Can an insult paralyse?

Did 16-year-old Shinjini slip into depression and suffer a paralytic stroke because she failed to make it on a reality show?

Her doctors at Nimhans aren't convinced about that cause and effect, but her parents have been telling anyone who'll listen that she was fine until the judges of a dance contest on ETV Bengali humiliated her out of the show.

Modern medicine, or at least the regular allopathic practitioner, does not believe the body and mind are connected the way we non-medical folks believe they are. And although many doctors tell you in private that they do see a connection, they are loath to admit it in a professional setting because that would make their work so much more complicated, and they risk peer disapproval.

People with an interest in the esoteric swear the waxing and waning of the moon can affect the mind. Medical literature dismisses the idea, and it is difficult for those of us who grew up on Western rationalism to contemplate such a possibility. But I had an uncle who used to feel restless as the full moon day approached.

Satyanarayana was the youngest of my father's siblings, and he was what people call mad. No one knew how he came to be that way. He had worked for a short while in the postal department in Hyderabad. My parents speculated he must have been shattered by something that had happened at his workplace. Love? Job rivalry? The kids were never told.

Satya grew his beard long and didn't pay much attention to what he wore, and would sometimes get violent. He wrote letters on post cards and tore them up, and sometimes shredded letters that the postman had delivered before they could reach the addressee in our family. He would launch into lectures that sounded whimsical and illogical to most people who did not know him, but since I had heard him for years, I could make out that one thought led to another, and the sound of one word was enough to trigger an apparently unconnected but phonetically connected thought. (I later learnt the literary critics call it the "stream of consciousness"). He often broke out into song. His favourite songs were those of the Tamil movie star Thyagaraja Bhagavatar.

We couldn't fathom why he did it, but Satya had the habit of walking away from home, and roaming the streets for days. How he managed to survive without money we never got to know. He would come back and quietly resume his routine, and wouldn't answer questions about where he had been or what he had done. On a couple of occasions, when he went away for long stretches, my anxious father would hire an auto at night and go looking for him all over Bangalore. My grandmother would sit at the door through the day, waiting for Satya to return.

Once, when Satya went away for a month, my father consulted an astrologer, who predicted that he would return from the eastern direction on a Friday. My mother's brother, who was a captain in the navy, happened to be driving into Bangalore from Madras, and noticed someone resembling Satya on the highway near Mulbagal. At first he didn't believe his eyes, but later stopped his black Chevrolet, reversed and drove back a mile or so. It was Satya! He brought him back home.

It was a Friday, and Mulbagal is to the east of Bangalore. My father became a firm believer in astrology after that incident.

Medical science knows a lot. Yet it is reluctant, and understandably so, to speculate about the mind. Hurt and humiliation work in strange ways. Some hurts may last a lifetime. Satya never recovered. But let's pray Shinjini does.