The Mother’s Day became very special for me since last two years, after my mother’s battle with cancer.  My mother is a cancer survivor. It is still hard to believe that I can hear her voice whenever I dial home.

 

She went through a curative surgery which most patients go through. And, I have managed to arrive home on the day of my mother’s surgery. I stayed with her for the next three months wondering what I can do to help her to cope with the painful chemo and post operation trauma. The hospital seemed a different world, a huge isolated island. It admits six hundred patients and almost as many are discharged every day.  What a prodigious number of patients!  Often, I got lost in the endless aisles and  corridors in the building. The space inside is like a maze. There are not many significant landmarks in the building: only countless rooms, numerous doctors, nurses, professional caregivers, visitors… I felt so, I didn’t know why? 

 

Everybody eventually becomes a patient in a hospital. There is ambiguous tension which hangs heavy in the air that swallows you up. There is a Television in each room which usually has six beds. The television is turned on most of times, but no one is really watching though their eyes are fixed on the screen. It is just another device that helps patients, caregivers or family members to escape from reality; the reality that hangs heavy on doctor’s chart. 

 

Everybody finds one’s own way to ignore or fight anxiety, to spend time day by day in the hospital. I was filling up pages of a drawing book with red. The act of painting became almost a prayer, erasing away unwanted words such as disorder, fear, unclearness, uncertainty, despair… Embossed stencil on a white paper is like a vague feeling of hope which is fragile and ethereal. It slowly takes shape and become alive when red runs through the veins of the transparent line. Repeated application of layers of different shades of red conquers despair. The specimens become alive one after another.