It’s been a year since we lost Sushant Singh Rajput [SSR], probably one of Bollywood’s smartest, prettiest and most talented actors of our times — to the menacing hands of mental illnesses. [This is discounting all that his ‘SSR-Armies’ believe in]

A year into his death, it still feels unreal — like a delirious thought, and this is for someone who didn’t even qualify to be his fan. I’d probably watched 4-5 films of his, and was mildly smitten by his good looks and was low-key swooning over his acting prowess. But I didn’t know anything beyond that, and I still don’t. Except the fact that he was mentally ill. Just like me. But I remind myself every day not to reduce him to just a star and his illness. There was more to him than just that, he was a son, a partner, a brother, and an icon, to thousands of ardent fans.

At a personal level, however, his death is a reminder of how precious life is, and how death brings out the unspoken love that people harbour in their hearts towards us and is a reminder of my precarious reality and the gaping potential to meet an end like his. It is both terrifying and comforting. Terrifying, because no one wants to be told that they might die by suicide, but it is comforting because you know you won’t be alone — that you too will end up wherever all the other people who die by suicide end up going.

And turns out I am not the only one. People who die by suicide, trigger a slew of suicide contagion-like behaviours and that is what makes mental illnesses so sinister. It should be feared, just as much as we now fear the COVID 19.

However, it’s quite a slippery slope, because at one end, we are trying to de-stigmatise mental illnesses, dispel the fear around it, but that often comes at the cost of romaticising being mentally ill. It is an age where youngsters think ‘therapy is cool’. Therapy is far from being cool, it is painful, expensive and harsh. Taking ‘happy pills’ doesn’t make you cool [and let’s not forget, they that seldom do what they claim to do]. They aren’t magic drugs that offer an instant surge of boundless joy, They merely bring some semblance of stability, that too at the cost of weight gain, chronic lethargy and emptiness, amongst a panoply of other side effects.

What is needed, is to view therapy and psychiatry the way you’d view someone going to the dentist’s or to the orthopedics’ clinic. In a clinical and sterile manner, instead of suffusing coolness into the equation.

And to know that there is seldom any panacea for these conditions, the pain never goes away, one simply learns to live with it. Just the way the hollowness in my chest left behind by the demise of SSR still persists. On most days, it is like the ebb and flow of calm beach waters, but on some days, it hits me like a tsunami, bringing along with it, feelings of disbelief, jealousy, angst, and heartache. Disbelief, because it is easy to assume that fame and fortune are guarantors of happiness, why would someone who had both, end his life? Jealousy, because he did what I have always wanted to do, but feared to do. Angst, because of the fear that I might do what he did, at some point in my life. Heartache, because there are no solutions to this emotional conundrum that pans out like a labyrinth, and that regardless of all the #justiceforSSR tweets & discussions, he simply isn’t going to come back. And that’s the worst feeling of them all.

All this is startling given the fact that I was in no way connected to him, or acquainted with him, but if his death could leave behind such a void in my [an abject stranger’s heart], I can’t begin to imagine what his family & close friends must have gone through and must still be going through.

And then come the fans. Who have been at the fulcrum of a lot of mud slinging for believing that the actor’s death was not by suicide, but an act of homicide. By whom? No one knows, at least not yet and we probably never will. But it is easy to dismiss their grief as something that is rooted in ignorance and naivety. Sitting on our high horses of being woke about mental illnesses, we often fail to see the power of trauma in suspending reality, and in submerging someone in the pool of disbelief. Maybe a little bit of sensitivity towards them, as they trudge their way out of this shattering loss would be one step closer in honouring the dead man’s spirit.

Hopefully, he is healthier and happier, wherever he is now. And hopefully each one of us gets the courage to process the grief [however big or small], left by his death, without ever forgetting what it taught us.