Grownups can be forgiven for crying
Once upon a time I laughed at my father for crying: he and I were in a cinema hall in Queens, NY, that showed Hindi films over the weekend for the growing Indian population in the 1970s’ USA, watching Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki, a social drama that bored me into stupor but which made my father sniffle throughout, tears streaming down his cheeks. As a 14-year-old I was astounded that anyone could cry at a movie, and that too a grown man. Why are you crying, I demanded. We Indians are sentimental, was all that he could feebly muster.
Nearly a decade later I asked the same thing of my bachelor granduncle in New Delhi, with whom I lived while embarking on a career in journalism. He was retired, a hard drinker and phlegmatic when it came to the seasonal controversies of our extended family. We were watching a 1980s Indian TV serial on the State-run Doordarshan, and I saw him holding a tissue near his teary eyes. My eye has a condition where it starts to run by itself, he said unconvincingly. I later asked a friend of his, another elderly bachelor, who said: don’t you know. As you grow older you cry more easily.
I have grown older, and this weekend I went to Bangalore for a major newspaper’s Literary Festival (invited because of my recently published crime novel, The CEO Who Lost His Head). I lost control of my emotions on two occasions. It was strange because I was otherwise thrilled to be an author at a LitFest, hanging out with other writers and talking to them about the very private creative process. Though it wasn’t the first time since I turned 40 that I find myself on the verge of sobbing uncontrollably about things that on the surface really shouldn’t make anyone, least a grown man, cry.
One occasion was during a session at the LitFest called “Mind Matters: Mental Health is the elephant in the room”, which had on its panel Anna Chandy, the analyst who pulled actor Deepika Padukone out of depression and heads the latter’s foundation in Bangalore; Dr Anjali Chhabria, one of India’s leading psychiatrists who has lately published a book on suicide; and Dr Shyam Bhat, a psychiatrist who’d published a book on broken hearts. It was an intense discussion on depression, anxiety, stress and suicide; the three mentioned case studies (though masking identities), and each was heart-breaking. And then
I also find that I cry at the climax of certain TV shows, or in cinema halls
Ms Chandy mentioned her book that is publishing later this year and that incorporates a personal childhood trauma. When she did, my heart sank and the tears began.
I don’t know why. I started as a crime reporter, and I’ve spent the middle part of my reporting career from conflict zones where I kept having to cross names out of my telephone. In my youth I was pretty stoic about the gory sights I’ve seen, or the friends who suddenly disappeared. When I heard these professionals talk about how some of us find life so bleak and hopeless that we think of ending it (India has the recorded the most suicides in the world during several recent years), I felt totally and profoundly sad. These suicides had died even before death. And I cried. The other occasion was while I was on queue at the airport, listening to music on my phone. An Oasis number came on, “Live Forever” (from Definitely Maybe). The lyrics say “Maybe I just want to fly/Want to Live don’t want to die/Maybe you’re the same as me/we see things they’ll never see/You and I We’re going to live forever”. It made me immensely sad for the lost moment in my life when the road ahead was endless; now visits to the hospital for ailing parents forces me to confront the fact that the end is not quite that distant. I sense that there was something I forgot to do while my youth slipped away. That I missed out on something, or simply that I just missed something. The optimism of youth, as expressed in song and Oasis’s melody, is not for me. Not anymore.
I also find that I cry at the climax of certain TV shows, or in cinema halls (somehow emotions feel heightened in front of a big screen), though it means silently bonding with my daughters who are less than stoic. Don’t ask me why, for instance, but when I watch George Clooney saying goodbye to his comatose wife in The Descendants I feel I’m in a canoe going over the Niagara Falls of tears.
Internet-research once lead me to read that we do cry more often as we get older; watching or hearing a narrative’s churning moment, the empathy that our lifetime of experience lets us access produces tears. All our own past distresses and disappointments apparently coalesce into that single experiential moment, and we cannot help but cry. I don’t know if it is catharsis or the lost optimism of youth or the gaining awareness of mortality, but obviously, stoicism is just a myth. Grown men do cry.