I step out
the waiting room and out the building housing the Intensive Care Unit. It is dark already and there is a chill to
the air. I have been at the hospital for
nearly eleven hours and should be tired but I am not. What I feel instead is gratefulness for the
cool Pune night, the trees the hospital has planted in its compound, and the
readily accessible tea at the canteen. I
get myself a cup and settle down on a broad platform built alongside the
building. Before me there is a man – so
tall, at least a couple inches above six feet – walking up and down, speaking
into his phone, murmuring. I cannot make
out his words but I can see he is distressed.
I half drink my tea, half watch him.
In the ICU
my aunt, who is the centre of my cousin’s existence, is fighting to survive.
I worry for
my cousin. Away from home I miss my
son. Only eleven. The centre of my life. How fragile everything is.
The man
finishes pacing up and down and sits down beside me on the platform. He is clearly agitated and fidgets constantly
with his phone, and I ask him what has brought him here.
He tells me
his father is fighting lung cancer. “He
never smoked,” he says with that touch of bewilderment one feels before an
unjust world. But it is also the
bewilderment of a child facing his parent’s mortality. The doctors have told him there is no
hope. “How can there be no hope?” he
asks. “What will my mother do?” he
wonders at another point. “I have a
family, a job, a little kid.”
I nod. What will his mother do without her husband?
Without a child dependent on her?
“And she
will have to deal with my sister alone,” he adds.
I hold on
to the last statement and try to make light of the situation. “Is your sister a handful then?” I ask,
smiling.
“Well,” he
says, “she is dead. You can’t get more
handful than that.”
I
recoil. I don’t want to be part of this
conversation. In this world of saline
drips and ventilators, where regular rules hold no sway, where mothers survive
daughters and non-smokers die of cancers in the lung.
In the
waiting room there is another mother who has been coming in every morning for
three months. Her son, twenty seven
years old, was hit by a motorcycle one night and brought into the hospital. In the hospital his brain had to be removed
from his skull and placed beside him.
Now they are waiting for the swelling in the brain to subside so they
can replace the brain in his body. I did
not know such procedures were possible.
It seems like something out of the movies.
“She was
nine years older than me,” the tall man says, speaking of his sister. “She used to come to my school for open days
and people would tell me my mother was so young and cool. I hated revealing to them that she was my sister. I liked it that they thought I had a cool,
young mom. And she was my mother too, in
many ways. She liked taking care of
me. Then she went off to Bangalore for
some job she landed and there she met a boy.”
I don’t
like stories where so much rests on sentences like – and there she met a boy --
where love is the cause of death and yet I am curious.
“They fell
in love,” he goes on, predictably. “The boy was five years younger than didi
and my parents did not like him at all.
My sister wanted to get married but my parents would not allow that. They thought he was too much of a college
kid, young and irresponsible. No real
job, no real earning. They wanted
someone older for didi.”
Oh my god,
I think, did she kill herself because she was older than her boyfriend? Is this how we will keep stumbling and stumbling
and stumbling.
But of
course, nothing is ever as simple or predictable as that.
“Then it
was February,” he carries on, “and didi came down with a fever.” As though fevers are fruits of
Februaries. “She took some pills and the
fever went away. And then it came again,
and went away. She did not want to
return to Pune because of my parents.
She really wanted to be with that boy.
But the fever kept coming and going, and she did not tell us because she
did not want to return to Pune. She did not
want my parents to come to Bangalore either.
And then from February it was almost the end of June.”
I have been
in the hospital for a few days now, relieving my cousin so she can balance her
job with her care for her mother. The
other day a family of Sikhs came into the waiting room. They were a grave lot, sophisticated in their
silence. Then a young woman who was with
them broke down into uncontrollable sobs.
It was clear to everyone in the room that she hated crying in public and
yet she could not help herself. She
cried in a way that reminded me of blades and nails. Sharp objects stuck in her throat. We found out later that her husband had died
of Swine Flu. It sounded so
innocuous. Swine Flu. To die of something that sounds like a curse
word.
“She called
us in the third week of June to tell us she was getting married on the 2nd
of July,” the man goes on, as though he must talk to someone. “That was all. Nothing about the fever that came and went
the entire time. My father refused to talk
to didi, but my mother and I went to Bangalore for the wedding. When we met didi, my mother immediately
sensed something was wrong.”
“What about
you? Did you think something was wrong?”
I ask.
He shakes
his head to indicate he no longer knew what he had thought then. “She was thinner,” he says, “but girls are
always trying to get thinner and my didi was a girl who liked to look
good. I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought. But my mother knew and she asked the
boy. The boy shrugged. She gets fever
sometimes, he said, but there was no fever that particular day and so nothing
at all to point at.
“A day
after the wedding, the fever returned with a vengeance. One moment it was not there and the next
second didi was high and burning. Mother
rushed her to the hospital and the doctors said she had Dengue. Nobody said anything about the previous
fevers. We did not know so we had
nothing to say. It was only later that
we found out, after didi’s husband told us about it. She died on the 31st of July. Exactly a year ago, not even a month into her
marriage.”
He is quiet
for a while after that.
I have been
married twelve years and it feels like a month.
A month must have been a blip.
“You know,”
he says, “it is very difficult to live the life of a single child after having
had a sibling for so long. I don’t know
how I feel about myself. I don’t know if
now I am supposed to introduce myself as a single child or a younger brother.”
I ask him
if he would like a cup of tea and he nods.
We get off the platform and walk towards the canteen. “Cancer is a knot in you,” he says, “a knot
that grows and grows. My father is dying
of that knot, and I and my mother are the outsiders, unable to do anything.”
We drink
tea in the canteen. There is a bulb on a
wall behind him and its light hits his back and gives him a hazy look.
When we
return from the canteen he says he wants to check on his father. “Thanks for the company,” he says, but
continues standing before the door that will take us to the waiting room. “I
think my mother envies my father. She
wishes it was she who was dying and not my father,” he says. “She cannot see me anymore. She sees only my sister and my father.” Then he goes in, wearily.
I stay
behind for some more time. When I
finally return to the waiting room, it is crowded, like a railway platform,
with beddings and bags pushed under solid, no-nonsense chairs screwed to the
floor, and I have lost my space. I squat
down on the floor amidst other people, conscious that we are all waiting to
hear about that particular person we love, now lying frail on a bed allotted to
her or him behind the double door guarded by a man whose power to deny us
access to the loved one is formidable.
In this
room that belongs neither to the world of health nor the world of sickness,
this limbo, I pray for my cousin. For my
aunt. For all of us marooned on this
desolate island, waiting to see if there is a way out.
If we were
all boats in an ocean, my aunt in the ICU would be a paper boat – weightless
and sinless -- but we are not boats, and
her frailty sits heavily within me.
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