What drove a city mom to such internal anguish that, before she hurled herself from the 19th floor of a Malad building, she also flung down both her children, in the dreadful irony of Women’s Day last month?
The trauma of the story in the papers the next day and the terrible, sorrowful poignancy of the pictures — the kiddie lunch box on the parapet, the child’s blue shoe in the grass — only added to a city’s collective horror. And fuelled questions about the depth of the lady’s mental distress.
For, as many reasoned, suicide might be an act of utter hopelessness, of futility in the face of insurmountable circumstances, but of murder — of one’s unsuspecting little ones? The level of desperation was not possible to grasp immediately. It affected us all deeply, this tragedy, especially parents. Mothers wept as reports surfaced and online social networking forums kept questioning the mother’s motives behind killing her children.
Reports now outline that one among us was indeed unnerved by the seeming desperation of that Malad mom’s final fall.
She reportedly was so deeply affected that she voiced a similar judgment to her close friend — if the woman wanted to end her life, she should have done it alone. And then, in an agonising copy of the same terrible act, she also flung her five-year-old son off the terrace of her seven-storey Dahisar building on Saturday before jumping off herself.
Perhaps both mothers were actually trying to spare their children a life without themselves — maybe, in some way, they believed they were protecting them by ending their existence. How to gauge their state of mind now, when they cannot speak for themselves?
American literary giant Henry David Thoreau wrote that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. In a telling coming-of-age movie, Dead Poet’s Society, those lines are repeated by a gifted teacher seeking to impart to his students the importance of being one’s own person. His effort bears fruit with terrible consequences — a teenager, whose parents forcefully oppose his chosen vocation of acting, commits suicide: in desperation. Because he feels he has no recourse, no one to appeal to, especially not those closest — his blood, his family.
Maybe it was the same for both those Mumbai moms. Maybe they took their lives because those closest seemed distant. For Mumbai, horrified and soul searching, it was a harsh wake-up call to the angst that sometimes simmers behind appearances. Yet, solutions are difficult to come by.
Because in a city that harbours such malaise that a mother would snuff out the very life she created and nurtured, before taking her own, there are few answers that can really measure up.
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