Demon Slayers

Uma Kukathas

The dragon appeared without warning overnight when Anjali was six. One Sunday morning she wouldn’t get out of bed, so I drew back her unicorn-print comforter and tickled her feet, expecting giggles, cuddles, and kisses. She sprung up like the creature from “Alien” and kicked me hard in the chest, then scooted back and shrunk up against the wall. Her long silken black hair had matted into nests. Dark circles ringed her eyes. The sleeves of her Disney princess nightgown were drenched, pooling water onto the bedclothes. When I reached for her, she slapped me away and curled up tighter, fists clenched, face twitching. I thought she might combust.
          Anjali was not a girl who had tantrums or struck anyone or anything, ever. The force of her blow rattled me. I mouthed her name and crossed both hands over my heart, hoping she would see it was me and know that whatever nightmare she was having had passed.
          She rushed at me again, this time to collapse into my arms. “I think I have two brains now, Mama,” she howled.
          The new brain, she explained between heavy sobs, was the dragon’s brain. It was telling her what to think and do. Germs were everywhere. The world was scary. If she didn’t keep herself completely clean, she would die. She had to wash her hands until she finished counting to one hundred, or something terrible would happen—to her, me, Papa, Raj, our pets, our family in Malaysia and Virginia, friends in Seattle. Shiva would stop dancing; the world would end. She had gotten up so many times in the night to wash her hands to make sure it didn’t. That’s why she was so tired, and her nightgown was soaking wet.
          “My old brain doesn’t want to do it,” she said. “But the dragon’s so strong. I can’t fight him.”
          I couldn’t understand what was happening to my fearless, funny, affectionate girl. The girl who crawled onto Raj’s bed if he cried out after a nightmare, clasping her little brother’s hand in the dark. Who loved playing in the dirt, searching for buried treasure and dinosaur bones.
          I wondered too if I was trapped in a nightmare, if any of this was real. I clutched her, hoping my grip could keep us both from spiraling into her new reality. I whispered, to soothe her but also to calm my growing panic, “Don’t worry, baby. We’ll fight the dragon together. I’ll help you slay it. You’ll see. Everything will be okay.”
          Everything was not okay, not for a long time.

At the clinic the next day the pediatrician said that the symptoms I described couldn’t have come on so abruptly; I must not have noticed them before. I said, “I’m a mom, I notice things.” “She seems fine now,” he replied, motioning to Anjali. She sat quietly and smiled as my husband, Karl, using his silliest voices, read her a story. Raj cradled her hand. “Maybe you notice too much,” the doctor suggested. An overly protective mother. A worrier. He explained that being irritable was developmentally appropriate. So was having an active imagination. He condescended, addressing only Karl, talking past and over me like I was invisible, or speaking slowly to the unenlightened immigrant woman. I was used to being brushed off like this. I seethed and felt warmth rush to my chest. But, as usual, I chose not to make a fuss, having learned it would only aggravate the man in power and help nothing. He sent us away.
          Anjali’s outbursts and handwashing continued. They came and went, always worse at home, never when we visited a hospital or clinic. One night, as we lay awake, terrified, Karl joked through his tears, “Maybe she’s possessed by that vaudeville dancing frog from the Looney Tunes cartoons. You know—the one who only sings when nobody’s around.”
          I Googled her symptoms. All the things I was convinced she had: delusional disorder, psychosis, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, brain tumor, PTSD.
          What I felt guilty about: I neglected the signs, saw only the perfect girl I wanted to see. I should have known, given our family histories of addictions, institutionalizations, suicides. What was I thinking, letting her see my mother’s open casket? Arguing with Karl, our raised voices surely carrying into the children’s bedroom in the small hours? Showing her “Sleeping Beauty”? Telling her the story of Shiva’s cosmic dance, explaining to a six-year-old how a god’s movements depict the universe’s motion and change?
          Then, a week after the symptoms appeared, as I searched late into the night for answers in medical journals I could barely comprehend, I stumbled on something that fit Anjali’s situation perfectly: an autoimmune condition named PANDAS, or pediatric neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections.
          The article explained that children with PANDAS develop obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, after contracting strep. They don’t always show typical signs of a strep infection, like fever or a sore throat. Instead, OCD symptoms appear abruptly, because the immune system overreacts when strep antibodies mistakenly attack the brain. Out of the blue, the child has obsessions, or unwanted thoughts, that they try to control with compulsions—repetitive behaviors like handwashing and counting. They know their obsessive thoughts aren’t real, but can’t not believe them or stop their compulsive behavior.
          My body trembled, electric at the possibility that I had solved our mystery. It all made sense: Anjali knew there was no dragon, that the thoughts about dirt and dying he’d put into her head weren’t real, but she couldn’t stop herself from doing his bidding anyway. But I wondered too if I was grasping at straws, seeing hope where there was none. I read through the article several times, then combed through the footnotes, following them like breadcrumbs into a dark forest of more papers, studies, and reports. All of them described cases exactly like my child’s.
          I went back to the pediatrician. “Help us,” I begged. “I know something is wrong.” When the doctor brushed me off this time, the heat in my chest ignited flames. I went full Kali to get what I needed. Kali, the fierce, divine mother of my Hindu tradition, the warrior goddess asked to protect the world from the demons trying to take over.
          “The symptoms are real,” I bellowed. “It could be strep. Give her a strep test.” “She has no sore throat, no fever,” he objected. It was 2007 and PANDAS was not understood, and controversial. I wore down the doctor and his colleagues with my insisting, pressing, demanding. I didn’t let them look past or talk over me. They saw none of this coming from the previously polite, soft-spoken Asian lady. They relented. The strep test came back positive.
          They prescribed antibiotics. In two days, all of Anjali’s symptoms vanished. The dragon had been vanquished, we thought, by the amoxicillin—a pink elixir, our wondrous magical potion.

The charm held for two weeks. Until one morning, when Karl and Raj came home from the park, Raj bearing gifts of horse chestnuts bundled in his sweatshirt. He kneeled down and emptied the bounty onto the floor in a grand gesture of brotherly love, and Anjali screamed. “What are you doing? You’re gross!” She pushed Raj over and ran to the bathroom. As Karl and I sat comforting our boy, we heard water running at full pressure. Anjali was crying and counting.
          That night, as I brushed her hair, Anjali told me the dragon had more than one head. “Please can we find a knight to cut them all off?” she pleaded. “So I can be myself again?”
          When I gave Raj a kiss before turning off their light, I saw his enormous brown eyes brimming with tears. I held him close waiting for him to cry, but he didn’t. “I can help defeat the dragon too, Mama,” he whispered. “So you don’t have to do it all alone.”
          The next day the pediatric clinic told us, again, there was nothing they could do. They handed us a list of specialists. As we were leaving, a doctor reminded us to store any guns we had safely in our home.
          I roared: “I am not an American, my husband is not that type of American, and what the fuck kind of advice is this?” They fast-tracked an appointment with a hard-to-get-in-to-see expert. Karl said it was so I wouldn’t string their heads around my neck like a garland.
          The expert, whom Anjali and Raj called Dr. Vulture, sat hunched behind a massive desk littered with pens, cups, and notepads emblazoned with names of drugs and warned that we really shouldn’t get our hopes up. Looking down his long, hooked nose, his beady blue eyes boring into me, he pronounced that since Anjali had begun to lose some of her old abilities like reading and drawing, she would likely never regain them. She would always need an aide. “But,” Dr. Vulture cawed, almost cheerfully, “Not to worry. What’s happening to your daughter doesn’t have to take over your life. There are medications to control her behavior.”
          I was almost glad for his callousness, because otherwise I would have broken down and wept. Instead, I bit out, “We’ve wasted our time coming here,” and cut short the appointment.
          Karl wanted us to try the drugs. I put my foot down. Why would we trade one form of crazy mind control for another? These people didn’t care about helping Anjali; they were pushers trying to take the easiest way out. “They’re doctors. Specialists,” Karl said. “They must’ve taken some courses besides ‘Talking Down to Others’ in medical school. They must have some idea what they’re doing.” To me, they were only more demons to do battle with. “Anjali wants to be herself again,” I said. “They think she can’t be. I know she can. I can get her there.” Karl submitted. Anjali didn’t take Dr. Vulture’s meds.

The dragon continued to control Anjali’s behavior and took over our lives.
          I embarked on a quest to make her better. Defeating the dragon became my sole objective. Nothing outside the protection of our family of four mattered. My work as an editor aggravated me—all that fuss about minutiae, parsing of trivialities. I abandoned my doctorate in philosophy, because how could I waste time in that ivory tower debating ridiculous abstractions—angels dancing on heads of pins, free will, cogito ergo sum—when I had the real, practical work of defeating a many-headed demon that had possessed my daughter’s mind? I found little time for friends or extended family and lost patience with anyone who questioned my methods to get Anjali better. I pored over more medical journals, contacted PANDAS researchers, joined support groups, and made appointments with practitioners in every healing field who could possibly help us.
          In this journey to seek a cure, we encountered all manner of wizards and weirdos who assured us they had the remedy we sought: a chiropractic neurologist who prescribed daily doses of Dance Dance Revolution; an energy healer who waved her hands above Anjali’s head while her partner read from The Berenstain Bears (bafflingly, insurance paid for these visits); an Ayurvedic doctor who advised boiling rose petals and coriander; a Lyme disease specialist who immediately diagnosed Lyme disease. Also: a nutritionist, a naturopath, an herbalist, a play therapist, an acupuncturist, a homeopath, and an occupational therapist.
          I don’t know which ones helped or if it was coincidence, but after a few months, Anjali’s symptoms improved. We enrolled her in a private alternative school willing to take her despite her “challenges.” She learned to read again. Raj began school, too, and developed into a joyful, sensitive boy who loved art, adored animals, and was always surrounded by friends. Life resumed almost as normal. Anjali’s OCD symptoms continued to flare to the point of outbursts every few months, at which point I repeated the same, tired dance with the pediatricians: I asked for a strep test, they said she had no sore throat, I bared my fangs, they did the test, it came back positive. Anjali took antibiotics, and for a few weeks the worst of the symptoms abated.
          Then, when Anjali was nine, we found an infectious disease researcher and pediatrician whose specialty was PANDAS. Dr. Moon lived in a town thirty minutes outside Seattle and took our insurance. We fell in love with her the first day. She bounced into the room, her curly bob bouncing with her, and sat next to Anjali. She said, “I’m so glad you’ve come. I can only imagine how hard this has been for all of you.” She told me there was much she didn’t know, but she was trying to educate herself and wanted us to learn together. She showed Raj how to make an elephant, his favorite animal, from a surgical glove. She asked Anjali many questions, not just about her health, but about school and friends, and listened intently, eyes wide as saucers, to all her answers. With the help of long-term antibiotics and the other complementary therapies Dr. Moon prescribed, Anjali’s symptoms subsided even further. Her OCD, the dragon, was still there, but over the next year she cut off a few heads and learned to check him. She was regaining control. “You are the knight,” Dr. Moon told Anjali during one of our visits as she squeezed her hands. “You’re the one who’s defeating this dragon.”

Amidst all of this, the 2008 recession had hit us hard. In 2010 my work began to dry up, and by 2012 we were living mostly off Karl’s public school teacher income. Our medical bills mounted, along with private school fees, and we were underwater with our mortgage. In 2013 we lost our house. Karl took a teaching job in Vietnam, so we could have health care that wouldn’t completely ruin us. We would also be closer to my family in Malaysia.
          We hoped Vietnam would be a reset. But the adjustment was not easy. The fancy private international school where Karl taught, and which our children attended for free, was nothing like what they were used to in Seattle. The students pulled up to school every day in chauffeur-driven luxury cars. Next to money, good grades in math and science were the highest form of social capital. Raj had left behind the tight group of friends he’d had all through elementary school to find himself, as a fifth grader, isolated and alone. Anjali entered middle school and experienced the usual stressors—physical and emotional changes, friendship drama, cliques. She also endured relentless bullying from her classmates.
          We made the most of our situation by visiting my family in Malaysia often and ditching school to travel around the region, visiting temples, monasteries, and wildlife sanctuaries. On our travels, Anjali and Raj discovered that Asian dragons were different from the ones they had learned about in the States. Dragons here were symbols of life, power, luck, strength, and enlightenment. In the three years we lived in Asia, Anjali began to talk in different terms about her OCD. By the time we left, she told us she no longer wanted to slay the dragon, but to make peace with it.
          We moved back to Seattle when Anjali started high school. She made friends quickly, did well in her classes, and was thriving, even though her OCD remained. Then she developed two more autoimmune conditions. Ever since her first PANDAS symptoms, Anjali’s physical health had not been robust. Now she had more bouts of sickness and recovery associated with the additional diagnoses. It helped that she had excellent doctors and therapists and a supportive community. She continued to excel in school, began to write plays and music, performed around the city, released an album, won awards. In her senior year, she was accepted to colleges with offers of presidential scholarships. Most people would never have guessed Anjali had ever been anything but the bright, funny, charming person she was now.
          Friends and family, even ones who had doubted my approach, were in awe of Anjali’s transformation, and her charisma. She had defeated the dragon despite everything. They congratulated me, too. “You’re such a great mom!” I heard over and over. “It’s amazing what you did for her.” They remarked as well on Raj’s accomplishments, his goodness; he was an extraordinarily talented artist and a kind-hearted soul. They admired how close I was to my children, how they talked to me—really talked to me—unlike other parents and their teenagers. I accepted the praise, nodding quietly with appropriate modesty and humility. I felt validated, justified, self-satisfied. If only Dr. Vulture could see us now.
          What I didn’t tell them about: My lingering guilt. Why didn’t I catch the warning signs earlier? Should Anjali have tried the psychiatric meds when she was six? Would they have helped? Could we have found better doctors, therapies, so her health wasn’t so fragile? Also, I was still on a quest to find the perfect therapist to completely cure her OCD. I was constantly investigating treatments to heal her autoimmune conditions once and for all, reading journals and attending webinars to keep up with the latest research.

Then the pandemic happened. The four of us were far luckier than most. We hunkered down in our little house, bingeing on carbs and TV. Anjali and I watched five seasons of “Buffy” together in three months. I taught Raj how to cook my grandmother’s curries.
          Four months into lockdown, Karl was diagnosed with cancer. Because of COVID, I couldn’t go to his appointments or be with him before or after surgery. When he developed complications that sent him to urgent care four times and I wanted to talk to his doctors, he asked me to back down. “No need to take up arms this time,” he said. All he wanted was for me to help him recover peacefully at home. I took it as an affront, that he didn’t want me to fight for him. But I did as he requested. And he got better.
          I asked Anjali and Raj how they felt about what was happening to their dad. What were their fears, their anxieties? They thought Papa was going to be okay. The doctors had removed all the cancer. We could all take care of him until he was healed. In that heightened emotional moment, though, captive to each other in our tight quarters, they wanted to talk about other things. Our conversations took a deeper turn. Stifled sorrows and pent-up grief from the past, which had been trapped inside them for years, abruptly surfaced.
          The things I learned from Anjali: she felt guilty I had given up my academic career, my freedom, our house, our life, because of her. Also, the lingering trauma of her childhood wasn’t just the dragon but being dragged from specialist to specialist, poked and prodded, always feeling there was something wrong with her, having to be a different person and needing to be fixed.
          Raj confessed: he couldn’t talk about his deepest feelings, ever, to anyone. He had so many friends, but didn’t know how to get his emotions out—because when he was little he learned to keep them all in, tightly sealed. “You were always so busy chasing that dragon, trying to make Anjali better,” he said. “I didn’t want to complain, to make my problems an extra burden on you.” He had been protecting me. Vietnam had been hard on him, but he had never told me how unhappy he felt. He was also sad that his relationship with his sister had deteriorated over the years, because he felt such resentment toward her. He couldn’t articulate these things and I had not seen his suffering.

In the story of Kali defeating demons, the goddess spreads her tongue out over the world and drinks the blood of the evildoers. The taste of blood makes her rage out of control, and she goes on a rampage that terrifies even the other gods. She hears no one when they beg her to stop. Shiva, her husband, finally lies at her feet and feigns death so she may see that her wrath is destroying everything—not just what she thinks is wicked but even the things she loves. The sight of her husband’s corpse shocks Kali into recognizing the effects of her actions, and she ends her killing spree.
          I thought my single-minded pursuit of the dragon was my maternal obligation. Like Kali, I believed I was the only one who could restore order. I hunted the demon to the exclusion of everything else, and I used the need to defeat it to justify everything I did—because I thought if I didn’t conquer it, our world would fall apart. I assumed I had done everything I could to protect my family. But I hadn’t seen the pain my actions also caused. My fears for my daughter, forged into fury, consumed me. I didn’t know how to put out the flames.
          My children told me about other resentments, shame, and pain they had buried. They said they had tried to say these things before, but I had heard only what I wanted to hear. They told it all to me now with great tenderness and love. But it was hard, and I tried to not let the guilt devour me.
          I embarked on another quest. This time it was inward. Some of the things I have tried: meditation, yoga, chanting mantras, psychotherapy, and writing this tale. Also, coming to a deeper understanding of Ma Kali, my inspiration and cautionary tale. I see her now as the compassionate mother, protector and nurturer, slayer of ego, destroyer of the self-centered view of reality, who kindles introspection and enflames true, boundless, unselfish love. In trying to process all that has happened, I have had to wrestle with demons lurking inside me I did not want to face. I am still trying to make peace with them. That is another story.
          Now, when a crisis happens, and Anjali sees me girding for battle, she reminds me to step back and breathe. “It won’t be the end of the world, Mama,” she says. “Shiva won’t stop dancing. Everything will be okay.”

Uma Kukathas is a writer from Malaysia now living in Seattle. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in swamp pink and has been supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop.

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