They say that madness is hereditary.

My grandaunt, my grandmother's sister, was mad. They locked her in the house, allowed her to linger within the compound in a sleeveless girly thin white dress down to her ankles. One day she escaped and jumped headlong into a well in our garden. She was nearly 18. I have a photograph of my seven year old self leaning against the sealed well.

We had a well once. We were rich once, textile merchants, and owned a stretch of shops along Chinatown. Although we were shrewd and intelligent, we were not ambitious and adaptable and when the Chinese no longer made their own clothes but bought pret-a-porter from departmental stores, we ran out of business.

You would have thought the madness ended with my grandaunt's death. I would have like it to. But the first strains appeared in Aunt Shirley, the second child of seven of my grandmother, second to my mother. When her then-boyfriend, visiting our tiny flat, commented on the size of her thighs as she was mopping the floor on her knees in her shorts, she flew into a stupendous rage and ditched him on the spot. But in recent years, she has mellowed while my own mother's madness manifests. My favorite anecdote is the one when she locked my father out of the house because her soup was charred. Or perhaps the one she ran out at 3 am to contemplate suicide while sitting in our car. There are too many stories of her madness to tell.

I should have suspected she is mad from the magical stories about her past she conjured and told us in the late of the nights when we were children. She is the one who told us about our mad grandaunt and embellished the story with a doomed love affair. After the stories, my brother and sister slept soundly but I was a light sleeper even then. When my siblings slept, my mother would rock herself with her hands clasping the sides of her head, unable to sleep because of the terrible pain she was in.

I should have suspected I have inherited the madness when I am the only one who inherited the splitting monthly migraines since I was seven. I store my mother's stories in my mind. I almost lost my sanity on a night in my university hostel years ago. If you have felt a muscle cramp before, madness feels like a constant cramp in the brain, with the skull clamping in. The thoughts linked to one another without reprieve, I thought and thought and thought and could not stop, I tossed and turned and burned in bed until the madness felt like a bicep curl being held too long and the brain was about to implode. I only hung on a thin thread because I remembered in the morning M. would visit me with breakfast. In those days, M. was my life line and thinking of him, the morning eventually came.

Come, listen to the stories I tell. I am a mad man, am I. I only tell true lies. Listen, come.