Depression
Picture this: woman, a doctor, successful, married, with a child who’s sitting her 10th Board exams (for those of you who don’t know what that means, it’s a massive centralized country-wide general examination that takes place twice – in 10th and 12th grade – in your academic career in India).
Said doctor is always tense prior to her child taking any exam and usually takes a week off her job to coach her child through them. She also does this post-exam review of the question paper to ballpark the performance – a common practice I used to loathe and refused to indulge in when I was giving my own Boards.
After one particular paper, mother and daughter pore over the question paper and find out to their dismay that the child skipped one question by mistake. It means an automatic deduction of – hold your breath – 2 marks out of a total of 100.
Mother can’t get over it. Daughter, who sleeps in the same room as her parents, wakes up in the middle of the night and sees mother sitting up in bed, weeping. She asks her mother if anything is the matter and the mother confesses that she can’t get over that 2 mark question that her daughter missed. The daughter consoles her mother as best she could and tells her to get some sleep before going to sleep herself.
In the morning, father and daughter wake to find mother hanging in the bathroom.
The funeral was today. Where the hell does everybody go from here?
Is this real or a figment of imagination??
Saagar – unfortunately, it’s very real.
WTF? Unbelievable!!!
What the heck! ..Ok, a barage of words coming and I don’t know where to start. So I shall stop.
She must have been a depressive to begin with.
It’s ghastly anyway, but what will it do to that poor child?
What she must be going through is unthinkable.
wow….that’s unspeakably terrible. I can’t believe that
well that scenario would really be the pinnacle of the exam death pyramid ..
wat the hell?? y wuld she do somethin like tat??
very wrong!! ;(
i still cant digest this.. i am reading the post for the third time now!!
I just cant believe this, I just cant!!!!! What could be so threatening about two damn marks that she had to take her life, and deprive her child of a mother. And how will those two marks even matter ten years down the line….it is scaring me now, this obsession mothers have with their kids marks,
Shocking really. But is there more than that meets the eye? Did the mother have OCD? But my sympathies with the daughter. What she must be going through is hell .
I really cannot think of this. Why the heck has the mother do commit suicide??? I could have understood if the girl would have committed suicide but for bloody 2 marks…she committed suicide and that too without the results coming out….I mean she didnt even see how her daugher did in the exams. ….
Now since we do not know about the whole story this would remain surprising for me…I cannot believe this. She must be going through something else that we dont know about and we are supposedly making up this story because we could not find anything else…..
I was thinking that the daughter is gonna end life, as that’s the norm these days, due to amounting expectations from parents. Seems this one is the case of demon eating its own creator. What a pathetic situation we’ve created for ourselves….!!!
it is not a matter of making up a story, or it being just about the “two marks”. Even if there was something going on before that, it might be of little consolation to her daughter, given that her last moments with her mother were concerning the exam.
I don’t know what else to say here. I lost a friend a few years ago, whose small child found her hanging in her room. She had been depressed for a very long time. How awful must it be when you cannot go on, even when there is something so precious to live for.
I’m sorry to read about this Amrita.
Amrita,
SOmeone you knew? Very sorry to hear this was real. I pray for the girl – whatever the mother’s motivation, it is the girl who has to live with this now.
M
very, very sad… I had to read this a few times to understand what happened.
We’ve created this monster for ourselves – this system of intense expectation and pressure…. from childhood through our adult lives. It is sad to think what message the daughter will come away with from this…
ouch…. horrible story… poor child… she is going to think , for the rest of her life, that her mother did it because of 2 m
Just a note: I’d be extremely surprised if she’d actually killed herself for those 2 marks. I’m pretty sure there was more to it but these were definitely the events leading to her death.
I’ve been disturbed about it all week for the reasons that all of you have listed – plus I can’t help but think about the larger family and what they must be going through as well the child, who now has to write her 12th boards. I can’t even imagine being in her position.
It’s just the saddest thing. And the reason I wrote about it was to encourage people to seek help if they or someone they know is suffering from depression. Sudden death is always senseless but I don’t know of any other case of sudden death that seems more senseless to me than one arising from depression.
Shit.
I can’t even imagine what her daughter is going through.
it might sound callous.. but with a mother like that…
MM – I don’t know. I’d rather have a sick mom who’s alive than a dead one I couldn’t get on terms with.