Deaths by cultural trauma

“Need is the mark of the
animal
Hunger the sign of life
At first there was the tooth
and claw
And then there was the knife....”
From The Darwin of Dhol
by Bachchoo

The suicides of two women, in no obvious sense related to each other, have dominated the headlines in Britain this week. One of them, a nurse, hanged herself in her nurse’s quarters and the other went two months ago to a bar in the City of London on the eighth storey of a building, lowered herself onto a ledge and jumped to her death on the pavement below.
Both were tragic and stunning deaths. Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse, was 41 years old and leaves behind two children and a husband. The second was a 29-year-old called Rema Begum, the report of the inquest into whose death was published this week.
Suicide is still a criminal offence, though the criminal is clearly beyond the law’s jurisdiction. It’s attempted suicide or aiding someone to it that’s criminalised and punishable and probably comes from religious doctrine which believes humans don’t take away what God gave.
A friend who works for The Samaritans which, through reputation and advertisement, urges people in despair to pick up the phone and talk to one of their volunteers who will listen and offer the human contact and support which may steer a potential suicide away from it, tells me that more
people in the UK die through suicide than die from cancer.
Some or perhaps most of these — there is no convincing statistical classification — are in advanced stages of depression, whatever that is, or suffer from some mental disorder. The rest may be victims of overwhelming despair. I write this, dear reader, while admitting to having no qualification to venture into understanding or pronouncing on the causes of suicide.
Nevertheless, the two quoted cases have some things in common. Both Jacintha Saldanha and Rema Begum were women of South Asian origin settled in Britain. Neither of them killed themselves as, say, the farmers of India who suffer drought, debt and an inability to support their families did, out of material destitution. Neither of them suffered from any mental disorder which would lead them to end their lives. Jacintha was a working nurse respected in her profession and Rema held a manager’s post at the British Library till shortly before her death.
Newspaper reports say that Jacintha left a suicide note, whose contents will be revealed to an enquiry into her death. The facts and events leading to it have been publicised all over the world. She was the nurse at the Kind Edwards London hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton as was, had been admitted with a severe bout of morning sickness occasioned by her pregnancy.
Jacintha was a senior nurse on duty at the hospital when two Australian radio journalists phoned in pretending to be Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles, the grandmother-in-law and the father-in-law of the patient. Their assumed accents as they enquired after the condition and progress of the patient must have been convincing as Saldanha put the call through to the ward so that Kate’s precise condition could be passed on to the Royal callers.
The information the hoax callers received was duly transmitted and the success of the hoaxers revealed to the world as a scoop and a prank. There was no great revelation in the information the hoaxers had elicited through their call during which they convincingly mimicked the voices and presumed idiom of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles.
The day after the hoax was acknowledged, Jacintha killed herself. Why? The King Edward hospital administration insists that no action was taken against her for falling for the hoax call. She was not admonished, threatened or disciplined because the hospital administration laid no blame on her whatsoever. They accepted that she had been the victim of pranksters and done her duty as she saw fit.
So why did she kill herself? Did she fear the ridicule of a world that would point the finger at her for gullibility? And was such a fear stronger than the instinct that would keep a mother alive for the sake of her two young children?
And if it was, what generated such panic? If the patient in that bed had not been married into the royal family and had just been plain Mrs Botany B subject to a prank call from a silly friend, would it have
cost Jacintha a moment’s regret?
Did she in this day and age when the media and the republicanminded mock the royalty of Britain unsparingly and with impunity, feel she had let the institution of Queen and country down?
The enquiry into her suicide and the note she left may eventually tell us.
Rema Begum, according to her friends who gave testimony at her inquest, suffered a different cultural trauma. She believed that the life she was leading as a professional female Londoner, with the social interaction with friends and colleagues and independence from her family traditions and influences, had in some way betrayed her Muslim roots. She was described at the inquest by her English friends as “the life and soul of the party”.
A stalker on the Internet had accessed details of her life, opinions and daily doings from her Facebook page and those of her friends and threatened to reveal these to her traditional parents and family.
The inquest found no evidence of drunkenness or any other destabilising factor. Rema killed herself out of a feeling of shame that she must have guiltily carried with her through her sojourn in life as the Britain of her generation lives it. Jacintha killed herself, one presumes, out of an absurdly exaggerated sense of duty to one of the monarchic institution’s members who are not in the least, judging from the exploits of her brother-in-law Harry and her husband’s uncle Andrew, averse to a few pranks and scams of their
own.