The mind can be a cruel thing to live with. While the heart beats, the brain acts. But not all its actions make sense. There are placid days, and then suddenly, out of the blue, an unrelenting storm starts brewing, making it a vessel of chaos. Manjiri Indurkar's memoir, It's All In Your Head, M (Tranquebar, Westland), is a deep exploration of this mind, but through human relationships—some that are heart-warming, but a few also complex and disturbing. Jabalpur-based Indurkar, who is one of the founders of the Bookshelf Writing Workshop, is not one of those famously popular people, whose life story has always piqued your interest. And yet, when she narrates hers, it's hard to keep the book down. She begins her story somewhere in the middle, when she is in her mid-20s, living an almost-perfect life with her boyfriend in Delhi. Their life flips over when a take-out meal causes a stomach infection, landing her in hospital. Just when the couple thinks the worst has passed, Indurkar realises she is turning into a hypochondriac, constantly obsessing about an illness that probably doesn't even exist. It begins to eat into her relationship.

One wonders if consuming bad food, can be so devastating, but when Indurkar offers the reader a peek into her childhood, a semblance of an explanation emerges. At first, it feels like a faultless life. Growing up in the late '80s and early '90s, in middle-class Jabalpur, had a charm of its own. Not to mention, a beautiful relationship with her aai and father. But, as she sheds layers, we learn of the trauma of sexual abuse, by a perpetrator who she confuses to be lover, and something even worse by another man, whose villainy she equates to that of filmi villain Mogambo.