The first thing which hit me as I entered the very first ward was that there are no allocated beds. The patients sleep wherever they fancy, sometimes not even on the bed. As I was told later, that's because allocation needs cooperation from the patients to work, or a massive investment/resources to implement it forcefully. This one difference made me realise that the work done by the staff at a Mental Hospital is ten times harder than at any other kind of hospital, hospice or care-home. Even the most mundane of tasks can become a challenge, sometimes potentially violent. In fact I was not taken inside the most violent ward where they were repairing a portion of a wall broken in an escape attempt.
A lot of patients looked perfectly normal. One lady got up in the middle of a group Yoga session, as we were passing by on the side, and gave an impressive speech, mostly complaining about the poor quality of food, about having to do too much work and other gripes, she even apologised at the end for hijacking the Superintendent's attention in this way. In the post-discussion amongst the team I learnt that she was a second timer at the Hospital.
There was another patient, a forlorn looking lady in her mid 40s, whose identity, language and place of origin have been a mystery since she came into the hospital 7 years ago. She is famous amongst the staff because she's the first patient; the Hospital inaugurated with her. The staff suspects she's Bangadeshi but no one understands her tongue, she doesn't speak Bengali. In my travels to obscure places I have used apps to detect a spoken language and translate it, so I offered to try it with her. The Superintendent agreed, a few of us were taken to a room and she was brought in. I first tried the manual way, looked at her and said clearly "Basha?" - which is the root word for 'language' in almost all Indian languages, she uttered a feeble "Odia", which bamboozled those present because this has never been mentioned in her records. It is not clear if she's literate, but I tried showing some Oriya words on my phone, she didn't show any response. Then I googled and showed her a picture of Mujibur Rahman and her face lit up visibly, she was definitely a Bangladeshi. Next I opened a Wikipage on 'Languages of Bangladesh' and read out, one by one, all the non-Bengali language names - Chakma, Hajong, Sadri, Kurukh, Koda etc - the list is quite long, I was myself surprised. But unfortunately we couldn't get a detectable response to any name. I tried the app (to detect the language) but her words were too few and faint for that to work. Then we tried to find her place. She identified an image of Sylhet Railway Station but mentioned another name (Karimganj), presumably a village in Sylhet. But on Google Maps they looked too far apart, so we discounted that as a meaningless contradiction, after several other attempts we gave up. I was quite disappointed that we did not get any breakthrough, despite the apparent advantage of technology, but I wish we had more time to think of alternate approaches or had come prepared with her case.
As I was seeing all this around me I couldn't help drawing parallels to and remembering characters from 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest', especially McMurphy and The Chief. I bet a lot of people I saw today were like them, sane (whatever that means) but errant, round pegs in a square hole. I bet some of us, certainly me, have crazier thoughts than them. What keeps us on this side of the fence is our ability and lifelong training to reveal only the most accepted version. We are programmed to conceal the rest, it is expected of us. The only way to unmask this society is to put a mask on everyone. This contraction makes me wonder - who's the patient? Who is real in this world, and who is fake? It's hard to play both at the same time. If tempted to pick a side, being the iconoclastic McMurphy doesn't work, it's much safer to be the deaf and mute Chief. Alas!
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PS - I came home and googled Karimganj and this is what I found - "Karimganj was previously part of the Sylhet District before the Partition of India. It became a district in 1983." The Bangladeshi lady was right, except her memory is pre-1983. I sooo want to go back and talk to her again.
