mayavini’, a term his son Sukant Deepak loosely translates as ‘seductress of illusion’. Maya or illusion became, through the decade of the 90s, a fog that surrounded him, sending his mind down odd, lonely paths, making him withdraw from his writing, his job (as a professor of English literature), and the world. Eventually diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder, Deepak tried thrice to die by suicide. For seven years, he was caught in the grip of mental illness.
These seven years form the focus of Deepak’s memoir Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha, translated from Hindi into English by Jerry Pinto as I Have Not Seen Mandu. The subtitle of the book—A Fractured Soul-Memoir—describes it well: this is not a neat, chronological recollection of what happened in those seven years.
He moves between three time periods: before his mental illness, through the months he spent in the hospital, and afterward. Mayavini keeps pulling him into an illusory world. At the same time, there are people in the real world—his long-suffering wife Geeta, friends, and writers.
I Have Not Seen Mandu manages to shine a light, harsh and unforgiving, on what it is like to have mental health problems. Deepak is brutally honest in his depiction of his illness: no matter how poorly it may reflect on himself, his family, or his associates.
On the one hand, there are the frayed tempers and increasing impatience of those who look after him (in particular, his wife and two children); on the other, there is the occasional empathy, the sensitivity and deep understanding shown by some. There are the stalwarts of Hindi literature, flitting in and out of Deepak’s memories, sometimes praised, sometimes lambasted.
And there is, at the heart of it, the haunting description of Deepak’s illness as it took over his mind. As always, in India, there is the stigma attached to it, too: the many people, close friends and relatives included, who branded Deepak ‘mad’.
Pinto’s translation has skillfully retained frequent forays into English, adding helpful footnotes to explain Deepak’s text. For those who may not read Hindi, Pinto enables a disturbingly intense peek into the mind of one of modern Hindi literature’s greatest, at a time when that mind was deeply afflicted.
I Have Not Seen Mandu
By: Swadesh Deepak
Translated by: Jerry Pinto
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
Pages: 342
Price: Rs 499