Psychiatry isn’t the only framework that has a kind of double-edged quality, offering a story that can save a person but that also, under different conditions, feels lonely and intractable. I wonder about the character of Bapu’s distress before it was classified as either mysticism or mental illness, just as I question whatever basic feelings existed in me before they were called anorexia. In each case, the original experience couldn’t be captured or understood on its own terms and gradually became something that wasn’t entirely of our own making.