10-year-old Sondip Ghosh has been undergoing treatment at Kolkata’s Tata Medical Centre since July 2022 for leukaemia. As the Durga Puja festival approaches, the boy’s parents, who hail from Madhyamgram in North 24 Parganas, were a little worried about how to take their child to see the puja pandals. Doctors have said that Sondip’s immunity is low and he should avoid crowds, his mother Dipanita Ghosh said.
Similarly, 68-year-old Gopal Chandra Pal, who has come from Bangladesh for treatment for throat cancer at the Tata Medical Centre, felt upset when doctors advised he could not return home as his chemotherapy would begin soon.
Both young Sondip and Mr. Pal are staying at Premashraya, a temporary home for a community of about 500 cancer patients and their caregivers in Kolkata’s New Town area, close to the Tata Medical Centre. Premashraya was built by Coal India Limited in 2015 and is run by Tata Medical Centre since then. The people behind Premashraya decided its residents should not feel left out of Puja festivities.
