Like everyone growing up in a family with tangles, off-shoots and clingy, extended members, I have my own stock of family lore. What mostly stood out from all that I heard from my parents, my paternal grandma and also my youngest uncles (twins) is that the madness that runs in several other families was called ‘genius’ in our own. This always left me confounded. What sort of a cover-up was that? Whenever I looked around to identify genius, I veered towards an Einstein or a Ritwik Ghatak.
Not my eldest aunt, who I called boro-mashima. If we segue back a bit, I remember my brother had a slightly older friend in middle-school, perhaps called Tiku or Tiklu. He was a good-looking fellow, healthy and somewhat shy. His mother, who visited us often, complained that he was more interested in ‘pottering around’ alone, ignoring his studies. Later, when my brother and I left home for college, we were told on our weekly telephone conversations that Tiku hadn’t been able to cross the threshold of school, and was often turning violent, attacking his own parents. “There was no such instance of madness in our family,” Tiku’s mother had told my mother. She never explained what kind of pottering around might have kept Tiku happy and busy. Perhaps things that ‘regular’ kids didn’t do, only the crazy bright ones did.
As children, we often used to hear curious stories about an uncle, my father’s cousin. Bubu was a genius by all means. He spoke over 20 languages or something, was a multiple college-university degree holder, an expert on many subjects under the sun, a human encyclopaedia. This was when he was not waking up his family at night, screaming loudly, “I want duck meat, now!” I met him only once. He seemed genial and approachable. We didn’t serve him duck, just a regular fish meal.
Yet another cousin of my father went missing after he left for the US. Known to be a fabulous scientist, we heard he was recruited by NASA. So deep did he go into the nitty-gritty of American power—science—that he never returned home to his widowed mother. The connections got feebler and most relatives attributed it to his astounding scholarship that overlooked family ties. This, until the poor mother died lamenting for her son who went completely incommunicado at the end of it. No one knew if he was even dead or alive, for whatever price he had paid for being a genius. Or a madman of sorts, who simply loved his work.
We all know the stories around Einstein, a lovable ‘mad’ man. Ghatak, the magical modernist of Indian cinema, is known for his alcoholism and an abrupt, unfinished career. They appear endearing because of their creations and inventions. Later, as a literature student, I encountered Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I noticed how they were mostly valued for their ‘mad’ streaks, not what they actually did in their respective fields.
My eldest uncle—jethu—came across as perhaps a jumbled version of all of the above, when I was old enough to understand him as an individual. Married to a Khasi lady early in life and then letting her go, he spent his time among his stacks of books, reading and writing. His fulltime caretaker, a needy woman from the neighbourhood, was photographed with our joint family in Tezpur, Assam, where uncle built a sprawling country-style house, complete with fruit trees, vegetable plots and a flower garden. Geeta-r Ma or Geeta’s mother, as she was addressed by all, seemed to be the only one aware of what jethu needed ’round the clock. His food, medicines, the thrice-a-day hookah, perhaps some alcohol (he possessed books on wine-making at home and apparently tried his hand at being a vintner), and the maintenance of his huge number of books was all minded by Geeta-r Ma. Occasionally, when we visited Tezpur during summer or autumn vacations, he took us out and bought us new clothes, balloons and toys. He loved to eat, but more or less in a fussy way. Any alteration to his routine and he threw a mighty tantrum unbecoming of an elderly man. And the anger was ugly. His only match was my grandmother, who was a fiery woman. In her old age, when she came to live with him, she often landed in spats, because jethu’s fits of anger manifested in extreme behaviour. My younger uncles—the twins—lived in the same house. Once, in a fit, jethu threw his own mother, the twins and their newly-wedded wives, out of the house. Well-known professors and scholars who were regular visitors to jethu’s living room to discuss philosophy, poetry and politics, were not surprised. He had even locked up one of the aunts inside her room because she had ‘disobeyed’ him.
“It’s his mad genius,” said others who knew the family. But no one would want to offer any counsel as to what really might have ailed jethu. The word ‘madness’ was a taboo. He was a genius, period.
Were these ‘geniuses’ abusive? I don’t know, no one tells. Why did my Khasi aunt leave, or what was the state of mind of the wife of Bubu (he died early, leaving a boy), or what was the lost-in-America uncle’s family like, I’ve never known. Maybe their friends and family forgave them. Maybe Geeta-r Ma, the outsider in the family photographed with the clan, alone understood the irrationality of an utterly scholarly and creative mind that was capable of kindness or largesse we kids glimpsed time to time.
Sometimes my mother would narrate stories about obscure relatives whose little tics were the butt of jokes, especially if they were women. A cousin’s mother who would verbalise her lament throughout the day and would later refuse to bathe and wash, was whisked away to a ‘camp’, never to come back again. Compare this to other women who would only wash on and on throughout the day, wash their hands and feet, the floors, their clothes and utensils even after they’ve been washed. My own maternal aunt Kamala, the sister closest to my mother, was an epitome of talents. As she grew older, her washing, scrubbing and cleaning became legendary. Every time we discussed in the family the urge for such cleanliness, my father would say briefly, “Women need their own space, and you know it better.” He was the type to refer to psychology textbooks on his bookshelf, but in this case, saying too much would result in family ties being tied into irretrievable knots.
My dad’s fits of rage—although said to have diminished as he became a “family man”—were subject of hushed reference. As a young political prisoner, just past boyhood, when the banned undivided Communist Party had its members scurrying for cover, a great part of his psyche was shaped by men and women he met as revolutionary acquaintances and jailhouse inmates. He told us about his close proximity to even ordinary criminals, to prisoners sentenced to death by hanging before they were taken away to their solitary cells, and encountering a merciless deathly whipping where the prisoner—stripped completely—was tied to a tiktiki or wooden A-frame, and left to bleed till unconscious. Father himself was one of those political prisoners who had been were chicken-cooped inside a cell and fired upon inside Rajshahi Central Jail, now in Bangladesh. The deep gash from the bullet wound—many died in that firing while he luckily got away fallen under a heap of bodies—in his hip, created a crater in our young heads too. We understood anger, madness and despondency while dealing with questions of justice.
As for my younger uncles, the twins Pintu and Mintu, they regretted not being born earlier to be a part of the political vortex of the elders. Although of mild temperament and no apparent sign of overtly irrational behaviour, they fought tooth and nail, upsetting my grandma, who looked down upon her older children’s atheism and spent time with the Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana. The twins in their calm times read poetry out aloud and reveled in the poetic madness fuelled by stalwarts such as Kazi Nazrul Islam. Living in the shadow of the genius—alive or dead—was their pursuit.
On my mother’s side, if Kamala was the tip of the iceberg, my boro-mashi Amala was the whole of Antarctica. A fabulously talented woman and dedicated teacher, she remained unmarried all her life. Curiously though, for a woman of her times, she possessed all the fine qualities of a prospective bride by the kilos. Her cooking was scrumptious, her sewing and knitting gorgeous, her skill with housekeeping and decorations unsurpassable. Add to all that her knowledge of the classics, expertise in Sanskrit and top-notch teaching skills. She was a genius of her times who worked and lived alone. But could even such a woman be called a genius? No one ever thought so. All they saw was a spinster fussing over cleaning and washing, ranting about her Partition-time misery, her being a stickler about her own sitting and sleeping place in the house if we ever messed with it, and her stubbornness in allowing any changes to come through. If ever accused of being ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’, even lightheartedly, she responded, as Sexton did, “Madness is a waste of time…”. She was too creative to even reflect on her perceived inadequacies.
As I think more, Amala was the renaissance woman for us back then. But the tussle between the definition of genius and madness continued to vex me as we were growing up. Whenever I asked my mother if the so-called madness was a latent trait in all of us, she flatly denied it in her own family, while indicating that our father’s family was the apt target sample. Because they were ‘geniuses’, according to all of them, mostly men. Women were not geniuses, rather sufferers, whether Plath or Sexton or my aunts. I had to disagree. “What about the ones, men very close to us, who pushed us to the brink with their mad streaks, even while the pandemic raged? Can you call them genius?”
“That’s a basket case,” she summarised promptly. “Nearly a copy of how this country is teetering on the brink, thanks to one or other mad men. They disqualify as family.”
“Where then will all the mad people of our family go,” I thought aloud, while on the phone with my mother.
“As long as they are not geniuses, they’d survive,” she said cryptically, and perhaps wistfully! I was tempted to quote Plath for her, tweaking it just a bit: “I think you made it up inside your head”, but I saved the conversation for more revelation the next time.
(This appeared in the print edition as "The Rabbit Hole of Madness & Genius")
(Views expressed are personal)
Nabina Das is a hyderabad-based poet & writer who was born & brought up in Guwahati, Assam
