Four Phases Of A Seizure

July, 2008: Prodromal Stage

In the plains beyond the city of Kanyakumari, one of my ancestors was ploughing the land when his till struck something hard: a stone idol. It grew warm and fleshy under his touch. He had inadvertently performed an unburial, reanimated a dead god. But which god? The name eluded him but the face looked familiar. He brushed the dust off the figurine and, finally, it came to him—the deity had visited him the previous night. In his dream, the god had declared: ‘I will appear before you soon. You must build a temple for me. My name is Bhu-shasta.’^[1]

Appa tells me this story as we sit on a cool temple floor in Thiruvananthapuram. I am nine years old and restless. Getting here had taken us an eternity. First, the family woke up at 6 A.M. and piled into the stuffy blue Maruti Suzuki, sitting on top of each other like stacks of firewood in the heat. When the roads crumbled away into the grass, we were briefly relieved to walk—until we realised it meant another forty minutes through waterlogged paddy fields. Our reward turned out to be an underwhelming temple in the middle of nowhere.

‘Today, Bhu-shasta will appear inside him.’ Appa points to one of my many uncles who is kneeling at the front of the congregation, sweat trickling down his back. ‘Then he will listen to the petitions of his devotees and provide solutions.’

When visiting our grandparents, my cousins and I would play games of god-god, influenced by Amar Chitra Katha comics and walls crowded with portraits of garlanded deities. The games play out like soap operas; similar to the Greek pantheon, Hindu gods are always entangled in affairs, betrayals and spats.

I get it, I think, the grown-ups like playing god-god too.

At age nine, I’m already something of a sceptic.

The singing begins, the temple vibrating with the Vasanta Raaga, and my father nudges me to join in. After forty minutes of this I am close to dozing off, when I am awoken by a roar. My uncle has risen. There is no microphone in his hand, but his voice has taken on decibel levels I have never heard from a naked human mouth. I shrink back as he throws himself violently around the temple, rocking pillars as he slams into them. Despite being a Tamilian, he is speaking in Malayalam. He addresses us as his children, telling us not to be scared. As my grandfather moves towards him, I whisper weakly, ‘Don’t, he’ll kill you.’

My grandfather speaks calmly, like he is chatting with the vegetable vendor. ‘My wife has been suffering chronic pain throughout her body that no medication seems to fix. What can I do for her?’

My uncle whips around—first his body, followed by his neck and then his head, in an unnatural, staccato motion. He seems to be aware of his surroundings, but his eyes are closed. He tells my grandfather to visit the Kamakshi temple and make an offering to the goddess. My grandfather nods and prostrates before him. I am proud of his bravery, baffled by his matter-of-fact countenance.

When the ceremony is over the cousins all agree, after a quick and furtive conference, to put an end to our god-god game. We might be putting ourselves in danger. The air simmers with awe and terror. From tomorrow we’ll play doctor-doctor or kabbadi.

As soon as we’re back at my grandparents’ house on Putten Street, I run to Ma’s room near the courtyard. I feel sorry for her—she couldn’t come because she’s menstruating—but I am too consumed by excitement not to share what I had witnessed.

Ma looks unmoved, almost contemptuous. She had stayed at home and read a book, and seems quite satisfied with her day. I am concerned she is not grasping the gravity of the situation. I flip through Amar Chitra Katha comics, re-read them with the scholarly seriousness of an anthropologist. I daydream about Vishnu descending to Earth as Kalki, his final avatar, and entertain the possibility of a brief romance.

Over the next couple of days, I read about spirit possession. I discover the sacred Sang Hyang Dedari, a Balinese ritual, in which goddesses possess the bodies of girls and women, compelling them to dance for hours. I find stories about jinns and setans in Islam, peye spirits who target young brides in Tamil Nadu. I learn that my great-grandmother experienced episodes of holy possession. Her mild mannerisms would be swapped for an extraordinary energy, and she’d behave like a ‘violent drunk’, terrifying my father.

When my summer vacation is over, I return to New Delhi and the rational world of my English medium school. The spiritual high wears off, diluted by daily life. When I think about it, my uncle probably picked up Malayalam during his time in Kerala, and spoke it in a Tamilian accent. I impose rational explanations onto what I saw—mass hysteria, optical illusions—and attribute anything that cannot be explained by science to a failing of my perceptions.

Over time, I develop an aversion to religion, especially as I come to recognise how it upholds oppressive caste and gender structures—which could explain why spirits often target women who lead controlled and repressed lives. Alongside my arousal at the existence of an anthropomorphic god, I had worried for Ma, who is neither a Brahmin nor a particularly dutiful mother.

But alongside my rejection of dogma, I discard my curiosity in the immaterial world. Louis Althusser claimed ‘those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology’ and I am blind to my indoctrination. I swap a spiritual ontology for materialism and Western rationalism. With it comes an existential dread that keeps me up at night.

I recall That Month I Believed in the Gods fondly, as a time of mystery and possibility, when bodies could be temporary vessels for something otherworldly and comic books could be artefacts. It comforted me to believe our lives are suffused with meaning that we are too small to comprehend, that death is not simple nothingness—our consciousness blinking off like a television in the dark.

September, 2011: Aural Stage

I am in the sixth grade, brushing my teeth and mentally reciting French conjugations in preparation for an exam. It has been a sleepless night and I am not yet fully awake. My hand jerks suddenly, smearing toothpaste over my nose. My sister raises an eyebrow.

‘I’m dancing,’ I claim, not wanting or knowing how to explain.

My hands have been convulsing every morning for the past few weeks. If I let my mind wander, it is as though my consciousness floats outside my body and an alien current takes over. Usually, if I focus and make myself present, I can regain control. But on this day my mind feels unusually pitched towards the yellow bathroom light. If I move towards it I feel like I can catch it in my mouth. I am reminded briefly of Hanuman mistaking the sun for a fruit and trying to eat it. I can imagine the taste of the lightbulb’s electricity on my tongue, how it would feel running through my body.

As I lean into the feeling, my hands began to dance. But instead of consuming the light, the yellow bulb over the sink expands and envelops me. It is not the harsh light that wakes me in the morning, but a deep lulling red like sunspots behind closed eyelids. People keep trying to pull me back. I experience the next few hours as a series of disjointed snapshots: concerned faces rotating under the ceiling fan, the inside of a cab, my nightie fluttering around my ankles as I am wheeled through a hospital. Through it all I receive gentle slaps on the face, like when my friend was bitten by a snake and kept up all night by her family. They said it was so the venom wouldn’t reach her heart.

I finally wake up in a hospital bed, drained of the energy that had animated my body an hour before. Several MRIs and EEGs later, I am diagnosed with epilepsy.

I have adhesive in my hair from the electrodes they stuck to my scalp. I have missed my French exam. I am impatient and excited to tell my friends the news.

‘They’re saying it’s juvenile myoclonic epilepsy,’ I say over the phone.

‘Awesome,’ replies a supportive friend.

Historically, many epileptics have battled stigmatisation and isolation, often born from the misconception that epilepsy is contagious. But that isn’t my problem. I am born in the right time and place to circumvent this and fall instead into a sweeter trap. Maybe it is my childhood immersion in books with ‘chosen one’ narratives, but I convince myself that this disease—which afflicts fifty million people worldwide—makes me special. In her book On Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes: ‘The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.’

In ancient Greece, epilepsy was often called the ‘sacred disease’. It was thought to be granted by the gods, often as a curse. But it was also linked to genius—the list of famous epileptics includes Julius Caesar and, supposedly, Hercules. In one of the first known treatises on epilepsy, Hippocrates refutes this idea: ‘It appears to me to be nowise more divine nor more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause from the originates like other affections.’

He also mentions that treatments of this divine disease include ‘applying purifications and incantations, and enforcing abstinence from baths’. I take my Levipil twice a day, and make my peace with the quotidian nature of my disease, as long as I can shower and brush my teeth.

November, 2023: Ictal Stage

When I mention I have epilepsy to Charlie, his eyes light up. We are walking down shiny cobbled paths reflecting golden streetlights. He is showing me around Norwich in England, where I’ll be spending the next year on a creative writing program.

After several seizures involving bitten tongues, bruises and a burst blood vessel in my left eye, my will to romanticise this disease has eroded. It is a topic I avoid. The day-to-day reality has revealed itself: I require more sleep than an average student, I react terribly to alcohol, my medication comes with a long list of vexing side effects which I try to ignore.

My Master’s degree is meant to be a fresh start, so I’m annoyed to find myself running my mouth this soon. It spills out when I forget something Charlie told me just the day before and I decide to attribute my bad memory to epilepsy. Despite everything, it’s still a solid excuse.

Charlie does not react the way most people do to my reveal (a sympathetic nod and change of subject). Instead, he is interested. He quotes David Yaden’s Varieties of Spiritual Experience, telling me that Hippocrates might have been wrong in his assertion that epilepsy is no more divine than any other ailment, ‘because about 1%–5% of epileptics do in fact experience spiritual experiences during their seizures’. He looks at me hopefully, like I might belong to that percentage. I am entertained. In India, Western medicine did everything in its power to replace its ‘unscientific’ indigenous rivals, while in the West, Ayurveda is spreading and the Englishman before me appears to take mystical experiences seriously. Then Charlie asks me a question no one has in years: ‘What is it like to have a seizure?’

At first, I claim that I never remember my seizures, but I know this is not completely accurate. The truth is that what I can remember is so hazy and elusive that floodlighting it with words feels deceitful. This is the one aspect of my life that has been off-limits to me as a writer. Every time I’ve tried, I have resorted to embarrassing similes and clichés.

But I’m flattered by Charlie’s curiosity, so I run my mouth again. I tell him how, right before my last seizure, or perhaps as it began, I felt myself returning to a familiar place. I was peeking through a corridor connecting every seizure I have ever had across my life, my consciousness spreading and melting across all my convulsing selves. (I use the word ‘peeking’ because it is the closest I can come to what was a disembodied sensation). It was not a feeling of cohesion—each version of me was distinct from the next, but we were strung together like a bracelet, by a diffuse spirit that could alter its state at any moment. As destabilising as this seems, it was not an unpleasant feeling. The last thing I can remember is my various selves feeling warmth for each other, until they exploded into light.

Regaining consciousness was painful—not just because I woke up more exhausted than I had ever been, but because I could not remember the faces of my stricken parents or even my name. My sense of self had died and was being painfully resurrected. As I scrambled to remember who I was, I flipped through several versions of myself across time before landing on the right page.

‘I sound like I was on drugs, don’t I?’ I say after struggling to articulate all this.

Charlie, who is a journalist reporting on psychedelics, doesn’t disagree.

When I get home, later than usual, I am greeted by anxious flatmates. The four of us, homesick to varying degrees, have swiftly emulated a small family. Maya, with her knitted cardigans and blithe, refreshing ignorance of pop-culture, is the grandmother. Poorva, juggling her demanding nutritional science course with waitressing to pay for her real passion—grocery shopping at M&S—is the mother. I am one half of the twin daughters. The other half is Eva: artistic, with a porcelain face like the dolls she collects and an unnerving ability to speak only when she has something to say. Although we enjoy the role-play, the caricatures sometimes dredge up parts of my personality I was hoping to discard, revealing a failure to reinvent myself. Although I am not the youngest, I am quickly establishing myself as a child: one inhabiting a dream-world, absentminded, eliciting parental concern from friends. I find it easy to attribute this arrested development to my epilepsy. Although I claim to resent the disease, I still play the part of the epileptic.

Before sleeping, I find a message from Charlie sharing a Granta essay in which the author Tao Lin notes a similarity between people’s experiences of tripping on DMT and near-death experiences: they all traverse a tunnel ‘toward a being of incredibly bright white light’.

I do not immediately understand what he’s getting at.

‘The tunnel,’ he says. ‘It sounds like the corridor you saw in your seizure.’

I note the eerie similarity in our language when I read Tao Lin describing his DMT trip: ‘My new reality didn’t look or sound like anything because I had no eyes or ears, and yet it wasn’t dark or quiet; it was dense with abstract, dynamic, discombobulating phenomena, which I perceived with presumably nonhuman senses. My main feeling was an almost unbearably poignant understanding that this place, this experience, was it, the fundamental thing I had to reckon with, my forgotten home.’ When I read the paragraph, I feel a sense of yearning. It has been a while since I’ve had a seizure. And perhaps—deranged as it is—this has felt like a small loss. My tunnel to oblivion has been medicated into obliteration, and I am anchored to this world like everyone else.

July, 2025: Post-Ictal Stage

Two years later I am in what appears to be a rainforest. Cave clusters are scattered and tucked into various pockets of greenery in the foothills of the Vindhyan Forests. I am visiting my friend Ritambhara’s hometown in Bhopal before she moves to America. I was in her position not long ago, poised to take flight and remake myself, and since returning to India have felt increasingly disenchanted. I search for clues that my year abroad has changed me. I’ve put on some weight, though no one comments. I lose it a month later (people comment then) and put it back on the next (another gracious silence). Am I a better writer? Perhaps. I am also a less joyous reader—unable to lose myself in books because I obsessively dissect their formulas, envious of a striking turn of phrase because I didn’t come up with it myself. I am hungry for a spiritual upheaval.

But when we find the first cave painting—a rusty long-tusked elephant on the roof of a cave—my mind quietens. It is difficult to look at a prehistoric stick figure and offer critique or compare the artwork to your own oeuvre. We crane our necks and stare silently. I find myself wondering how the artist scaled the wall, whether ladders existed in 10,000 BCE. How do we connect to our progenitors? Both responsible for our progress yet primitive by our upgraded standards—like meeting yourself as a child. I feel both maternal and infantile standing in the cave’s mineral womb.

By the time we reach the Auditorium Cave, the largest of the cave shelters flanked with quartzite towers, my mind is curiously blank. A twenty-five-metre tunnel opens into a yawning cavern like the mouth of a primordial creature. My friend Ritambhara places her palm against the outline of a hand drawn on one of its boulder-like teeth. It fits perfectly. As we walk through the tunnel I think of my seizures, my fragmented selves holding hands like a chain of paper angels. I recall something my uncle said: ‘Did you know that your body no longer has any of the skin cells it was born with? Thanks to cell regeneration, you’re a new person every seven years.’

I wasn’t surprised to hear this; I had confirmed as much in the corridor. It always seemed odd to me that I can only experience life as myself, and my seizure told me not to worry—I am always being reborn. This revelation was accompanied by gnawing dread. Misfiring brainwaves and a possessed body imply an unstable and unreliable self, shifting like shadows. If I have an immutable self, it does not reside in my body, mind, gender or sexuality, all of which are prone to change. Maybe it resides somewhere less obvious. In the most advanced stages of her Alzheimer’s, my grandmother still enjoyed mishti—it’s possible that her sweet tooth was a crystallisation of her essence.

My suspicion that everything I think I am is temporary can sometimes compel me to check out. I behave like a detached yogi, treating life as a pit stop, reluctant to participate. I’ve been surprised to learn from friends that I can come across as indifferent or aloof. My schoolteacher called me her ‘absentminded professor’ and one of my college professors said I sit in class like a sage with clouded eyes, levitating ever so slightly, not quite there. Warm descriptions which gloss over my more frustrating qualities—that I am ditzy, forgetful, often irresponsible. I have not found much patience for those qualities in adulthood, so I have tried to quash them. I am more attentive now. I try to be observant. I am learning to take care of myself. I am also more unforgiving, emotionally volatile. Everything I want to change about myself, but can’t, drives me mad. I cry more easily and frequently.

Near the Auditorium Cave I read a plaque informing me that the Mesolithic people would bury their dead in their living areas within the caves. I visualise families living with corpses under their floorboards.

Outside of seizures, there exist plenty of reminders of our transient, unlocatable selves: falling in and out of love, ageing, changing a long-held opinion, la petite mort. But like most twenty-somethings, I am impatient. I crave a full-fledged metamorphosis, or at least a paid vacation from myself. Yet everywhere I go and no matter how much I change, there I am, tethered to myself. A self that once knew how to be light and airy, now slackened to dead weight. I am not sure exactly when I revoked my permission to drift and daydream, but it is a loss that feels as spiritual as it is intellectual.

We step outside the caves to sun showers. According to my mother this means that somewhere a fox is getting married to a dog—shiyal kukur-er biye.

The feeling of cool water on hot skin takes me back to an afternoon on the beach in my childhood. I must have been around ten years old. Although my parents were weary of my reckless overfamiliarity with the ocean, on that day I was allowed to wade to where the water reached my chest, bobbing up and down with the waves until my skin was pruned. My father was a few feet behind me, keeping an eye out but not obtruding. Ma was further in—she had reached that point of the ocean where waves swell before unfurling, her head a distant jet-black blot in the water. I felt delirious with a dual sense of contentment and possibility that I have not struck with quite such precision since. Later that day, Ma announced her intention to go deep sea diving. ‘Me too,’ I decided.

Deep-sea diving is not an impossibility for an epileptic, but the Sport Diving Medical Committee advises that, to dive, someone with epilepsy must be free from fits and off medication for a minimum of five years. For a long time, this was my goal. I nursed a vision of myself in the sea as a talisman against seizures. But sometime in the last few years I abandoned the idea.

I will always have my mother’s description of the rippling underwater world she saw. She told me how clown fish move from female to male, changing shapes and sizes, and jellyfish pulse like changing minds. She described a world that invites surrender, like returning to a place you’ve never been. She also told me how, as the pressure hummed in her ears while she descended, she decided she’d prefer if I never went deep sea diving.

I recognised her feelings of wonder and trepidation. I felt at home in the place she described. I have been there.

I recall waking up after my first seizure—the brief moment in which my sister, mother and father were strangers. The consternation on the faces swimming around me, telling me who and where I was until I remembered. The terror abating as recognition clicked, and it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Of course I know who you are. I’m sorry, I went away for a while. Don’t look so concerned, I’m back.

NOTES:

[1] Bhu meaning Earth, Shasta referring to the offspring of Shiva and Vishnu’s female form, Mohini (also contradictorily named the Swayam-bhu: one who birthed themself, without any parent).