Normalcy

Had it not been for Maya, I would have never seen that patient.

Entering the OPD that fine Thursday morning, he wasn’t a hard one to spot. Amongst the crowd of some forty people in that room, he was the only one with the description she had given me. I looked for his file amongst the bunch of dozen others lying on the table and called out his name. As per my guess, the same man, well dressed and seemingly coming from an educated background, somewhere in his mid-twenties raised his hand, somewhat sluggishly, hinting signs of disinterest in the proceedings going on in that room.

Well, let me describe the room for you.

Located in the center of the premises of a leading Psychiatric center in New Delhi, this room witnessed some fifty odd lives being transformed every day. The walls in this room have heard the strangest of tales and weirdest of experiences undergone by men and women struggling to combat various mental disorders they deal with, and still, those walls kept those tales a secret, unlike a few mortal beings like myself who chose to put a tale out for my readers, and to some extent breach patient confidentiality.

I took a look around. There was hardly any vacant spot. The whole room was chaos. The huge center table was over occupied with my co-JRs, post graduate students and interns, each engrossed in extracting patient information and putting pen to paper. I loved this part. Being a doctor in Psychiatry, one has the luxury of being the person whom people would open up their darkest secrets to. Most of the parts in their stories are intriguing, and most of it becomes routinely common with time. But if you have a keen ear, the vigor is always there. Most doctors in Psychiatry love to play with the dynamics of their patient’s tale, the heartiness of their narratives and the sanity of their accusations. Even if they malinger, the Psychiatrist knows it, and that’s when it becomes fun.

Finding no space in that room, I decided to take him to the doctor’s duty room in the male ward. He slowly followed me and I judged from his disheartened gait, drooped shoulders and long melancholy face that he badly needed help. Thankfully the duty room was vacant and provided us the privacy needed for the forthcoming conversation. I tried to make him comfortable, briefly introduced myself and assured him that his friend and my school-mate Maya had sent him to the right place. But he chose to remain pretty silent during most of the interview and spoke only when pestered. His eyes had that hint of ache, his face had lost all expressions, indolently exuberating a lot of suffering, an ocean of misery and a million painful stories to tell.

It took me a while to build up a rapport with him, and even more, to find out problems that were bothering him. He was lost, hopeless, depressed, and to an extent, felt guilty of something terrible that he had done. His sexual interests lied in men and his last relationship with another man that lasted for a year, had recently come to an end. What made things worse for him was that he was still struggling to find his place in the matrix created by the accepted norms of the dominant majority in our society.

Often the toughest question one has to answer when asked to, is – ‘Who are you? What is your identity?’ This man here, was clearly struggling to find that for himself.

He told me that he had been hiding the truth of his sexual interests from his parents, from his sister and best friend, and even his peers at college. But it always came with a price. If anyone amongst the gang of his male friends spotted a hot chick, they would expect him to join the series of erotic comments and guffaws that followed, but he completely found himself out of place. Out of place to an extent that, the feeling of non-belongingness to people slowly crept in on him. He described it as a suffocating feeling that he’d been struggling to free himself from, ever since he had hit puberty. He was in a constant battle with himself, every single day of his life, fighting hard not to succumb to the false convictions that he had been trying to convince his mind with.

It took me a while to realize the seriousness of his problems. This was the first time I was dealing with a patient like this during my residency. I asked him how difficult was it to spot people with the same sexual inclinations as him and he said it was a pretty hard and risky venture. He feared being mocked and abused if any desperate attempt of inquiry from his side failed to parallel his assumptions.

On one such previous attempts a year ago however, he had run into a charming man his age, who shared the same interests as him, befriended him and he gave him the best time of his life. He said he taught him to cherish life, to accept himself the way he was, to grow into a better person every day and, to Love! He claimed that he had spent with him the happiest time of his life. This relationship lasted for a year before fate decided to play cruel, plunging him to a realm of emotional challenges he had never dealt all by himself before and that had brought him to me.

The moment he finished talking, he burst into tears, trying hard to fight back his naive emotions as he attempted to conceal his poignant face with his tiny hands. The sight was somehow very touching and I knew right at that moment that I had to help him in whatever possible way I can. I was also glad that something called ‘compassion’ was still alive inside me somewhere. I wrote his case on few sheets of paper and asked him to follow me into one of our senior consultant’s chamber for further work up and counseling. He was earlier reluctant but then he loathedly followed.

As I approached the consultant’s OPD room, I saw he was already occupied with a huge crowd of patients that were allotted to him that day. I went inside and asked him if I could discuss a case with him and the consultant was generous enough to grant me my wish but said he’d do it once he was done with the remaining patients. So he kept my sheets and asked my patient to wait outside and that he would call his name when he was finished seeing other patients. Since I had other patients for myself to attend to, I gave him my contact number, asking him to give me call when the consultant calls out his name.

Within an hour I got a call from him, I reached the consultant who addressed the patient properly, exploring every aspect of his history that I had missed, wrote him some medicines and suggested a few counseling sessions and made sure he felt better when he left the consultant’s room. He left that day and in subsequent weeks the clinical psychologists at the department took care of the rest.

Two months passed for this incident, when on a yet another Thursday, I received a similar case for work up. This new guy was equally distraught, had more or less the same issues like the previous one and was equally in need for medical help. In addition, he had an urge to turn into a woman physically as he always felt he was a woman trapped in a male body. He wanted me to help him kill that urge. He too, was ashamed of being the way he was, failing to come at par with his natural mental state and not accepting himself the way he existed. He had come here for treatment of his, what he described as ‘abnormality’ as he strongly desired to fall back in the socially acceptable norms of Normalcy, get married to another woman and produce kids as was expected of him.

On further enquiry he revealed that he was incredibly gifted with the talents of sculpting and painting which he also used to earn his bread. When asked about how he spotted his companions in a world that was full of judging people, he said picking them up in a crowd was almost as difficult as spotting a needle in a heap of hay. He was later diagnosed of gender identity disorder. I took his number as he invited me to one of his upcoming sculpture exhibitions in Old Delhi. I browsed his work on his Facebook page. Most of his works in stone were inspired by ancient scriptures and figures in Hindu mythology, depicting various forms of people with gender identity disorders, Shikhandi from Mahabharata being the most prominent. He had also portrayed the body of both Shiva and Parvathy fused into a linguistic creature which he’d labelled as Ardhanariswara.

I had a hard time sleeping that night. What kind of a society do we live in ? Where survival of the majority is all that matters yet survival of the fittest is the rule. What if the majority isn’t fit to survive? The socially accepted norms are often hard on the neglected. And perhaps they are neglected for a reason. The majority fears challenge. They fear being overthrown. The kingship is at stake if the pawn chooses to question. I kept turning and twirling on my bed up till dawn, then reached out for my phone, scrolled down searching for the previous guy's contact number, forwarded it to the sculptor guy and hit send.

Then I cursed Maya. And then I cursed some more.

Dr. Prateek Srivastava.