The day felt sticky, the low, black sky weighed down with the scent of monsoons. With puddles beneath their feet and shut umbrellas in hands, they shuffled into the building in their damp dhotis and saris, an elevator heaving…
I must have been eighteen when the stranger in my neighbourhood took his life, the doctor who had moved in less than three months earlier. We lived in a village where everyone knew each other, going back at least two generations. But the stranger’s only label was the new doctor.
That was so until the day he took his life. In the absence of any other information, he was reduced in his roles and defined by his final act. The new doctor, a husband and a father, who committed suicide.
I knew no one who committed suicide until then. It was to me just the final recourse of forlorn lovers in the ultra-romantic Indian movies I watched. But in real life—one I hadn’t yet lived, and one I viewed through a black-and-white lens—I viewed suicide as cowardice and a shirking of one’s responsibilities in the face of life’s challenges.
So his suicide outraged me. How could someone abandon his wife and kid, no matter what his troubles were? What was the point of education if it couldn’t inspire fortitude? Why did he marry if he had suicidal tendencies? Wasn’t it a criminal offense (which it was in India’s colonial era penal code that viewed suicide as a crime against the state and religion)? In my rhetorical arguments with the dead man, his death was an affront to others, a renouncement of his role as a protector and provider.
I knew nothing else about him, not how he died, where he came from, what drove him to the drastic act, or what became of his family later. But looking back through the ensuing two decades, what I find entirely lacking in my impressions of those days is an empathy and understanding of the human condition. I had a rigid view of a society in which everyone had an inescapable and often strictly gendered role. When someone refused to play along, I was quick to judge.
A few years later, my schoolfriend lost his father to mounting debts and the rail tracks. Another friend lost his to marital troubles and immolation. A few years later, a classmate from college, someone who was intelligent, kind, sensitive, and erudite, lost their life to suicide after battling loneliness and depression.
Each of them seemed to challenge my black-and-white prism and confront life in all its varied hues. They were all men. Barring my friend, they were all fathers. But slowly, I was seeing them beyond their fatherhood or gender. I was beginning to understand the loneliness of men and the social expectations placed on them. They made me reckon with the unseen troubles of the mind.
So this story is my atonement against social certitudes. It’s an attempt to see such a situation without judgment. A man is lying dead, leaving behind the traces of his fully lived life.
GAYATHRI THIYYADIMADOM is a writer from India, currently living in Germany. She holds a day job in tech and writes personal essays on Medium, exploring life’s existential questions.
