He was lying on a bed in a hospital. On the
right side of the bed a monitor was seen showing the ups and downs in the breath
of the patient. An oxygen mask covered most of his face. A blood bag was
hung on his left side to a stand providing the new blood to his old, wrinkled
body. The needles were injected in his left hand. His eyes were closed. The
whole body was motionless except a slight up-side down movement of his belly and
the oxygen tube.
‘Can we lend our breaths to someone?’ she thought
and prayed she could do it. She was sitting beside his bed waiting for him to
open his eyes and recognize her at once.
‘Getting his
lost love might imbue in him the desire to live’, she prayed.
‘We will
meet once again in life, I bet’ he had said in his characteristic perky voice
some 50 years ago while she was bidding him good bye forever. She too had
wished the same but she hadn’t expected their meeting on this turn of life.
The day he
was admitted to the hospital directly from Savera Old-Age Home, her son had
left her there. She felt like coming into a vast desert of loneliness. She felt
lost. Her son turned his car and said, “I will come once in a month to pay the
bills, till then take care, love you mom!” she didn’t get what he said. When
she woke up from her reverie she only saw the clouds of dust the car had left
behind and the last few words of his son echoed in her ear-‘love you mom!’
A maid took her to room no-7. Sitting on the
bed in her room she saw through the window the blurred images of an ambulance
parked in the yard and some apron wearing people taking a man into it onto a
stretcher. She asked the maid about the man.
‘He got a
paralytic stroke’, she said in an unconcerned voice.
‘Who is he?’
her next question.
The maid
became irritated by the questions but she didn’t want to be rude to the
old-woman on her very first day.
‘His name is
‘Ramakant Vaidya’, he is from Mumbai, he was a teacher, happy?’ said the maid
at once trying to get rid of the newly arrived ‘good for nothing’
septuagenarian.
‘Oh my
god!!!’ Lata mumbled and sat on the
floor. She couldn’t breathe properly. The feeling of profound joy and the deep
sorrow surrounded her in the same moment.
Whatever, an
oasis had emerged in her desert-like life right then.
image courtesy: google
