India Stories: Journey to the Centre of Mr Will

From New Year in Delhi, to having to move house, to hearing about the suicide of a friend, the past three months have been… a thing. Take a journey with me to the core of what’s going on in my head. Look to your left and see the new special classes at the children’s home! Oh, look over there and see the colourful festival of Holi!! Quick, DUCK, those incoming mental breakdowns are coming really fast!!! You know what, you’re gonna need to put your seatbelt on.

[Trigger warning: discusses themes of suicide]

Journey to the Crust

I started off my 2021 in New Delhi experiencing the culture of what North Indians humbly call the “real India”. Mithai (sweets), Indian soap operas, Indian Big Brother (“Bigg Boss”)… hey there’s a pandemic, so I’m not gonna go and see the Taj Mahal and get engulfed in the crowds. It was nice to have a change of scene. And temperature. For my British friends, winter in Delhi is akin to winter in the UK, only with blankets instead of central heating. And can we talk about gol gappa? Indians go crazy for them. Basically they’re savoury snacks that look like profiteroles but aren’t, so can only disappoint. And they’re filled with tangy ginger-coriander-mint-WATER so you can’t just take a nice bite and eat it in your own time – you’ve got to hold your nose and put the whole thing in in one go. When you’re not concentrating on stopping the water from going down your throat the wrong way and involuntarily spurting up snot from your nose, you’re trying to work out how to get your teeth to break the thing down so that you can swallow it. What a snack. Seriously, have you never tried just putting a donut in the microwave?

Jokes aside, I’m grateful to the Mehra family for putting me up, feeding me (not to mention the risk of hosting a traveller in these days of COVID). I couldn’t think of a better way to unwind than just hanging out with a family like you. Also, a special shout out to Deviyani and Shantanu for hosting me for a night of board games and amazing food. Love you all!

It was a relief to get back to the warmth of Goa, but I’d be getting back to the task of moving house. In my previous blog I talked about how I had to find a new place to live because my landlord wanted to move in. Thanks to my friend Debbie, I have a place to live. It’s a little bit further away from where I work in Santa Cruz, but it’s a beautiful location. The apartment was unfurnished but Debbie and her mum and dad managed to scramble some things together – a table and chairs, a coffee table and divan, a tv stand, a couple of armchairs. They also found a bed and fridge for me to buy. And thanks to my sponsors, I was able to buy them. Thank you sponsors! I have a place to sleep! The divan is a door laid down with wheels on, and two mattresses on top and I love the hell out of it! It gives me an excuse to relax while planning lessons and editing music.

Now I wake up every morning and immediately put on some shorts and a t-shirt and go for a walk, managing around 2.2 miles. I have to leave before 8am otherwise it all gets too hot. The society I live in is at the top of a big hill so the walk involves a lot of steep uphill/downhill pushes, but the walk is so refreshing and beautiful. At that time in the morning there’s a light haze in the air electrified by the new sunlight. Pink, peach and cream bougainvillea line the little village streets. Locals are out washing their cars before the heat makes it too difficult. Dogs are lazing where they wish. At the bottom of the hill is the river Mandovi, where fishermen are bringing in the last of their morning catch. Women are sitting by the road selling the fish in glimmering silver piles. The little blue ferries make their trips back and forth from one shore to another, carrying cyclists, pedestrians and cars. When I go in the evenings, the energy is even more beautiful. 

Journey to the Mantle

After moving house and settling in, I got back to work teaching the children of Bethesda Life Centre, Goa. A new year gives one a momentum and energy to try something new, which I believe is a vital part of teaching. So I incorporated 4 new classes to my timetable.

The girls home had music theory included in their lessons. Currently I’m teaching four girls acoustic guitar and four girls keyboard. Every now and then I get them all together and explain the basics of chords, scales and keys and how we can work things out for ourselves. This is one of the foundational elements to how I teach – to give a student not only the information, but the ability to work out the information for themselves. It’s the difference between giving someone a fish to eat or teaching them how to fish for life. It’s one thing to know what notes make up a C major chord, but it’s much better to be able to work out how to play a D major chord using that same knowledge.

The senior boys home had a few new classes this year. First up is the songwriting class, where we learn how to construct a basic song. Since January we’ve been working at making songs about superheroes and supervillains. Classes started with picking four adjectives to describe our chosen subjects, then adding rhyme, then turning them into sentences. Then comes the musical part of picking a key, chords and using them to write a melody. We’ve formed a chorus each as well as a post-chorus. We also spent one class playing the party favourite ‘Consequences’ and learning how to create a narrative using nouns, adjectives and verbs. That was a funny lesson.

The second new class for the boys is the aural class, which teaches us how to listen to music. We spent a few weeks learning to listen to intervals (the pitch distance between notes) and now we’re learning what cadences are. To find out more you’ll have to come to class. 

The final new class is what we call ‘Combo’. It’s a better way of saying “band”. This class is all about working together as musicians to create one sound. So far everyone has been taught to play and only listen to themselves, but if you want to play in a band, then you need to listen to everyone in the band and find your place. It’s not such an easy thing to do. So I picked 10 of the boys and split them into 2 groups with drums, bass, keys, and guitars in each band. Each band spends a few weeks working on a project song. For this class we’re currently learning ‘Family’ by The Chainsmokers, and ‘you!’ by LANY.

The other thing going on in my wider community is church. We have a small church here in Goa and until now we were recording our church services in isolation. It was a far more relaxed affair, being able to get a few musicians together whenever we were free and record a week in advance. That gave me at least a week to edit and produce the music, add the lyrics, export and upload to YouTube. It was a good 8-12 hours solid work. But since January this year, we’ve been meeting together again on Sundays in our small building we call the ‘hub’. It’s been so lovely to see everyone again after almost 12 months of being apart.

Welcome to the Core

For the past twelve months, we as humans have seen a major challenge to our mental health. Spending so many weeks or months in isolation has taken us to a place we’ve not been to in our lifetimes. Now as we navigate the awkward phasing into some sort of normal life, we’re posed with the question, “where am I at”. To put it another way, “am I okay”?

Going back to live church services was a lovely step for most of the church, but we still film the services and upload them for our diaspora in the UK. And for the guy that edits the church services, it means that I have to spend my entire Sunday, setting up early, leading worship, making sure the camera captures everything, packing down, then going somewhere quiet and spending the rest of the day editing the sound, adding the lyrics, creating a thumbnail picture, exporting and uploading to YouTube. It really is a mammoth task.

During 2020, police presence on the roads of Goa exploded. There were suddenly police on every major junction and crossroad. And the police here are corrupt. They see a white person and rupee signs appear in their eyes. I’ve been treated like an ATM a couple of times and it shook me. I’ve already mentioned in the previous blog how I learned to either ignore and drive past the police with confidence (even after they blow their whistles, haha) or just use google maps to work out the backroads and evade them altogether. 

But what that did was make me paranoid. I didn’t want to leave the house because I was scared that I was going to be taken advantage of. I know, I’m a white male complaining about being oppressed. But this is actual prejudice. I’m a minority living alone in a foreign foreign foreign land. Now in 2021 my heart starts beating fast whenever I see a policeman by the side of the road. I cover up my white skin before I set off, using shades, masks and long sleeves. 

Now, as a teacher at an NGO, I’ve been told to stay at home as much as possible. I’m fine with that. But what I’ve discovered recently is that I’ve been using that as an excuse for never leaving my apartment. Goa has beautiful beaches 20 minutes drive away from me. I hear from various people that they’re quite crowded, but I tell myself that that’s why I won’t go to the beach, when in reality I’m covering up the fact that I’m scared. I’m scared to be seen by the police. I’m scared of what they’ll do when they see a foreigner driving a car. It’s still true that I need to stay safe, so beaches needed to be navigated with intelligence. But I feel that if I just stay in my apartment then I can hide from it all.

I learned that someone was spying on my instagram and was passing around a picture I’d posted of me with a glass of beer on the table. They spread it around their friends saying “how can a christian drink beer”. Someone verbally attacked me on a Whatsapp group, calling me “oversmart” because I’d interrupted him once when he was talking to me… 18 months ago. It’s a disturbing trend in today’s age that we take offence at the smallest things, even things that don’t concern us, and use social media to judge and “cancel” people. Urgh. Where is the love?

Really I miss my UK friends. I miss my mum and my brother and his family. I miss fish and chips. I miss easter eggs. I miss salt and vinegar crisps. I miss not sweating. It’s a lonely thing to be surrounded all the time by people that are so different. You wanna talk about isolating yourself? Live in a different continent. There’s so much work piling in on me and often it feels like there’s only me here. I know there are so many people supporting me but this is an example of the mental health problems we’re forced to face within ourselves in 2021.

Just after Christmas, I learned that one of my friends here in Goa had taken his own life. He wasn’t answering his housemates calls or any phone calls or messages, so after several hours his housemate broke down his bedroom door and found him hanging from a ceiling fan, with a note in his jeans pocket. I was in Delhi when I heard and I broke down crying. It hit me hard. He was always the cheery guy, with a beautiful welcoming smile. Where did this come from? How did it happen? Why didn’t I see the brokenness and the loneliness in him? Have I been so wrapped up in my own loneliness that I stopped seeing it in others? I hate that thought. 

The truth is that he wore a ‘mask’ to appear a-okay. Two thumbs up. But inside there was a pain that festered without any exposure to fresh air. Indian men especially feel a lot of pressure to appear in control.

It’s okay to not be okay.

One thing that has helped me is feeling like it’s ok again to touch. To hug. Obviously, I’m very careful (I mean, come on, I’m basically a self-imposed monk), but still, being able to put my arm around someone is such a healing thing for me. Confronting my loneliness and naming it has also been key in healing. Confronting my grief and wrestling it. It’s okay to not be okay.

But the thing that spurs me on the most is my late friend. I found a way to process the grief. I never want something like his pain to go unnoticed by me. I want to help people through this. I want to bring love wherever that pain festers. I want to bring light to the dark places. My friends name has since become a mantra in my heart. Whenever I hear or say his name, my whole being responds with love, light and beautiful sorrow.

Long may it do so. 

Footnotes:

• Please comment below and join the discussion by following me on Twitter and Instagram.
• If any of what I said gave you something to think about or stirred something, please let me know. We’re all in this together.
• Again, to my sponsors, I want to say thank you. I’m doing this without pay, and every day is really living on the edge. With every donation, every month, my heart fills with joy to know that I can continue to bring love and joy to the lives of these amazing boys and girls. I truly love you and thank God for you every day.