How to Kill your Family

It has taken great effort for me to start writing this. My brain kept debating with my heart as to whether I was doing the right thing. The reason was not so much my aversion to washing dirty linen in public as the fact that these are emotions I have never before confronted in my life. There was a very genuine fear that I may not be strong enough to see this piece through…..that I may chicken out. If you are reading this, it means that I have been victorious in this battle.


I got married rather early. I was all of twenty-five, and so was she. Our first son was born on our first wedding anniversary. Quite frankly, I wasn’t ready for it, but after a few initial hiccups, I guess I began to cope. Our second son was born in the fourth year of our marriage. It was much better this time around. Married life had mellowed me down and I had become in the true sense, a father. It was a pretty idyllic situation. Eight months later, we moved into our own little apartment and coming home acquired a new meaning with the two brats jumping all around. For the first time in my life, I actually looked forward to the kicks I got in the groin on a fairly regular basis. Nothing on earth could have prepared me or for that matter my wife and children for what lay ahead. Events were to unfold that would ultimately change the course of our lives forever.

A little bit about myself. I had a very protected childhood. Materially, I’ve never had cause to complain. If I did lack anything it was exposure, to people, to the world. This caused an unhealthy concentration of my affections on just two persons. Without naming anyone, these two people were the world to me. Everything I did, everything I dreamed of, everything I ever wanted to be revolved around them. I have never believed in the existence of a God, but these persons came pretty close. In the most complete sense of the word, they were my Idols. One of them, I could admire only from a distance. My vision proved too inadequate to reach the lofty ideals he’d represented in my small world. The other was the Rock on which the entire edifice that was me, stood. This Rock had been my support for so long, I had forgotten that one must someday learn to stand on one’s own.

But how was I to know that he who I’d considered a Rock for so long was after all, a human being? And like all human beings, he too had his weaknesses? Thirty years of seeing through his eyes had tinted my vision to such an extent that the entire world on the other side of the glass seemed to be coloured black, while everything on this side was bathed in white. Never had it occurred to me that the glasses I wore might be at fault. That they might be too darkly tinted. So dark that I’d been blinded to the fact that the world had no Black, and it had no White. All it had were shades of Grey. I implore everyone out there – you have been born with a brain, use it; you have been born with eyes and ears, use them. Learn your lessons early, and learn them well. ‘Cos if you don’t, life has a way of teaching you those lessons and trust me, life is at once, the greatest as well as the most unforgiving teacher. I neglected learning my lessons as long as I could, and when life decided to teach me my lesson, it did so the hard way. One wretched unannounced day, the Rock on which I’d leaned on for so long, shook.

I was to learn much later that what I lapsed into at the time is technically called a depression. Well, whatever it’s called “technically”, it was bad. I completely lost the will to live. But that was not all. I lost my children’s trust. This was two years ago but I still wake up in the dead of night when my children’s eyes flash behind my closed ones. Their eyes had once had that unconditional trust in them which only children can manage. That was until their father changed beyond recognition. They couldn’t comprehend why their father had suddenly started drinking so much. They couldn’t comprehend why their father had started snapping at them. And this was no ordinary snapping. It was the works. Wild, rabid dog snapping. The man who brought chocolates for them every day, now brought home nothing but abuses. Children who had never heard their father raise his voice now had to face the spectacle of a man who was either quiet or screaming at the top of his voice.

They’d had so many laughing sessions together, the kids and their father. One out of the three of them would crack a silly little joke on their mother (his wife) and all three would double up laughing their heads off as if it was the funniest thing in the world. Sometimes they laughed so hard they ended up crying. Now, they didn’t have to laugh to do that.

In the beginning, the children did make attempts to make their father feel better. They would come into his darkened room where he usually sat with his face as long as a road-rolled goat’s, and try and cosy up to him. They’d lie down next to him and run innocent fingers through his hair. He’d slap their hands away. They’d come close and put their guileless heads in his lap. He’d get up and walk away. They stopped coming. They literally grew away from their father. Overnight, the house they had come to call home had turned from a bright happy place into a dark dreary dungeon. They couldn’t speak loudly in the house, they couldn’t laugh loudly, they couldn’t play.

Children are supposed to learn about the good things in life from their father, about the virtues of patience, of love, of family. My children learned to snap. Even so, my ignorance was so complete that I totally failed to recognize the change in their eyes. Where there used to be nothing but admiration, there now was fear. The eyes that looked up to me once upon a time, now deliberately avoided me. Yes, I lost a lot more. I lost their childhood.

Their mother, my considerable wife. If there can be debts between husband and wife, I do not know how I am going to repay her’s. One lifetime would be too short to even begin. I do not know what Hell will be like, but what she went through in those two years should come pretty close.

Consider this – in the space of a single night, a person who you’ve lived with for six years and loved for all of thirteen, mutates into someone you don’t seem to recognize. I still remember those infinite eyes staring at me in disbelief when I’d snapped at her the first time. There was a time when I’d have killed myself before bringing tears into those eyes. Now, those very eyes cried all night, night after long night, and they didn’t seem to kill me anymore than bullets would kill a corpse. That’s what I’d probably become, a corpse.

How else can I explain it? When the woman you’ve won after a seven year long trial-by-fire lies by your side sobbing, only a corpse would not reach over and draw her close. I did not. When the woman you’ve shared everything with silently wastes away her life in a prison of your making, only a corpse would not make an attempt to break the bars. I did not. When the mother of your children suddenly develops dark circles under her eyes, only a corpse would not realize that it is nothing but an extension of the darkness he’s caused. I did not. Yes, I lost a lot more. I lost my woman.

It was two years before I started to recognize the need to do something about it. As usual, it was the considerable wife who came to my aid. She fixed me up with a nutcracker (psychiatrist). It took time, but my woman was not about to give up. There were innumerable relapses on my part in the form of violent refusals to go to the good doctor, but my woman had decided that it was time she took the short ‘n’ curlys in her own hands. There were times when she physically pulled me out of the house and drove me to the doctor. Overnight she changed from a Mother Teresa into a Phoolan Devi with a Parsi accent. A couple of months of medication along with some invaluable counseling got my derailed bogies back on track again. If I were not so worried that my wig might come off with it, I’d take my hat off to her. I do not think I would have the strength or the patience to do what she did, were she to go through what I did. I do not know if it has to do with a woman’s famed strength or a man’s rotten upbringing. If you’re reading this, Thank You, considerable wife.

I’m much better now. Still on medication, but I don’t care. I’ve decided to leave this place and go away as far as I possibly can with my family. Maybe I’m running away from myself, but if it helps me to be a better husband and a better father, I’ll run as fast as I can. And Heaven knows I have a lot of running to do. Just this morning, instead of going to work, I took my little one to a garden and just sat there and watched him play. If I’d ever have believed in a God, this is how He would have looked. The sun glinting off his vibrant hair, cheeks turning rosy red, smile stretching from ear to little ear, untrained hands pulling up the pants that refused to stay on that tiny behind........yup, this is how He would have looked. It was again the eyes that gave him away. Endlessly mischievous when playing, they suddenly seemed to age when they turned towards me.

All at once, the gap I thought was narrowing, seemed to widen into a never-ending abyss. Between me and the family I killed. An abyss that I created.