Till the Last Breath . . . (23 page)

‘Don’t whatever me,’ she said angrily.

‘Whatever.’

They both laughed. They lay there, talking about anything that wouldn’t remind them of what was going to happen to them. The clock touched five. There was a shuffle of feet near the door. With Pihu’s parents, the ward boys and Arman walked inside. Seeing her mother in tears, her tears came back, too. Only momentarily. They pulled the curtain between Dushyant and her and she could see Dushyant’s horror-struck face hidden behind the curtain.

‘Do we really have to do it now? You said seven, not five,’ her father begged.

Arman’s head hung low. He said in a soft yet assertive voice, ‘I know, Uncle, but the surgery room will be inspected later, early tomorrow morning. We have to schedule the surgery right now or we won’t be able to. Please try to understand.’

‘But … but …’ Her mother wailed and threw herself at Pihu, who felt helpless and a little scared. ‘Don’t take her, she is fine!’ she shrieked.

‘I will be okay,’ Pihu whispered, with tears in her eyes.

Her father, too, joined Pihu in her bed and both of them hugged her. There was no stopping the tears now. Arman cowered in a corner and he looked scared, too. She waited for Arman to look at her and when he did, she smiled meekly at him as if to say,
I am ready
.

The ward boys shifted her to the stretcher and slowly started to roll her away, her parents still clutching both of her hands and walking beside her. She took a deep breath and braced
herself for what was going to follow. She had led a good life. She had no regrets. As she passed Dushyant, she noticed the shock on his face, too. She smiled at him and moved her lips to say, ‘I will be back. Don’t worry.’

Dushyant smiled at her and the stretcher was out of the room. Her parents said a million things to her about how much they loved her. She closed her eyes and thought how superfluous and unnecessary those words were.
She knew
. If she died, their loss would be far greater than hers. She knew they knew she loved them.

As Arman bent over, pretending to help the ward boys roll the stretcher into the lift, he whispered in her ears,
‘I love you, my beautiful wife.’

Time had slowed down. It had been four hours now. Dushyant had spent a major chunk of his time in the hospital not talking to the girl on the other bed, but he felt lonely without her on the bed beside him. He missed her cherubic, irritating presence. The empty bed and the perfectly ironed bedsheet, which had been changed since she last slept on it, scared him.

His mother had dozed off on the bed after some high-intensity sobbing and his father had been looking at Dushyant as if to ask if he was forgiven—or if he had driven Dushyant to the condition he was in right now. Or so Dushyant thought.

Constantly, his eyes went to the bed alongside his and he could still see all the books scattered around, the crutches Pihu had used when he first saw her, the wrapping paper of the gifts her friends got her. There was a crushing sensation in his heart like he had lost something important. No matter how hard he tried to shake off thoughts of Pihu’s pulse dropping to zero, her lifeline flattening out and she breathing her last on the surgery table, he wasn’t able to do so. His own heartbeat slowed down every time he thought of her not being there.

Zarah walked in a little later with an envelope in her hand. Dushyant didn’t think anything of it before she handed it over to him.

‘How’s she?’ Dushyant asked as Zarah started to walk away.

‘It’s still going on. I am too scared to go in and disturb them,’ Zarah said.

‘And what is this?’ he asked pointing to the envelope in his hand.

‘I have no idea,’ she replied curtly. Her mood since the morning hadn’t changed. It seemed as if she was still hurting from what had happened earlier that day. Dushyant would have stopped her from leaving the room but he wasn’t sure himself about what he wanted.

Nervously, he tore off the top of the envelope. There was a slightly crumpled piece of paper inside with something written in a familiar handwriting. He read:

Hey Dushyant,

I hope you are doing well. I have always hoped.

I
am leaving. I would have stayed, but I can’t. It’s my time to go. For the second time and this time it’s because of me. You deserve better. I shouldn’t have come back, but then I couldn’t help it. As I leave, I want to let you know that every moment I had spent with you made me a better person, a better lover, a better daughter and a better sister. I know the world warned me against the obsessive, paranoid, angry guy that you no doubt are, but you’re a lot more than that and they will never know it. I experienced it and I know that any girl who gets to walk into the sunset with you will be the luckiest girl there has ever been.

I lost you the day I left you. I don’t want to go back in time and brood over what happened between us. But what happened is something that I will take to my grave, smiling. It’s time for you to move on, find a new life, find someone who will accept you the way you are, love you for the person you are. And as I see it, that person is around you. You just need to acknowledge it.

I hope you have a good life. I will be thinking of you. I always have. No matter whom I was with.

Love,
Kajal

P.S. I am not disappearing from your life; I don’t think I can do that any more. I am going to London. Call me if you need me. I will always be there. Stop drinking.

As Dushyant finished reading the letter for the second time, he realized two things: though Kajal meant a lot to him and always would, he had paid his dues, and that he had suffered a lot to love her again as insanely as he used to. The sleepless nights he had spent wondering if he still meant anything to her had extracted every bit from him. Loving her was tiring and he didn’t know if he had the strength to go through that again. Even so, the last line brought a smile to his face. She would still be around, be a part of his life, be there when he threw the big parties, and be with him in his heartbreak if he had any. That in itself meant a lot to him.

Maybe he needed someone damaged, like Zarah, and not someone with the perfect life like Kajal. For one thing, he was sure he wasn’t in love with Zarah yet. But it was an infatuation,
and it was growing. She was with him in the worst of times and she had helped him keep his shit together. Who knows where it might lead him? He closed his eyes and fantasized about him asking Zarah out on a date. And he thought about how Pihu was doing in the surgery room. Quite a few hours had passed and, ideally, it should have been ended by now.

He closed his eyes and the monitor showed a flat line.

There were shouts across the corridor.

‘CRASH CART!’ Zarah shouted and two ward boys came rolling in with one. Dushyant’s heart was a flat line, his body had had a violent seizure seconds ago and had now gone limp. His parents were shrieking, wailing, shouting at the top of their lungs, ‘HOW COULD HE …!’, their faces pale and hands flailing wildly.

Zarah rubbed the paddles together, ripped his robe apart and sent an electric shock flying into his heart. Nothing happened. She tried it again. Nothing. And again. Finally, the heart picked up and Dushyant started breathing again in short coughs. All his stats were still low and dipping. Zarah asked the ward boys to shift him to the Intensive Care Unit and rushed out, ignoring the pleas and the shouts of his parents.

‘He needs surgery. NOW!’ Zarah shouted to someone on the phone. Zarah face drooped. There was nothing she could do. There were no matching donors.

We all have our places in this world. I do, too. I, Dushyant, am the rotten apple of the basket. I stay in the basket too long, I tend to ruin everything. That’s my place in the world. That was supposed to be my identity till my last breath. Like the identity of Zarah is to unscrew herself, for Arman it is to do what no one else would, for Kajal it is to try to find what her heart really wants, for Pihu it was to smile and make the world a better place. It’s what defines us.

But that day when I had decided to do three extra shots of vodka and five extra drags and three extra snorts of cocaine and then passed out after a seizure, I didn’t know I would wake up to a new morning and to a new identity. I was in pain, in considerable pain, and there was just one person who still smiled at the rotten assemblage of human tissues that I had become. That person was Pihu. A little girl with the brightest of smiles and the biggest of hearts who didn’t think anyone was bad inside. And for someone like me, who has ten thousand layers of bad before the slightest of good, it meant a lot. What would have happened had I decided to do that one month later? Who knows? I would have died, that’s for sure. But I would have died a bitter, angry guy.
Am I happy now? Will I be happy five years from now? I don’t know. Do I thank her for saving me? Yes. Do I feel good about being saved? Again, I am not sure. Why should I be happy just because I have a few years more to live, why should I be happy just because I have more time with my parents? Why should I be happy because my folks won’t grieve? For Pihu, these questions were the answers. Then why didn’t she get those last few breaths? The extra few years?

As I look at the empty bed next to me and the missing books and the absence of her chirping laughter, I feel the world has permanently become a little darker, a little sadder. All I remember of her are her last words to me, ‘I will be back. It will be okay.’

Well, she lied. I don’t think I am forgiving her for that. Not now, not ever.

She left us behind to miss her, to yearn for her, to find things to distract ourselves from missing her. She is not there. She is not around us. I will never see that smile. She will not be on the next bed trying to irritate the hell out of me. She will not talk till my head bursts into little splinters and then irritate me some more. I have not met Arman, but over the last few days I have heard stories. He told Zarah that he was sure she smiled at him long after her heart rate dropped and the lifeline drew a flat line on the monitor and the doctors failed to revive her. Zarah tells me that Arman had spent the night at the morgue standing outside her frozen casket because Pihu was afraid of the dark. She tells me he had to be forced out before he caught pneumonia or something worse. She tells me how every night Arman comes to both the room and the terrace where they had gone on their first date. She tells me how her mother had fainted when she had come back to the unlucky room no. 509 and how she had to be pulled from Pihu’s bed by her father. She tells me her father looked like a walking corpse when he heard the news. She tells me how both sets of parents
had cried arm in arm. She tells me how her father comforted my crying father (crying!) when I was battling for my life while their daughter was dead. Zarah tells me that her father has not said a word since the day Pihu passed away on the operating table, lying on her side with her back cut open and a smile pasted on her face. It was painless, Zarah tells me.

Does knowing that it was painless make me feel any better? It doesn’t. She was no stranger to pain. She was strong and she would have picked pain and life any day over comfort and death. People like her aren’t meant to die. They never die because people don’t forget them. Did she give us enough moments together? She would never have been able to even if she had died a hundred years later. People like her just don’t live enough. No matter how long, how fulfilling their lives, how painless their deaths are, people miss them. Like I miss her, and I hardly knew her. We weren’t even friends; we were room-mates.

She dies. I live. I cry. Where is the sense in that? I didn’t even want to live. I thought the procedures, the medicines, the doctors and the drips were nonsense. All I wanted was to get injected with a few extra CCs of morphine in my drip and I would pass on to the next world, painlessly. I didn’t want this. I hated pain. I have done everything to run away from it. I used to numb it by injecting and snorting everything I could find. I hated pain and I hated life. I get nothing, she gets everything. Nobody wanted this. How do you think I will feel when I look at her parents, childless, grieving at their loss? How do you think I will feel when Arman crosses my path? We were in the same room. Same room! How difficult was it to have our fates switched? How wrong can God get, if there is one? We were right there. How could he not see?

Did I find a donor? Yes, I did. It was
her.
The perfect match. We were room-mates
.

But that’s not the only thing she gave me. Fifteen days after my surgery when I was shifted back to my room, the bed next to me was empty but for a little note on top of it. I opened the note and it said:

‘You were the best room-mate ever. Now, we’re 2-2. Don’t waste it.’

I cry.