Every Mother Visits But Mine
I was used to the sounds of closed wards: patients singing songs, asking for money, muttering to themselves, talking to invisible friends, or screaming desperately for some delusional imaginary threat. At times, there was only silence—especially while I sat in a modest room, less a lab and more a waiting lounge, with a blue board above the single entrance that read: “Clinical Psychology Lab.” It was a place where I’d often sit with my fellow trainees, surrounded by wooden boxes that cased IQ assessments, Rorschach cards, and MMPI proformas stored in almirahs behind dull, dusty glass. But that day I heard a voice that was unlike anything I had heard before.
At first, I thought it was a patient or maybe it was an attendant. Possibly raising his voice as the waiting line was too long outside the small therapy rooms lined together each housing a worn-out wooden chair, a pink plastic stool stained with white paint, and a once-padded visitor’s chair whose sunken padding now held the shape of too many anxious bodies. The paint on the walls of the room chipped, the silence thick, and the air echoed with the sound of someone trying quietly, desperately, to be understood, this was the place where my fellow M. Phil trainees conducted their sessions. Or maybe someone was complaining to the trainees, frustrated by not understanding what was taking so long inside. After all, the role of a clinical psychologist—just like many aspects of mental healthcare—still isn’t clearly understood or comprehended by many.
But no, it wasn’t that. The voice was different. It became clearer, louder, and closer. It was the sound of a woman who was praying, giving duas; not in panic or confusion like I was used to hearing from the patients, but this time it was with intention and rhythm. I grew curious.
I stood up from my seat and walked out of the psychology lab. I saw an old lady, possibly in her late 70s. Her wrinkled face, her gait, and her silver hair all bore witness to the years she had endured. Her presence was that of a stereotypical Kashmiri woman: frail with a traditional headscarf—a daej covering her small head which was tied in a knot behind her head. Out of curiosity, I followed her and saw her passing through the green gate that was just left of the lab, perhaps some twenty steps away. The metal gate painted green led to the male and female closed wards. It was not just a metal gate painted green, but a rusting barrier that split the hospital’s geography separating the forgotten, the unwell from the ordinary. I had walked past it countless times. But that day, I watched it with new eyes. I watched her cross the gate walking slowly - frail, limping, but resolute. Her lips uttered duas for every patient there in the closed wards. She walked with the grace of a pilgrim bearing offerings of love and prayer into a space most people fear to approach.
Just across the green gate lay a garden, fenced with green grills, where two women strolled in the afternoon sun. A mesh door stood ahead, its metal web framing the view into the female closed ward. A patient stood at the window, leaning just slightly out, only her head visible watching the world she once belonged to. The caretaking staff greeted her with unexpected softness. I quickly understood why. Her daughter, a patient in the female closed ward, had been complaining to the staff that while other patients were often visited by family, she hadn’t seen her mother in the last 2 months. And today her mother was visiting her, with an explanation: she had fallen off the stairs, hurt her leg, and was put on bed rest for 2 months. There was no drama in her telling—just quiet regret, visible helplessness, and a wish to be close again. The staff seated her in the small garden just outside the mesh gate guarding the closed ward. And suddenly, the door opened.
Her daughter stepped out. Not very tall, short hair; perhaps shaved to avoid lice or to make grooming easier. Her eyes scanned the garden until they landed on her mother. As soon as she saw her mother the daughter ran, the mother opened her arms and they embraced with a force that defied age, illness, and institutional walls. There were tears, unhidden and unashamed.
The mother showed her injured leg like a child, proving she hadn’t been careless with her love—“See, this is why I couldn’t come.” The daughter held her as if she might disappear again. At that moment everything paused for me: illness, diagnoses, and psychiatric labels all got stripped off in that singular act of reunion.
At that moment, I was reminded of what Levinas calls the “Face of the Other”. I felt the weight of what he meant. I wasn’t just seeing it with my mind, it was something I felt deeply. Standing there, I felt I was no longer simply a witness, I had been summoned possibly by some divine providence, by her face, her longing, her pain. It didn’t ask to be studied or explained, it simply asked for my presence It demanded I see her not as a case or a condition, but as a person, as a daughter who missed her mother, and a mother who came limping through pain just to be held.
Levinas pointed out that the face of the Other calls us to responsibility—not out of fear, but out of the sheer fact of their vulnerability. And in the space where diagnoses hung heavier than names, two faces met.
My curiosity didn’t stop there and I later learned that the story behind her getting institutionalized was far more complicated and painful than I had imagined. A history difficult to hold, almost impossible to tell. Yet, even in such disrupted lives, moments of connection still emerge maybe brief, imperfect, but real. And perhaps, that is what makes them all the more human.
That day, the therapist in me learned that behind those locked doors, life does not pause, longing does not wither, and love does not decay. Sometimes, on rare afternoons, the gate opens just enough for us to pass through, and the barriers dissolve, uniting those who wait and those who visit.
Not every patient gets a visitor. Some wait forever, some forget to wait. But this daughter remembered to wait and when her mother came, she didn’t walk with excuses.
She walked with prayer, love, and a limp.
Naqeeb Roufi is an MPhil Clinical Psychology trainee at the Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences – Kashmir (IMHANS-K). He writes about mental health, human relationships, and the unseen emotional realities inside psychiatric institutions.
