My Teenage Angst

I am not as normal as I appear. Woody Allen

My two older sisters were the the big Kahunas. It was “NinaVarsha this” and “NinaVarsha that”, with nary a Bharti thrown in. Growing up as the third kid, I was largely ignored, as the youngest sometimes are. For years, I tagged along behind them, both physically and mentally. They were fairer, and got the looks and the brains in the family. And when they hit puberty, they got boobs. I was flatter than a Kansas landscape. If my eyesight was 20-20, my body measurements were 20-20-20. The teachers at school looked at my face, my skinny frame, my report card and then double-checked whether I was really NinaVarsha’s little sister. The piteous looks accompanied the ‘Maybe she is adopted’ thought.

I remember wanting to be as beautiful as my sisters. Since that was out of my control and could be achieved by nothing short of a miracle or better still, rebirth, I concentrated on being as smart as them instead. I had tuition teachers...English, Maths, Hindi. I took sitar lessons, singing lessons, drawing lessons, sewing lessons, cooking lessons. I loved learning new things, wrote journals and tried my hand at writing The Great Indian Novel. I pictured myself being the kind of person that says “You almost gave me a conniption!” when scared; a person who hears the name Levi Strauss and thinks of the French intellectual and not a pair of jeans; someone who can tell the difference between a Manet and a Renoir and the words discreet and discrete; someone who knew Georges Sand was a female and how to pronounce Yeats and Proust; the etymology of assassin and serendipity.

I read and read and read. After Noddy and Big-Ears, I moved on to Malory Towers and St. Clare’s, the Famous Five and Secret Seven, the Bobbsey Twins. P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. On to James Michener and Taylor Caldwell and Ayn Rand. With every book, I went into another phase of my life. I wanted to go to boarding school, be a detective, be a twin, have Vishnu wear coattails, travel to Hawaii and Afghanistan and the South Pacific, read the Bible, be an ethical egoist.

Reading books took me into a world of Walter Mitty fantasies and fueled my over-imaginative mind. I read Francoise Sagan, and went around saying Merde! And Zut Alors! Jean Paul Sartre had me wanting to move to Paris and sit in cafés, wear a beret, and discuss existentialism. I loved reading about Che Guevara - but the closest I got to him was buying black paint and making a poster; and the closest I got to rebellion was refusing to eat the bhinda shaak or sitting through another long puja.

I loved The Bell Jar. Reading about Sylvia Plath led me to contemplating suicide. I guess I wasn’t so much depressed as I was unbalanced. I remember standing on Walkeshwar Road, waiting to cross the road and for the traffic to abate (now there’s hoping for a miracle), when I got the idea. I estimated whether the speed of the cars would have me as road-kill or lying maimed and crippled at Breach Candy Hospital. Ok, too messy and too complicated, requiring a skill involving accuracy of jumping into the road at precisely the right time. Slamming into the side of the car could result in a small bruise for me, an impressionably big dent in the car. (Things haven’t changed much regarding the metal gauge used for Indian cars. Resting so much as a bottle of Bisleri on the hood of a Maruti can involve some serious body-work).

I read about Marilyn Monroe, which gave me the idea of sleeping pills. Where would I procure some? Our family doctor didn’t believe in giving us medicine. A bit absurd when you think about it. Would the Pope not believe in giving benediction? If one of us had a fever, he would tell us to go lie in bed, to cover ourselves with thick razais and sweat it off. This in total contrast to the American idea of being dunked in a cold-water tub. If we had a headache, he told us to drink tea. Strange as it sounds, this still works for me today.

Anyway, back to my drama-ridden narrative. Soooo, sleeping pills were out of the question.

Next idea: drowning. Two possibilities here: 1. Governor’s Beach, where Dad had procured a pass to the private stretch of beach on the bay. Problem was the shallow bay meant swimming out a good two miles to get to the ocean - a feat totally out of my abilities. 2. The pool at Willingdon Club. As with a lot of things in my childhood, I was overlooked regarding swimming lessons. I was almost eleven, when it came to light that I did not know how to swim. (They also forgot about taking me to the dentist. So Nina and Varsha got dental cleanings, retainers and their cavities filled, while I got crooked teeth). Anyway, although perfectly content to stay swimless, I was then forcefully woken up at an ungodly hour of the morning before school, and driven to the Club against my will. Of course, they had to get this brilliant idea during the winter months, when there was a layer of fog on the water and you couldn’t tell where the fog ended and the icy-cold water began...terrifying for a girl who doesn’t know how to swim. The instructor was an extremely obese man called Bathena, who tied an empty dalda tin around my waist with a rope and threw me into the water. Naturally it was the deep end, instructors in India - swim teachers or otherwise - being well versed in torture tactics. All those months learning how to swim, I never saw a drop of water touch any part of Bathena’s 300+ pounds. He paced up and down by the side of the pool, shouting, yelling and berating me about being a real sorry-assed swimmer. Americans should really do a power-point presentation to educators in India called: “You can do it honey!”

...and back to the story. Last resort: hanging. Ugh! the very thought of it was so disturbing, it lasted not more than five seconds in my already-disturbed mind.

Being the cowardly sort, the idea of killing myself seemed too scary, extremely inconvenient, and not to mention terribly labor-intensive. The Sturm und Angst period thankfully lasted little more than two weeks and less than a month. I had by then fortunately discovered Mills and Boon, and entered my Romantic Period.