Suicides in Mumbai.

(Jan ’10)

            Today a woman in her forties was brought in dead into the hospital. Upper middle class, she’d hanged herself in her locked bedroom, found by her fifteen-year-old daughter. Traumatic. Mostly, this sort of an ‘arrival’ into Casualty arouses morbid curiosity. But this time, there was a pukka debate, for in the last week or longer, there has been at least one suicide per day, and none of them dowry deaths. Teenagers, mostly, but other non-conforming ones also.

            One eleven-year-old female hanged herself because her parents said ‘no dance class for you, you have to study’. She’d appeared on one of the telly programs and had done well, maybe won a prize or two, and had got hooked on to that dream. So some blamed the television programs. Some blamed the parents for putting too much pressure on the child. Others took the easy way out: ‘it’s the Kaliyug’, bad things are bound to happen. One paper asked “Is Mumbai sick?” No one mentioned, at least in the papers, that our kids are just not used to taking ‘no’ for an answer. One of my colleagues told me that she gives her college going kids flavoured potato wafers in their tiffins, because they won’t listen to her. They’d always had chips, whether or not they were good for their health, and now it’s too late to mend their ways. Small matter, but these are the things that eventually matter because they grow into bigger messes.

            A fourteen-year-old boy killed himself in his school toilet. I personally believe that when such incidents get a lot of media attention, it also arouses curiosity and gives ideas to those who otherwise may not have ventured into this unknown territory.

                        I remember, a few years ago, I’d had a chat with a girl of the same age who’d jumped out of her school corridor and survived. She said she did it impulsively, ‘just to know what it felt like’. Let psychiatrists answer that one. One of my school-mates had done it to ‘teach her husband a lesson’. Hers was a regretful, horribly painful end, with her skin peeled off, her flesh all infected, her throat parched, hungry for air, with her mind intact and screaming for help, mercy, life. Too late.

            The young don’t know how permanent it is. An acquaintance’s daughter, bright and studying for her tenth boards, told her pal next door to phone her at a given time and keep it going till she answered. The phone rang and rang. The door was locked from the inside. The mother and sister ran out and saw through the window: the girl was hanging, dead. This had nothing to do with marks, nothing to do with being a dysfunctional family, no way one could really blame the parents, so then what? A thirteen-year-old in our neighbourhood died whilst trying out a way of getting a ‘high’ by depriving himself of oxygen. In the tiny Mumbai flat, his mother was in the kitchen and his grandmother had just left the room for a couple of minutes. A quick experiment with a bit of rope and he was gone. And that was well before the 3 Idiots was conceived.

            One newspaper came out with an article on successful people who were school or college dropouts: Sachin T, Albert E… but all dropouts aren’t prodigies. I remember thinking this after ‘tare jameen par’, that all persons with learning disabilities aren’t necessarily blessed with great talents. And all those who are doing badly in exams don’t necessarily have a label “dyslexic” or something else. We have to be objective, careful… else the (false?) aspirations lead to suicides.

            Desperate young men in trouble with money toss themselves off high floors, women not knowing how to get out of romantic tangles throw themselves before trains, old people who feel neglected and lonely after their spouses are gone swallow lethal doses of pills, and these teenagers who’ve barely moved out of childhood … we get to know only the successful ones. Who knows how many attempts have gone unnoticed? Who’d want to admit to a desire to kill oneself? Just as divorce or homosexuality or even a handicapped member of the family was once a dirty secret, it’s now suicide’s turn to come out of the closet. Just as Alcoholics Anonymous encourages its members to get on track by first publicly acknowledging that they have a problem, so also those connected directly (“I tried” or “I wished to try”) or indirectly (“Someone in my family…”) need to open up if we are to accept it as a problem and tackle it with sensitivity.

                        Who knows who’ll be caught unawares next.

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