Husband Instagrams wife's time with cancer over 10 years

Select posts from Nitesh Mohanty's Instagram account, @nimo_obscura: Diya rests in the morning, scenes from Tata Memorial Hospital including a reflection of Nitesh and Diya, and cut fruit (which bore the caption ‘Portrait of a couple')

The longest 30 seconds of Nitesh Mohanty's life was on the morning of January 15, 2007. His wife, Diya, who was sleeping next to him, began shaking suddenly and violently. In the days to come, Diya, then a head designer with Spaces by Welspun, and Nitesh would be least prepared to learn that a brief fit would herald the presence of a low grade astrocytoma. With those 30 seconds, cancer would no longer be an acquaintance but a friend who had overstayed his welcome.

Teaching an elective on time travel and memory at Ahmedabad's National Institute of Design, Nitesh asked his students that, if they could go back in time and change one moment, what would that be. He asks the question of himself now. "If I could change those 30 seconds of her first epileptic attack, I would do that. Ten years later, I am still living those 30 seconds," he says.

The evening light is slowly fading at Nitesh and Diya's apartment in Borivli. A large print of Gustav Klimt's The Kiss hangs shyly beside a window that offers a generous view of Sanjay Gandhi National Park's rolling hills. And, unless Nitesh told you so, it would be hard to guess that behind one of the closed bedroom doors, Diya rests in the company of a friend, Sonal Choudhury, and a house help, Kanta Ekka. Save for the whir of the fan and our chatting, here is a quiet rarely found in Mumbai.

From a low table in front of us, Nitesh, a visual artist and visiting faculty member, picks up a copy of Susan Sontag's On Photography, and he quotes verbatim, "All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability."

There is a reason why he brings up these lines. If the act of taking a photograph means freezing moments, as the present becomes past, then it couldn't be truer than in this couple's life. On Instagram, Nitesh runs an account under the handle @nimo_obscura, where he chronicles the full sum of the experience of cancer, as both devoted husband and helpless onlooker. The frames portray hospital wards, lunches and paraphernalia, and companions such as Sonal and Kanta. Each post is accompanied by a quote or a line from one of the many books that are arranged like Lego towers in their house.

Chronicling life
"Instagram is my soliloquy," Nitesh says.

In 2011, when Diya had a relapse of cancer and before the rise of Instagram, a photojournalist friend asked Nitesh if he was photographing Diya. "I said I wasn't and wondered what she meant. She said, 'Hold each day as it passes by.' That made me realise that there may be something to it, that, although this is a futile attempt, I could hold on to each passing moment," he says.

That year, Nitesh took to a DSLR. Between multiple appointments with doctors, the lines between spaces started to blur. Home and hospital - there seemed to be no difference. If, as a young couple, they had dreamt of an itinerant life, the truth now was that the longest travel that happened was between Tata Memorial Hospital in Parel and home in Borivli.

"I started spending a lot of time at home. Once you start doing that, you become aware of every little thing. I make salads for Diya and notice the sunlight falling on the kitchen slab," he says. The DSLR shots didn't only feature his wife, but odd details, like olive oil and whirring fans. He showed prints to Diya, who, like many of us could be, was confused by the abstractions. "Where were these shot?" she had asked him. "Nowhere," had been his reply. "People think they have to travel to various destinations to shoot. My life is home bound for the most part and, that way, you start paying attention to minute details and the rhythm of life, even in interior spaces. The sound of the azaan, the chirping of sparrows or the flit of the corner of a curtain - you know what happens at what point of the day," he says.

These images, titled Nowhere, made their way into a curation by Akshay Mahajan for FOCUS Photography Festival in 2015 and were shown at The Hive, a now-shuttered arts and technology venue. However, when a second-hand, battered iPhone 5 came into his life as a gift, Nitesh took to Instagram. "I find Instagram as a way to escape. It is my way of making sense of what's going on. Diya and I have been trying to make sense of what's been happening to us for the last decade," he explains.

On Instagram, Nitesh's feed is a mix of several emotions - hope, surrender, grief - borne out of mixed states - exhaustion, monotony, anxiety, and, love. The images are snapshots of things - such as cut fruit or strands of hair - as much as Diya herself. If there is a word that would exemplify the condition, it would be "waiting" - a state of limbo, a permanent transience, a characteristic feature of those patients and families at Tata Memorial Hospital. "Tata Memorial Hospital wasn't new to me. My grandmother and mother both had cancer, so the space didn't intimidate me," says Nitesh.

However, the truth about cancer is revealed only when you talk to Nitesh. His Instagram feed hides it behind smoke and mirrors. You get just a hint of what's happening, but not quite the full image. Reflections, superimpositions, cryptic descriptions - the brutal reality about cancer, and what it can do to your life, is not put out there.

A friend tells Nitesh that his photographs remind her of Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. "My work is nothing like Christopher Doyle's cinematography for In the Mood for Love, but I get what my friend is saying. I don't want people to know me. If they knew me, they would sympathise rather than look at my posts from a distance. The distance is important," he says. Which is why Diya is both beloved and metaphor in Nitesh's series. The pictures of her are fuzzy, a figure in the shadows.
Is the composition of the photos a deliberate attempt to hide? Not deliberate, says Nitesh. Alluding to his Instagram handle - the word 'obscura' should tell you something - Nitesh says, "I think the fuzzy pictures are representative of my state of mind. I wasn't this person 10 years ago. I can't recognise myself anymore. I will be true and say that since that moment and now, I haven't remained the same person."

A personal account
For a belligerent Internet generation and its performance of positivity on social media, Nitesh's feed should come as a surprise. If we are used to seeing posts of weddings, engagements, exotic vacation destinations, births in the family or a new car, then here is an account of grief. This memorialising is not melodramatic, but poignant.

Nitesh is aware that the posts are for public consumption, and, while the question of sharing personal grief with strangers often arises, he has made his peace with it. "I was once seated next to a young girl in the metro. She was scrolling through my feed and double tapping the posts, hearting them. She had no clue that I was sitting right next to her and it was my account. It hit me then that these are random people. But, I do think, from the feedback I get, that this can be a shared experience," he says.

In October 2016, an MRI scan revealed that Diya had a fast-spreading glioblastoma. While in her last stages, it is a hard question to be faced with - how long is the last stage? In Nitesh's Instagram account, there is a mourning in progress, for the slow but definite passing away of a dream of togetherness. We ask him if this is his ode to Diya. He corrects us. "It is my song of despair. Like Pablo Neruda. Twenty love poems and a song of despair," he says, with a smile.

"Those 30 seconds jolted us. Before that, we were like any other couple. After 2007, we were forced to reassess what we wanted. However, this is not the way you want to learn a lesson about life," he says. Cancer is their friend, says Nitesh, which has made them more attuned to the details of the everyday, a quality that every photographer would be paralysed without. It is why Nitesh says he can wait patiently for crazed sparrows to stay still as he shoots them. It is why he can watch sunlight fall on Diya's shoulders every morning as she sits by the window. It is why he can predict when gulmohurs and will give way to the flames of the forest at SGNP.

"I had to wait for four days after I fell in love with her before we could speak to each other," he says, recalling their first day as classmates at Sir JJ School of Art in 1992. Nitesh was 18 and Diya 17. They found out that they both lived in Borivli. As an aside, Nitesh says, "These days, with the Tinder generation, we quote Rumi and talk a lot about love but we don't do it enough. Love was very different in the 1990s. You fell in love and you thought you would be together forever. Diya never had to ask me if I would marry her. It was understood I would. To call Diya my muse is to reduce what I feel for her."