Book Excerpt: 'Homecoming' By Neha Kirpal And Nandini Murali

This article contains mentions of self-harm and suicide
September 10 is 'World Suicide Prevention Day', an initiative aimed at raising awareness about the importance of mental health and providing support to those affected by suicidal thoughts and behaviours. As part of this year's observance, entrepreneurs Neha Kirpal and Nandini Murali are soon launching their book, Homecoming: Mental Health Journeys of Resilience, Healing and Wholeness, bringing together the voices of 11 Indian women leaders navigating severe mental illness. 

Author Neha Kirpal is the founder of Amaha Health,Children First, and the India Mental Health Alliance (IMHA). Meanwhile,Nandini Murali is the founder of SPEAK, Vice-President of Learning & Research at Avtar, and a gender and diversity professional. Their book is said to be India’s first anthology on women leaders navigating mental health challenges. 

Homecoming features accounts of depression, schizophrenia, chronic anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder, suicide loss, and inter-generational trauma, nudging for accessible quality care and building support systems for people in homes, colleges and workplaces. These narratives of survival, resilience and hope illuminate the importance of learning from lived experience expertise, invaluable for designing care practice, public policy and community support systems across the country.

Here is an excerpt from the book.

An excerpt from 'Homecoming: Mental Health Journeys of Resilience, Healing and Wholeness'

Being and Belonging -Neha Kirpal

It took Arjun ten years to make that call. He said he couldn’t do it alone anymore. I think a part of him finally recognised the gulf between the world inside my mother and the world outside. While he was still loyal, dedicated to her beliefs, there was a small part of him that understood they needed help desperately.

Ironically, I was on a bus, heading to a friend’s wedding in Jaipur when my dad called me right after he hung up. ‘Where are you?’ We found Mummy and Arjun! Come straight to the Delhi airport. We’re flying to Nepal!’ I didn’t even know how to process what I was feeling at that moment. I just jumped off the bus, stopped a police car on the highway and said, ‘Please take me to Delhi airport, it’s an emergency!’

I was swarmed by emotions: fear, panic, joy, anger, resentment, excitement. Why now just when I was moving on? What state will we find them in? What will it take to be together again as a family? My dad had remarried by then. My brother was asking us to come bring them back home. My mom was chained to a hospital bed in some tiny village in Nepal. Did I even have it in me anymore? I carried so many heartbreaks and grudges, so many unresolved pieces that weighed me down. I was caught in this strange in-between space of wanting neither the past nor the future and having no idea where to go in my present.

We flew to Nepal and reached the hospital in Gongabu, where we found my mother in the midst of a full-blown psychotic episode. My brother Arjun was standing beside her, looking exhausted and beaten down, but he fell at my father’s feet, overwhelmed with gratitude at our arrival. It was a devastating moment, revealing in one look the extent of his struggles in trying to live with our mother’s illness all alone without shelter or resources. I stared at my mother with no recognition; it was like seeing a completely different person—an older, shrivelled version of herself. She was as thin as a stick and so fragile. I didn’t even know who this person was anymore. Nothing about this felt like a family reunion as I had so often imagined for it to be in my dreams.

We went to pick up their belongings before flying back, from a tiny hamlet where they had built a life as teachers at a local school. My mother, in her brilliance, had been home-schooling my brother all those years. Their room had stacks of books— astrophysics, chemistry, political theory and a range of other readings. Arjun was exceptional too, just like our mother. He had never gone past seventh grade in a traditional school but studied at the British Library by night and started tutoring students preparing for engineering exams by day to earn a living. They even had a little notebook where they wrote their own poems and jokes—threads of joy they stitched together, in the margins of a life shaped by survival against all odds.

Homeless, penniless and feeling ‘hunted’, without a friend in the world is how my younger brother grew up to be the man he would become. They had remained cut off all those years from everyone but each other, holding their silence to protect themselves. They couldn’t ask for help, they couldn’t reveal their names. To be known was to be found, and that was a risk they couldn’t take. So they lived in complete isolation, mother and son, building a world that only they could understand for as long as it lasted.

Ironically, my impression of a ‘normal, happy family’ was about to come true—albeit for a short time; on 21 April 2004, on our way out of Kathmandu, we all went out to a small restaurant for a meal together. My father even asked my mother, ‘Would you like to split a beer, just like we did back in the good old days?’ And she said yes. So, there we were, the four of us just having a family lunch. Mummy was in this strange place between psychosis and calm, fully herself and yet not all there. And yet if someone looked at us through the window, they would never believe this to be a family that was torn apart by such adverse circumstances.

After flying back to Delhi that day, my mom began her first proper treatment for schizophrenia at a mental health hospital, after acutely suffering for nearly twenty years.

Excerpted with permission from Homecoming: Mental Health Journeys of Resilience, Healing and Wholeness  by Neha Kirpal and Dr. Nandini Murali, published by Westland Books.