So, twice every week, Mehta’s Babulnath studio fills up with special children, some suffering from diseases as debilitating as cancer, others like 13-year-old Neeta who suffers from epilepsy and under developed motor skills. “She could not even talk but after coming to the studio alongside her sessions at the special school, she has started expressing herself more clearly and some vowels have began to form from her lips,” says a jubilant Mehta.

The introverted 11-year-old Rhea Mehta has been coming to the studio for five years.

“She had a creative block but now she is one of my best students,” says Mehta.

Then there is three-year-old Rhea Sawant, who was a hyperactive child who initially could not sit through a single class. “She has calmed down and does some amazing paintings,” adds the 43-year-old Mehta, who has been discovering the healing powers of colour and the joys of working with children.

“Usually I don’t tell them it is therapy. I just play some music that is calming and get them to open up through using colour; they find a connection inside themselves. I don’t insist on a perfect landscape, the grass need not be green or the sun yellow—it’s all about free-wheeling and coming out with whatever you have inside you,” says Mehta who has done workshops for children undergoing chemotherapy at the Tata Memorial Hospital. She also regularly works with street children at Kala Ghoda.

Her own paintings also adorn the walls of the meditation centre at Shirdi Saibaba temple, among others.

Mehta has also had several exhibitions at Mumbai, Pune and Delhi, shifting from realistic works to landscapes and then to the elements like fire, water, air, earth and space.

She captures a slice of these cosmic forces to heal with colour and music therapy, her art always imbibing the principles of healing.

For the cancer patients, the idea is mainly to cheer them up. “I never ask them to stop medication or anything, but this assists them and alleviates their pain,” she observes.