The Day My Brain Exploded Read online

  “Never provoke a fight again, Ashok,” she said.

  I would obey.

  Lady of the House

  In the second semester of sophomore year, we had an assignment in history class to write about a pivotal moment in America. I wrote about World War II and the Japanese-American internment camps. As I researched this era, I had a weird reaction: I was jealous. At least they were with their own kind.

  As bad as school was becoming, there was good news on the home front: finally, another family of color was moving into Quail Creek. The newcomers were a black family called the Taylors. One mom, one dad, and one lovely teenage daughter, Karen. Mom happily brought over her special welcome wagon of coconut rice. After just three weeks of settling in, they told Mom they had to take a quick trip to Atlanta, for a family emergency. Upon their return to our community, they noticed blue graffiti sprayed on their townhouse.

  GET OUT NIGGERS.

  They moved out of Grayslake immediately. Seems they followed orders perfectly.

  Throughout everything, I begged Dad to move. He refused; after all, his work was in Chicago, and we could afford the mortgage for our Quail Creek townhouse.

  One afternoon while I was doing my homework, the doorbell rang. Mom went to the door, worried about finding a Jehovah’s Witness, but was instead confronted by a tall, white, middle-aged dish network salesman.

  I overhead their brief conversation.

  In minimal makeup and barely-there lipstick, she was dressed in a simple white tee and gray flat-front trousers, and looked effortlessly glamorous.

  “Hi!” she said, smiling at the man.

  “Hello, may I speak to your boss please?”

  “Pardon me?” she said, confused.

  The salesman sighed, as if he were doing a favor by deigning to talk to her again.

  “I said, may I speak to the Lady of the House, please?”

  “That’s me,” she responded with a sigh.

  We knew, once again, that nothing had changed. Mom could be a fairy-tale queen, wearing regal red robes and a glittering crown as she glided through a glittering ballroom, in a moated castle of precious marble and stone. If this castle was in America, she would still be asked if she was the maid.

  Sweet Dreams

  As I had enjoyed creating art ever since I was three, drawing and painting images both figurative and abstract, I took multiple fine arts classes. In Figure Painting I, I met a beautiful girl named Kayla Moore. She was a contrast from all the other Teutonic students in the school: her father was white, her mother black. She had full, gorgeous lips, which of course were labeled by the students as “nigger lips,” Angelina Jolie and collagen having yet to make their marks on our culture. Kayla was curvy and petite, shorter than me, with long, waist-length bronze curls that highlighted her dark golden skin. I was infatuated with her, but was too afraid to ask her out on a date. Being such an outsider had subconsciously affected my sense of teen conventionality, so I simply didn’t have romances.

  In the same class, I made friends with Joel Tomasetti, who, like Kayla, was different from the masses. His parents were from Sicily. With olive skin and an ebony crew cut, he was wonderfully eccentric, insisting on painting fake plastic fruit in most of his canvases. His height matched mine, yet because he was a gym-bot, he was conspicuously muscular, not merely toned.

  Ever since seventh grade, when I first heard about “cumming,” I had been jerking off on a weekly basis, hoping I would finally release what the kids called “jizz.” It never worked. The “J” word was still foreign to my body.

  Finally it happened, very, very late, at the age of fifteen.

  I was asleep at the time, waking up to a sticky mess on my stomach. My first wet dream, I thought.

  But then I realized what I had been dreaming about.

  Kayla had been fucking me.

  So, too, had Joel.

  The Motherland and the Great Escape

  Even though my life in Grayslake continued being a nightmare, I had been granted parole on occasion, one month each. My parents had taken Prakash and me to Mumbai on five summer odysseys. I would relish everything about the city: the tastes, the smells, the sights—from the moment our planes arrived at Sahar Airport, now renamed Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport in honor of seventeenth-century Emperor Chatrapati Shivaji Raje Bhonsle. Great leader, yes. Catchy airport name, hell no.

  Like any major international destination, the airport was not located in the city center—just as JFK and LaGuardia were not located in Times Square—but was located in the surrounding neighborhood of Andheri. As soon as we entered the airport, I knew a missing piece of my heart had been replaced, momentarily, at least the part that needed drama, energy, and sweet suffocation. We would always arrive in India at the ungodly hour of 4 a.m. Never changed. No flight, it appeared, could ever reach this enormous city in the midst of daylight, or in the traditional scape of nighttime. After trying to navigate through the storm of travelers to the visitors’ passport line, we would pick up our luggage before heading to customs. Since our family was of Indian blood, the airport officials spoke only Marathi to us. Luckily, this was the language of Mom’s childhood, so after she joked and giggled, and occasionally flirted with the security guys, we passed through quickly and easily.

  Once we finally left the terminal doors, it dawned on me: this was India. The first thing that hit was the heat, an immense heat that overwhelmed me with its gorgeous unbearability. Next came the smell. This was not the odor of cabbies or the restaurants in Manhattan’s Little India. Scents mingled in the steamy air, assaulting me like a punch in the face, the smell of double-decker buses that squeezed between motionless cars, and of cows that nonchalantly strolled the streets. No, this was not about sweaty, unwashed men; this was the smell of a universe in which humankind coexisted with animals, coexisted with congested heat, and coexisted with fragrances that surprised as well as amazed.

  It was natural that with so many people, the air was ripe with stress, though not the emotional kind, but the type in which people were late to work and had to hurry, babies’ cries were drowned by rickshaws stalling, and pedestrians were so frustrated they were yelling at the air above, not at the streets below.

  India was a world of contrasts. Orthodox priests, in saffron robes and holy threads, were driving mopeds. Farm animals stopped at crosswalks. This was God’s backyard: a family reunion with a messy barbeque, and pets running throughout, and neighbors sunbathing.

  Perhaps the most wondrous thing for me was the ocean of beautiful brown skin around me. After all, I was a brown-skinned boy in a small Bible Belt town in the heart of all-white America. I never felt attractive, or even human for that matter.

  In India, I could finally discover this beauty of recognition in others, and it was amazing. When I would look up, down, left, right, I would see people that looked liked me. Same eyes, noses, mouths, pigments. I was alive at last, a human being with a beauty seen throughout the streets. Each person I saw was a reflection in a mirror I desperately needed. Perhaps this was why I had such a viscerally angry reaction to the white faces peeking through—the European backpackers, the rich white American women on their quest for spiritual healing via Oprah’s book club. I was finally, after all, entering a land smothered in colors I could never experience in my daily life.

  The joke, however, was that, deep in the pit of my redneck soul, I didn’t believe I was even considered Indian when I went to the subcontinent. Just a “damn dirty Yank,” to paraphrase Charleton Heston’s infamous words of contempt leveled at the apes in the movie The Planet of the Apes.

  While these trips to India typically included my family, I finally traveled there alone, the summer before my junior year at GCHS. The experience was life-changing. Rather than head to Mumbai, this time I chose to travel to multiple cities, including New Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, and Kerala, uncovering religious centers of the many diverse Indian faiths. I saw the famed Snake temple, Taj Mahal, Jami Masjid mosque, and the Sikh G
olden Temple. I even made a pilgrimage to Gandhi’s tomb, walking down the path where the Mahatma himself walked as he was assassinated.

  We Have Overcome

  Newly empowered, I returned to high school a different person. My hair, parted down the middle, had grown very long, falling past my shoulders, and I now wore circle-framed spectacles instead of my trademark squares.

  I had become John Lennon with a tan. Additionally, I had bulked up, my body having packed on a mighty twenty more pounds, and I had grown to what would be my final adult height. A new Ashok reentered GCHS that fall. No longer fearing my white, popular peers, I started attaching myself, with a vengeance, to different cliques, like the goths, alterna-punks, skaters, art elites, stoners, and, of course, nerds.

  We now assembled a Warholian factory, a demimonde of outcasts, underdogs, and subversives. In addition to my buds Kayla and Joel, there was Tom, the geekish loner who read Stephen Hawking; Steven, who worshiped Satan; Chris, the boy who wore mascara and red lipstick; Karla, who could barely stand, pumped full of narcotics. And of course, all six students of color in the entire school: Missy, Lila, and Doug, the token black kids; Sam the Korean; Emilio the Mexican. And me.

  On graduation day, after finally surviving our nightmarish high school years, “the Factory” sashayed through the halls, shouting “We Have Overcome.”

  Most of the kids in my town weren’t headed for college. After graduation, many were arrested for minor felonies, or had babies who would likely end up playing with the pink flamingos that vamped in their yards. SATs were never discussed in GCHS, and my guidance counselor guided me toward a local junior-vocational institute. I eventually took the tests on my own, however, and actually applied to a few four-year universities, vowing never, ever to return to Illinois.

  I chose to attend New York University.

  But what else could a Baby Buddha do?

  Wasn’t the Big Apple the only possible destination for a fleeing Midwesterner?

  The Incarceration, Part Two: 2000 (IV)

  Dura: Cinco De Mayo

  On May 5, 2000, my skull was opened.

  An unseen nurse wheeled me into the operating room. It’s strange, but I swear it was my linebacker-abuser Janet. Or was it Satan, Mephistopheles himself? Let’s just call her Janestopheles. She could have been the one who rolled me in. Perhaps in that moment, my subconscious mind was thinking of a possible postsurgery death, via a non-Hindu highway. Perhaps I had envisioned not a Kingdom of Heaven but a Kingdom of Hell.

  Here now, a gripping recap of the subsequent thirteen-hour operation, none of which I remember of course:

  1. At 7 a.m. anesthesia was shot into my arm, rendering me unconscious. I was placed facedown on a rotating operating table, my arms spread wide, my head tightly secured in a viselike contraption. The visual effect was that of being nailed to an upside-down crucifix, which was perfect for my Messiah complex.

  2. After incisions were traced across it, my naked skull was penetrated by an instrument cruelly and inaccurately called the “Midas Rex” drill, as if this procedure was going to transform my brain into gold.

  3. My skull plate was then lifted away and placed into a sterile salt solution, so it would be shiny and new when it was screwed back in. My brain was now naked to the air.

  4. The surgeons started cutting into the messy goo. The leftover AVM was coagulated with a form of glue into an electrified removable ball, then taken out completely. Blood was drained, the brain was fully cleaned and irrigated, and four metal clips were stapled inside to discipline the remaining veins. No more tangles.

  5. Drumroll please—my skull was brought back from its salt-bath and returned to its proper position. Four titanium plates were placed over the entire puzzle, and steel screws secured them onto the bone.

  6. The reattached piece of skull, now outlined with heavy metal, was in the shape of a horseshoe.

  Cortex: Family-in-Waiting

  An account of the seemingly never-ending surgery would not be complete, of course, unless accompanied by the seemingly never-ending wait. As my head was opened and closed, my family held their vigil. Mom, Dad, Prakash, and Karmen began their marathon sofa-warming in the waiting room at 5 a.m. and had carved near-perfect buttock grooves into the furniture cushions by the time the butchery ended at 8 p.m.

  The room had peach carpeting, white walls, and in the middle, a large grouping of bamboo planted firmly in a red glass vase. A television screen was secured on a wall.

  The four Rajamanis claimed two of the plush blue sofas in the surprisingly crowded room. Twelve other people were there, also waiting for their loved ones.

  As the amount of time increased, so did my family’s fears and anxieties. Mom began cataloging and then endlessly reviewing the list of possible consequences: total blindness, total deafness, total paralysis.

  Prakash finally verbalized what everyone had been thinking: “He could die.”

  Mom looked away.

  The wait was toughest for Dad, a recovering heart patient himself. He couldn’t handle stress very well, and this stress was overwhelming. As he stood up to stretch, his eyes closed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Mom asked.

  Dad’s body began to sway. He quickly reached out to grab an arm of the sofa, but pawed the air instead. Then he collapsed on the carpet. Karmen and Mom screamed. Nurses rushed in. Their prescription? A cup of orange juice. Strange, but it did the trick. Dad slowly gained complete consciousness.

  Karmen brought him sugar cookies from the cafeteria and then she walked him up and down the hallway. Dad stopped to look at a large aquarium. The fish calmed him. Dad didn’t collapse again.

  When the surgery was over, two of the surgeons informed my family that I was fine, but explained that I was extremely fragile, and nobody could visit me for a while.

  But they also had come to know my family during my long stay here, so they permitted one person to see me in the postsurgery area. Dad had just collapsed and Mom would be a wreck if she saw my head looking like a horse-hide baseball. Everybody decided that Prakash was the guy to do it.

  He climbed into a standard blue hospital gown and put on a surgical mask and gloves. When he entered the room, he was horrified.

  I was wrapped, head to toe, in bandages. There were five or six plastic tubes jutting out of my skull. My shaved, ravaged head still bore bloodstains, and a clear plastic mask protected my face. Metallic bracelets attached both arms to the bed.

  Prakash gaped at me silently for a minute, and then he slowly returned to the lounge.

  He described my appearance and told everybody that all the medical attachments made me look like an astronaut ready to blast off into orbit. He had hoped to put a smile on my parents’ faces.

  He failed.

  Thalamus: Damage, Divinity

  “He’s fallen! Oh my God, he’s fallen!”

  Joanna and Kiyanna shrieked in one piercing voice that cut through the stillness of the ward. As Becky had permanently left the hospital for another job, these were the only two protectors paid to take care of me at night.

  Forty-eight hours after my open brain surgery, I fell. It was about 2 a.m. I was in my private room in the hospital’s critical care section.

  Back then, I didn’t know where I was. But I knew I had to take a leak. There was a bathroom in the room, so I headed for it. Sure, there were tubes sticking out of me. But when nature calls, such details hardly matter.

  The next thing I remember, my back was splayed across the cold tiles and I lay in a jumble of tubes. That’s when the screaming started.

  Until that moment, my mind had convinced me that I was home, safe and sound. My delirium had allowed me to forget about my time in the hospital, about the bleed, and most of all, about the surgery. Until that moment, my sole quest was to reach the bathroom.

  When I heard the nursely shrieks, I knew I had done something wrong. The PICC-line had popped out—a twelve-foot drainage tube needled into my arm and extending to my aorta. I
had also dislodged my ventrics, those antlerlike tubes drilled into the bone of my skull. The fall had ripped them all out.

  Unaware of the severity of the situation, I laughed with embarrassment. I was just a silly old man who fell while going to the bathroom. “God,” I murmured, “I slipped. I’m so retarded.”

  Kiyanna quickly called my family. I was placed back on the bed, my medical equipment next to my pillow. The doctors were summoned and I was brought to the Intensive Care Unit.

  Upon arriving, Mom was too stunned to speak. But Prakash was not at a loss for words:

  “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU TWO,” he shouted at the nurses. “YOU BETTER PRAY THAT NOTHING HAS HAPPENED TO HIM!”

  Joanna and Kiyanna were not fired, just reprimanded. But everyone felt this incident would prove prophetic. How could I survive, when every single thing that was keeping me alive had been violently ripped from my body?

  The next forty-eight hours proved to be the scariest yet. Unfortunately, I was coherent at this point.

  I had an emergency MRI and emergency EEG. There was no new damage, but the pain was severe and relentless.

  “I’m dying! I’m dying!” I had never screamed so loud. I had never known such agony. I cried for my mother. Only later did I learn she had been by my side all along.

  After the MRI, I was whisked to an operating room where the emergency surgeons quickly drilled new ventrics into my head, inserted a new PICC line, and replaced the feeding tubes. The renewed pain was overwhelming. But I was alive.

  A few days later, I found myself in Brooklyn, New York. My head was resting in the lap of Lord Krishna in a temple. I was at his altar, deep in the dark inner sanctum, fragrant jasmine flowers and elaborate golden lamps surrounding my limp body. Using an ivory cloth, the Lord was tenderly wiping away the blood cascading from the cracks in my skull, cleansing and purifying my wounded head. I cried in ecstasy as I looked into his eyes.

  Returning to the hospital after what seemed like days, I awakened in bed to the warm faces of Mom and Gina, a new nurse hired to take care of me, just a week earlier. She was young, Chinese, and obese.