The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,1

in medical school, that I realized that Rajesh was likely in the throes of an acute manic phase. His mental breakdown was the result of a near-textbook case of manic-depression—bipolar disease.

Jagu—the fourth-born of my father’s siblings—came to live with us in Delhi in 1975, when I was five years old. His mind was also crumbling. Tall and rail thin, with a slightly feral look in his eyes and a shock of matted, overgrown hair, he resembled a Bengali Jim Morrison. Unlike Rajesh, whose illness had surfaced in his twenties, Jagu had been troubled from childhood. Socially awkward, withdrawn to everyone except my grandmother, he was unable to hold a job or live by himself. By 1975, deeper cognitive problems had emerged: he had visions, phantasms, and voices in his head that told him what to do. He made up conspiracy theories by the dozens: a banana vendor who sold fruit outside our house was secretly recording Jagu’s behavior. He often spoke to himself, with a particular obsession of reciting made-up train schedules (“Shimla to Howrah by Kalka mail, then transfer at Howrah to Shri Jagannath Express to Puri”). He was still capable of extraordinary bursts of tenderness—when I mistakenly smashed a beloved Venetian vase at home, he hid me in his bedclothes and informed my mother that he had “mounds of cash” stashed away that would buy “a thousand” vases in replacement. But this episode was symptomatic: even his love for me involved extending the fabric of his psychosis and confabulation.

Unlike Rajesh, who was never formally diagnosed, Jagu was. In the late 1970s, a physician saw him in Delhi and diagnosed him with schizophrenia. But no medicines were prescribed. Instead, Jagu continued to live at home, half-hidden away in my grandmother’s room (as in many families in India, my grandmother lived with us). My grandmother—besieged yet again, and now with doubled ferocity—assumed the role of public defender for Jagu. For nearly a decade, she and my father held a fragile truce between them, with Jagu living under her care, eating meals in her room and wearing clothes that she stitched for him. At night, when Jagu was particularly restless, consumed by his fears and fantasies, she put him to bed like a child, with her hand on his forehead. When she died in 1985, he vanished from our house and could not be persuaded to return. He lived with a religious sect in Delhi until his death in 1998.

Both my father and my grandmother believed that Jagu’s and Rajesh’s mental illnesses had been precipitated—even caused, perhaps—by the apocalypse of Partition, its political trauma sublimated into their psychic trauma. Partition, they knew, had split apart not just nations, but also minds; in Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”—arguably the best-known short story of Partition—the hero, a lunatic caught on the border between India and Pakistan, also inhabits a limbo between sanity and insanity. In Jagu’s and Rajesh’s case, my grandmother believed, the upheaval and uprooting from East Bengal to Calcutta had unmoored their minds, although in spectacularly opposite ways.

Rajesh had arrived in Calcutta in 1946, just as the city was itself losing sanity—its nerves fraying; its love depleted; its patience spent. A steady flow of men and women from East Bengal—those who had sensed the early political convulsions before their neighbors—had already started to fill the low-rises and tenements near Sealdah station. My grandmother was a part of this hardscrabble crowd: she had rented a three-room flat on Hayat Khan Lane, just a short walk from the station. The rent was fifty-five rupees a month—about a dollar in today’s terms, but a colossal fortune for her family. The rooms, piled above each other like roughhousing siblings, faced a trash heap. But the flat, albeit minuscule, had windows and a shared roof from which the boys could watch a new city, and a new nation, being born. Riots were conceived easily on street corners; in August that year, a particularly ugly conflagration between Hindus and Muslims (later labeled the Great Calcutta Killing) resulted in the slaughtering of five thousand and left a hundred thousand evicted from their homes.

Rajesh had witnessed those rioting mobs in their tidal spate that summer. Hindus had dragged Muslims out of shops and offices in Lalbazar and gutted them alive on the streets, while Muslims had reciprocated, with equal and opposite ferocity, in the fish markets near Rajabazar and Harrison Road. Rajesh’s mental breakdown had followed quickly on the heels of the riots. The city had stabilized and