Cancer Ward: Open To The Sky

Chirodeep Chaudhuri brings the surreal lives of Mumbai’s pavement-dwelling cancer patients into soft focus

CHIRODEEP CHAUDHURI
Photojournalist

SINCE ALEKSANDR Solzhenitsyn, the idea of the cancer ward has always been a sterile place – a place where those who have this dreaded disease are segregated from society. But in the city in which I live, there is a cancer ward open to the sky.

When I first visited Lady Jerbai Wadia Road, a small back lane in central Mumbai, there was nothing to distinguish this little community of 15 to 20 families from the millions of other pavementdwelling residents of this city. The difference lay in the details: the child wearing a medical mask and playing with a cat, the way a woman smiling at me from under a tree had covered her thinning hair with a jaunty head scarf; and a plastic bag hanging on a railing, a plastic bag marked “CT Scan”. These are the patients on the pavement, the spillover from the Tata Memorial Hospital, Asia’s largest cancer treatment facility.

It was easy to see this as yet another manifestation of the failures of a third world nation, the lack of medical infrastructure. But over the next few months, I found the story behind the story. There are secular and religious institutions that will offer these patients a bed but often they are crowded, even claustrophobic, as one patient put it. Sometimes, they are far away and a patient may be too weak to make the trek to and from his home. And anyway, when 43,000 new patients arrive every year, some are going to end up on the street, especially since 70 per cent are treated free of charge.

	BABANRAO GAWLI Thane, Maharashtra THE ELDERLY COUPLE lives at Virar, one of the northernmost suburbs of Mumbai that can be reached by a two-hour long journey by local train. “Earlier we used to go back each weekend,” says wife, Babybai. “Then slowly his weakness (from a month-long radiation treatment) made it difficult for him to travel by train… and you know how crowded the trains are,” she said.
	SIADULARI Banda, Uttar Pradesh SIADULARI AND HER family decided to reside here because they felt the nausea caused by her radiation therapy would make it difficult for her to travel to the hospital in the buses that ferry patients to and fro from these homes for their appointments. “For the women patients the biggest problem is using the latrine,” says her husband, Girjashankar,
	BREAKFAST Lady Jerbai Wadia Road IT IS 7.15 in the morning and people have started to queue up for the distribution of breakfast. They start assembling from about an hour earlier, leaving plastic bags, bottles, a bowl or a lunch pail or even their slippers as a symbolic booking of their place in the queue. “One has to admit, inspite of the filth, the mosquitoes, the noise… no one will ever sleep hungry,” says a patient.
	MOHAMMAD MANSURI Satna, Madhya Pradesh EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD Mansuri’s family went into shock when they discovered he had cancer. “Everyone wondered how he got it. They are fancy diseases of royal people,” his elder brother, Ismail, had teased him. His operation was to happen in June but got postponed because of voting in Mumbai. Mansuri finally had a successful surgery. “I’ll be going home in a few days,” he said, with a smile.

The patients who lie down on the street are not resigned to their fate; they are waging a determined battle against it. They do not want to die. They want to live and they will do what it takes to get better again, even if it means recuperating from the savageries of radiation therapy in the dust thrown up by passing cars and huddling under plastic sheets when the torrential sub-equatorial monsoons wash the city.

I learnt that a community grows among these cancer patients and their family members who have made the journey from various corners of India’s rural heartlands to the Tata Memorial Hospital.

But these impressive numbers also contribute to the one thing that brings all these people together: an infinity of waiting. They wait endlessly, for an appointment with the doctor, for a diagnosis or a result of a test, for their turn at an operation or at a chemotherapy session and finally, they wait to get better.

The plight of the pavement patients has triggered a number of philanthropic responses. Some provide free nutritious meals or distribute tarpaulins and blankets for protection against the weather. And in a city where fights over water are not uncommon, the inmates of a nearby chawl (one room tenements with common toilets and bathrooms) are magnanimous enough to allow the families to fill water from the community taps. When your water supply is measured in hours per day, this is genuine sharing.

SOME WILL die on the street. Many more will survive. They will go back to the backbreaking work, scratch a living from the soil and return each year for an annual check-up. But while they are here, they are a community that shares an enemy: cancer. They battle the rain and the flies. They learn to live with the cacophony of the city’s traffic and the way pedestrians may intrude upon their space at will. They bathe. They eat. They find time to play, laugh, gossip and grumble. They look out for each other and guard each other’s belongings. They forge a community and refuse to admit defeat. As a manifestation of the transcendence of the human spirit, the community of temporary residents of Lady Jerbai Wadia lane is hard to beat.