What keeps me going

I was in a hospital and half-asleep on a large hospital bed. I was clutching my aching abdomen.

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Monica, my daughter, entered silently and got wordlessly under the blanket with me. She hugged me, more than once. Then she kissed me.

Suddenly the pain dissolved in thin air. She was no longer my accomplished daughter, a hard-working executive who also runs a house and manages three small children. Now she had transformed miraculously into a five-year-old, who clung to me in our Manila home as I read her stories at night. She was my precious little daughter, whose very sight was the everlasting fireworks of delight.

I have always been an active, untiring person: swimming and running, yoga and tai-chi, plays and politics filled the hours left after the giant slices of reading and writing. An overnight change was therefore mysterious, discombobulating. I was suddenly exhausted and enervated all day. All I felt like doing was to lie down and read.

I was given medicines and antibiotics. I went through x-rays. Nothing. Finally, a computed tomography or CT scan. That unmasked the adversary. The feared carcinoma, what my brother Pritish—who was its hapless victim too—had facetiously named in his dying days The Big C.