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CITY LIGHTS
Outside, looking in
C.K. MEENA
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Sanity is a question of degree. What is madness but a disruption of the norm? Society has little tolerance for deviants
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The thick, lightly-tinted, double-panelled glass door was closed and a lone employee, M, sat working inside, the light shining in her cabin. I was outside, half an hour early for a weekend film screening. No one else was around and so I thought I wou
ld say hello to M.
I tried the door. It wouldn’t open. No lock was visible, but a blinking red light told me it was one of those new security systems. I didn’t remember it being there on my earlier visits when the door would be wide open and people wandering about. I moved closer to the glass and waved to M, who was in plain view. Couldn’t she see me? I knocked on the door as hard as I could. Clearly, she couldn’t hear me either.
I sat, solitary, on one of the stone benches and stared at the wall. After a while I decided to go upstairs to sit in the auditorium. A similar glass door, but without a swipe-card system, was rock-solid shut. Had I come on the wrong day? It was only 20 minutes to the screening.
I went back to meditating on the bench. After five minutes a young woman arrived. She wanted to meet M. “There she is,” I said, pointing, and as the woman automatically approached the door I added, “But you can’t go inside.” I gestured to the security device. She looked at her watch and said, “I’m supposed to meet her now.” We looked at each other and smiled. The absurdity of the situation had slowly dawned on us. So near, yet so far.
Ask the watchman to call her on the intercom, I suggested. She went out to the gate and came back in saying incredulously, “He says nobody by that name works here!” This was beginning to sound sounded like Kafka on a bad day. I could only point helplessly in M’s direction and say, “But there she is.” A brainwave struck me. “I’ll give you the office number and her extension. Call her on your cell.” I open my tattered address book and gave her the number. She called, and a recorded voice told her the office was closed for the day and would she please call again on Monday.
The young woman was on the verge of despair when M got up from her seat and came out of the cabin. I waved frantically and banged on the glass as she walked right in front of me and moved across to the right. I put my lips close to the crack between the two panels and yelled her name. She disappeared behind a partition, emerged after what seemed like an eternity, and walked back to her cabin, oblivious to two figures pressing their noses against the glass and gazing at her like star-struck fans.
M turned off the light at last and emerged from the door as though nothing had happened. Nothing had, as far as she was concerned. The excitement outside had completely bypassed her. For a while, there, I had felt like a ghost in one of those Hollywood movies, observing this world from the one beyond. Or as though I had turned a corner or fallen through a gap in time to find that everyone including me had changed identities.
This must be the sense of unreality that many whom we call “abnormal” experience all the time. Imagine what the inside of their minds must feel like, those who are with us and yet apart, those who are known only by the names of their mental disorders – countless names coined by men of medicine. They are probably like ghosts hovering over the material world or people trapped behind a soundproof and transparent door, unable to communicate with us. In some cases we are the ones on this side of the door, struggling to make ourselves heard by them, while they remain inside, remote, wrapped in a blanket of silence.
But sanity is a question of degree. What is madness but a disruption of the norm? Society has little tolerance for deviants, for those who don’t play by its rules. Mild eccentricities draw no more than a smile or a stifled giggle but go over the edge and you are treated with fear, pity, ridicule, embarrassment or incomprehension. Society clubs together the unhinged and the rebellious. It wants to keep them out of sight, exile them to its fringes. Here’s an outrage: Pharmaceutical companies in the US are pushing prescription drugs for teenagers who have problems handling authority. Rebellion has become a mental disorder! This nation of pill-poppers has already accepted medical solutions to the problem of hyperactive kids in kindergarten, so the latest trend should come as no surprise.
Obedience is the cardinal virtue of an orderly society. Questions are a disturbance. One can picture society as a large, immobile square of plain white. Outside its perimeter are swirling, cavorting yellows, greens and magentas. Occasionally, some of the colours on the outside leach into the square, and stains and splotches relieve the grim whiteness. And who are the colourful ones but those touched by creative madness – the thinkers, the dreamers and the saints? “Madness” is what has given us Mahadevi Akka and Virginia Woolf, Bobby Fischer and the Taj Mahal. The glories of insanity are what make life worth living.
(Send your feedback to ckmeena@gmail.com)
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