The New Year's Joke

“Madness is like gravity, all it takes is a little push.” – The Dark Knight's Joker

My tummy is upset again. I am tense. Fragile like a cracked windshield. One push and I will cross the threshold into the world carefully documented by Dostoyevsky. A world of the deranged, the mad, the ones off their hooks. The poor people, sometimes hard-working, sometimes not. Living in shabby places, going to shabby places, coming from …you guessed it.

I want to destroy every sign of life I’ve left. Every word document, every mail, every notebook, each cloth, the spectacles, the book cases, the lamps. Everything I had held with some pride as mine – every thought. I want to gather it all up in a heap, strike a match and see the flames rise into a bonfire on Lohdi.

Each time I feel like this – nerves on end, eyes beginning to turn in upon themselves, mind racing mindlessly from one disaster to another of my life – I feel cursed. Why do I do all the wrong things. Like Raskolnikov, who goes about half-starved and mumbling and does not know the extent of what he has done till he is in prison paying for it. I feel mindless, divested of sense till its too late. Or like Golyadkin, who is too awkward for his own good in social situations. Who attributes his downfall to his evil double when there’s actually only him. I couldn’t even reach the end of that book because I felt so sure of it happening to me as it was happening to him. For days I could not sleep properly. They take him away in the end. With bated breath I read him being taken away in a carriage. God knows where they locked him up and how he lived out the rest of his days.

Come to think of it, Chekhov has also written about madnesses. There are degrees of them and everyone has their own definitions. But all that keeps running through my head is – I’m so scared. I don’t have the courage to feel that everything will be alright. I don’t even have the strength to believe in my own goodness anymore. Like the doctor from the story – Ward No. 6 – who began to enjoy talking to a ‘madman’ was thrown into the cell himself and so shocked was he that he died before the night was over. To be clubbed with the mad – the damned, the lost – the ones who don’t even feel God’s mercies.

How can one ever sleep? Or eat or do anything when all one feels is the terror of being thrown out of the house. Turned out any moment. Wondering who will be angry or sad or let down by you again.

There was once a man who disintegrated when I said his name. Broke into little pieces on a beach. I’m on that same beach today. Splintered.

Only I don’t yet have the courage to disappear into the sea.