brain damaged

When I was very small I toddled across a fallen bottle of prescription pills and ate a bunch without anyone noticing. If I’d slept that night through I would have died.

This was in Bangalore. An old lady, a friend of my mother’s, stopped by and saw that my feet were strangely pale. Rubbing them didn’t bring the blood back. She told my mother to get me to the hospital RIGHT NOW. Her son was sent out to hail an auto and get any cash my mother might need. Finally, as we rushed out the door, she mentioned she’d understand if my mother never smiled or said hi to her after that night. It was common knowledge that my dad didn't like my mother getting friendly with the neighbors.

The doctors confirmed I had been poisoned. My circulation had slowed dangerously and my brain was already severely depleted of oxygen. There was a medication they could use, but the hospital didn't have in stock. My mother called my father in tears. He rushed out of work and bought a massive quantity of it, enough for me and a hundred other children. Afterwards he said over and over what a travesty it was that a child might die of such an easily remedied lack.

Raising me was not a difficulty that united my parents. They have a way of fighting that loops back through time like a headache, drudging up every resentment of the many years of their marriage, all the irreparable damage each feels the other inflicted on me, the only project they attempted together and a failed one in many respects.

I was eighteen — I’m surprised, looking back, that I was that old — when I first overheard them reach, after several hours, the subject of who was the blame for Divya having eaten the Pills. It made me queasy, I don’t know why, maybe because neither of them ever brought that incident up, maybe because my dad likened it to a murder.

---

Sometimes it’s like my brain goes offline for a few seconds, during which I drop things or pick them up or walk into something or trip without realizing it at all. I’m known for being careless, even clumsy. K affectionately jokes that I'm brain damaged.

It might actually be true, though. The doctors didn’t know if I'd ever fully be okay. Apparently I was precocious to an almost unheard of degree before this happened, and then I became more listless, more confused. I'd sometimes clock out in the middle of playing and stare vacantly at nothing for minutes before coming back to myself.

Growing up this was just another addition to the plethora of narratives that made me very bitter and justified me not trying at anything. I felt all my potential had already been wasted, that my parents had squandered it, that I didn't have any of the normalcy or community I saw so many girls around me thrive in. It felt like I spent my evenings trying to block out endless quarreling and figure out why everything I said seemed to rub other kids the wrong way.

In elementary school I was precocious in academics and ingratitude. I said quite astonishing things to my mother for my age, things like, "I wish I didn't have to go to school. I hate you. I wish math didn't exist. I wish I'd never been born."

My mother usually treated me like I could do no wrong, but at times like this she would scold, with surprising frequency and vehemence, to be careful what I wished for, even in thinking. She painted a picture of God sitting up high granting out wishes at random, "So be it! So be it!" I thought that was pretty stupid of God.

One afternoon when I was five I woke up from nap to a warm, perfectly still, perfectly empty house. I ran from room to room screaming for my mother in terror. She had been right, and God had granted me my wish. I ran outside sobbing and spoke to the sky, begging God over and over to give me Amma back. That was how she found me on her way back from the laundromat.

Almost seventeen years later, my mother came to see me, an uninvited, much-begrudged guest. She got turmeric stains on my white couch and confessed that she, too, had once made a wish without thinking, and that wish had almost come true.

One day when I was very small she’d sat thinking about how bright and full of hope her life had been so recently and how it was now. Her dreams of love were ruined forever and her other dreams fettered by so many things: her chilly, absent husband, her tyrannical in-laws, but ultimately by the ever-demanding baby in her arms. I was the reason she couldn't leave, the reason she was tied to this mean-spirited, miserable, controlling family, and she wished I had never been born.

She said I spent the whole day whimpering and fretful, but I was a colicky baby so this was not unusual. My mother told me how exhausted she was, how long she tried to get me to sleep.

After I finally dozed off, she made herself coffee. Her usually deft hands fumbled the cup, and I was woken up by the clanging of metal on cold tile. At her wits’ end with the crying, she summoned the old lady next door for advice. If she hadn’t dropped the cup…

I can still see her face in the dim warm lamplight, the sheer earnestness in her voice, the complete and total reverence for this lesson she was certain God had taught her. She sobbed as she prayed over and over for God to give her child back. You could see, you could really see, how it was never the same for her after.

---

I guess it was never the same for me, either, but truthfully I’m at peace with all my might-have-beens. I consider myself enormously lucky now, to have the life I've had, the parents I've had. People always protest when I say this, but I know I bear some responsibility too. I was an unnecessarily big complication in a complicated life; if I’d been a gentle, sweet child it would have more meaningful and easy for everyone involved.

It was just hard having any perspective in all those dim, lonely years, where the only happiness and peace I ever found was in solitude, watching leaves drink up the afternoon and whispering stories to lizards sunbathing on the pavement.

---

These days my parents are tired of fighting about me; they avoid it by staying in different hemispheres. Actually my father was always tired of it, and I suspect that’s why his work always required he live in another city. These days, I guess, he’s also tired of the pretense.

There’s a scene in the shockingly perceptive 90’s coming-of-age cartoon Daria where Daria, eternally difficult, is finally old enough to feel guilty about it. Her parents hasten to clarify that, yes, they fought lot about her, but not because of her. Her maladjustment was a consequence of her unusual brilliance, a tradeoff they were happy to accept, a gift, not a curse, to the family.

I just wish I could convince my parents how happy I am now, how grateful I am for everything.