Recently, I read a story about a journalist who had worked in war zones, most recently in Syria, and was found hanging from the ceiling of a bathroom in an airport in Turkey.
The story stirred an old set of sensations: an all-consuming mix of dread and guilt that manifests as a pressure in the back of my throat; a fire that races up and down my insides; a pain in my chest that squeezes all the air out of my lungs, threatening to explode my heart and rip apart my sternum. Sensations that plagued me on an almost daily basis for a year and a half after my return from Kabul in 2013.
I came back with daily panic attacks. And nightmares that would visit me night after night. I feared going to sleep. The slightest noise would awaken me, and I started to sleep with knives beside me. Until one night, when I almost stabbed my brother.
Sleeplessness took its toll. I started taking sleeping tablets, but soon that didn’t work either and I started drinking — in increasingly larger amounts — to get to sleep.
What had I seen, what had I experienced to warrant this? I counted up the incidents everyday. But it was never enough, compared to the experience of others I knew. Those who have lived through kidnappings, watched their friends and family die. Those who have lost limbs. Those who have spent hours alone, in silent terror, suffocating in panic rooms.
Let me be honest. I have not lived through war. I have lived, merely, for six months in a conflict zone reeling from the effects of decades of near-constant war.
But it was enough.
I will tell of you of just one evening out of the six months I spent there. I had fallen ill, and an Afghan doctor had written me a prescription, but the only medication I could acquire was long past its expiry date, and had an adverse effect. I needed, urgently, to see another doctor and resolved to fly to India. After a harrowing struggle at work to wrangle my medical leave, I was sick to my stomach, and a friend invited me to a small party to blow off steam. Those present included a warlord-turned-prominent politician; an eastern European mercenary, ex-Kosovo, who ran a business on the side smuggling alcohol into Kabula couple of ex-U.S. military defence contractors.
That evening, I had the stupidity to accept something that turned out to contain an indecipherable mixture of illicit substances.
It must have been the combination of fear, drugs, sickness, expired antibiotics and stress that unleashed a series of hallucinations that lingered and returned. That night — and in my dreams for the next year and a half — I saw skulls mounted on the famous Soviet tanks that lie rusting on a plain outside Kabul. Jawbones creaked and eye sockets popped as the skulls turned to ask me, “Why are you here? Why are you here when you have the choice to leave?”
Why had I gone? I had gone for excitement, adventure. A desire to broaden my understanding of the world, and desire to write things that could inspire, or lead to, cultural change. But also for money.
Yes, money. What I made in a month in Kabul was nine times what I made as a writer in India.
Was I so different from the opportunistic warlords and mercenaries, the contractors and the ambitious NGO workers? My grand reasons withered away. War is an industry, and I was a mercenary.
I went to India, got prescribed a better set of medicines, and came back to Kabul. I served out my contract, completed my work and returned home. I got better, but the nightmares didn’t stop. Nor did the almost daily panic attacks.
I had left Afghanistan, but somehow it hadn’t left me. I carried it with me, daily — in my cells, in the circuits of my brain, in my dreams, in my waking moments, in my body. I could not forget. The past and the present merged. My mind kept imagining that I was back there.
I started to perceive the truth that an Afghan friend had shared with me — war does not end, even when it does end. If the experience wouldn’t leave me, what could I do? How could I make it end? Could I leave it? It was then, when I began thinking of knotted bed sheets and ceiling fans, that I resolved to seek help. I went to doctors and psychiatrists. They put me on pills. These initially gave me relief — but the nightmares returned, and the panic attacks persisted. The dosages increased and kept doubling. Under the effect of the pills I could hardly get out of bed. The days passed by in a haze. My depression returned.
The doctors did not understand what I was going through. They treated my condition like a physical or mental disease. I have come to understand since then that it was not that. It was a fundamental loss of faith in the world, in God, and fundamentally — in my own self.
The way to recovery came not through doctors, but through the kindness of a friend who suspected the true nature of what I was suffering. It was under her urging that I started to meditate, on a daily basis, and to come to grips with what this was. Meditation helped retrain my brain and my circuity, the neuro-feedback loops that kept the nightmares and panic attacks returning. It forced me to be conscious of and confront my fear. To ask myself what shaped it.
The truth was that I could be this person: I would do anything — anything — to save myself. I would run, I would hide. I was even prepared to kill, rather than be killed. I was brought up to believe in goodness and ahimsa. The shock of realising that what you believe about yourself and what you are are not one and the same — that was part of my crisis.
This condition, this ripping apart of the psyche, my psychiatrist told me, can be called Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. We read of mass shootings, in army bases and in civilian life. We read of suicide bombers. We call them mad. In my case it is not madness nor a disease of the mind or the body — it is a crisis of the soul.
Sometimes I wonder if the real malaise we suffer from is a lack of empathy and imagination. When I heard the news of the plans to bomb Syria, I try to imagine, again, what year after year of this can do to an entire nation, a culture.
Samhita Arni is an author based in Bangalore. She spent six months in Kabul in 2013 working as a television script writer for an Afghan TV network.
