The Amazing Race

In the last decade, all three had been diagnosed with, fought and survived cancer. ‘‘It’s amazing how a disease has brought us together,’’ exclaimed Doshi, as people milled around them, wondering what prominent faces were doing amongst lovers’ rocks. In the midst of streetside voyeurs, they traded stories about chemotherapy, radiation and hair loss with the equanimity of accomplished war veterans. ‘‘In a couple of years, we probably won’t even remember what kind of cancer we had,’’ said Bhojwani.

The first reaction to cancer is the same as a sentence to life on the green mile. But truth is that many survive, and the illness becomes just another chapter in their biography or an excuse to do something different. ‘‘You fight,’’ says Naik. ‘‘What’s the point in asking why me? Why not me?’’

Ten years ago, fight is precisely what this former north Mumbai MP did. The then parliamentarian was attending the winter session when he was diagnosed with second stage lymphoma. ‘‘I told Vajpayeeji that there was a possibility I would not be back for the next session,’’ the now 70-year-old remembers. Then his colleagues, constituency, the entire country knew.

Naik’s office became a makeshift hospital while he underwent chemo sessions at Tata Memorial Centre—the top of the study door was sawed off, and glass installed so constituents could greet Rambhau. ‘‘They came to meet this thin bald man they had voted for,’’ he says. In front of his million-strong audience, Naik’s hair went then came back, his body shrunk then filled out again, he fought three more elections, became minister, and finally lost his crown to a jhatka-expert from tinseltown. But that’s life.

Naik isn’t the only one who tags war games with cancer. When the National Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar’s oral cancer resurfaced earlier this year, the 64-year-old simply refused to push the red button, saying that he would do the one thing he knew best: Hit back and win.

In the midst of crucial state elections, Pawar worked 15-hour schedules, and kept every campaign date. The biggie from Baramati vowed that just as a farmer routs anything he hasn’t sown, he would weed out the tumour in his mouth.

But unlike rallies, cancer’s not a crowd-puller when it comes to jobs.

Anup Kumar was an advertising star in 2000. At 51, he landed the top job at an Abu Dhabi-based advertising firm. Kumar gave notice to his employer and began formalities for the Arab visa. During the mandatory physical examination, they discovered a shadow on his lung.

‘‘The lung cancer diag-nosis was the end of my new job as well as my old one,’’ says Kumar. ‘‘Who wants to hire a guy who’s going to be sick all the time?’’ True. And Kumar was not one to remain quiet about it either. Unemployed and in debt, he wrote a 2002 bestseller called The Joy Of Cancer,detailing his experiences.

‘‘If I hadn’t yelled out from the rooftops then it might have been different, but I’m much better off today for having told the truth,’’ he says.

Fifty one-year-old Bhojwani remembers how she would take her mother along for radiation so that people would think the older lady was sick. In 2000, the woman who didn’t know what an oncologist did for a living was diagnosed with breast cancer, just under two months after a headlining 25th wedding anniversary bash. ‘‘How others would react’’ was top-of-mind for Bhojwani, especially since it was breast cancer.

‘‘Your breasts define your womanhood, it’s killing when they suddenly tell you there’s a chance of losing it,’’ she recalls. For a year, she didn’t tell anyone except close family. Then, in December 2001, with typical flair, she wrote The Mammogram That Changed My Life, for a women’s magazine.

It’s tempting to sneer at Kumar and Bhojwani as self-involved, but you’d be surprised at the number of folks who hang up at the mention of the ‘c’ word. ‘‘A lot of people don’t want to talk about it because they’re in pain or too embarrassed,’’ says Kumar.

If embarrassment was a criterion then Kanta Doshi would have never met Ram Naik. The 55-year-old woman behind the erstwhile Pizza Express chain, was a swinging socialite and entrepreneur till August 2003.

Today, the twice-divorced mother of two, who lived in stilettos and pants most of her adult life, houses a bladder fashioned out of her own intestines. In an operation designed to rout the cancer in her bladder, doctors removed the infected organ and created another. Months later, it malfunctioned and began to retain almost 90 per cent of the urine.

Since then, Doshi has to insert a catheter into her bladder to relieve herself. ‘‘Who spends time thinking about the urinary tract? Heck, I didn’t even know there was a hole next to the vagina,’’ she exclaims. Though in remission now, Doshi suffers the aftermath of living with an ill-functioning organ—the humiliation of needing a maid to insert a tube into her to pee, the pain of swollen legs and an inflated abdomen. ‘‘I think the saddest part is looking at my closet and all the stuff I can never wear again,’’ says the tiny-framed lady.

That said, the full-time entrepreneur has just finished her latest project—a Thai restaurant and is working on her next, a home-catering outlet. Her maid accompanies her to meetings so Doshi can be catheterised, and she rarely leaves Mumbai. Ask her what she intends to do with her second life, and she’s clear: ‘‘I have to learn to catheterise myself, then my maid can take a holiday.’’

If Doshi had one of the worst—and rarest—forms of cancer, Sunil Kakar had one of the most common. Colon cancer. The chief financial officer of Max New York Life Insurance is a pragmatic man. When he was diagnosed, he looked at five people on his father’s side—father, two uncles and two aunts—all colon cancer survivors. ‘‘I’d watched them fall ill and survive through it,’’ says the 47-year-old.

A clean living workaholic, Kakar says that his chances of getting the disease were so high that he’s just glad it was his colon that got affected. ‘‘There’s a lot worse. At least with the colon, you can just remove it.’’

It wasn’t as easy for his family though. Kakar’s parents, he says, felt responsible for his condition. ‘‘You spend the time focussed on just getting through it, but everyone else focuses on the anxiety and dread.’’

When the responsibility falls on the patient’s shoulders, guilt comes full force. Kumar’s stage four lung cancer was the result of his nearly 50-sticks-a-day smoking habit over 35 years.

‘‘You look at your friends who smoke and wonder what it is that separates you from them. Why cancer chose you,’’ he says. It wasn’t as though he didn’t know the dangers or that he didn’t try to quit. He had many times, always unsuccessfully. Walking out of the doctor’s office the day he was diagnosed, Kumar’s tobacco appetite simply disappeared. ‘‘That day the craving just died,’’ he says.

But when your very existence is in jeopardy, guilt ought to be in short supply, they insist. ‘‘There’s no point thinking about what will happen because you have no control over it,’’ says Naik, who wrote a will within a month of his diagnosis. What one does have control over is attitude.

Bhojwani and Kumar took that outlook through and out of their illness. Bhojwani has formed the Women’s Cancer Initiative, an outfit for cancer research and public education. Every year, she combines three of her greatest assets—friends, clout and party skills—to raise funds. Kumar has a third book on the way and is planning a number of short films on the subject (adman Prahlad Kakkar has promised to shoot free of cost).Keep on going, it’s key. “I get up every day, thankful for what I have, then I get busy,” says Kakar. There’s a lesson and hope for survival within that.