The deepest cut

Listen to excerpts from Outlook's Suicide Isn't A Moral Question issue, by Pragya Vats.  #Suicide #OutlookMagazine

Transcript

00:00 This is Pragya and I bring to you excerpts from the latest issue of Outlook,

00:04 "Suicide isn't a moral question."

00:07 The issue looks at serious public health concerns that suicide poses.

00:10 7,03,000 people die by suicide every year, according to the World Health Organization.

00:17 Suicide is a political, economic, societal, cultural, and mental health question.

00:22 September 10th is World Suicide Prevention Day,

00:26 and the issue delves into farmer suicide, student suicide, and suicides that have been caused by trauma.

00:32 India decriminalized Suicide with Mental Health Act in 2017.

00:37 The deepest cut by Shimoipu Kundu, an author and columnist based in Kolkata.

00:43 Death has no vocabulary in Indian families,

00:46 so how does a daughter find a way to mourn her father's accidental death?

00:50 I was in a long-distant relationship last year with a man claiming that his long-broken 24-year-old marriage was over.

00:58 He constantly referred to his wife as an ex while occupying the same suburban London home,

01:04 co-parenting their autistic daughter, and our relationship ended just a day before our one-year anniversary.

01:10 It was just the kind of complicated affair that being single in one's mid-forties one desperately hopes to avoid.

01:16 It wound up on a cruel, one-sided voice note sent in the middle of my night.

01:21 "I'm now going off for an office dinner," it winds up, matter-of-factly,

01:25 barely three weeks after a holiday in Thailand.

01:28 As I writhe in bed battling a complicated chest infection contracted from him on the same trip,

01:34 my eyelids are heavy from steroids, my autoimmune is through the roof, everything is in pain, everything feels broken.

01:42 I don't know why I think of Baba again that morning, replaying the audio,

01:47 my fingers trembling, devastated by the finality, sitting on the pot,

01:52 warm tears streaming down my face and neck and melting into my bosom.

01:56 I sob violently as I pee, breathing with difficulty.

02:00 My left lung is not the same after the deadly second wave of COVID-19 wrecked my system.

02:05 Post a three-week haul in a faceless, overcrowded HDU unit of a private hospital in Kolkata,

02:12 the city of my birth, around me, the all-pervasive stench of death, disinfectants and stretchers,

02:18 and ambulance sirens return to haunt me.

02:21 I was four when my biological father, Basudev Kundu, a promising young banker and alumnus of Presidency College,

02:28 which is where he met Ma, Sushmita, he called Meeta, shot himself.

02:32 A year into the treatment was schizophrenia, after he arrived one night,

02:36 visibly distraught at my maternal grandparent's South Kolkata residence.

02:41 My parents were estranged by then and living apart.

02:44 Ma walked out of their marital home with an asthmatic toddler huddled on a cycle rickshaw.

02:49 She stood with no luggage as her aging, heart-patient father peered from the first-floor balcony,

02:55 taking in the only daughter who had married against her mother's wishes.

02:59 For these and more, read the latest issue of Outlook.