“Mama why am I suffering so much?” he asks. My sister replies, “Because you are the bravest of the brave.” I am sure there are plenty of other conversations that this mother-son duo share in that hospital room where the doctors are constantly monitoring my 12-year old nephew fighting a battle with a demonic disease called HLH. I get a few glimpses into their conversation on days when my sister is free to talk. The heaviness of her breath, the pause, the tone and texture of her voice is so embedded with this inexplicable grief that it makes me want to liberate into a howl. But I hear myself lying and telling her ‘it’s not the time to be sentimental, stay strong, keep pepping him up and keep feeding him’. I can say this much: I feel pain to the bone and I wish nobody, not even my worst enemy, suffers from ill health. At other times sick of the nurses and doctors fiddling with his veins, he angrily tells my sister, “You just keep looking at me, you don’t tell them anything.” Right n