"Is something wrong with your mother? She was talking nonsense to me for a long time" said the school sports teacher to a young small boy of 13 years.
The young boy had a puzzled look on his face. He didn’t know how to reply to the question. Inside his heart he knew that on some days his mother did talk nonsense but he couldn’t fathom the fact that his teacher was talking about the same to him. He kept quiet.
Now it was the time for the teacher to feel awkward. He reproached himself for asking such a stupid question. Building upon that stupidity, he asked "Are you listening to me boy?" this time a little louder.
The boy didn’t reply. His friends, who were sitting next to him, hadn’t heard the teacher the first time, now looked at him and then at the teacher. They could sense something was wrong but couldn’t pinpoint to it. Upon realising that there wasn’t any reply to come, the teacher went away shaking his head, leaving the child alone with his friends.
They were sitting in the middle of the auditorium, waiting for the annual day program to start. The most outspoken child of that small group looked over to the child and asked politely "What did that A-hole want to know?"
The child looked directly at his friend’s face, as an acknowledgement to the question, and didn’t reply. But the emerging tears in his eyes were enough to tell his friend that there was something wrong. The whole group started to badmouth the teacher. The program started and all was forgotten.
That afternoon after the school got over, the young child walked to his home, alone lost in his thoughts. He knew that his teacher had asked him a good question, a question to which he himself didn’t know the answer to. He walked quietly on the footpath. The footpath ended and he crossed over the road and went to the other side. On this side of the road, there was a school from where the children were making a lot of noises. But the young child was oblivious to the craziness around him.
"Should I ask my father about this? Will he be able to give me a proper answer? ....Nah he wouldn’t be able to. He always busy in his work and if I ask this uncomfortable question, he might shout like the last time when I had asked him where did the children come from?....Who else can help...hmmm…who else can make me understand and let me know of the proper answer. Maybe the kind lady who lives on the first floor will be able to say something. No she wouldn’t be able to and I don’t think I am that comfortable discussing with her."
The young boy was lost in his thoughts. No solution came to his mind. He went on walking sheepishly. In an about half hour, he reached his home, dropped his bag on the chair present inside the drawing room and switched on the television, forgetting the all important question which was bugging him. An hour went so. No one came to trouble him. His mother had prepared the lunch and was sleeping noiselessly in the next room. Finally his thoughts came back to the question. Still nothing came to his mind. But this time, instead of procrastinating, he had made up his mind. He switched on the iPad, which his cousin brother had gifted him for his birthday, and searched for "My mother is mad?" on Google. The search result astonished him.
"My mother is angry at me, what should I do?" Irrelevant question! He flipped through some more results. They were as useless as the first result.
There was a nice article "My mother is sick and I am mad as hell." It was a heart wrenching article about the mother suffering from cancer and the daughter who couldn’t do anything about it. Even though the article was beyond the maturity of the young boy, still tears came in to his eyes at the end of the article. He could empathise with the pains of the daughter. Still it didn’t answer his question since he knew that there was something mentally wrong with her.
This time he searched for "My mother is mentally sick." and the results came more specific to what he was looking for. They were lot more serious and grave.
The firs result was "mental illness, suicide, depression in my family." He opened the link. It was a gruesome description about the family and how it was affecting the psyche of the author. In the middle of the article, the young boy scared closed the link. His heart was pounding. It took him a while to understand that such problems weren’t present with him. He went to other results and started to read them.
After a while of reading, he finally he came across an article which was more suited to his taste. It was a list of mental disorders on Wikipedia. It was a comprehensive list which didn’t make much sense to him. But the idea struck his mind. This time he did a better phrase search on Google.
"Mental disorder + hallucination + nonsense talking"
The search results were full of schizophrenia. Excitedly, finally being able to find something concrete, the child started to read as much as he could about it. There loads of articles, stories, news and images about it. He went on reading about it for an hour.
Looking over to the symptoms, he started to make a mental note. There were words to which he didn’t know the meaning of for which he had to do search for their meanings.
Distress - Yes
Hearing voices or noises that are not there - Sometime, as stated by others
Inattention – Don’t know
Confused or unclear thinking - No
Reduced emotional expression and social engagement - Definitely yes
Paranoia - Maybe
Hallucination - Yes
Most of the symptoms matched with his observation and he was convinced that his mother had schizophrenia. Happy to solve the problem at hand, he went on reading. Suddenly he came across a word he had recently studied in school "genetics". He did a search on the word to confirm its meaning. As per the meaning and the article, schizophrenia is genetics; hence he has a 50%-50% chance that he himself is suffering from it. This revelation stumped him. He started to think. In his heart he knew that he wasn’t like his mother, neither has he behaved like her nor his actions suggest. He knew he was completely different from her. He didn’t face any problems nor had symptoms like the ones mentioned in the article. But as per Wikipedia, schizophrenia sometimes had a slow onset and can hit a person in his middle age. "Am I mad? No I am no mad. I am sane. But yesterday I was behaving like a lunatic when I had caught Daman cheating. He had started to shout that I am mad. Oh he must be joking…… What if he was right and I am actually but I don’t see it myself just like my mother.....stop talking nonsense....what if Daman is right?"
His mother walked in the room. She had a smile on her face. She quietly kissed on his cheek and everything was right in his mind. Forgetting the stupid fight he was having with himself, he switched off the iPad and the television and started to describe the whole day to his mother. His mother listened to everything he said. She then stood up to warm the milk and came back with a milk with bournvita in a glass. He drank it quickly, asked her permission for going out and went out to play.
Later in the evening, he came back tired and sat on iPad to open Facebook. The page on schizophrenia was still open. He looked over to the page and his doubts again sprang in his mind.
And the debate started again. "No...Yes...No...Yes...No..." It went on.
Suddenly someone tugged at his shoulder, breaking his chain of thoughts. It was his younger sister. He smiled and asked what was troubling her. She looked squarely in his face asked softly, making sure no one else could hear, "Bhaiya Bhaiya, is something wrong with mother?"
He looked at her, dumbstruck.
PS: Sorry for the mistakes. Didn't have time to edit the story.
