A short extract from a story I am writing, 'Ayomide'

Chapter 26

Amanda’s father had been white and her mother was Indian. She had olive dipped skin, almond shaped, fierce brown eyes and long black hair that fell to her waist. She wore bright coloured embroidered saris and her bed was laid in orange and yellow linen. She smelt of cinnamon and when she spoke her voice sounded like it belonged to someone who knew what she wanted and knew how to get it, as though at the sound of her voice, the clouds would roll back on themselves, pour down rain or give way for the sun if that was what she wanted. She had lived her whole life in Cambridge and had spent the latter part of her thirty-three years institutionalized, treating bipolar depression and hypomania. Her teenage son, Hamjit, had her hair, jet black and it felt to his shoulders in loose curls, and he had her voice; he had her intelligence and her confidence.

Amanda said her illness started shortly after Hamjit was born; it had started off as post-natal depression which she did not get help for because she did not know at the time – eighteen and newly mothered, living with her boyfriend in his basement apartment – that there was a name for the gloom and moodiness she was feeling. Shortly after Hamjit was born, she broke up with his father and moved back to her parents’ house, who had never liked her boyfriend and had never liked her decision to keep the baby. Her depression went unattended to and worsened. She was institutionalized first when Hamjit was sixteen months old and all through his life she had drifted in and out of hospitals, each stay promising to help her get better, equip her with life skills and tools which would help her deal better with the illness but six months, a year later, three years later, she was back.