It was in 2008 that I first noticed it. My husband and I were visiting my mother in Chennai. My mother (Amma), my husband and I were in a movie hall. Watching a Rajini film (Sivaji the Boss) in Chennai, a rather festive affair, turned out to be one of the most devastating memories of my life. While the on-screen hero was playing out an indefatigable character, Amma, my real-life hero, suddenly froze in her seat. Confused at first, seeing her unable to respond, we scrambled about for the next twenty minutes and had to carry her out of the hall. I did not have the faintest idea at the time that this brief incident would eventually turn into a drawn-out and emotionally exhaustive experience.
What followed was a series of frantic visits to several medical experts, most of them in vain as the right diagnosis seemed increasingly distant. The tremors in her hands became more prominent, more frequent. It was clear, however, that it was not related to age. By the time we arrived at the diagnosis that she was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease – what we hitherto believed to be a western disease – it had reached an advanced stage. It did not particularly help that we knew very little about the progressive condition, what it meant for Amma and what it meant for us. The ignorance, coupled with denial, left us largely unprepared for what lay ahead of us.