The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,2

healed—but he had been left permanently scarred. Soon after the August massacres, he was hit by a volley of paranoid hallucinations. He grew increasingly fearful. The evening excursions to the gym became more frequent. Then came the manic convulsions, the spectral fevers, and the sudden cataclysm of his final illness.

If Rajesh’s madness was the madness of arrival, then Jagu’s madness, my grandmother was convinced, was the madness of departure. In his ancestral village of Dehergoti, near Barisal, Jagu’s psyche had somehow been tethered to his friends and his family. Running wild in the paddy fields, or swimming in the puddles, he could appear as carefree and playful as any of the other kids—almost normal. In Calcutta, like a plant uprooted from its natural habitat, Jagu wilted and fell apart. He dropped out of college and parked himself permanently by one of the windows of the flat, looking blankly out at the world. His thoughts began to tangle, and his speech became incoherent. As Rajesh’s mind was expanding to its brittle extreme, Jagu’s contracted silently in his room. While Rajesh wandered the city at night, Jagu confined himself voluntarily at home.

This strange taxonomy of mental illness (Rajesh as the town mouse and Jagu as the country mouse of psychic breakdown) was convenient while it lasted—but it shattered, finally, when Moni’s mind also began to fail. Moni, of course, was not a “Partition child.” He had never been uprooted; he had lived all his life in a secure home in Calcutta. Yet, uncannily, the trajectory of his psyche had begun to recapitulate Jagu’s. Visions and voices had started to appear in his adolescence. The need for isolation, the grandiosity of the confabulations, the disorientation and confusion—these were all eerily reminiscent of his uncle’s descent. In his teens, he had come to visit us in Delhi. We were supposed to go out to a film together, but he locked himself in our bathroom upstairs and refused to come out for nearly an hour, until my grandmother had ferreted him out. When she had found him inside, he was folded over in a corner, hiding.

In 2004, Moni was beaten up by a group of goons—allegedly for urinating in a public garden (he told me that an internal voice had commanded him, “Piss here; piss here”). A few weeks later, he committed a “crime” that was so comically egregious that it could only be a testament to his loss of sanity: he was caught flirting with one of the goon’s sisters (again, he said that the voices had commanded him to act). His father tried, ineffectually, to intervene, but this time Moni was beaten up viciously, with a gashed lip and a wound in his forehead that precipitated a visit to the hospital.

The beating was meant to be cathartic (asked by the police, his tormentors later insisted that they had only meant to “drive the demons out of Moni”)—but the pathological commanders in Moni’s head only became bolder and more insistent. In the winter of that year, after yet another breakdown with hallucinations and hissing internal voices, he was institutionalized.

The confinement, as Moni told me, was partially voluntary: he was not seeking mental rehabilitation as much as a physical sanctuary. An assortment of antipsychotic medicines was prescribed, and he improved gradually—but never enough, apparently, to merit discharge. A few months later, with Moni still confined at the institution, his father died. His mother had already passed away years earlier, and his sister, his only other sibling, lived far away. Moni thus decided to remain in the institution, in part because he had nowhere else to go. Psychiatrists discourage the use of the archaic phrase mental asylum—but for Moni, the description had come to be chillingly accurate: this was the one place that offered him the shelter and safety that had been missing from his life. He was a bird that had voluntarily caged itself.

When my father and I visited him in 2012, I had not seen Moni for nearly two decades. Even so, I had expected to recognize him. But the person I met in the visiting room bore such little resemblance to my memory of my cousin that—had his attendant not confirmed the name—I could easily have been meeting a stranger. He had aged beyond his years. At forty-eight, he looked a decade older. The schizophrenia medicines had altered his body and he walked with the uncertainty and imbalance of a child. His speech, once effusive and rapid, was hesitant and fitful; the words