Death of an Imaginary Friend

I knew my life was supposed to matter, but it just didn’t feel like it did. Not being able to understand the intangible sadness, I created a reason to grieve.

I haven’t gone back to that building or even that school campus in 25 years and yet I could enter through the school gate, walk up the sloping road, turn left, enter the building on my left, take the steps up to the second floor and show you exactly where I was standing next to my English teacher when we had this long and extraordinarily intimate conversation.

There was a low, white parapet wall next to me with a rounded ledge and my left hand was on it throughout, holding on for support. I was 16 years old and Deepa Raghavan was my English teacher. I was smart, popular and happy, but I was also a very troubled teenager.

I had chosen Humanities subjects in class XI and there was a feeling that real life had just begun. Finally I was studying exactly what I wanted to. From having been a somewhat zoned out back-bencher for the last four years, I now sat in the front seat in the centre of class, looking up at new teachers eagerly, lapping up the History, Economics and English lessons.

Deepa Raghavan taught us Great Expectations by Charles Dickens that year. I was Pip, not Estella. Sometimes even Jim, the blacksmith - a man with no social graces, but love and enthusiasm to share. That year of reading that novel would transform our imagination.

When Deepa stopped me in the corridor between classes and asked me what was the matter, I knew she had something serious on her mind.

“You sit right in front of me, Natasha. You are an eager student, you volunteer for everything, but you look so sad," she said to me. “What is the matter?"

I had nothing to say immediately. I must have mumbled something, even tried on a weak smile.

“I’ve been watching you for a while," she said. “It’s very distracting. What is hurting you? Is something going on at home?"

Everything was all right with my life. I was thin but I was strong. I had inexplicable stomach aches but I was healthy. I was quiet but I was also boisterous. I had many crushes and occasionally I stalked them during lunchbreak.

I was incredibly sad too. I was wounded and confused. I knew my life was supposed to matter, but it just didn’t feel like it did. There was an amorphous guilt. Whatever I was doing, it seemed to not be what I was supposed to be doing. I felt wrong. Even though I knew I was not.

We were reputed to be one of the best schools in Delhi. We were also referred to as a ‘factory school’. That didn’t seem to deter any parents from wanting to push their children on to the conveyor belt of the production line. Children were the raw material to be converted into saleable products with price tags. That seemed to be an end in itself.

Everywhere around me, aggression and pushiness were rewarded. There were no quiet spaces. Little time for gentleness, for sharing. For appreciating the presence of each other.

Our family had moved cities and schools repeatedly in search of a better future for the children. I had lost friends and grandparents. Two of my friends had lost their fathers in the year we turned 15. Both of them had been alcoholics. Grief was entangled with shame and silence.

The Air India Boeing Kanishka had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean after a mid-air bomb blast by terrorists on board. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been assassinated a few years ago. From the fourth floor terrace of our flat, my brothers and I had watched homes of Sikhs set on fire in our neighbourhood. Two Sikh boys in my class had returned to class with their hair cut for the first time in their lives. Guneet’s family business had been destroyed in a fire. He didn’t make eye contact with anyone for a long time.

Our lives were privileged. We were supposed to be winners, destined to be successful adults. We would transition to prestigious colleges and migrate abroad, grabbing wealth, power and complacence as we built on our advantage of birth.

We didn’t acknowledge our wounds. We were supposed to ignore any incongruity we felt. We didn’t stop to be tender. To heal or help others heal.

“It’s all right, these things happen. Move on now," adults would say. “Nothing happened to you, don’t be so sensitive. Grow up."

I coped with the dissonance in my soul in many innovative ways. Over the years I had had an imaginary Russian mother, a gaggle of aunts who were funny and interesting, imaginary pets and gadgets, a twin brother who died... and some very real, very intimate friends who were always there but you could not meet them, because they didn’t really exist.

I coped by losing weight. I don’t know if I ever really ate a full meal. I look back and wonder if a lot of those black holes of teenage angst were just hunger that I had learnt to suppress.

Everyday injustices, harsh words, bullying, humiliation, callousness and the misguided sense that children are dumb and don’t really understand much takes its toll on all of us. We insist that children must be moulded and trained and fundamentally changed from their natural state of being a child. It is a universal assumption that innocence is the antithesis of smartness.

That day in school, my English teacher held on to me till I opened up to her. The corridors around us went silent as the next period started and all the students went back to into their classes. Deepa didn’t let me go.

“My best friend died," I said to her finally. Not being able to understand the burden of intangible sadness I seemed to be carrying with me, I had created a concrete reason to grieve. In the story I lived in my head, my imaginary friend had died that summer.

“Natasha, my husband died two years ago," she said to me. “My children lost their father. He was an officer in the Indian Army."

Here was an adult, sharing her own life story with me, consoling me. She wasn’t feeling sorry for herself. She was asking me to consider moderating my response to the world around me. It didn’t matter what was hurting me, she was showing me how we can cope.

“Do you see me sad?" she asked. My teacher, recently widowed and a mother of two children younger than me, was acknowledging my grief and inspiring me to recover.

In the week that I had written the first version of this essay, 132 children and 10 adults have been massacred in a school in Peshawar in December 2014. Children had been being lowered into their graves by a city in shock and despair. My own children heard about it in the morning assembly in their school. They stood silently for 2 minutes to mourn for others like them.

If we really want to protect our children, we need to help them heal their hurts by acknowledging them. Make some space to share our grief with them, not just our rage or silence.

(An earlier version of this essay was published in Mint Lounge)

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