Whispers went ahead to conclude that the mother, the only ‘sane’ person in the entire family, was to blame. It was said that she must have done something terrible, and her family was paying for it.
Had this family been fortunate enough to live at a time when ‘madness’ had a diagnosis, hence treatment, each and every one of them might have gone on to lead a productive life.
The children would have completed school and gone to become the lawyers, doctors and teachers they kept hearing about.
That is how we described mental illness those days. I remember that it was a family of seven children, and as each child grew up and got to a certain age, they began to exhibit symptoms of ‘madness’. They would become violent, start talking to themselves and neglect their hygiene.
Consequently, they would all drop out of school, one by one, and would spend their days roaming about the local shopping centre collecting garbage, begging and sometimes physically attacking those they came across unprovoked.
