For you Sushmita ( from Keerti)

I do not know where you are, but with each passing day I miss you. It is a long journey that we shared, from those early days in Tilonia in the seventies and early eighties, through your later battles with your fragmented self.   It was in the early days of your illness, when Amit and I got a call from Aunty asking us to come to Jaipur. We drove through the night and reached Barkatnagar in the wee hours of the morning. We found you huddled in a corner of your room, almost in a foetus position. You were afraid of each object in your room. They had taken on life. Very soon, it began to feel as if some kind of extra terrestrial invasion had blown your world apart, and fragmented it into a zillion smithereens. Your world now existed of codes. Each gesture, each colour, number or movement had a message for you. I remember you asking me "Why are you wearing blue? Are you trying to say something to me? It just went on an don as you tried to share the several meanings that numbers, object and events had taken on. It was endless, the battle to preserve your fragile self through the onslaught of this new codified world and coupled with the numbing bombardment of allopathic medication. Yet you withstood it. I am in complete awe.   I remember how Amit and I worked out a structure for each hour of your day… I had never realized how long a day is, until then. It was our meager attempt to provide scaffolding for you…. a structure to guide you through the many dark and unfamiliar alleys of your day; something for you to hold on to. I was very moved at your discipline and the effort you made to follow it; and even more at the fact that even at the peak of your fragmentation, you went to work each day. Every morning around eleven O'clock, aunty told you it was time and you set out to walk the length of Kisan Marg and cross the railway line to go to the Bodh Office in Gandhinagar. On a few occasions I accompanied you. The hot sun beat down on us uncaringly. You seemed to be unaware.   Your experience can never be mine Sushmita, but I don't know how you survived all the codes on the way. You plunged through it all somehow. You never did much in Bodh, in those days, but you held on. You went each day. I'm sure the old timers from Bodh will remember. You were so brave. I want to salute you Sushmita, for I had the privilege of experiencing how brick by brick, slowly and painfully you rebuilt your world.   Then there was time when you came and stayed a few months with Amit and me in Delhi, and in between you went across to Laksmi's place. By now you were better, and your life was now just punctuated with "episodes" and semblances of "wellness" in between. My children were very young and I could not give you the time you needed. But there was this half an hour each evening at four o'clock. This was the time when we shared a cup of tea. You wanted it "properly" in a teapot, with a tray and tray cloth and dainty cups! They are so vivid those "four o'clock tea sessions"…mostly in silence. ..they became the constant in your scattered and codified day. But you held on Sushmita, yes, you held on.   Slowly the times of lucidity began to increase. I had imagined that these will become times for self pity or self indulgence. Yet, you had this amazing ability to merge the personal with the social. You wanted to share your vulnerability and loneliness. You felt that a mental illness is misunderstood. It was that much more difficult to deal with because it was intangible. The larger world could not relate to it and unlike a physical illness many of your friends could not understand it. This heightened your feelings of isolation and loneliness. You were able to blend your subjective world with the larger objective reality… your inner world with the outer! As you watched yourself, and allowed your insights and reflections to grow, you channelised them into a concern. You wanted to reach out to others in your condition. You wanted to share your journey so that the larger world could understand its ambiguities, and reach out to you and to others. You invited Dr. Sarin, and the doctor from NIMHANS to do workshops; you wanted Gautam to make a film on your journey. How did you do it Sushmita? How did you always manage to distance yourself and reflect, even when your world was in a state of turmoil, when your world was falling apart?   Through the little bits of sharing that I now feel so privileged to have been a part of, you made me cherish the little little things of life. Just cooking 'alu sabzi' or 'lagoaing jhadu' or even having a bath became opportunities to celebrate. I was reminded of how much I take these little events for granted. They took on a new life! And those sudden creative sparks through it all. Where did they come from? You gave me a painting with a poem on kites. I have to look for it. I can go on and on. I don't know how many people are aware that you were the main force behind Bodh??   There were those completely infuriating aspects too. ..the ease with which you shamelessly borrowed money and in the next breath gave it way to one of your umpteen friends or family. It used to make me mad! I now want to laugh. I was so terrestrial, you were so moonbeam!   Slowly you got well Sushmita. You became like "the old Sushmita of Tilonia days". You often told me that you wanted your friends in Jaipur to know what you had been like. I had promised you that I will give you the photographs and videos that Amit had taken. I'm sorry that I delayed it Sushmita. You were getting well Sushmita. I did not expect you to die. They are being shared now Sushmita with friends. I don't know if it is too late.   There is an inner compulsion pushing me to write all this deep inner stuff. Somewhere I want the world to know. I know you did too. Perhaps I am trying very inadequately to try and do a little of what you wanted to. I don't know…I want to try and capture what you were. I know I never can… and yet Sushmita it has been wonderful to have had a friend like you. I don't want to cry but I don't know why the tears just come, and I feel such a lump in my throat…   Take care wherever you are. I hope you can finally be at peace. Keerti 27.08.2010

For Sushmita ( from Sathya )

Dear Sushmita, I have no idea whether this will reach you wherever you are; but this is more for all of us who travelled together for a while in this life. From the time Arti wrote, I have been sifting through memories, which though not many are so vivid in my mind. Forgive me if my representation is not accurate but these are my memories. We belonged, so to speak, to the batch of late 1970s, post emergency, filled with burning  idealism wanting to change the world and, with no clearly formed  ideology, the 'voluntary sector' became the first stone we stepped on. Wishing to work with the poor, we wished to live a life not far removed from them.  So, simple housing, lifestyle, and all that could be covered in a meagre 'honorarium' were what we 'voluntarily' chose. Soon, our ability for 'relentless questioning' led us to see the seamy side of power politics and the structural power of such dynamics which could not be challenged easily and we stepped out to find our uncharted way. We first met in the late 1970s. You and Arti had just left SWRC Tilonia when you both visited me in VHAI to discuss the politics of 'development'. You both were then in a more advanced state of 'development' as I still had on my rose tinted glasses; it was to take another year before the scales fell off my eyes, for me to leave the confines of an institution, forever. Our paths again crossed in Kishore Bharti and later in Bhopal in September 1984 when the pregnancy outcome survey on the Bhopal survivors was being conducted in the midst of immense tension due to threats from the administration. You came when the survey was underway and your first spontaneous comment was that it was so rare and wonderful not to see any visible hierarchy in an activity that was being carried out by more than forty women activists and health workers under such difficult conditions. While the compliment was to me as the coordinator of the survey (words, as you can see, I treasure even today), it said something about you as a person to whom the Chinese poem,  "Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say "We have done this ourselves"', was more than the meaningless mantra it had become in the development world post the lifting of the 'bamboo curtain'. And that was the principle you lived by. Your creativity and unmistakable talent(s) were at the service of the people; what if it was appropriated and claimed by others as their own… with your merry laugh you moved on. Our next major interaction was when your mind began playing tricks on you. With the blurring of the boundary between reality/unreality, you did not know what to trust, whom to trust, the consequence of the 'embodiment' of life's challenges. I was privileged to be one of the persons whom you did trust and you let me spend a week with you in Delhi when treatment was being initiated. Later, you would occasionally call, and we would catch up, the ripples of your laughter echoing in my ears long after I had put the phone down. We continued to keep track of each other through our close friends - Arti and Keerti. One day you called and expressed your desire to visit Mira Sadgopal in Pune to meet the members of a mental health collective and so we went together, on one of the hottest days in May, train leaving from Nizamuddin at the height of the heat (1.30 pm, I think), traveling in a second class compartment, every metal object searing our skin where it touched, the food we took spoilt by the evening, but we talked; for the first time you shared, things I am not at a liberty to reveal. We talked about the gossamer thin veil of sanity, the struggle when the compulsion to walk a different path with ears tuned to a different drummer leads to places unknown and 'knowledges' (insights?!) unsought; what is 'normality' and what is 'non-normality', we wondered. We talked about the medical solutions which were hardly an improvement, yet so critical in reclaiming the 'self' and of course 'radical psychiatry' which denied the role of therapeutics. Not having much emotional baggage to speak of between us, you permitted yourself to lower your defenses and allowed me the privilege accorded to few, to get a glimpse of the lost child within; you who exhibited only your 'free child' to the world! The Pune trip helped you to decide that the escape from reality was only one aspect of your 'self' and that you did not wish to make that the centre of your life; you felt that it was sufficient to accept the 'reality' of the periods when you 'went away' and make space in your life when your mind commandeered a different self; but for you, the periods of freedom were too precious to be frittered away in wanting to understand the whys of it. Surely, life was too brief and needed to be lived with joy, happiness and, of course, laughter, you decided. And if medications helped. then so be it even if it distorted memory, time and the body.   You combined three very precious qualities: integrity, courage and tenderness. You never wavered from your idealism. You dealt with life's hand outs, the good, the bad and the ugly, with dignity, equanimity and of course, always, merriment. How you managed not to grow a single cynical bone, I have always wondered. During our Pune trip I urged, as I urge all my friends from the 'batch of late 1970s', to put down on paper our journeys in life, the idealism we shared, demons we faced, and the wisdom that is the hard earned fruit of our labour (and grey hair), written in pain but also full of the joie de vivre, celebrating life.  I do not know if you did. I hope you did. I was not a part of your everyday life; we had not met or communicated for the last 2-3 years. Yet, you are a part of my history and with your passing away, there is a hole in it. But then, dear Sushmita, all of us are also in the queue, only you got a bit impatient and jumped it. So, till we meet, here is a temporary goodbye on this your first birthday in a different life. Sathya 23 August 2010.

Children's Paintings Done On Sushmita's Birthday...

Here are lots of paintings done by children on Sushmita's birthday at the celebration in her home (as described in earlier posts from Vijay and Kavita).

To see the pictures, click on the "BirthdayPaintings" title on top of the blog (below the tagline "A blog for friends of Sushmita", and just above her picture).  [Photos from Kavita]

You can also see a whole album of pictures of the birthday party here:  Sushmita'sBirthday

a phonecall from Sr Janet

Sr Janet phoned to say that the sophia sisters said a special prayer for sushmita on her birthday

from indira

आरती, जो फोटो तुमने ब्लोग में पेस्ट किया है सुष्मिता का उसकी वह चुन्नी मेरे पास हे, जो उसने वहां पहनी है

a response from dunu

the best part is memory - always. dunu

Happy Birthday- poonam batra

Happy birthday dear Sushmita!! Sorry for having missed the celebration of Sushmita's life in Jaipur!! Remembering her most fondly... Poonam