Jerry Pinto’s translation of Hindi playwright Swadesh Deepak’s memoir I Have Not Seen Mandu captures both the fractures and the resilience of the human spirit with nuance

Some books are difficult to read and impossible to review as existing templates dissolve, revealing without filters an open wound, with sinews, muscles and tendons visible and palpable. One is simultaneously pulled towards it and also needs to escape it, as it holds a mirror to the possible darkness that might exist in one’s soul.

The book, translated from Hindi into English by Jerry Pinto, defies categorisation, genre or any kind of labels. An important book, not only about medical science, mental health, but about the human spirit, its resilience, its fractures and, somewhat curiously, also about affirmation. I Have Not Seen Mandu is about art, about words, images and meanings, about making the invisible visible and the visible invisible. It chronicles the writer’s struggle with mental illness, recorded with alarming honesty, that does not waver from looking straight in the eye, warts and all.

Deepak’s endless hallucinations about a beautiful seductress Mayavini, who comes to meet him with three white leopards, is a scene that, perhaps, Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel may have imagined — an image that both disorients and fascinates by its sheer visual sumptuousness and hidden meanings. While reading the book, you enter into a private, secret chamber that has been locked for ages, removing the dross to explore the hidden anger and lacerating pain that unnerves and grasps in a way that is alluring and dangerous. A surface read of this brilliant nuanced translation is impossible. Its searing intensity and naked honesty demands pauses to catch one’s breath.

Deepak speaks of his seven years of exile in a “bottomless pit” — his terrifying incarceration in a Chandigarh hospital. Surrounded by doctors and nurses, under the bleak lights and amid barbaric electrical shocks, it was like being trapped in a medieval dystopian world, where the smell of unbathed bodies, stale food and medicinal belches pervaded the atmosphere. The minimalist conversations between Deepak and his co-patients and nurses in the psychiatric ward reminded me of Marat/ Sade, a play by Peter Weiss and performed, ironically, in a psychiatric ward by Jerzy Grotowski. Full of contradictions and multitudinous viewpoints, the book cannot be classified as a conventional memoir. About the cast of characters, Deepak says, “I follow my characters with a loaded gun.” The combustion of the impact is loud and clear — conversations between Deepak and various protagonists are part imaginary, part fictitious, but absolutely real. The real becomes the imagined, the imagined the real, and truth hovers in between like a pesky drone.

Strangely, I had never met Deepak even though, since 1984, I have lived in Chandigarh, where his presence in the theatre fraternity inspired awe and respect. But the question that bewildered me was this: How could a man suffering from emotional, spiritual and physical disintegration create such luminous articulations and portrayals, choreograph objectively a dissolution of all that he held precious? Make it communicable, identifiable, with empathy and compassion? Despite his terrifying illness that was slowly destroying the fragile structure of his domestic/creative space, he creates a distance in his writing between what he felt and what he experienced. He becomes both the subject and the object of his own complex drama, that unspools like a tangled ball of wool.
I always wonder how a doctor feels when he operates on a body. Does he ever imagine the man behind the body, with dreams and aspirations? A similar feeling engulfed me while reading the book. It was like entering the heart of darkness with the lid of consciousness flipped aside to see the entrails of a life stricken by despair.

When the writer re-entered the “sane” world after seven years, he was persuaded by his publisher Girdhar Rathi to write about his travails. “I don’t want to write about my illness… I don’t remember the events in any order,” he tells Rathi. “When did I say you have to describe your illness?” replies the publisher/editor. “Write it down as it comes, forget genre, and style. If you want, write a poem; put in dialogue as if it’s a play — a fractured prose for a fractured autobiography.” It was from this conversation that the memoir was born.

Deepak writes in the introduction to his book, “First, I had to make the ethical decision that nothing would be hidden.” The memoir is a stream-of-consciousness one, ostensibly without order, structure or chronology, yet lucid and articulated without subterfuge or euphemism, in which the past, present and future collapse into one another. His wife Geeta stoically stood guard during his illness while daughter Parul created her own carapaces. Here, I am tempted to quote from the piece “Papa Elsewhere” by his son, Sukant, from the anthology, A Book of Light (2016). It starts with an image of a boy lying in bed, trying to sleep. His father, having recently returned from hospital, is outside his door, knocking. The boy has an iron rod under his bed. He loves his father, his father loves him. The rod is “just in case”.

(The writer is a Chandigarh-based theatre director)