She doesn't recognise people, or greet them. She doesn't smile at them or respond to their queries. She sits in her bed like a block of flesh with a deadpan face and blank stare. From time to time she breaks into frenzy, watching TV, listening to music, talking into the air, shouting, singing and dancing, all at once. At other times, she slumps into depression, shuts the door, sobs in bed and sits like a stone.

She no longer speaks to me when I see her. We grew up

To define true madness,

What is it but to be nothing but mad?

-William Shakespeare, Hamlet

SOMEONE I know has lost it.

The signs were there for several years. She avoided people, mumbled to herself, lost appetite, couldn't sleep well and became withdrawn. Soon she started to talk incoherently and laugh without control. Her parents felt embarrassed and tried to keep her away from guests and visitors. Out of sight she went out of mind, and the world soon lost interest in her. Now, she has also lost interest in the world.

Her long flowing hairs are gone, hairs, which once banged over her forehead holding, in their tangles, the dark splendours of a cloudy sky. Her shorn hairs stand erect on her head like stubbles, reminding of the desolation of a paddy field after the harvest. Her face is swollen like a pumpkin, and her teeth are stained like damp neighbourhood walls. She doesn't take care of herself anymore. It doesn't matter to her.

together in the same neighbourhood.

We played, fought, argued, and did everything children do when they grow up. We collected comic books, stamps, pictures of movie stars, and shared a common passion for icecream and tamarind. All those sounds of my life have now folded into her silence. She exists just like a relic of my lost world. It saddens me whenever I try to think about her.

I never took time to know what was happening to her. Her parents once asked me to talk to her about a young man whom they had chosen for her. She agreed to marry him, but changed her mind next day. I was annoyed with her and concluded that she was hopeless. I didn't want to have anything to do with her for a long long time.

Sometimes I wonder if her reticence is deliberate, if she is avenging silence with silence, shutting out the world, which had shut her out first. She was a sprightly girl, who loved make-ups, new clothes, romantic novels and

lots of dreams. She wanted to be married, have children and a happy life. She often claimed that Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir visited her in dreams. She had ambition; she wanted to be like them. We listened to her, and never sensed that her mind was crossing into minefields. Most young people I knew wanted to become like somebody when they grew up. Parents encouraged them to think like that.

She started to hear things after some time. She could hear a voice whisper into her ears every time on everything everywhere. At first we used to feel amused by what she said, joking that she could hear the voice of her conscience on detached speakers. She would get upset, and argue with us like someone who couldn't get her point across other people.

Nobody knows what happened that led to her insanity. Some relatives would say her parents should have got her married before the anxiety of youth fried her mind. Neighbours would say that she must have caught the evil wind,

while walking alone on the roof at night. Others blamed it on the bad genes, tracing that some of her granduncles had also gone mad. There were many conjectures that she had a silent heartbreak, the shock of which blew her mind.

I don't know which of these is true. I don't know why the person I grew up with has lost her mind. But I can't help thinking that someone I know has become a mental case, that one of the products of the same batch as mine has turned out to be flawed. I could accept her better as dead. Death erases life clean, but madness makes it a clumsy mess. I would have wished her alive if she were dead. Now I wish she had died instead.

I also wish I could rewind our lives, my life, her life and start from the scratch! Only if I could keep a close watch and understand where her life started to go wrong! I don't know what the mind looks like. But I suppose it's a complex circuit of delicate feelings, where thoughts and emotions are processed to cope with life. Right now that process doesn't work for the per-

son I know. She has a malfunctioning mind.

I have talked to some psychiatrists and they couldn't give me hope. They said it could be anything from bipolar disorder to acute dementia and advised that the patient should be taken to a mental home. But the parents don't think a mental home would be a nice place for their daughter. They believe that their daughter needs their love more than anything else.

Lately, I have tried to spend some time with her, looking at her from a distance like people watch birds or animals in a zoo. We never talked, although I tried to pick up a conversation with her without success. It seemed to me that there was no warmth left in the world that could thaw her frozen heart. She glanced at me a few times with her icy eyes, her face stilled under the burden of silence that filled her life. I thought perhaps she was trapped inside a bubble and a prick of memory could set her free. I talked about our childhood days, about the funny things we had done together, the jokes, the people, the fat tailor with a knobby nose, and the cobbler who used to keep his tongue clenched in his teeth while doing his stitches.

She picked up a little pouch and fished out some betel nuts, lime and chewing tobacco, rolled them together in the palm of her hand and then threw it into her mouth like some delectable stuff. She then whistled in the air and hummed a tune as if the concoction had done wonders to her taste buds. She made faces towards me although her eyes never made contact with mine, and suddenly got up and ran out of the room like a ballet dancer.

As I looked at her vanishing frame, I wondered what was lost if she could still feel happy like that! Then it occurred to me that perhaps she could become sad just as quickly, and madness was a disorder when mind lost its grip. She had lost nothing but herself in the altered state of her jumbled thoughts. The loss was mine alone. Someone I know doesn't know me anymore.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.