The Day My Brain Exploded Page 4

  As a result, we were the only Indians there. In fact, the Rajamanis, along with one Mexican family and one black family, were the only nonwhite clans in town. And though I was, of course, aware of my somewhat different appearance, I was raised to be proud of who I was as well as of my cultural heritage, something that occasionally created a bit of tension in that environment.

  I had to go to Avon Center School. Not too painful. The main problem was my name. Realistically, “Ashok” is only two syllables; it shouldn’t be a problem. But on the first day of every school year, the teacher found a new, more inventive way to fuck up my name.

  Some variations included Uh-Sheek, Ah-Shook, Ass-Hock. Even my classmates were sick of it. With a collective yell at the teacher on the first day of the school year, they would clarify: “It’s UH-SHOKE!”

  The new teacher, flushed with embarrassment, would then say it correctly. By the next day, though, it would be forgotten and we would start all over.

  It’s funny how young kids lack an instinct for racism. My skin color was not an issue. Sure, I’d be asked by a classmate, “How come you’re not pink like me?” But then I’d explain my Indian background. They might not understand, but they accepted the answer. The only other person of color in elementary school was Lucy Davis, a member of the only black family in town. Though we never became close friends, the looks in our eyes showed our connection.

  We felt that bond even more during the seasons we were supposed to make Christmas cards. In first grade, our teacher was a Latina named Ms. Marquez. The kids tried to depict her in their cards. As they did, one after the other called out, “She’s not our color!” They held up the peach-colored crayons, which the box had conveniently labeled as “Flesh.”

  “We can’t use Flesh color to draw her!” they exclaimed. So they used the black crayon from their boxes.

  By 1985, when I was in fifth grade, Dad had gained a hefty forty extra pounds since welcoming me to the world. Mom retained her slender figure. Her biggest physical change was that she had she had chopped her ebony waist-length locks and wore her hair shoulder-length.

  During that year, for classroom show-and-tell, she once made me take a small bronze statue of a Hindu deity, one of those ten-cent figurines found in any Indian knick-knack store.

  I had already seen artwork and sculptures of Hindu gods and goddesses, especially Lord Krishna, with his serene, blue-skinned face, peacock-adorned hair, and golden robes. He could be seen on paintings and wall hangings in my house as well as in Indian stores and the homes of my parents’ friends.

  The statue I was bringing to school was of Lord Krishna as the Vishwaroopa, his multiheaded, twenty-armed avatar, representing God as the ultimate power that controlled the creation, preservation, and destruction of existence itself.

  Of course, I did not know how to articulate all that at the age of ten, so Mom explained it to me in understandable terms.

  “Why does he look like that, Mom?” I had asked the day earlier, confused by Krishna’s multilimbed appearance.

  “All of his arms and heads equal all the people in the world,” she said. “It means that God is everywhere.”

  “So is that statue God?”

  “Not exactly,” she said with a chuckle. “It just shows what God means. But it’s still holy.”

  So I brought the idol in, excited to describe this unique figure to my class.

  Ms. Swenton, a fifty-year-old white woman who excelled in frumpiness, introduced me.

  “Ashok is next,” she said, her needle-thin, unpainted lips in action, “to show what he brought. Everyone pay attention.”

  Just before me, a boy showed us his pet puppy, a golden retriever named Demon. The class, of course, loved his presentation, their “oohs” and “aahs” flooding the small yellow-tiled room. It was a tough act to follow.

  I went to the front, gussied up in my au courant gray turtleneck and plaid pants chosen by Mom. I looked too smokin’ for Grayslake.

  “Everyone,” I said, “this is Lord Krishna.”

  The kids, still panting over Demon, shut up and listened. They seemed intrigued.

  I had my speech prepared.

  “He’s God and this—”

  Before I could continue, Leslie interrupted, her blonde pigtails bouncing.

  “Ewww! You mean your God is metal? That’s dumb!”

  “Jesus is a man!” said Mike, who looked like a sweet, cute version of Curly from the Three Stooges.

  “You should love Jesus!” some other classmates boomed.

  “How stupid!” Leslie snickered. “How can God be for show-and-tell?”

  The whole situation was frustrating, as I, myself, was still confused about my religion, not completely understanding that idols were not actual Gods but just symbols of one monolithic divine force.

  I did know one thing, though. The Lord Krishna I was holding had many, many arms.

  “Here’s what’s stupid,” I said. “You think your Jesus is great. I’ve seen pictures. He only has two arms. My God has so many arms he can kick your stupid God’s butt!”

  I had unlocked the door to an invisible sports stadium. Three of the kids, as though rooting for one of the teams in a football game, started cheering, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

  “Krishna! Krishna! Krishna!” I countered, trying to yell above the impromptu pep rally. “You know my God can beat up yours!”

  Here I was, starting a holy war in elementary school. All of the white Christian children were squawking at this point.

  Ms. Swenton intervened: “Okay, class, simmer down.”

  So the battle had to stop, forcing a draw between Jesus and Krishna.

  “Time for morning break,” she said.

  I’M TOLD THAT when Prakash was born, he was as fair as I was dark, so while the doctors thought I looked Tibetan, they thought he looked Israeli. All these descriptions irritated my mother, who was aching to see at least one of her newborns resemble her husband.

  While I loathed our small, conservative Midwestern town, Prakash loved it, enjoying everything Americana, from barbeques to the National Football League. He watched wrestling entertainment events featuring the likes of Hulk Hogan. I, however, wanted to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Our family, of course, went to view bombastic wrestlers rather than see sweet transvestites.

  Ethnic minorities in America, I once heard, adjust to white life in two ways: either by assimilating or flat-out rejecting it. Prakash chose the former.

  Even from the start, we contrasted. He was a typical toddler, loud, hyperactive, and overanimated, bouncing from one place to the next. Just as my nickname of “Baby Buddha” suggested, I was sluggish and quiet, firmly immobile in my crib. Perhaps my brain’s hidden tenant was already sapping vital energy. Or perhaps I was just too lazy to bother, preferring to sit and drool rather than run and yell.

  Prakash’s valor on his wedding day was not the first time he rescued me.

  When I was an infant, he was already my savior. Mom loved to tell me how he would don her white apron as a cape while swirling round my crib, enacting the role of superhero.

  Of course, he always succeeded in making me laugh, and apparently was the only one who did, as my round, glum face hardly ever smiled. When he saw me looking bored, he would take red markers and draw circles all over the white wall in front of my crib.

  As we grew up, the most fun we had as young brown hicks was our time together at the Lake County Fair, a yearly festival in the county to which Grayslake belonged.

  At every food stall we visited, Prakash and I would always encounter the same question and engage in the same conversation with the animated men and women behind the tables:

  “Can you two boys speak English?”

  At eight, when I tried to respond, “Yes!” my eleven-year-old brother would shush me.

  Looking at the vendor, who was usually either a pasty white woman with a crispy-banged bouffant or a pasty white man with a crispy mullet, Prakash would shake his head sadly
.

  “No, we don’t know the English,” he said in the thickest, juiciest, messiest Indian accent possible. “Can you help us?”

  “Oh that’s what I thought,” the vendor would say mournfully. “You poor, poor things. Have these snow cones, on the house. Just go home and try to learn our language, I’m sure you can do it.”

  Prakash would grab the snow cones as we walked away, always saying the same thing: “What a douchebag.”

  We relished the freak houses and games, gobbling all the corn dogs we could eat. One year, when I was nine, his saviordom reached its apex. After enduring the relentless stares of all the bearded truck drivers and other folks who could squish our tiny burnt umber bodies with their thick, white fists, he finally walked through the crowd to the Ferris wheel, yelling all the way.

  “Peek-A-Boo! Peek-A-Boo!”

  He covered his eyes as though he were a severely mentally challenged infant. The fair-goers would stare no longer but just look away, shake their head in pity, or just talk amongst each other about those “poor ignorant injuns.”

  Prakash didn’t realize it, but his peek-a-boo performance was flat-out avant-garde protest art at its finest.

  Years later, when I was twenty-one, and living in New York City, my parents finally moved out of Illinois, to, of all places, New Jersey, the ethnic soup in which I was born.

  They even moved to an area one hour from the same town where Peanut made his debut. Dad had been offered a job he couldn’t refuse—and this job was located in Manhattan. It was confounding that it took almost two decades for them to move out of the Bible Belt and, when they did, that they would be living right next door to where I had run off to. But, as I would discover later, the term confounding would be no stranger to a description of my life.

  The Incarceration, Part One: 2000 (III)

  Frontal: Choke on Dry Tears

  My long hospitalization was beginning as my time in the ER was ending. The first step to retain control of the excessive blood and toxic fluid expelled from the hemorrhage was a procedure called a ventriculostomy, an operation in which they drill holes in the skull and insert tiny plastic tubes, also called ventrics, to drain the fluid. The tubes were surgically pierced into my skull, sticking to my bone—ancient, jagged, and fossilized armor for the rotted wetness inside. My brain had become, simply, a liquid mess.

  The ventrics inserted, my body was pumped with IV bags full of drugs to sedate me and control the increasing pain. Once I was fully stabilized, the doctors gave my family some good news: They informed my family that I was lucky—the AVM was located in the right side of the back of my brain, a relatively safe place. But it was in the occipital lobe, the vision center.

  There was more news. As a result of the bleed, I had developed meningitis. That alone could kill me.

  For seventy days to follow, seventy seemingly endless days, I fought against both the meningitis and the septic consequences of the brain fluid. Most days I was unconscious, babbling away. On other days, I could only put forth a semblance of lucidity before falling into a comalike sleep. Every day my body was immersed in harsh drugs, including codeine, valium, cerebroantibiotics, and amphetamines.

  Soon, the doctors had to decide how to deal with the remnants of the AVM explosion. They consulted with my family. There were options. Embolization meant applying glue to the AVM to control it. Radiation would burn away the AVM. But in both procedures, there was a strong likelihood that I would face another hemorrhage. The surest solution was also the riskiest: the last option, a craniotomy. My parents listened and decided on this, open-brain surgery.

  Among the risks? Blindness, deafness, and even total paralysis. I could become a quadriplegic or a vegetable. Death always remained the other possibility.

  Luckily, we had Prithvi, a distant relative in Canada—very distant, the uncle of a cousin of an uncle, I think—who was a neurologist. My parents contacted him immediately, and even though he barely knew us, he became their guide throughout the hospitalization, dispensing advice regarding the surgery, the medications, and everything else.

  As I began my long hospitalization, Dad dropped off Sunil Uncle and Supriya at the airport. Mom went to Prakash and Karmen’s apartment, where she would live during my hospital stay. She saw packed suitcases; the two were to have spent their honeymoon in Fiji. The suitcases would now be unpacked.

  Corpus: Count ’em, There’s Two

  In addition to the meningitis discovered in my immediate hospitalization, I was soon diagnosed with a second case of bacterial meningitis—a very rare type. It was discovered as the doctors noticed heightened swelling in my brain—swelling that didn’t correspond with the hemorrhaging. Also, my white blood cell count was increasing rapidly.

  While the first type of meningitis discovered was “staph” meningitis—a relatively common type of bacteria—the second type was a complete puzzle. Staff from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) came to investigate. The hospital’s infectious disease doctors became a permanent fixture at my bedside.

  After weeks of blood work and lab tests, including routine tests for cancer and HIV, they found the answer to one of the mysteries: meningitis due to campylobacter.

  According to CDC, this ultrarare killer affected less than 1 percent of the population worldwide. It was prevalent in the Third World, originating mostly from, of all things, diseased poultry.

  When I was lucid enough to think back to the days before the wedding, which seemed like centuries, I remembered ordering garlic chicken from a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan. Unwittingly, of course, but still reprehensibly, they’d quite possibly been an accomplice in the attack on my brain.

  Parietal: Hallucinate

  I died for your sins. I am the body of love. Find salvation through my pain.

  These words, of course, connect to Christ, but for some reason I yelled them while in the hospital—and I’m not any shade of Christian. They broke loose as my mind unleashed a torrent of fictions, all of which at the time I deeply, desperately, believed. My Savior complex, I later found, was a textbook reaction. Many brain patients, especially those surviving a hemorrhage, aneurysm, or stroke, don’t question the veracity of their hallucinations. My imaginary beliefs were far from imaginary to me.

  The Christ incarnation was just one of many guises as my brain continued to bleed. The surgeons patiently waited for a clot to form, so they could begin planning for my craniotomy.

  While they were waiting to open the jar that was my skull, my mind kept on chugging. I suffered a form of mind-rape; my thoughts and feelings were presented nakedly, vulnerably to the world. With my brain torn and bloody, my superego had vanished. Without mental inhibition, my entire inner world, once a lush, fenced garden, had been violently laid open.

  I never shut up. Sometimes the words were coherent, sometimes not. The doctors told my family to be prepared for my shifting intellect, saying that brain-injury patients travel in and out of lucidity, swimming in and out of consciousness on a daily basis. Through my incessant yelping, I was able to convey what I was feeling and seeing—primarily my hallucinations. For three months I remained in that state, existing not only in the quiet world of the Neuro-critical Care Unit, but also in the deep, dark world of my mind. Days bled into nights, nights into weeks. I had lost track of time while my entire world lay in my skull. The NCCU staff would continuously ask what day and hour it was. Sometimes I knew, sometimes I didn’t. It was often impossible to figure it out. Even surrounded by people, mine was a world of maddening solitude and darkness.

  The nightmare played neatly off of my massive messiah complex. Looking at—and experiencing—the violence done to my body, I had no choice but to deify the pain, to make it holy. I felt the sharp, intrusive needles stabbing me and I felt the metal tubes drilling into my skull and I felt the restraints strangling my hands and arms and I felt the injections on my feet to prevent clotting. Since my pain was so intense, I decided it must be virtuous.

/>   I later understood that technology had saved me. But at the time, it felt as if these were instruments of my destruction.

  As I underwent the incessant physical cruelty, my mind provided its own escape. My hallucinations were my only way out.

  When the pain grew too intense, Ashok-as-Christ emerged. When I watched my family members—all sitting in chairs, their faces wearing looks of deep agony and despair—I realized I had to save them.

  So began my romantic affair with my corporeal self. I would rant daily, “I’m the Body of Love, I’m the Body of Love,” as my family looked on in mute, helpless horror. In those moments, I inhaled the world’s suffering. All of humanity’s dreams, hopes, fantasies, and nightmares lay inside of me, and I never let the doctors and nurses forget it. Whenever they performed their routine tasks, I said solemnly, “Go ahead. My body is ready for you.”

  My mind whirled through erotic nightmares and dreamscapes as well, involving different genders, fluids, and bleeding and sucking. I recall one hallucination vividly: in my mind, the hospital had a secret orange room, a room of depravity, a room of liberation. It was packed full of women and men of different colors. Some Indian, some Latino, some white, some black. All naked. I remember entering, and running to their bodies like a savage animal and attempting to lick and taste all the flesh they offered.

  I remember seeing a gorgeous Indian girl and sucking her nipples till she ripped them off herself out of pain. And when the Latino started exploding in my mouth, his juice wasn’t white, but red. It was blood. I was so turned on, and the more aroused I became, the bloodier the room became.