Following interview of Bahen Shirin Tyebbhoy, Calcutta, by Mudar Patherya

My sister Tasneem was 35 with two young children when the doctors conducted a test on her and came up with the conclusion: leukemia.

Leukemia. If you had to find a synonym for this disease in the mid-Seventies, then the nearest you came to was ‘hopeless’. It indicated a painful journey towards an inevitable end. It indicated hospital visit after visit. It indicated needles and pipes thrust into a body. It indicated rising expenses. It indicated declining health.

So when we heard the dreaded L word, we wept. It is still relatively easy to reconcile with the death of an elder, but someone your age? Your sibling? Especially when you are in your thirties?

So as was usual – actually, still is – in the Surat of the mid-Seventies, all problems, big or small, ended up at the doorstep of the Dai of our times. Maulana patiently heard the arzis; he looked up when my brother and brother-in-law relayed what the doctors had said about ‘ummeed natthi’; he quietly said what proved to the most defining observation on the terminal illness “Doctor kai khuda natthi’.

The result was that Huzurala gave them shifaa nu paani with saakar with the insistence that “keh jo ke roj paani le. Ek bhi divas no naagho na thaai!” and each time they would go for qadambosi, Huzurala would ask “Tabiyat kem chhey havey? Paani to roj layi chhey ne?”

Two years of treatment passed. Finally, the doctors said that if my sister was to be saved, she would need a transfusion. Their recommendation: some of the best clinics in America. Since this was turning out way too expensive so we submitted an arzi to Huzurala. He asked us to arrange everything first and then return. So we decided on the next preferred alternative – London. When we went to Huzurala for permission, the jawaab was immediate: “Raza chhey!”

 All sisters went to Mumbai to get our bone marrows checked for compatibility; mine was the nearest, so I accompanied Tasneem to London for her treatment. The doctors gave here a 50% chance of surviving; some doctors said the treatment could well be traumatic as Tasneem would lose her hair in addition to other side-effects; some said that the pain itself would be so debilitating that she would be completely drained midway. Tasneem was undaunted; if we have Huzurala’s dua, she said, then why worry.


The treatment began. Tasneem devised a way of secreting the shifa nu paani and saakar in the sterilization room so that she could have it everyday. And each time she was wheeled out of the radiation room she would be smiling.

 The result is that Tasneem survived and from what at one point seemed a hopeless case, she is still living with us today, has grandchildren and has lived the last 30-odd years of her life with relatively no medication.

 And the turning point was when Huzurala looked my brother and brother in law in the eye and said, “Doctor kai khuda natthi!’

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