Forgetting important events in one’s life is not received well when it concerns other people. Forgetting your spouse’s birthday or the date to pay your son’s school fee can lead to unsavoury moments in family life. I cannot remember other people’s birthdays. For this reason I do not give away the date of my birth to people; I feel pressured to ask theirs in return, and then remember it, which I will forget eventually.

The reason I bring up remembrance of days is because I am trying to recollect the year and date of my suicide attempt. I think it was sometime in September of 2022—might have been ninth of September—that I tried to take my life. But I am not sure. How does it matter, I ask myself. If I have a habit of forgetting important dates, it is not surprising that I have forgotten this detail. And I do not even know whether this is an important date. I do not know whether my actions on the night of the ninth of September, 2022 has had any effect on my life since. Rather than debate about the vacuity or significance of that act, which will get me nowhere further, I will describe the evening and my coming to in the hospital bed after an unknown period.

September in Mumbai is when the southwestern monsoon had passed the city and reached the Himalayas. Thus I do not think it was raining that day. Dusk had fallen and it must have been around seven in the evening. I remember being down—I have been down for sometime then—and being on a call with my psychiatrist. He had looked up the phone number of the student counselling centre at my campus and made me dial the number. I do not remember whether it was him who called the centre or me, but they called me back. Sometime during this, I had swallowed one, two, and then a whole lot of antidepressants and antipsychotics and other pills. I remember the counselling centre calling me back and I refused to tell them where I was and they told me they could find that out from the students’ database. Anvar took me to the hospital. I remember waiting for an auto with him by the tree that has since fallen over. I do not remember anything after that. From my medical history sheet I later found out that I was cognisant and not disoriented. I had given Aditi as my emergency contact during the period of total blackness during which I was taken in the ambulance. There is a vague memory of a group of nurses surrounding me as they lavaged my stomach. I felt the most peaceful I had felt in a long time.

After I was shifted from intensive care to a room, Reshma and my brother joined me. Reshma sneaked in an omelette-sub. The hospital staff took away the medicine cabinet. I do not know what I would have done with the medicine cabinet. Although it had sharp corners, I could not have harmed myself with those. It was not tall enough to serve as a stool; even if it were tall, there was nothing to hang myself from on the ceiling. My brother whispered something about missing work. The flight back home was split between Mumbai, Bangalore, and Calicut. From Bangalore I watched the sun come up above the horizon diffused through the clouds which were orange, blue, and white.