Anjum

There was very little conversation in the car on the drive back from the hospital. I was helplessly lost for words.

“It’s alright. I don’t regret my decision,” Anjum said calmly. With her unfaltering gaze she asked, “Do you remember when I called you after the surgery and told you I had decided against all toxic follow up treatment?”

I remembered that telephone conversation very well. I even remembered where I was standing in the veranda of our mountain lodge on that sunny March morning and the trees I was looking out on, while I had wished Anjum a happy birthday and she mentioned that the surgery had been successful. The lump had been minuscule and removed entirely. She had decided against following up with the hormone therapy usually prescribed for this early stage of breast cancer. Instead she was going to follow the Ayurveda route, of non-toxic treatment.

I remembered thinking to myself, is she informing me of her decision or is she asking for an opinion? Is she expecting a response from me? I hesitated about voicing my doubt. I was not a close friend. If friendships are measured in concentric circles, then I would have placed myself in Anjum’s third or fourth circle. Though our circles intersected many times because of common friends.

Instead I asked her what her parents, doctor and other friends felt about her decision. I remember her high pitched cheerful laugh which always seemed to emerged from the base of her throat and she said she could hardly inform her doctor about this decision.

After the surgery Anjum’s health was sparkling to say the least. Our meetings and phone conversations were sporadic in a regular sort of way. Our conversations revolved around health, diet, exercise, travel, restaurants, books, movies, our usual mutual interests.

I had at that time recently returned from an ashram in the Himalaya after completing an instructor’s course in Yoga and although I had no intention of teaching it commercially she asked if I would get her started on a Yoga routine. I was happy to agree.

I would drive across every morning to her beautiful, airy first floor duplex apartment in Delhi’s Nizamuddin and practise with her on her terrace under a canopy of Gulmohar and Amaltas trees that was alive with birds at 7am. I’d give her alternative postures to try out to get her left arm and shoulder moving which were sore and stiff after the surgery. She never winced from pain while she tried out an asana that we both knew might give her some discomfort. She would crack up looking at my pained expression instead! “Don’t worry!” she’d say and gingerly keep pushing her physical and mental limits. We continued this routine for a little over a month and then it was time for her to go to Kerala for her Ayurveda treatments. On the last morning of our Yoga together, while we were sipping lemon and ginger tea afterwards she presented me with a Tiffany’s silver bracelet. She called it Guru dakshina, an offering of thanks to the teacher.

It is hard to describe Anjum’s dusky good looks without falling into the cliché trap. Her radiant complexion was something between the colour of medium brown full bodiedcoffee with a liberal splash of milk. Her darker lips would often part in a wide, ready smile, showing beautiful, even teeth and a hint of dark gums. She was given easily to laughter and giggles. Her eyes were almond shaped, framed by dark eyelashes and strong, black, well-shaped eyebrows.The dark brown pupils sometimes caught the light and made them seem lighter than they were. Her hair was dark and glistening, bouncing with good health, and she wore it a little below her shoulders. She was slim and petite. She was a regular at the gym and the month I did Yoga with her I used to marvel at her supple, chiselled body. Physically she was a perfect blend of her Bengali and Punjabi genes.

We had known each other through our thirties and into our fifties and so I had seen Anjum evolve as an artist. Her creativity was perhaps inherited from her artist parents, both of whom are well known and well regarded for their work. This could not have been easy for her; an only child following in the footsteps of famous parents would have left her wide open to insecurities and comparisons. I wish now that this was a conversation I could have had with her.

The next time I met Anjum was in Vancouver and we ended up sharing a room and a queen-sized bed at a common friend’s home. She was radiating wellness. It had been a few months since her return from Kerala. She was following a vegan diet and we spent many wonderful days exploring vegan restaurants and visiting art galleries. Being no less than a style diva herself, she insisted on giving me a makeover and we shopped for clothes like I have never shopped before or since.

Experiences, meetings, conversations that take place away from the humdrum setting of “back home” take on a different hue;those breaks from the routine always seems more special, and happier. In that week in Vancouver, none of us brought up the “C” word. She looked far too cheerful and healthy to even mention it. Perhaps the disease was there, ever present in her mind, but I was not so close a friend for her to share such confidences with.

Almost a year had passed when I met Anjum again back home in Delhi. She dropped by one day for a fresh juice while she waited for an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon who’s clinic was close by. Her left shoulder was stiffening up and was painful. My heart sank when I saw her. To anyone who might meet her for the first time she would still seem vivacious and beautiful. But I could tell there was something amiss. Her face seemed bloated as did her body. We looked at each other and she knew what I wanted to ask. Had she had her cancer check-up recently? “No,” she said, “but I am going for my tests tomorrow.”

When I called her a few days later, she had received her results which showed some fluid build-up in her abdomen and possibly a lung. She was hesitant to go back to her earlier doctor. She had an appointment with another doctor for the next day. I asked whether she had someone accompanying her for the appointment. I offered to go along if she wished, and she accepted. It was a quiet drive to the hospital. The meeting with the doctor was fraught,his stony expression giving nothing away. He directed Anjum to Oncology where he wanted them to mark out the affected portions on her body, so that the radiation could start immediately. While she was there the doctor called me in to his consulting room. He wanted to know my relationship with Anjum because he had a serious medical prognosis to discuss. When I explained that she would take all her own decisions for her treatment he said he would wait to speak with her. I asked Anjum whether she wanted me to stay while she consulted with the doctor and she said she did. With an extremely heavy heart I listened to the doctor handing out Anjum’s death sentence to her. She listened stoically and asked how much time she had.

He gave her two years or less.

Anjum and I never discussed that meeting with the doctor again. Neither of us wanted to remember the timeline he had handed her.

I will never know her painful conversations with her octogenarian parents or her childhood friends. Did she discuss death with them? Was she depressed? Did she feel hopeless? Was she worried about leaving behind parents in their old age who’s lives had revolved around her, their only child? I will never know.

What I did observe in the months following that meeting, was a warrior emerging from deep within. She willed herself to survive and live in the best possible way without squandering away the remainder of her time.

She faced her precarious and hellish treatment with equanimity. She never gave in to any part of the cancer treatment without being fully informed of the regimen and all it entailed. It was her body, her person and she wanted to be respectful of it even though she knew she was dying.

Our calls to each other became more frequent, usually to discuss alternative ways of relieving the pain and discomfort of the toxic treatment that she had fought so hard to avoid.

When the tentacles of the disease continued its advance into different parts of her body, it had to be met with ever more aggressive treatments. Radiation progressed into chemotherapy. Keeping her beautiful hair from falling out became a challenge. She did not want to lose it. It was the only time I saw her vanity coming through. And that gave us hope: it meant she intended to fight and she wanted to look good. When it seemed like the chemotherapy was failing in Delhi, she went to try out cutting-edge treatment in New York. Her parents went with her.

Our goodbyes were normal and cheerful, as though she was off on a vacation. Neither of us remotely considered it to be a forever goodbye.

Our conversations shifted to WhatsApp. Her friends’ circle formed a group to keep all those who knew her informed of Anjum’s progress. Sometimes the disease had the upper hand and sometimes the treatment. In all of this Anjum stayed in charge of her mind and body. The aggression and the defence, the disease and the treatment were both being played out in her body and her being. She dispassionately observed both and embraced both.

In this battle of strength with cancer, Anjum never let her work suffer. It was what made her feel normal and sane, her refuge from the illness. Even in New York she continued to paint and create on the days she was feeling good. She kept up her discussions about a solo show in Delhi with her agent and gallerist.

Then the downward slide began. I didn’t hear from her for a couple of weeks. She had not been checking her WhatsApp messages for many days. From the friends’ group I came to know that she had been hospitalised: one of her lungs had collapsed. I can only imagine what her parents must have felt giving support to Anjum in a busy, alien metropolis full of strangers. A handful of friends rallied around trying to keep up the flagging spirits of two elderly parents who were helplessly watching their child slip away. Before losing consciousness Anjum had left instructions that she did not want life support.

She was just marking time now.

One of her close friends called me in Delhi to say that the doctors had given her only a few hours, maybe a day. All her friends around the globe, started a spiritual vigil. As much for Anjum as for her parents.

And then miraculously, Anjum re-emerged at the same side of the tunnel as all of us. Months later when she was back in Delhi, she described how she had seen herself on her hospital bed and had decided it was not time yet. How while emerging from that coma, she gasped for air as though she had been under water for a long time. Her first words were, “I am still here!”. In March last year, on her birthday, she had one of her most successful solo shows, titled “I am still here”.

This turning back midway through death’s door was as though a rehearsal for Anjum, her parents and all of us. As though preparing us all and her for the inevitable. We never discussed any of this, but from her conversations I knew that Anjum was slowly wrapping up.

I remember sending her homemade grapefruit jam from my farm and she messaged to say that her mum loved it and I must send it every year. It seemed like an instruction to be carried out once she was gone. Another time she sent a photograph of her father looking into her camera with a raised whiskey glass in hand. She wrote that he came up to her sitting room every evening to have his whiskey as he didn’t like to drink alone.

She was paying more attention to her inner self, her thoughts and her words. She was practising with a therapist who taught her to meditate and articulate and structure affirmations to herself. She would send me these affirmations daily. I marvelled at how crystal clear they were and how there was hope, love and positivity in each one of them.

I have everything within me to maintain an equilibrium. Anjum.

Her father would drive her daily to her studio, and she kept this up for as long as she could, more as a reassurance to her parents, that she was still engaged with the world. Though she would simply collapse and lie inert in her studio until it was time for her father to fetch her.

Over the months the fluid build-up in her body became more rapid. She needed to have catheters to drain fluid from her lungs and stomach. Even with those pouches taped to her torso, she continued to live and paint bravely every day.

Let today be physically comfortable, emotionally strong and creatively a powerful day. Anjum.

When the final decline started she was able to eat less and less. Even when she had an appetite she was unable to eat more than a morsel as the nausea would take over. Her body was too weak to accept the devastating treatment anymore. Palliative care began at home. When she started slipping into a state of coma, she was taken to hospital. After a few worrying days in a cheerless hospital room, where her doctor counselled her a few times, she asked to be taken back home. She wanted to wait out the end with her parents, in her own bed, looking out through the window at her plants on the terrace.

I was not in Delhi in the last few weeks of Anjum’s life. Her WhatsApp messages became infrequent and then stopped. I started sending back to her, the affirmations she used to send me. I could tell that she had read them but there was no response.

I am my own master as well as my own slave. What I choose to be today is up to me. Anjum.

We all spent the last few days of Anjum’s life fearful and suspended in our own. Just when the wait was becoming unbearable, we awoke one dismal November morning to a message on the friends’ WhatsApp group. Anjum had drifted away in her sleep in the early hours of the morning. She slipped away with her parents beside her, holding her hands.

What seems is the end is always the beginning of something new! Anjum.