Love and the Dark Night

THIRTEEN

Today is the last day in the planet. Cosmic dust comes down from space, there is a flaming meteor, it has wiped all the ranges of the Himalayan range but one. It is at the last summit and now the meteor takes the shape of a pizza cutter, it moves in a menacing and sadistic style towards the last remnant of the range, it enters the range and begins its journey and slices it like a Black Forest sliced by a chef’s sharp knife, the way that oddly-hatted man had come to our house and had driven the kitchen knife through a hundred-gram butter.

The lids of my eyes flipped open. Everything was a blur. Where am I? The realization arrived on cat-feet. I am in some bed, soft-mattressed, dreamy land.

The next days passed by in blurred vision of sorts, as if the power of your eyes have suddenly increased and you are about to lose your vision. Time was slow one time and next it picked up speed and everything went spinning. Each day whirled past me, mixing objects with events, sounds with words, tastes with smell while I stood by unmoving.

I got up once in a while, walked, peeped out a bit from the window, from the window to the wall and back to the bed. Sometimes Tessa entered, by then her face had taken a familiar position. She sat sometimes in the chair and most of the time on the bed, patting my arm then getting up and leaving.

A smile always spread on her face, a little smile, telling me, we’ll wait till you get better and then we’ll talk. Her smile that reassured that all will be fine.

But what I found to be a stronger impression on my mind was the new world I found myself in. This world away from some other world, perhaps, that I had been in. My mind pictured, in a vague sort of way, gigantic flying birds, someone sitting on it, a child barely ten years old, a middle-aged man with a reassuring smile on his face, his hand on the boy as he held on to the bird’s neck. This, on a bright sunny background of trees and fields and a sky with a lone cloud floating in a slow-hurry manner. The picture came and went. I didn’t try to grapple with this picture to force me to show more. I allowed it to come and go riding on its own unicorn of freedom. If an observer had to study my movements, he would conclude not more than the mere thought that I was a child in adult clothes, a juvenile vagrant wondering at the clothes and stuffed toys displayed on a shop window.

Whatever I did got repeated in my mind, till I went back to my bed. This repeat happened several times of the day, in between which Tessa came and went, trailing her smile and keeping it in me, storing it one coin after another, till the smile became as broad as the river Nile. 

Beginning with the brown panelled floor my feet touched sending warmth all over my body, like one stepping on soothing refreshing grass. This was followed by the washroom, the off-white coloured floor, the fittings and the faucets. I turned them on, watched the water flow out, cold and warm, the wash basin white without any speck anywhere, the small black tray at the window with three plastic transparent bottles with slim snouts holding body wash, shampoo and the third one, conditioner for the hair.

Did my past return now and then? I saw something in a haze, a room with chairs and attached desks, a white board with something written with a blue marker, a table with thick books piled against the wall, something with TAS, or SAT, or ATS on their spines, I couldn’t fairly fix into my memory. Then from the vague alley of the same memory a flat appeared with a living room, two bedrooms and one lady, shaven head, a tattoo above her left ear. Something began to take place whenever her face appeared. It rested on my mind, with the little nose, thin fine lips, her hand on my face, her fingers lightly running up and down over my cheeks and my neck.  

*

All three times, breakfast, lunch and dinner Tessa brought food and kept it on a black fibre glass folding table on the bed. The plates and small containers were microwave heat resistant and the food something akin to the kind I was familiar with. Potatoes, eggs, two pieces of chicken. Sometimes pasta with white sauce, my favourite.

The doctor arrived in the late afternoons with another man who carried his briefcase and passed him whatever he wanted and stood next to his senior as he sat, his hand on my forehead, on my wrist next. The doctor peeled off the bandage gently enough so as not to allow me to feel the pinch except the coolness when it was off my forehead and when the doctor applied a piece of cotton wool drenched in antiseptic liquid and wiped the crusted ointment away.

The pain, earlier like the stab and twist of a knife became a dull ache which I could bear.       

            The doctor got up, let the assistant apply the appointment afresh with a cotton swab and then dressed the wound with white cotton gauze that he wrapped around my forehead before fixing it to the back of my head with a pair of clips.

All the while I remained still, my eyes closed, the smell of medicine floating in my mind like little pieces of candy clouds, and my ears picking up the scraps of conversation hovering around in the room between the doctor and his assistant.

And sometimes Tessa who must have entered quietly, stood by the door watching. 

“How much longer do you think?” Tessa said.

“We can't take any chances,” the doctor said. “He is getting along fine but we have to keep on changing the dressing and applying the ointment.”

“The wound has missed his eyes,” the assistant said. “He was lucky.”

“Does it hurt him?” Tessa said.

“I think so,” the doctor said. “But we have to give him medicines to numb the pain, to help him fall asleep. That’s a good method of healing”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad you are not taking any chances.”

I kept on watching through half open eyes the assistant putting a hand under my head and helping me get up for the pills. Eyes closed I swallowed them with room temperature water from a glass which sat on the bedside table.

Tessa looked at me. “You sleep now,” she said.

I could hear the assistant shut the briefcase and with the doctor both walked out of the room, their steps receding away into the woods of my past.

“When you get up dinner will be on the table by your bed.” That was Tessa’s voice.

I turned to thank her but she stopped me. “You don't have to talk now she said. Let's wait till you get better.”

As days passed the pills began to work. From the moment Tessa left with the doctor and his assistant, I slipped into a deep sleep that pulled me right through the evening and well into the night when I woke up, drained.

Dinner helped, for it was a friend of the medicines I was taking. The food was warm. I pulled the table to the bed and ate, rinsed my mouth with a glass of water and went back to sleep again. Unlike the first night, when images from my past haunted my sleep, hammering against my closed eyelids, now it was more uneventful. Perhaps it was the medicine, perhaps it was the pain I was not sure but I realised I slept more soundly now, not even turning during the night. In fact, when I woke up in the morning, I found that the sheet I had pulled over myself in the night was still spread straight, there being only a few wrinkles here and there, some above my knee and where my toes were and above my hands, my fingers to be exact. The pillow wasn't turned or twisted, not a single crease in its white case. Did somebody I know come in the middle of the night and with her soft hands smoothen the sheet?

Sleeping and waking and sleeping again, eating in between, all this happened with a hazy and far away picture of a figure with a shaved head, a middle aged lady, someone I did not know. She passed through the corridor of my half-sleep-half-wakefulness world, stopping by and slipping away, compelling me to stretch my hand and hold hers so as not to leave me. This life of routine settled into my system. It was a matter of days and nights before I began getting accustomed to the objects around me, the same objects that, a short while ago, so strongly held my fascination.

Until one morning when I discovered the view from the window. The view of several young ladies and a scaffolding of sorts being brought inside the gate.