Depression

I have often heard people 

Saying these words, "purane janm ke karmo ka phal hai" to every misery they cannot reason

Like the birth of a stillborn child

A tree with dying roots

A boy supposed to carry the weight of the family weighed down by the weak spine 

Depression

Me

I hear them consoling my little cousin who cannot walk and talk but smiles too often

"Iske karam hi bure honge" (his karma is bad)

Not knowing that he wants to be a kabaddi coach when he grows up

You see people who don't dare to dream

Tell the others to be scared of opening eyes wide to let the shine of hope enter through the pupils which keep on dilating until the eyes and light seem similar

My depression is a punishment

To all the times I judged my class girls in short skirts, I reason to myself

Maybe god is that cruel

Watching every eye that judges

But where does he go 

When sinners roam like Judas

Often stabbing people in their backs

My depression is a punishment to her

Says my mother

For loving me too much

Because pampered children are glass souls

And the world is a stone

Nobody breaks people like us

We hit the world and break into shards

My depression is a punishment to my father

For some unspoken good deeds, he did

He has saved children over his life, he says

But couldn't save his own child from falling into the clutches of a disease which entered through my skin into the entire home 

Which keeps silent 

Because depression follows sounds

We have been mum ever since

Titptoeing our ways through the life

As people watch us from afar and call us a mad family

Depression is karma getting back, they say

As I watch myself wither away one voice at a time

Maybe depression is a misery unreasoned

Maybe it is bad karma revolving like an impending tornado

Ready to suck everything which seems alive 

Maybe when my mother teaches the students abcd

She really means another bad chance of depression

Her alphabets dance around taunting her for not being brave enough to face the sentences the twenty six letters weave out of depression

And come out through the mouth of a daughter 

Who no longer believes in the prayers her mother coaxer her to do

You see depression talks in the language of ghosts

Creating pandemonium out of the visible emotions 

Till they swirl and twirl

Like a girl's frock

And fall on bruised knees

Bleeding out tears of extended silences 

And mourning distances 

Some measuring to unknown conversations over dinner table

Like, "what was the last time you were happy"

"Stop it" shouts the internal voice of us all together

So we eat the bittergourd silently

Because that's what depression does to a house

It makes everyone eat bittergourd in silence

And isn't that horrible enough to know

That sometimes situation which demand a war cry

End up sending sos signals to somewhere 

Anywhere in the deep void a family becomes

But nobody comes to save

So all we do

All a family does is

Hold each other hands

And drown

One hope at a time

Until what lies is a remnant of a building

That lies flooded with water

So next time you ask 

What worse can depression do

Know this

It can drown families to death

Who knows how to swim through