Not many doctors aspire to be a James Herriot. A Madurai psychiatrist wants to be one, post-retirement. Having published his first novel, The Lone Limbo, he is in the final lap of his second. The doctor-author, C. P. Rabindranath, former Head, Department of Psychiatry, Madurai Medical College, sitting in his clinic on Dhanappa Mudali Street, speaks to S. Annamalai about his passion for writing and why he chose the novel genre to create awareness of the predicament of people with mental illness .
Dr. Rabindranath, scion of the royal family of Kozhicode, wanted to study B.A. (English Literature) after schooling in St. Joseph’s and St. Mary’s and Pre-University Course in The American College, so that he could become a writer. But his ex-serviceman father, who had settled in Madurai after retirement, thought otherwise and made his son a psychiatrist. The yearning to write rejuvenated in him when he was transferred to Tiruchi from Madurai in 2009.
Travel and writing
“I used to commute in the Vaigai Express to Tiruchi and utilised the travel time to write the novel,” says Dr. Rabindranath. The novel is the “true saga of an intelligent and emotionally stable computer professional [his patient], who escapes from the throes of chronic insanity and extended treatment due to care and affection showered by his family and friends.”
The novel is Dr. Rabindranath’s “attempt to lay bare the facts, and the truth about the day-to-day life of a person who is mentally ill” in a narrative laced with humour, thrills and a dose of crime.
Who inspired the novel? “My patients and their caregivers. The community is not congenial to people with mental illness. It should be more empathetic and able to tolerate the patients better. We should give the patients a chance to become normal instead of making fun of them. The family dynamics is an important factor in curing mental illness.”
He attributes the disintegration of joint family system as the reason for the plight of people with mental illness. He hopes that his maiden sally into creative writing will be an eye-opener for society. The Epilogue, which carries the narrative of the protagonist Arvin, as a response to the novel, says, “My rehabilitation …was by and large carried out by the community around me — consisting of my family, friends and the village folk…It should be a mass movement by every sane individual and not by caretakers and professional managers of the illness alone.” Speaking beyond the novel, Dr. Rabindranath expresses concern over the increasing trend of alcoholism and drug addiction.
“Addiction to alcohol and drugs predisposes a person to and exaggerates already existing genetic predilection for mental illness.”
“The community is not congenial to people with mental illness. It should be more empathetic and able to tolerate the patients better”
