I continued to feel high and continued to accomplish things. The hypomanic stability of 2018 had carried over cleanly into the new year; one of those rare stretches where the bipolar engine runs at the right temperature and you almost forget it is an engine at all.
One very important event of this year was that somehow my son Alex agreed to come to India and live with me for some time. I was overjoyed. Ten years. I was going to meet my son after ten years. I had been carrying that number quietly, ten years -and now it was finally going to close.
But for reasons I will not detail here, his plan was cancelled at the last moment.
Of course it had a very bad effect on me. The number went back to being just a number. I won’t pretend otherwise. But I continued. That word “continued”, is doing a great deal of work in this chapter, and I am aware of it.
The relationship with my children, in general, was far below my definition of a father’s relationship with his children. They didn’t show much interest in my dream of establishing a “home.”
In retrospect, I understand it better than I did then. I was asking two young people who had built their lives in Spain, on their own terms, without me, to now reorganise around a dream that was essentially mine ; dressed up as theirs.
The “home” I was imagining was a replica of my childhood with Papa. They had never lived in that childhood. They had no reason to want its replica.
I started working on a new but important milestone : my plan to leave India forever, cut all ties, and go back to my own world. I set the target as early 2020. The destination was Estonia. A practical choice: a forward-thinking, digitally advanced, no-nonsense small country that asks very few questions and gets out of your way. A shelter, a base, a holding point, until my children eventually came around to Dad’s idea of “home” and decided the place together.
As for funding all of this, obviously it was to come from my share in the ancestral estate in India. Preparations had already started in late 2018. I sold a significant part of my share.
The extended family responded with the resentment that is, in such matters, entirely traditional and entirely predictable. I was bothered least. The estate had been my financial spine for years -feudalism, for all its sins, is at least reliable.
2019 closed with the Estonia plan locked, the children at a distance I was still calling temporary, and the bipolar steady. Three out of three wasn’t bad. I had been in far worse positions.
