no unifying diagnosis

it has been a long week

For the better part of this week, my family and I took turns staying with my maternal grandmother in the hospital room where she was being treated after fainting and falling down. (nothing to worry about— much better now!) Honestly, all I wanted to do was catch up on some sleep there while Nani rested, but like every other place in Benaras, hospitals too resist any sense of privacy with such intensity that you sometimes wonder if you are single-handedly ruining the civic culture by demanding it. Throughout the day, you can hear relatives in the corridor, loudly discussing the details of and speculating about patients not their own; sometimes, they will knock on your door to check on a person they have only been vaguely acquainted with for less than forty-eight hours— partly genuine concern, partly for gossip that will tide them over the slow, unending days of waiting for a loved one to get better.

My sister and I first rolled our eyes at the curiosity that seemed to be the real plague running through the place, then we learned to simply nod. After we took Nani around for some fresh air in her wheelchair one day, a man strolling around in the corridor with his hands behind his back came up to us and asked if this was a police case; when we looked at each other quizzically, he pointed to the swollen side of her face and lowered his voice to ask: “domestic violence?” In the moment of stunned silence that it took us to answer— not because domestic violence is unheard of, but it needs incredible self-confidence to believe that strangers would confide in you that information if you only asked— he assured us too: “Don’t worry. happens sometimes.” Just as he was launching into his take on why total criminalization of such violence is bad, we smiled apologetically and went inside. all of this to say: the fact that I overheard what follows is not creepy, just the default state of things.

In the hours I spent there, often I'd catch a glimpse of another patient across the hall: a middle-aged woman, with high cheekbones and a general agitation in her manner, surrounded by three older women who never once seemed to leave her side. She was refusing medication; almost every attempt by the nurses ended in a physical struggle. when the doctor came for his daily rounds, I heard somebody outside our door ask him what was wrong with this woman who oiled her hair for an hour every night and then locked herself in the bathroom for another two every morning to wash it. “Mental case?” he asked with real horror in his voice. The doctor replied dismissively that it was schizophrenia; she had had it for almost eight years.

Over the days, many theories were put forward: she does not want to return to the home of her in-laws, her mother ventured. another woman offered that she does seem dispositionally lazy, so maybe this was a nice period of rest for her. The doctors, though quite empathetic to her situation and usually the only voices of reason in the room, despaired about possible courses of action.

Schizophrenia does not have a test, so it is usually diagnosed based on a common set of signs and symptoms. based on observing the patient’s behavioral patterns over a few months, and assessing their account and of those familiar with them, the doctor decides a course for medication. many things could have gone wrong, the doctors would tell her relatives, and every different explanation for why she was responding this erratically after years of medication could be true. He tried to explain the idea of living in a different reality, the metaphor of looking at the world around you through shattered glass: the truth changes at every angle. How do we relate to somebody who does not share our world?

On the chair next to Nani’s bed, I scrolled through Twitter. Earlier last week, I had begun typing out something about the US election— how checked out I found myself of that news cycle, which is unusual given how much news coming out of the US occupies our collective imagination. I never ended up putting it out, or finishing it for that matter, because the idea at its core could be condensed into a single line, too bitter: two terrible candidates running for the top post of perhaps the evilest nation in history, hopefully, they would elect whoever is worse for them.

So much has been said in the aftermath of the results, and so much more will be said. Bad Dem strategy, the unprecedented radicalization of young men, zero-sum identity politics, abandoning the base, favoring corporate interests, misogyny, racism, the usual cocktail of reasons that make it the place that it is. I’m sure all of these are true to different degrees, but the results (and the platform on which both candidates ran) are only the symptoms of a morally bankrupt politics.

My feed since has been full of frankly unhinged American right-wing content. Looking at a lot of it (and general reaction to the events of this week across the spectrum of American media, politics, and popular culture, with only a few exceptions), I keep thinking the same thing: how do we relate to somebody who does not share our world? A lot of the challenges are quite clear, not just in the US but across the world and quite certainly in India— for example, a generation of men growing up on the internet with no buffer to extreme right-wing radicalization, or the anti-labor pro-rich move in popular economic thinking. But before the work of politics begins— and I do wholeheartedly understand the commitment to building coalitions and grassroots activism— the complete absence of any empathy when it comes to many of these groups is jarring, and sometimes almost impossibly difficult to look forward through.