1-4 EXCERPT FROM THE SIKH PATIENT

They say I’m well now. But what do they know? They say congratulations like it’s a gift. I’m here, yeah. It’s really me this time, not some woman sitting on the edge of reality, on a bus somewhere, laughing like she’s on weed. And when I look in the mirror I see a face that’s not even, something has always been missing in this face. I forgot the other day when I looked in the mirror, I forgot at what rate I was missing myself and running into an image of a stranger. It’s like smelling fake flowers. But it’s my face and I can finally see it. I have green eyes and sometimes when I look into them I see the sea. And sometimes I see green eyes. The part in my hair is like an exclamation point, announcing something, like the partition of India and Pakistan, it is just a line.“That’s what I think maybe sanity is, finally realizing that something is missing. When you are insane, you are the one who is missing.” I say it in his nice posh office where we sit on black leather chairs and sit next to mahogany tables. And I think of how luxurious it is to have an interiorly decorated discussion about insanity, as opposed to just being. Let’s dissect it; let’s tear ourselves apart. How about we just be? For a second I wish my mind could shut up and I could just be one with the furniture or something…“Where do you think you went when you went missing?” My doc, as I like to call him, is a Jew. He has that introspective sort of beard that suggests he understands the Holocaust, or perhaps I’m projecting. I’m the crazy one, I’m allowed to hallucinate.“I went up and I went down and I went around and around. I just went, like the wind. I was free.” I think about how there is no wind in this room; it’s stuffy. Outside the window, I don’t see any wind but it might just be there. I never saw my freedom but I know it was there and now it’s gone. Like the wind.“Are you not free now?” he asks and scratches his chin, which is a bit uneven too.“No not like that, I mean I didn’t care what other people thought. I didn’t care about my thoughts. I let them be, I let myself just be what I was.” I stare at his gray eyes that remind me of the gray sky and my gray life.“Do you think you care too much about what people think now, now that you are sane,” and he actually waved his four fingers in the air like quotation marks. I appreciated that.“Yeah, I don’t know, I think about everything…I don’t know how to just be. I could be then and not think about it so much.” Like I think about how you have a gray beard and how everything in the world matches, kind of.“Do you think you are romanticizing mania because there is something missing in your life that is making you feel unhappy?” Oooh, that was such psychiatric talk…he was losing me….“Look I know when I went home with an unknown cab driver that I could have been raped or killed or something…I know the mania impeded my judgment and made me yell and cry…I know all that…but I was also free for a second.”“Free of what?”“We are not free.” I looked at him hard, my green eyes met his gray eyes and for a moment we were just color.“I know that…but the question is now that you tasted freedom, can you incorporate that into your life experience?” He was wearing a suit, for godsakes the man was wearing a suit!“Yeah…I guess I just want to say that there is something out there that’s better than this…” and I could go on but I’ll save that for later.It’s funny, there are times I think that when I laughed so hard and the next minute cried harder, that was the only time I was ever really alive. It might be a mental myth...and maybe I don’t want to relive it. But I’ll tell you that I know something….It’s been a fabulous few years now, and they keep changing the names of the pills and the doses. Sometimes they’re pink, sometimes they’re yellow. But my name is still Yasmine and I’m still brown. They say now to call it Bipolar, they rarely say Manic Depression anymore. I mean, those are the names of the disease I have.And what about my name? My daddy’s dead but he was the one who wanted to give me a Muslim name even though we are not Muslim. We are Sikh. He lived in Pakistan when it was still India and when he hung out with Muslims he noticed that he always like their names. He really liked the letter z. That’s how you say it, you know, it’s really “Yazmeeen.” When there was war and he had to leave what is now Pakistan, the only thing that was Muslim that he could remember was the z’s.I probably name my daughter Zara, if I even have one.I might not have kids, you know, I mean I might pass my disease to them. Do I want other people walking around this earth as confused as I am? I don’t want to be responsible for that shit.I don’t have any kids yet, but I do have a family. I blame them for everything, ‘cause that’s what families are for. I think it all started when my grandmother died. 

EXCERPT from THE SIKH PATIENT

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