Part 1-Personality Disorder

And so I am back! I’ll be off again soon, but that’s still a coupla days away. But in the last one day back home, I fought with mom :) Oh! Nothing serious. Just the usual stuff. Just wish mom would give up trying to psycho-analyse me.

Psychology is crap if you ask me. It’s just a bunch of people trying to make the world alright. Introspection is a good thing, but presuming to do it for others is just that: Presumption! My mom is a psychologist. Need I say more?

She was a professor of psychology and a very brilliant one at that. The brilliance though, died after her marriage. Or so she says. The reason being that my dad was highly skeptical of the whole affair. He was extremely curious after they got married and would have her psychoanalyze him. Then he lost interest and made sure mom did too! I mean, lose her interest at psycho-analysing him. At least that’s what she says when she’s pissed with him. In fonder moods though, she says she saw only figures in his head and she was never any good at figures and so she gave up.

When I was born, my mom found me a perfect subject. She had had two younger siblings, numerous cousins and one baby (my sis) to look after and had never been so puzzled by a child, as she was by me.

I seemed to combine all the diseases and intricacies she had studied about. The first thing she realized was that I was exhibiting signs of a ‘deviant’ personality. I simply wouldn’t behave like normal babies.

She made my life miserable trying to make me behave like one. The fact that I didn’t play with dolls struck her as very strange. Stranger still, I didn’t play. She gave me sissie’s blue-eyed doll….I even remember she called it Seema (my sis I mean, not my mom). I immediately stripped Seems down to the last shreds of her clothing, plucked out her eyes and hair and then proceeded to yank off her arms and legs.

I was one, my sis four and the little girl (my sis) was traumatized beyond repair. I got spanked by her and she was about to do to me what I had done to her doll, when my parents explained very patiently to her that I was only a baby. My sis being the angel in disguise that she was, actually bought this explanation and didn’t once try again to take revenge.

In retrospect, mom says that was only the beginning of a life long pattern of deviant behaviour. When I was three, Dad went to Hong Kong and bought me the most lovely of dolls-again a blue eyed, blonde. Only, this time she was wearing a bridal costume, was called Cindy and even said hello. I was suitably charmed and went off with it to the fields. Mom was happy. At last, I was beginning to play with dolls.

I came back a very dirty, happy child from play that afternoon, and after the usual fuss over food, was put to sleep. It was evening when Mom asked me back for the doll to keep inside. She wanted to keep it inside cos it was a very expensive doll and she hoped that having been initiated into playing with dolls as every little girl should, she could introduce me to cheaper versions.

Anyways, so…when she asked, I remembered and trotted out. Mom trotted behind me, giving me a baby lecture on why toys should be used carefully and well, and how I should always bring toys back inside. I just kept trotting and Mom kept trotting behind me too. The fields at home were wide and huge…and finally I went to the old unused barn at the end of it and proceeded to dig up a little mound that had been recently erected under the tree. Mom watched in horrified silence and there she lay. Poor Cindy, buried instead of being wedded.

Looking sad and forlorn. The doll, I had decided, would have to die. And so, I had buried her. On seeing the doll, dirty and eaten by the white ants that infested the place, mom gave a war-shout, picked me up and proceeded to thrash me until her arms grew tired. * sniff * I tell you, I was used most badly as a child. It must have been very traumatizing. I don’t remember if it was. Nobody at home talks about THAT. Only the story of MY MISDEEDS has come down to me.

After that, nobody tried buying me dolls. They gave me cars and trucks instead, each of which followed a similar ignominious fate. I would play with it like they wanted to while I was under supervision and the minute I wasn’t, I’d set about dismantling it to see how it actually worked.

Dad says if I were capable of putting it back together as some children are, he’d have cheered up thinking maybe I would be an engineer. But putting back was not my forte. I’d bring it all apart and then lose interest. Soon, they stopped buying me toys. Or clothes. Or anything. I tell you my parents used me most badly.

They left me to my own devices. That was when I started conjuring up imaginary friends and talking to myself. And that was how I came to eating whatever came my way. Very often mud, and one day a 1 rupee coin, which stuck in my throat and wouldn’t come out and wouldn’t go down, and which saw me in the hospital for the first time in my life.

That was phase one. Diagnosis-Deviant Personality.