I first left India in 1969, to attend medical school at McGill, but then abandoned that course of studies during my third year, in favour of a PhD in psychology. Then, as I was finishing my doctorate in 1975, I hit it off with a couple of Ottawa psychologists at a conference. We stayed in touch, and they eventually invited me to join their practice.
The conference was on Narrative Therapy, a term I heard for the first time that year, an idea that, at first, grasped me more than I grasped it.
Ever since I was very young, I’ve kept a journal. Not unusual, you might say. Lots of people do. True. My father kept a journal—he recorded in it the details of his days, where he went, whom he met, what he ate, what irritated my mother. My uncle kept a journal—he recorded each thing he bought and how much it cost. His entire life in purchases. He showed it to me once, with unreflexive pride. He thought everyone should keep such a book.
But I keep a journal differently. I note, on a left-hand page, an anecdote—something characteristic or outrageous a friend or family member said, or perhaps a confidence told to me. On the facing page, for as many pages as it takes, I properly tell the story: third-person, quasi-fictionalized, including matters not witnessed, details I can’t really know; and so try to explain what I have seen or heard.
All my friends are in there. Everyone in my family, except my mother—I have often described the inexplicable things she says and does, but long ago bowed to their inexplicability. There was no sense in my trying to write fiction that explains them. I also make notes on my own life, though I have never tried to make fiction out of that.
When I was young, I hid the journal above a rafter in the room where my sister and I slept and studied. Kritika saw me writing in it, but I tried to keep it from her. It was a private endeavour. My countrymen don’t believe in privacy, so I’m not sure how I got that idea. Perhaps some child in an English book kept a secret diary and the notion infected me.
My sister told my mother about the journal. They found it and read it, then my sister took it to show my friends.
Only one took it very badly, but that was because the passing around of the journal meant everyone knew about his incestuous relationship with his aunt, which I never would have divulged. He blamed Kritika, and rightly. She was a little like my mother, in her use of an imagined victimhood to justify morally dubious acts. Several others disliked one story about themselves, but found another story to redeem the first.
Kritika, by contrast, didn’t like the way I wrote about her, ever. One story was based on a series of small lies she told when we were on holiday, staying with relatives. Each one cast her as disadvantaged or needy and told how she had gained something for herself: the final portion of a dessert, the window seat on the train. I wrote the story from her point of view, so it wasn’t entirely unsympathetic, but as her fibs accumulated, it became clear they could be interpreted another way—my way. I may have been too close to her to get her right. Or it may have been my accuracy that offended her.
After I came to Canada, my journal-writing stopped. I seemed unable to represent Canadians on the page. I couldn’t authentically write dialogue for them, for instance. I couldn’t imagine details or deduce motivations. I could write about Indian acquaintances (dinner friends, I called them—Indian families who brought me home and fed me, out of some fellow feeling), but this was a lonely enterprise. They were not, generally, people who interested me very much.
Yet when, in my final year of grad school, I saw a notice for that conference, “Start Making Sense: the Uses of Narrative in Therapy,” I felt an instinctive pull. I attended the conference and had some excellent conversations. One of them resulted in a job.
Four or five years after, I met Rosslyn. This was at another conference—“Mental Health Professionals in the Ottawa Public Schools.” I never would have attended except that someone from our practice needed to go. Boring as hell. Rosslyn agreed, even as a newly minted guidance counsellor with much to learn.
There were many matters we agreed on, Rosslyn and I. It’s nice to recall that, though my recollections depend on my moods. By the time we met, I was already feeling a kind of disaffection with my Canadian middle-class clientele. But disaffection is too strong. Boredom? Not quite that either, though it seemed that if I saw children, it was for tantrums and truancy; adolescents, anorexia and related rebellions. Adults? Marital woes, anxiety, depression.
I found my clientele homogeneous. Rosslyn thought my inability to distinguish them was a failure of imagination. At the time, her criticism annoyed me, but I might agree with her now. It wasn’t so much that the clients and their problems were homogeneous, it was that I wasn’t perceptive enough to differentiate them. My therapeutic interest is in framing individuals’ maladies as stories within stories within stories, the way people themselves are nested within families and societies. Presenting problems may be superficially repetitive, but they will also contain many unique facets. My challenge is to tell the story on the individual’s terms, giving a nuanced sense of his problems’ origins—in himself, in his community, in societal expectations.
I came to attribute my blocks to my newness here. My clients’ aims; their ideals; the things they felt they deserved in life—much of this did not make sense to me, even after long, hard thought. I could parrot their accounts of their family histories, homes, schools, but these places and people were not imaginatively available to me. In talk therapy, I would tell my clients versions of their stories, but these were so much narrower, shallower, than what I hoped for.
Rosslyn occasionally referred children to the practice where I worked. Anorexics or vandals she referred to whichever of the psychologists had a vacancy in our caseload. Native children and immigrants with adjustment troubles she tried to refer straight to me. I refused. She grew impatient trying to convince me. She was refusing, I thought, to see that, as hard as it was for me to help mainstream Canadians with their mainstream problems, the prospect of trying to address outsiders’ problems was even further from my capacities. She thought I would identify with them, while I feared I wouldn’t be able to tell their intrinsic psychological problems from the ones engendered more by societal demands. Which story nests and which is nested? I would be the blind leading the blind up and down Escher stairways.
The only exceptions were Indians. I saw two, in the four (or so) years that Rosslyn and I were together. One was—yet again!—an anorexic, a wealthy Canadian-born teenybopper. The other was an engineering student who had attempted suicide after failing classes and admitting to a friend that he was homosexual.
With them, I attempted the method I had mused on for so long in the absence of opportunities to test it. They told me their stories; I wrote my versions; I gave these back. We discussed, they corrected, I revised, they revised; we worked, together, toward the future chapters, in which they became the people they envisioned—with increasing specificity, clarity, logic—themselves to be. The narratives broke up their monolithic notions of their identities, their histories, and, most importantly, their destinies.
These two early attempts were ridiculously successful. If Rosslyn had thought me arrogant already (I was; I am), I must have become insufferable then. And yet these were the times she was at her most encouraging. She only wished I would find the confidence to use the method in the rest of my practice. I believed I was not qualified and would not be for many years, if ever. She thought me stubborn. Again, she was not wrong.
Then, in October of 1982, my father fell ill.
I arranged a leave to go back to New Delhi and spend time with him. Kritika also came home, but only briefly: she was, by this time, raising her own family in Montreal and couldn’t stay long. While in Delhi, I arranged to meet with a psychiatrist and a sociologist whose collaborative work I had long admired.
