When Will I Go Home?

Desperate to leave, inmates of the century-old mental health facility near Ranchi open our eyes to the world of those deemed too "ill" to live with others in society

- By Md Asghar Khan IS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT FROM JHARKHAND

INSIDE the female section of the Ranchi Institute of Neuro-Psychiatry and Allied Sciences (RINPAS) in Kanke, 10 km from the Jharkhand capital, a woman who claims she won many singing competitions in school is singing in Bengali. “The earth is my home, don’t bind me here,” she explains the lyrics in Hindi. “Let me live freely... I want to live. I want to fly.” The 40-year-old from West Bengal—let’s call her Sunita—was found to be homeless and brought here by the authorities in 2016. Diagnosed with psychosis, a condition marked by disconnection from reality, Sunita has been waiting all these years for her kin to come and take her away. Now I can sense why something said to me in jest in childhood—“he has become majua, send him to Kanke”—always had that edge. People in our village would say this every time I got too stubborn or persistent, and I would invariably flare up as I knew the reference was to those whom society considered to be “abnormal”.

Nearly two and a half decades later, I am at the very place where they had threatened to send me, surrounded by many who had “become majua”, so to speak, and landed inside the walled compound in Kanke that houses RINPAS and the Central Institute of Psychiatry (CIP)—with pain, restlessness, sadness and a desperate search for family in their eyes. Sharing this search she has clung to for the past seven years, with every unfamiliar face she meets, is a 25-year-old woman—let’s call her Priya—in RINPAS’s female section. She recites her home address in a single breath, names her parents and brothers, and begs to be taken home. Soon her mood shifts and she begins singing songs in Santali (the most widely spoken language in the Munda subfamily of the Austroasiatic languages, related to Ho and Mundari), Nagpuri (Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken on the Chotanagpur plateau) and Hindi.