ARJUN RAINA: extracts from The Eye of Childhood

Not all brains work perfectly and survive life’s turbulent journey. Photograph by Amel Uzunovic

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The Brain

Dear Reader

Have you ever thought about your own brain, this mysterious organ, controlling all your actions, intentions, emotions, memories and feelings? Sitting up there in your skull, working to make your legs walk, your arms swing, your heart beat, your neck bend, your eyes see, your ears hear, your tongue taste?

Making you do all the wonderful things that you take for granted.

Even, incredibly, helping you recognize your own face when you look in the mirror.

Recognizing yourself, knowing your own face, from seeing your face in the mirror knowing the feeling of who you are. It is your brain that helps you do that. All this from that small organ that sits up there somewhere under your fuzzy hair.

Now imagine if one day this organ breaks down. Like a car engine does sometimes. Rattling, stalling, stuttering, stopping then refusing to start again, refusing to function. Leaving you stranded right there in the middle of the street. What would you do then?

Well, with a car the answer is relatively easy. You, that is your brain, would first recognize that the car had broken down and needed repair. Your brain would then call a car mechanic to come fix the engine. As easy and simple as that! Well, that is true for a car breaking down but not for your brain. When your brain breaks down there is a complication. For it is the brain itself whose job it is to recognize dysfunction. To tell you what is going wrong. To pin point error. Sadly, when the brain is breaking down, there is no one there to share the bad news. Once the brain begins to break down, when one by one all its systems start crashing, it finds itself with no help to stop its slide into a full blown crisis commonly known, well, as that frightening thing called ‘madness.’ A dark and sad human condition that consumes sanity leaving no light for the floundering brain to find a way out of a desperate darkness. Not even a faint flicker!

Except perhaps (and I say perhaps because not much is known yet about this incredibly complicated organ) a very tiny particle called a mirror neuron. Now dear reader if you were to check with a neuroscientist, perhaps she would deny this. Not give a mirror neuron the kind of role and significance this story teller is attempting to. I accept this. This obsession with a mirror neuron could be a lie, could be mere conjecture, this could be a story teller’s fantasy, this could be a desperate clutching of the last straws! Yes, it could. However, in a darkening world any light is worth holding onto and a mirror neuron is such a beacon of light! Now I hear your brain worrying, wondering, trying to figure out what this strange creature inside your head is, something you have never heard of? Is that perhaps because you had never really thought about your own brain? Never thought about what it was made up of, what it felt, looked like, how tough or fragile it was? Never thought about it breaking down.

Why? Because you never needed to! Never having broken down, gone crazy, mad, nuts etc., you’ve never needed to inquire, find out, examine what sits in your head and rules the roost! Well, you’ve been lucky, very lucky.

Sadly, not all brains are so lucky. Not all brains work perfectly and survive life’s turbulent journey. Some unfortunately get damaged and breakdown. Like my unlucky brain.

This is where my story begins.

Many years ago, when I was still young and fragile, one dark and cloudy day, luck and light both deserted me, all that was left functioning in my brain as it began to break down, shut down in that dark hour, in that dark and lonely tunnel was, perhaps, a thing called a mirror neuron. Now, as shared earlier, not much is known about this little creature in one’s brain. Neuroscientists are still exploring its nature, its true potential. For now, however, I ask you to accept its existence and believe in its potential to make your brain feel, make sense, hold onto itself and to reality, even as all around it things are crumbling, breaking down, and going crazy.  For the sake of the telling of this story of my own breakdown, I request you let the mirror neuron play its part in this difficult narrative. If not for its scientific essence, then at least for its literary truth as a living character, who by witnessing my breakdown helps me tell my story.

A crazed and maddened story.

It is for this, the difficulty of a telling a story of one’s own breakdown, that I ask of you dear reader not just for your patience and perseverance but also for your courage, kindness, inquisitiveness and care, for this story is not just any man’s fantasy, but my own very real story, of ‘madness.’

The Watchman

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One dark and cloudy monsoon day, a watchman, armed with a large wooden stick swung out at my head aiming to crack open my skull. It was a brutal act and if successful would have surely killed me. I was no robber, no thief. I was just an accidental intruder, doing what the watchman thought was a very strange action. I was sitting staring out into space and sporadically winking. Not winking at the watchman but winking at/to myself. Not just winking but also double winking cross winking. With each/both eyes.

The watchman was a simple fellow. Something in his brain made him decide I was dangerous, and he swung out to break open my head. The blow would surely have broken open my skull spilling my brains out onto the wet hard-tarred road.

To be fair to the watchman, before calling him a brute, a title that perhaps was well deserved, it is only correct to try and see things from his perspective. After all he was on duty and was perhaps only doing his job.

What made him do this? Was he naturally a brutal and violent man? Was he terrified, threatened by me, the madman? Was there some childhood trauma that compelled him? Was it his illiteracy, his ignorance? Was it his low social status and some brooding repressed dissatisfaction with life in general? What was happening in his brain? Was he too breaking down, going nuts, mad? What?

Now, about me! Why was I sitting there cross winking? What was happening in my brain? The cross winking perhaps was an external manifestation of the chaos, the panic and the confusion of my brain. What had caused it? What had impacted, affected it? How affected, infected, maddened was I? How cross-wired, disconnected, short-circuited and fused had my brain become?

To understand this, it is necessary to stay with the me for a while, to walk along with me, to observe me, to try and understand how I got to be sitting there in front of the watchman. To understand my crazed brain, it is important to know my story. And for me to do this well I have to tell it as an objective story, not just as my personal tale. For things get terribly complicated when the narrator is himself in a crazed state. Only a chaotic unreadable story can be the consequence of the narrator himself going nuts!

It is to avoid this chaos that I need to tell this story as if it existed outside of me, as an objective story, a story with characters and a plot, with a timeline, a beginning, middle and an end. A story with a firm hold on reality.

The story of Monty the Mirror Neuron!

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Dr Arjun Raina was trained as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and as a Kathakali dancer at the International Centre for Kathakali, New Delhi, India. He has been performing and teaching drama and theatre for over 30 years. Arjun holds a PhD in theatre and performance from Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. He has taught at the National School of Drama, New Delhi; and at the Ambedkar and Ashoka Universities in India. The following two extracts have been reproduced here from his book, The Eye of Childhood (Zorba Books, 2023), with the author’s permission.