This year saw anxiety become an unwelcome guest in houses across the world, one that refuses to leave. In 2020, a time when mental health and the fragility of emotional well-being made headlines, Manjiri Indurkar's personal story in It's all in your head, m makes for essential reading.
Not for her honesty—laying herself bare about her struggle—but for her voice: Incredibly powerful, laugh-out-funny, warm, poetic even, compelling and addictive.
It is a rotavirus attack that leads to Indukar's self-discovery into childhood secrets that she has kept hidden. The virus usually hits young children and not adults. Hospitalisation followed and she soon realised that her body was reacting to something deeper than just an infection. “This pain that was hiding in my gut, rotting slowly, coming out in the form of stinky, disgusting bodily fluid had to be cured. It was time,'' she writes.
In the book she maps her journey to self-discovery, the therapy to finally let go.
Abused when she was a child, Indurkar writes about being taken from playing hide-and-seek by “Ajit'' and her clothes being taken off. It happens frequently. Her grandmother Aaiji witnesses it, keeps quiet and never does anything to help her. She writes about her shame, her confusion, her betrayal, even her best friend discovering it. She writes about the trickiness of memory—and how she digs out her childhood photographs for this chapter. “Does it hurt, she says. I nod, it does hurt. How many times? Is it only Ajit? I say no. I tell her about Mogambo,'' she writes. The incidents are vividly described, matter of fact, desperately sad, but she doesn't write with a sense of victimhood. In her retelling her story, she does so with dignity, vulnerability and certain defiance, she makes the reader part of the pain of her struggle—and lingers long.
It is this core of resilience, a spark—and her courage—her sense of survival that stays even longer. The book is also about family, the complexity of it, its secrets, beyond just the ties of love. The bonds of pain that bind people even closer. The relationship with her grandmother, her boyfriend's Avi's relationship with his mother. But beyond just a memoir of deep secrets of childhood, it is also a book about heartbreak, finding a voice and letting go.
It is also about love. She writes about love beautifully, with awareness and not sentimentality; the thrill of falling in love, the courting, the slow cementing from friendship with long evening walks, reading together, the buying of books and shelves, the total all-consuming overwhelming aspect of love. “I had gone home to Jabalpur for Diwali, when I returned to Delhi after a week, Avi came to pick me up at the airport. We kissed in front of the Arrivals Gate of the Indira Gandhi International Airport, Delhi, while people watched us. Some even made judgmental faces. But it was an important kiss. My inner small-town M wanted trademark big city moments, and this was that for me. Later on, picking each other up from the airport became our relationship ritual,'' she writes.
More than just a memoir of her unravelling, the book is a book about coming together, being broken and hope. Grab it.
Book: It's all in your head, m
Publisher: Westland Tranquebar
Pages: 218
Price: Rs 399
