The happy train

My Aunt Paula's brother shot himself in the head the other week.

She had to fly back to the US for the funeral. He was 33 and had shown no signs of wanting to kill himself.

When I called her in the US, she had gone for a walk and I spoke to her mother.



She came back to stay with us in London on her way to Birmingham. She looked battered. "I am," she said. She described the first days of mourning: "I didn't know you could feel so much pain, then one day I woke up and I was just numb."

The last thing I expected Paula to do in that state was to say something funny. She said she didn't know how to break the news of her brother committing suicide to her therapist: "He left for a holiday before I went and he said we'd been making good progress."

She had been in therapy for a good few months. I offered to drive her to Birmingham from London in her car and take the train back. "Are you sure?" she said. "It'll cost you a lot to get back."

She now appeared keen to be back with her family: her husband and daughter; her job she seemed more determined than despondent. When we arrived, she sunk into a sofa while my uncle prepared lunch.

I dashed upstairs and booked myself a ticket back to London for u00a312 (around Rs 1,500); a bargain as last-minute you can expect to pay u00a360, or even more. I bounced downstairs from my uncle's study saying, "12 pounds to London, wow!"

"I got a ticket for twelve pounds!" I told Paula when she got up. She didn't say anything and went into the kitchen. I left them and took a bus to the station and thought about life, death and the joys of a bumper-deal seat on the train. I thought of Paula's therapist and how he would react to her news.



And, try as I might, I couldn't imagine what on earth Paula was going through; where she was at. I could, however, imagine just about why someone might choose to auto-destruct.

My therapist says depression is repressed anger: you have to look at what is making you angry and turn it into positive energy. He's an Englishman in Goa who charges Rs 1,000 (around u00a312) a session. He recently visited London for a few days and his rate soared to Rs 4,500 (u00a360) which I could not afford (my key problem on returning from India each time is that a dosa costs around Rs500 here as opposed to Rs 15 or, if you're going high-end, Rs 60).

Still, he was kind enough to meet me for breakfast u00a320, and we both got to eat something. (Hey, there's a recession.)

Meanwhile, for the past year my friend Jenny has been doing a maths course to get into university. She's 35 and will be a mature student. She is prone to bouts of severe melancholy but since starting therapy, has worked on that positive energy and spent hours and hours in her study poring over calculations.

In the two subjects she took, Maths and Further Maths, she scored 97 per cent and 98 per cent respectively.

Her husband showed me into her study one day. The air was thick with unsolved equations, text books and exercise books it reeked of maths hell. Still, she's brimming with happiness now because she can follow her dream of becoming a scientist. (There is one equation she has trouble explaining, though what happened to the two or three per cent she fell short of? I can't quite compute that, or the fact that she did better at Further Maths.)

I always hated maths at school. It was as difficult for me as spelling is for a dyslexic child. The teacher would say: "If X is equal to six then Y must be...?" At this point my brain would ask me why X had to equal anything: X depressed me. Y depressed me more. That both of them might equal this or that, if Z was added to them, meant nothing to me. I wanted to leave the classroom and eat a hotdog.

Sometimes I think of that genius kid at school whose intelligence buzzed around his head while the rest of us tried to study pornography under our desks. He probably went on to invent something really important. He could be a therapist now and per cent who knows? he may have taken his own life (although I came across his lookalike in a porno recently and could swear it was him).

As I write this, I'm hours away from taking a train to see my sister perform at the Edinburgh festival in Scotland.
I feel smug that I haven't shot myself in the head. She doesn't know how lucky she is.