World YWCA Day 2019: Women changing power structures

43-year-old Mishta is settled in Bangalore after living in many cities - born and brought up in Calcutta, school years in Bombay and college years in Delhi. After a First Class First from Delhi College of Art, she completed a Masters in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins School of Design in London, with two scholarships from the Sarabhai Foundation in Ahmedabad and the Aga Khan Foundation.

She has been married for 13 years to her husband who she met serendipitously at Bangalore’s iconic Koshy’s Restaurant and proceeded to fall in love with, over a year-long Tai Chi class they were taking together. Her husband runs a user experience design agency called Clay.

They live in a home they designed to resemble Portuguese architecture, to pay homage to their love of Goa and the sea. They stay with their beloved six-year-old daughter and their one-year-old Persian cat Smudge.

Mishta designs books, posters, logos and crafts miniature garden landscapes for her newly-launched Drawater Gardens. She is currently trying to teach herself Latin and to source fashionable walking sticks.

Do you work exclusively from home? Why did you shift from an office job and how has it worked out?

I work exclusively from home and have been for many years. I have worked in offices from the start of my career in advertising and publishing in 2000 till I got married in 2006. I built my own practice in graphic design from home since then, working with clients such as Art India Magazine, India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore Club, Iskcon, and various publishing Houses such as Hachette, Orient Blackswan, Amaryllis, Random House, Oxford among others.

How much has your peripheral neuropathy affected you in terms of not just the physical and mental pain you have to endure, but as a parent with a young child?

Peripheral Neuropathy is a condition that causes nerves to die starting from the edges of one’s body. This condition developed for me after my pregnancy so I have not been free of it even for a day since having my daughter.

The pain is intense and continuous. It does not stop even for a moment. I am currently afflicted in my feet and my hands. I use a walking stick to help me and walking hurts very much. I always wear socks and am beginning to wear gloves too, as nerve damage makes the skin terribly sensitive to even air. My feet feel like they are on fire most of the time. I take a cocktail of medication which has severe side effects too, so I have to struggle between the relief the medication gives me vs the fall-out of taking them. Side effects range from nausea, to insomnia, to high blood pressure, to complete loss of appetite, to loss of taste buds in my tongue and degradation of teeth to short-term memory loss to abject sleepiness and brain fog. It’s a long list! There is also the constant fear of overdosing which I have to guard against. I have ended up in hospital and ICU more than I would have liked.

Mentally it has been a very hard journey and still is. It is very easy to tip over into darker thoughts that question your usefulness or value to yourself, your family and to society, with such a condition. I am overwhelmingly tired too, of the battle I have to face every single day to combat the pain.

My six-year-old and I are also working towards striking a balance between what I can give her and do with her, and what I cannot.

She understands as she gets older that I cannot run, I cannot play physical games or take her to the park, that I tire easily, that swimming too, that we both love, I will slowly give up. She sees me using my walking stick, she massages my feet or fingers sometimes. She’s learning to open the front door so that I don’t have to struggle down a flight of stairs to do so. Her grandmother drives her to her ballet and art classes and birthday party invitations.

But the greatest pain has been watching her develop anxiety about me. After once unfortunately watching me collapse and be carted off to hospital, she spent most of a year refusing to leave my side and go to school. She worried that ‘mummy would go away’. Though her anxiety is better controlled now, it has been the hardest fall-out for me to watch her struggle through her fear of losing me to illness. I have been told that I will ultimately end up in a wheelchair permanently someday, and I hope that I can prepare my daughter to be strong enough to accept it.

Tell us something about Drawater (how did the name originate?) Gardens, and where people can buy your work.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa is a painting by a Japanese artist called Hokusai. It is one of my husband’s favourite pieces of art and when I invited him to help me come up with a name for my fledgling practice, he coined the term Drawater, ie the powerful act of drawing water in motion that stands for strength, decisiveness, control, fluidity and beauty.

Drawater Gardens is an offshoot of my design practice Drawater, which I am less and less able to do nowadays as holding the mouse and controlling it to work on the computer screen has become a struggle due to the nerve damage.

The Gardens are miniature artistic landscapes, where I have combined my love for all things green, stories, painting, craft, fantasy, colour and even movies, into engaging tiny worlds. Each piece is carefully handcrafted with found objects and curated elements, a tiny microcosm that will give the onlooker a small slice of peace, happiness and tranquility. Each piece has a story tucked into the many details. You can find your own story too, a special spot you visited as a child, a memory or even a place that exists only in your imagination. Drawater Gardens makes it real.

I worked for over two months creating about 50 pieces. They were launched on 5^th April at Timri, a lovely store in Indiranagar, Bangalore, and ran for three days to a great response. Sales and viewing continues on the Drawater Gardens Facebook group page, where new Gardens are uploaded into separate photo albums. If one of them resonates with you, do write to drawater.design@gmail.com or whatsapp 9900966946 and I’ll have it sent across anywhere in India.

Link - https://www.facebook.com/drawatergardens

What was the genesis of Women’s Wellness and how has it affected your interactions, and perceptions?

Women’s Wellness is an online Facebook group of roughly 3,000 plus women from practically every corner of the world. I started this group as a response to my experiences with getting my Peripheral Neuropathy diagnosed and treated. I realized that being a woman of a certain age makes you a target for certain clichés which are very difficult for a lot of male doctors especially to circumvent.

I was repeatedly told that my pain was not real, that it was in my head, that what I was suffering from, was depression or even simply housewifely ennui. I was pressured into taking anti-depressants regularly and my need/asking for painkillers was humiliatingly termed an addiction. After many years of stumbling around and losing faith steadily in doctors, I chanced upon a Facebook group that helped me with diagnosis and even treatment.

I decided then that I wanted to bring women together, to empower them best I could, to understand medical terminology and conditions, so that we are not at the mercy of doctors who would tend to lump us into generic categories or take pain less seriously than they should. The group speaks to women in countries where they do not have access to strong medical attentiveness or even a society that is open to discussion regarding our bodies. Women from Pakistan, Africa, India, South America, Arab Nation, Korea, Malaysia, Bangladesh are all reading what I post and educating themselves about what can go wrong in their bodies, familiarizing themselves with basic medicines, re-creating home remedies from different countries, and learning to get confident enough to ask questions of their caregivers, to become aware of side effects, and not accept diagnosis or treatment as face value.

The group also emphasizes that men are not allowed, this being in the title itself. This tag has been hugely successful, because it means women have a safe space here to talk about what happens in their bodies without any pressure to look or sound great and they are reassured that only other women are listening and can understand.

My greatest happiness from this group has been that I now perform a unique function of being able to connect women who share similar conditions/illnesses from across the world, and they can discuss treatment plans, options, or even mental states, a channel they would not ordinarily have access to.

Last year I held a day-long Wellness Festival called The Pink of Health Festival, held at the Bose Compound in Bangalore. It included seven to eight professionals who spoke about and gave demonstrations on yoga, diet, local food, plants, meditation and even courage. There were lovely stalls selling jewelry, soaps, jams, butters, honey and healthy food. There were foot massages and nail art, body composition machines and complimentary tisanes. It was a lovely day supported by friends and colleagues and visited by Bangalore’s women. I hope to revisit and host another day like that again soon, health permitting.

My dream is to take this message, that as a woman, you are worthy of medical care and attention to the best of a caregiver/ practitioner’s ability, and that you have the right to be believed, to all parts of the world. As a woman you are worthy, period.

Social Media & Portfolio: https://www.facebook.com/drawater/