How to find happiness when life deals the cruellest card of all
When Nina was 16, her father killed her little brother and himself. Incredibly, 20 years after this unimaginable horror she decided to forgive him. Here, she reveals . . .
AT AROUND 6.30pm on Thursday, May 22, 1997, Nina Nayar and her mother parked outside their house. Nina’s day had begun as usual. Then 16, she had gone to school where she was a straight-A student. She and her brother Vijay, ten, came home at around 3.30pm. Her mum was working late, but her father was at home.
Even though her parents had separated six months before, he would stop by in the morning and evening. That day he hadn’t gone to work. ‘I am feeling kind of unwell,’ he told Nina.
Nina and Vijay watched TV, did their homework, ate the spaghetti their mother had left in the fridge.
At around 4.30pm, to Nina’s surprise, her mother walked in. Her meeting had been cancelled so she was free to take Nina to an appointment at the optometrist. Vijay jumped up. ‘Can I come with you, guys?’ he said. ‘No, I’ll take you to the shops and buy you some jeans,’ said his father. Vijay’s favourite things were skateboards, rollerblades, and the full moon. He was adventurous; soft and gentle.
Nina and her mother got ready in the hallway. ‘Mum!’ Vijay called out from upstairs. They could see him leaning over the banisters on the second floor landing. ‘Can I get two pairs of jeans?’
‘Sure, whatever you want, Vi,’ she replied.
It was the last time Nina saw him, his face gazing down at them beneath a boyish mop of hair. Less than two hours later, his body was found lying on the floor with a knife by his side.
His father’s body was close by. The father had killed his son, then taken his own life by setting fire to the family home.
Detectives gave the time of the murder-suicide as around 6.15pm.
By the time Nina and her mother got home, police, firefighters and ambulance crews were everywhere.
Nina will never know what made her father do the unspeakable and murder his own child, but she knows it was premeditated and required planning. ‘Detectives said that had Mum’s meeting not been cancelled, I would have suffered the same fate.’
Inevitably perhaps, Nina suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder caused by that return to her burnedout home outside Toronto, Canada, with Vijay lying dead inside.
THERE were many sleepless nights spent trying to piece together her brother’s last terrifying moments. ‘I had terrible survivor’s guilt,’ she says, ‘Why was it not me?
‘Why didn’t I tell him to come with us? Why did I leave him with my dad? Why wasn’t I there? If I was there, could I have done something? His last words were: “Can I come with you, guys?” ’
As well as destroying much of the life she had led to that point, her father made her future feel impossible as well. ‘I was in a daze, like, what just happened?’ she says. There was so much to work through.’
We meet in a studio where Nina, 38, bounds in, warm and smiley. She is happily married to Mike Purewal, a senior sales executive, with whom she has a daughter, Bianca, four. She lives in a light-filled home near Toronto and now has what she lost at 16: home, hope, equilibrium.
Within the past two years, she’s undergone an almost complete reinvention. After 12 years in the corporate world and a series of highpowered
jobs, Nina has become a mindfulness guru, setting up her business Pure Minds to offer guided workshops, and writing a best-selling book, Let That Sh*t Go, about how to ‘find peace and happiness in the everyday’.
Billed as a practical guide with more than 100 tips, it is also an insight into how, after the most horrific thing imaginable, Nina has been able to live without getting lost in what she describes as a ‘dark hole’.
‘To be aware of all the different places my mind can take me, and to be able to pull myself out of it, has been everything for me, because the mind can absolutely get the better of us,’ she says. ‘We think between 50,000 and 70,000 thoughts a day, and a lot of those aren’t nice, are stressinduced, or lack self-love.’
Mindfulness, a form of meditation, promotes awareness of the moment as an alternative to submerging yourself in painful thoughts.
Traumatic memories, she explains, used to be ‘quite paralysing’ but now: ‘I acknowledge them, instead of pushing them away or suppressing them, as I used to. I allow myself to feel sadness, anger, guilt, resentment — even if it’s for 30 seconds.
‘Then I take a deep breath and remind myself of what I can and can’t control. I can’t control the past, but I can control how I react to it.
‘I am far from perfect. I have moments when I get upset and hit lulls, but I try and constantly apply mindfulness to my life.’
Nina’s parents were born in India and moved to Canada in the late 70s.
Her mum Rita worked in IT strategy, and her father, whom she doesn’t want to name, was a mechanical engineer.
In public, her father hid his abusive behaviour well. ‘He was a soccer coach, he gave a group of us kids maths classes,’ she says. ‘You would never know. Even when my mum decided to leave him, a lot of people said: “Why? He’s such a nice man”.’
But looking back the level of control behind closed doors was disturbing. ‘He wouldn’t let mum go to the shops or travel for work. He would record her phone calls.’
In December 1996, after 22 years of marriage, her mother handed him divorce papers and told him to leave the house. He moved into a friend’s basement ten minutes away.
‘He would come over pretty much every day, but his behaviour was unpredictable,’ she says.
Some days he would do the dishes — something he never did during their entire marriage — tell her he was sorry and beg to be allowed back. ‘The next he would be standing behind her car, not letting her go to work, yelling: “You stupid b***h! You aren’t going to get away with this!” I think that’s why it took so long for her to leave him. She was scared.’
But she never thought he would do what he did. The immediate aftermath was unbearable, particularly at school. Despite a supportive group of friends, ‘I felt embarrassed, judged,’ Nina says.
By contrast, she loved university in Ontario, where she studied business and psychology, because ‘nobody knew’.
She dealt with her father by pretending he didn’t exist. ‘I’d say he passed away.’ In the same way she almost never talked about Vijay. ‘If someone asked if I had a sibling, I’d mostly answer no.’
Life flourished despite it all — but her unconscious often threw her back into the past. ‘I would have really bad nightmares.’
Father’s Day cards in the supermarket aisle would trigger paralysing emotions of anger and sadness. A mention of her brother’s favourite basketball team would bring back all the pain of the original bereavement.
She had professional help from psychologists and a grief counsellor, but most healing of all was the mindfulness she began more than 20 years ago, inspired by her ‘spiritual’ mother. But things really changed in 2010 when she put her career on hold and moved with her husband to Northern California to take a one-year course at the Chinmaya Vedanta Centre, which teaches Hindu spirituality.
‘I completely unplugged — no phone, internet, TV, friends. Just us, the teachings, and the red woods,’ she says. ‘Not having dayto-day distractions and being immersed in nature forced me to deal with everything I suppressed. Memories and feelings would come up that I hadn’t thought of or felt in years. Sometimes this would result in tears and sometimes in life-changing “ah-ha moments”.’
LIFE threatened to unravel again in 2012 when her mother was diagnosed with a type of motor neurone disease, and died at just 61, in 2014, when Nina was pregnant. ‘I was like, are you kidding me? It’s not fair. I thought, surely I’ve already paid my dues?’
Then, in 2015, Nina read an article about a girl who forgave her father. ‘She said: “I’m not forgiving what you did. I am forgiving you for the sake of me.” Something clicked in me. I thought, I need to forgive him.
‘That’s the only way I am going to be able to let go of all this anger and resentment I have carried around for 20 years.’ She now thinks her father must have been ill. ‘He obviously had depression, and some personality disorder. He could have been a narcissist.’
It’s taken a long time, but something has finally shifted. ‘I feel lighter, calmer, happier.’
She says she used to dread the month of May: May 22 is the anniversary; May 28 her brother’s birthday.
‘I’d feel really down. I remember that day, of course, but I don’t see it as a massive tragedy any more,’ Nina explains. ‘Instead, I see it as I wouldn’t be who I am if that didn’t happen. I wouldn’t have had the tenacity to dig deeper into what life is about.’
Vijay would be 33 this year. And for the first time ever, his team, the Toronto Raptors, won the NBA title, the basketball equivalent of the Premier League. Nina watched the game on TV dressed in the jacket Vijay wore to matches, which had been hanging in her wardrobe for 22 years.
Nina says that when she used to think of Vijay it was always in terms of tragedy. But sitting there, knowing how happy he’d be to watch the game, she was able to remember him as he always was: ‘My incredible little brother.’