"From the past"

The three days old flowers on the bedside had started to dry. Even though I kept telling the nurse everyday to water them properly, and she did, I continued to contemplate if had she been a little more careful about the time and the quantity of water, they could last one more day. The day was coming to an end and there was no sign of him today as well.

I tried to pull the curtains from the window and saw that the moon was rising and sun was setting at the same time. The sky was patched, orange, blue and bright red, all mixed up to create as if the colour of gloom, the colour of my empty heart. My eyes were stuck at the door, I almost imagined him knocking at the door and startling me with another white rose bouquet in his hands, hiding his angelic wrinkled face under the disappearing grey hair mound. In the last two days and today, every time someone opens the door, I trace the corridor outside to look for him, find him somewhere, but the door gradually shuts leaving me feel more paralytic than ever. My longing to stand up on my feet and run down the hospital stairs in my gown grows humungous, but I know that I can’t get up, and all I can do is to wait., wait endlessly till he really does come and knocks me out of my heart, sweep me off my feet and love me like no one does.

“Aunty, it’s time for your physiotherapy, the physiotherapist is here.” the nurse said to me. It was a good hospital, and the caretakers were good too. But they did not belong to me. There were many patients in the hospital, and quite a few in its Neuro ward. The nurses and the wardboys worked like machines with no tangible emotions, their faces made of stone, expressionless even at the sight of blood and they react in the most inhuman way when they see someone in pain. I asked the nurse about him yet another time to get the same answer and I bit my pillow cover to vent my frustration and misery.

“May be he has forgotten me, or he had some work. Didn’t he tell me he would be travelling this whole week?” I was trying to remember my last conversation with him. He had come three days earlier with the usual white rose bouquet. He sat with me the whole day and we talked about life, my disease and the treatment. We even joked about the MS (Medical Superintendent) and his long white beard. He told me how he was doing all his housework by himself because his wife wasn’t keeping too well health-wise and his housemaid had ditched him. “May be there was too much work today, and he is too tired to come. After all he is an old man too, like me and age gets on to you no matter how fit you try to keep yourself.”

I didn’t know his name, neither what he did nor how he knew me. As far as I can sketch my whole existence, I become more conscious of the fact that he existed much before me and he was there by my side from the very beginning. I remember last week we talked about love. I don’t remember falling in love with anyone in my life. I have always been lonely and ill. He told me how love can make you a weak and strong person at the same time. “Meera”, he had said calling out my name aloud that day. “There is a trade off between loving someone and loving yourself. The heart has only this much love to give, and your mind gets to decide who you want to love more.” Today when I was trying to get up from the bed, I knew it would hurt my whole body but I was trying to lift myself so that I could see outside the window for his sign. “Is this love?” I wondered. We talked about promises. He told me “Meera, when you make a promise to someone, make sure you say it loud enough so that it resounds in your head for a long time. I have promised to love my wife till death do us apart and it resounds in my head all the time.” He had asked me if I had ever been in love and I had said no. I think I lied.

It was 10 pm now and was quite late by hospital standards. The nurse had arrived to give me the sedative. I asked her once more, “just in case”, to get the same answer yet again. “Let him be, he doesn’t deserve so much of a thought” I decided. The nurse had put out the light and it was dark again. Nothing close to how dark I felt. I was angry, upset, helpless, and had succumbed to the feeling of love that I had for him in my heart. “He lied when he said love makes you stronger, it makes you weak and so fragile.” In all this time in the hospital, lying on the same bed, feeling powerless, depending on other people for even my basic needs, I have never felt as feeble as my heart was making me feel that moment.  “I DON’T LOVE HIM”, I said it aloud for it to resound in my ears, just like he had told me. I don’t remember when I slept.

....

The sleep was quick. The night passed by earlier than I thought it would. There were people outside my door talking about someone. Yet another old patient, who had succumbed to his senile weakness, may be. The nurse wasn’t around so I shouted out to a young guy outside my door and called him inside. He seemed to be a new face in the hospital, possibly an intern.

“An old man was admitted two days ago when his cancer was diagnosed at a very late stage. There was no way he could be saved. ” He told me. “The sad part is that his wife is admitted in the same hospital. She is suffering from Alzheimer’s.”

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