The Strange Silences: Writing Mental Health in Indian Fiction

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

Cobra Orchard does not sugarcoat or dismiss mental health in Indian fiction. A discussion that was and still is taboo. More controversial than themes of violence and mindless crimes.

There is a character in Cobra Orchard, a man whose family quietly organizes itself around him. His moods. His presence. His absences that no one can explain. Conversations held in the next room. Things never said in his presence. Workarounds so practiced that they have become invisible.

Everyone knows. No one openly says it.

This is a story I have seen in real life more times than I can count. It is one of the reasons I knew I had to write him.

He hallucinates. He sees things no one else can see, and what he sees is vivid and overwhelming and sometimes terrifying. His father cannot stand him. His brother resents him. His mother loves him deeply, genuinely, completely but from a distance. Because loving him means confronting a future she is too frightened to name. She protects him. She defends him. She fights for him. But she cannot fully embrace him.

Only one person in the house truly sees him. Not manages him. Not handles him. Sees him. Her name is Chintoh.

I did not want to write a character whose condition existed to simply create a story. That kind of representation does more harm than good. It reduces a person’s inner world to a device, a danger, a twist. What I wanted instead was to write someone whose mind works differently. To show with honesty and without flinching – what this truly costs him. And what it costs everyone around him.

He is not a symbol. He is a person. He writes real poetry. He thinks and feels just like everyone else.

Mental health in Indian fiction has historically lived in one of two places:
Either it is the shameful secret families bury, or it is the dramatic rupture that destroys everything. What I find missing is the middle: the daily, quiet, exhausting reality of a family that loves someone and does not know how to reach him. The father who expresses his fear as contempt. The mother who expresses her love as anxiety. The brother who expresses his grief as cruelty.

None of them are villains. All of them are failing him.

We have a word for this in Indian families. We call it nakhre. Drama. Weakness. We give it other names because the real name feels too large, too permanent, too impossible to fix. And in this avoidance, the person at the centre of it all is left to carry a burden no one will acknowledge out loud.

Writing this character, I kept asking myself: what does it feel like to be the person that everyone manages but nobody truly sees? What does it cost a man to live in a house full of people who love him and still feel entirely alone? What does it mean to see the world differently in a family and a community that has no language for being different except shame?

These are not comfortable questions. But I think mental health in Indian fiction will only grow more honest if we are willing to sit with them, rather than resolving them neatly or using them for eliciting shock.

This man does not get redemption in the traditional sense. He gets something quieter and, I think truer. He gets to be seen and heard. By one person. Completely.

That feels like enough. That feels like everything.

Cobra Orchard is available on Amazon Kindle. If you have known someone like him, or if you have been him in some way, I think you will find something true in these pages.

Dive deeper into the psychology of Cobra Orchard with cursed fates.

Visit me here as I talk about the difficult real-life themes of Cobra Orchard.

Have you ever lived in a family where everyone knew something was wrong, but nobody said it out loud?

If this story moves you, meet the full world of Cobra Orchard.

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