The Hospital

 

There are little wooden cabins housing tiny chai stalls, pan and cigarette kiosks, and fruit and vegetable booths. These are skilfully set up over the open drain passing in front of the hospital. In front of this little market, you have juice carts with their promise of restoring the weakened vitalities of the patients as well as their caretakers.

It is a small world, operated by small people to satiate small-time hunger. The items dealt in are very small but carry big effects, and it’s the same wherever there are more claimants for meagre resources. Tea, biscuits, crisp fans, chewing tobacco, pan masala, cigarettes, beedis, and sometimes an odd glass of mausmi juice when it turns a grave matter on account of some sickness or accident. These are the important elements of the day in the life of a common man.

Tobacco and chewing masalas are the most important among these. They bring instant help and succour, a kind of sip of life, a gratification that helps the labouring class in turning near-sighted and see just a small stage of life, which in turn enables them to ignore the biggies of life. So on an hourly basis, it somehow propels their life in their poor corridors. Further, these small items kill hunger, almost replacing lunch and dinner but they bring death as well, slowly-slowly, and cancer as well, which has its special, ill-famed category of death.

At a few hand’s distance lies the death-defying shadow of the hospital.

Inside the dull white concrete facade, man’s efforts to postpone mortality shine in the white-lit corridors, OTs, ICUs, general wards and private rooms. The hospital stands like the main body of the protective army. The little chain of tea stalls clings in reserve like a support staff of supplementary ranks, right there to support and provide solace and sips of comfort to the advance guard.

Made of smoky old wood, standing on rickety stilts, the rudimentary wooden kiosks support many families, as much as they support and provide succour to the anxious relatives waiting for their ward to heal and join the stream of life again. Some of these operate throughout the nights, giving warmth and hope to those sleepless eyes whose relative is perhaps fighting for life in the hospital. Little awnings of rucksack cloth, moth-eaten wooden tables, clanking glasses, cheap plastic chairs and the local Hindi newspapers have an unobtrusive world that stays on the sidelines and silently bends down to offer a hand of support when required. It goes back to its own loneliness once the help has been offered.

****

The night-time nurse in-charge of the ICU possibly observes the creeping claws of death more vividly than perhaps any other professional. The fact that somebody is under the intensive care of the doctors verifies just one thing—the health condition of the patient is very serious, needing constant surveillance, observation and medication in an environment of almost no disturbance and noise. She is here to keep the flicker of life alive during the long drawn hours, to defy death from the side of the crippled human beings under her care. She usually doesn’t expect more than a stream of constant groans and complaints both by the patients and their family members. However hard she works with howsoever care and compassion, it’s but never enough. Her effort is always expected to be more. When a patient throws pained fits of irritation, her caring, helpless, shiny, big eyes show some traces of unease, a slight off-balance. Her fair brow gets a few lines. But then the inescapable call to duty draws her out of the pit of doubt. And here she is again the same caring angel, the very same assuring smile, the very same gentle, soft words.   

She is petite and fair. Her features are very smart and capable of many an interesting expression. She but evinces only the silently brooding, carefully nursing visage. It’s just a fraction of all the treasure-trove of the possible outputs of her sharp features. Aren’t all of us living just fractional lives, defined by the necessities of our professional commitments? Her dress, her manners, her expressions all but smirkly covered up by the white hospital smock she wears over the colours of her personal wear.

She arrives at the call of duty in a stylish set of salwar and kameez cut in the latest fashion. She thus arrives as a young girl but then becomes a caring woman the moment she enters the corridors of duty. Her day starts when the others’ comes to an end. During the sunless working hours, she is the mature doctor’s maid stifling yawns and killing sleep, while the world outside snores in oblivion. By the time of sunrise, her beautiful, bright, shiny eyes lose their glow to appear cutely discharmed. Duty at the cost of beauty. Sleepless, fatigued nights and slumberous, energyless days, following the natural cycle in reverse.

Her days pass in taking naps now and then, and attending the household chores in between. A persistent restlessness and heaviness of mind surrounding her all the while. But she has to keep her head clear through the nights. That is important. Most importantly, she has to keep her smile. A smile is very assuring. It is more effective even than the medicines. It’s her priceless offering beyond the monetary calculations of costing and billing. She understands the value and significance of her smile, so much so that it has now become a habit.  

You see very less of life and living during the day. And at night you have to keep your smile as the clawy hands of death creep closer and closer around you to claim many of those whom you bless with your care and smile. A challenging job indeed.  

Glowing under the bright ceiling lights in the hospital corridor, in the disinfected phenyl-laden air, one sees just a fraction of her real charm. Earlier she had a crying sea of sympathy for the suffering fellow human beings. Her heart ached and eyes had tears many times. But your sentimentalities tend to stiffen under the bombardment of the scenes carrying the pictures of death, diseases and injuries. The continuous repetition of such harshly harking, diseased realities leaves those who work in a hospital with blunted emotions and checkmated sentiments. They see the reality and act the real way. They then remember the patients by room or bed number. Diseases and injuries are permanent, only their carriers change. Just like a river, permanent in its flow but the waters changing every moment.

The luminous world hurtles ahead; she appears to look at it with tired, sleepy eyes. Does she have a crush on some young patient? No, disease and injury drive away love’s cooing and bring in kindness and care. The hormonal storms of physical attraction and likings get sublimated to change into something more soulful, something beyond mere body and its desirous bundles of burden. But then these are even more important, even better than the love between two desirous bodies in full bloom.

And what about the feelings for some handsome relative of some patient spending the night to help his ward in the hospital? Who can trace the beautiful, mystically charming wave in the sea of a young girl’s heart? Perhaps such normal ripples do arise in the silently brooding waters in her heart. But then such ripply playfulness is discernible in the open, sun-worked days. In the brooding swathes of the night, such ripples, even if they arise, go unnoticed and unacknowledged even by one’s own self. They just fade away leaving no trail or shiny smile.

She has brief interactions with the ward-boys, floor-washers, sweepers and other fellow ladies of the night shift. The words are but without much energy and spirit—mere formalities, they die in the disinfectant-suffused air. Conversations are just bare minimum. Half smiles rule.

****

It has perhaps been well said that to be poor is a curse. To be poor and get afflicted with a disease or meeting an accident (provided the poor person doesn’t die)—thus needing hospitalisation—is a bigger curse. God save the poor from the disease and accident! But then disease, accident and poverty are almost synonymous.     

A five-year-old boy is brought in the ambulance of a smaller hospital. His travel on the stretcher from the hospital front to the ICU raises many eyebrows. His mother, short, black, tied in a sari, can’t even dare to enter the bigger hospital. This world is too big to her, and costlier. The banyan tree in front of the building, with its sturdy leaves, casts its shadows unmindful of caste and class. She finds it familiar, this comforting shadow, and sits here wailing, praying for the life of her child. Death, pain and agonies are routine in a hospital. So people just give her the quickest of an indifferent glance and move on without any visible discomfort or invisible pinch to their soul.

The father is inside the building, squatting against a wall in the crowded corridor. One other fatigued, old and stretched-beyond-limit relative is running helter-skelter to fetch medicines from the chemist. After a couple of hours of praying ordeal, the devastated father emerges from the front glass door carrying the boy’s body in his hands. The boy is covered with a shawl. Some people are curious to know about the boy’s status. With silent tears in red eyes, he looks at his wife standing like a stone statue under the tree. The God has decided not to heed her prayers. Perhaps there must be more pressing matters for him to attend at the moment.

Vocal noise should not be made the parameter of evaluating pain and sorrow gushing inside a person. A cry is just on the surface. It ripples like a mountain river against the stones. Silence is at the bottom of the sea. It is in the pits of undisturbed calm that the pain and suffering hisses its merciless monstrous chants at its cruellest best. In the depths of her heart, soul-wrenching currents are moving swiftly, jarringly. The maternal mountain crashes. Much to the surprise of those around, gearing up their ears for a splitting cry, she doesn’t trouble their ears. She suffers silently. The deep focus of the tragedy is shaking her body. She silently shivers under the impact of the lynching by her fate.  

They have to carry the body to their village 50 kilometres away. They sit by the road to wait for a bus. Till the bus arrives they have the time to settle down and compose themselves. The bus arrives. The father takes the lead and bravely carries the body into the bus. Just like any other passenger heading to a destination. Possibly the other passengers think that the child is sick only, that its heart is still beating.

She sobs and stands by, giving only this much clue that she is the mother of a sick child. People do expect the poorest of the poor to be presentable, to behave themselves, to maintain the decorum. The poor couple is doing it. Quite conscious of their low status in the big world, she is shy to mourn openly. She cries within herself, waiting to reach their house and then shed the inhibition and mourn openly. She is now supposedly the mother of a sick child. She has to maintain the image.

God shouldn’t put such live coals on the palms of the poor, if He is the God we think him to be because He himself will come under the curse of the poor.

****

Her brow has lines and lines, and more lines. Unlike her haphazard, famished, disordered life, these lines on her brow are quite ordered. It’s a nice presentation of the graphical pattern of magnetic lines around a magnet. She is dark. During youth—if homelessness and poverty allow the fountain of youth to sprout forth at all—she must have had delicately carved fine features. But all that is gone now, gone earlier than it should have. Only one expression—an effort to draw sympathy—pervades her face now. Clad in stinking rags, she is pleading with the in-charge of the nursing staff in the emergency ward.

‘God bless you beta...please give me this injection!’ she takes out a thin used vial from the knot on a corner of her head-cloth.

Poverty is the biggest disease, and helplessness is its everlasting effect. God must be feeling lesser burden on His conscience after afflicting a poor person with a disease as his prayers are less cumbersome. The stout, chubby faced gentleman, carrying a happy demeanour even in the white-lit claustrophobic air, tries not to listen to her. But a poor person preys upon to grab the littlest of morality’s morsel available on the face of a relatively better placed human. The way he avoids her eyes, while discarding her appeal and the absence of shearing notes in his denial, makes her intent stronger. She pleads again and again.

‘What is this injection meant for? And who prescribed it?’ he tries to speak hard, to cut the confidence in her pleading.

It’s of no use. She knows this check-dam is not made of solid cement and mortar. There are humanistic holes in it to peep through. She opens a little bale of clothes and takes out a dog-eared, soiled, time-smeared prescription slip. The edges at the folding lines are about to fall apart, thus rendering it useless of its oft-repeated claim to prescription.

‘This is long time since then. For this you need an ultrasound done. Taking this injection without knowing the condition now will be bad for you taiji,’ he tries to scare her away with a list of dangers to her life.

But to her this injection is a needle of life. She cannot stop believing in its effect. The warning vanishes in the disinfected air. She has now caught the attention of the people around. They look at her in mild irritation. She is poorer than anyone around, thus giving the dozens of people nearby the excitement of being better placed, even rich.

She is now squatting on the tiled floor. No word seems enough to budge her from her perch. He has to give in. There is no other way. Muttering and reproaching—afraid that the manager will soon come to know—he asks her to lie on her side on a stretcher. She shows unexpected agility and is lying on her side, expecting the sweet sensation of the needle on her bottom. He pulls down the edge of her great long-skirt a bit to expose the time-wearied skin on her hip. The skin but is better here, surprisingly. He injects. She winces with pain. But then smiles a toothless smile, a bit shy even.

Once obliged, she comes again, the next day, with a brighter hope to get rid of the disease forever. She is wearing a cleaner ware today. A boy of around five accompanies her. He seems to have come to look at the interiors like a tourist.

She is but for less luck today. Luck is rare, that’s why it’s called lady luck, otherwise it will lose its status of being a prestigious lady.

A poor person needs luck in many corners to feel its impact even slightly in a little corner.

The smart, overzealous manager, taking his job too seriously, has come to know of the transgression. The nurse in-charge has been smartly warned against repeating the thing. Yesterday’s benefactor, his moustache trimmed nicely, having worked for 36 hours at a stretch, followed by 12 hours of rest, and then repeating the same over weeks after weeks, flatly refuses in an angry tone. This time there is no breach in his NO. She feels it. This NO is too solid, rock-hard, to be melted by her pleading voice. But then the success of yesterday is too near. Taking inspiration from it, she squats, mutters more pathetically, like life is draining out of her, shows infinite helplessness through her eyes and waves of hands. She has high hopes of getting cured of the malady with the help of this about-to-tear slip of an age-old prescription paper. The hope fades. The malady will outlast the slip. Its paper is too old now. Her disease is stronger without doubt.

With a heavy heart, and a look of last appeal to the onlookers, she walks out. The child is not bothered about anything. The hospital is too big, clean and exciting for him. In the corridor, many people pass her carrying costly medicines for their wards. She stares at the medicines with a strange look, like she looks at food when terribly hungry. She even feels like snatching a bunch of medicines and chew them raw, to quench her hunger, to kill her disease.

The manager, flirting with the reception girl, yells out his authority. People sitting in the reception hall take their eyes off the TV. Many unconcerned eyes follow her out of the hospital. She is somehow courteous. Possibly for yesterday’s stroke of luck. She uses almost all her strength to pull the main glass door and close it safely behind her.

****

The watchman is medium built and of average height. Not much flesh on his body, shoulders of medium girth, and waistline has a bulge. He is a watchman under compulsion, not by choice. Who chooses lower rung occupations? These just come to ride the back of swift horses of circumstances. But he seems to have fallen in love with the job. It comes with ease to him now. To make him more authoritative, he has groomed handle-bar moustaches. He seems to impose more visibility to his persona with this hairy addition to his face. His khaki dress is styled like a policeman. He scampers around as the beacon of security for this private hospital.

He misses shoulder tabs and insignia on the belt. That would have made him almost look like a real policeman, he thinks many times, especially when he sees the real policewallah. But the simple truth is, he is just a private security guard. The saving grace is, such finer nuances are missed by the poor, the illiterate and the beggars. To many of them he is the same typical, to be scared of, policeman. He feels it and is happy about it, taking it as a bonus on his meagre salary.

He sits on a chair under the ceiling fan dangling from the tin-shed entrance porch of the hospital. He is mostly on lookout for the ambulances taking a sharp turn from the road to appear suddenly in front of the hospital gate. A whistle dangles from his belt. He blows the whistle to alert the ward boys to come dashing out to admit the patient. His other job, more tedious one, is to force people to park their bikes and scooters in straight line along the hospital’s outer wall. He is very much concerned about the hassle-free movement of the ambulances. Well, that is necessary because in medical emergencies time matters a lot. He has seen the value of these critical minutes.

The moment there is a cut in the electricity, he rushes to the generator set to start it as soon as possible. He understands the value of electricity for the patients. Then there are oxygen cylinders to be loaded and unloaded. It’s a relief to see somebody who is true to his khaki, even though he is a fake policeman. Being non-sarkari means one has to force the last ounce of capability and efficiency to the commitments and duties—as man is nothing but an animal in the advanced stage of evolution. He is thus safely tamed and reasonably habituated to take the job seriously. His commitment is unwavering because he knows that there are better statured people who don’t even need an imposing handle-bar moustache to make them eligible for the security job.

****

In the tiled, tube-lit hospital corridors, life seems ever-put on the support system. The furnishings in the rooms have a depressive similarity. Enamelled iron beds, waste buckets, toilet bowls, medicine chests, metal chairs, narrow padded and unpadded bunks, drip-stands with emptying or empty bottles dangling like chandleries of the palace of the wounded and the diseased: a house put in order to hold back dear life at any cost.

During the day, care-worn guardians, family members, relatives and friends of the patients make the corridor air a bit less depressive. This humming of healthy lives spares the cubicles on both sides from becoming tombs of semi-death. At nights the corridors echo in silence as if in sync with the agents of mortality peeping around some corner. In the dimness and faded light post midnight, the angels of death might be moving silently, on their tip-toes to pluck out their harvest from any nook corner where there might be some loss of handhold by the humans or the institution. They peep to snatch the prey from the medicinal clutch-hold and the grasp of fervent prayers.

And the patients do keep awake at nights; otherwise they won’t be patients at all. At nights, the fear of death and pain strikes them with a potent force. Much to the chagrin of death’s angels, the hospital is never fully asleep. There are lone sentinels on the night duty. They continuously stifle their yawns to keep the lamp of hope and life alive.

****

This woman knows how to fully vent out all her sorrows at the time of the looming death of her husband. Admitted to the general ward on the top floor, his system has started to revolt against the chains of medicine. They rush him to the ICU on the ground floor. She is terrified by the look on his face. She is beating down her disbelief; disbelief about the fatal moment; holding onto the belief that she will see his live face again.

Absorbed in her pain, she is crying at the top of her voice. The notes of her crying writhe with rumbling, lynching pain in her heart. It reverberates through the staircases and corridors. The soufflés of her husband are dying down, the fear and sorrows in her heart are erupting with the fury of hot, shearing lava.

A woman is basically somebody’s wife in India, the husband being the main pillar of her identity. Life literally comes to a naught when this pillar crashes. This poor woman is on the verge of losing her identity and she realises it. Her startled relatives are feeling scared, more embarrassed for bringing disorder into the hospitalised orderliness. Her wailing goes up as they take her down the stairs. The rich might not be that rich in revealing their sorrows in the most natural form. The poor vent out their sorrows in full tempo. It does not cost them anything.

When such pains and sufferings explode, the hospital management has clear guidelines to whisk away the source of the cries, lest it gives a pessimistic message to those around and consequently creates a dent in the facade of the hospital’s brand. But patients do die here. The aftermaths but have to be managed. Life is more important than death. And so is the image of the hospital and the commerce of course.

She has turned a widow by the time she reaches the ground floor. She has to wail and express it in the loudest possible manner. She is whisked away. Hospitals are for hope. Mourning is private. It is for home.

****

The sweeper is supposed to be the humblest. He does full justice to the supposition. He lays the foundation of clearing the dirt and various other components of death and disease. In a way, this very act of cleaning is the foundation on which a hospital stands. People rush past him, maintaining a safe distance from him, to keep themselves healthy and clean. There is a stampede on the just washed and neatly wiped white floor tiles. There are newer marks immediately after he undoes the stigmas of earlier footsteps.

It’s his fight, relentless, head bent down, invisible in the crowd. He is on a war with uncleanliness. He swipes the path to health and curative powers to make it germ-free. He has to continuously look at the floor, here, there, in front, sideways, ahead. His world is on the ground. Not an inch above it.

He is never seen talking to anybody. His features are fine on his dark face, though. His head seems to have taken a fancy for ageing. His hair is falling early. He keeps it closely cropped. There is hardly any expression on his face covered under a few days of stubble. It is a clean private hospital. He can never take the risk of any dirt around. If there is any, he is at a risk of getting fired from the job. He has a friend who works in a government hospital and his world is totally different. His friend has a secure job and hence his world is a few inches above the ground.

****

The nights are groaning, recuperating, healing and convalescing in the ICU. With her beautiful smile and soft words, she keeps the hope alive. A smile overpowers the grimace of death. Her nursing smock hides all the charms of her colourful clothing and the contours of her lithe body. It but oozes out of her beautiful eyes and rosy lips.

Her identity, her relation to the outside world has come to be swapped by the word ‘sister’. It is thrown mechanically at her. She bears it like her hospital name. A young heart beats under the dress coat. She is of the marriageable age. Whenever a handsome young man addresses her by her hospital name, she can feel the pinch at her heart. It feels bad. She has the normal feelings of a young girl. The crippled old could very well have said ‘daughter’ to her. But even they call her ‘sister’.

Nursing is the noblest of the noble professions—how can we forget that healing lamp lit by Florence Nightingale over the fields littered with blood and bones. And just like any other noble thing it has to bear the burden of goodness during the contemporary times, when the ends justify the means, and ends being just dehumanised versions of success predominantly in monetary terms. A nurse has to go to the backstage to do her duty. There are many who will have a mocking strain of a smile at the merest mention of the word ‘nurse’. Taking great solace and satisfaction, the society at large pays them back with slingshots of rotten tomatoes. Many tongues in India follow the grotesque course of calling them ‘immoral’. Visitors to the hospitals eye them with suspicion and gratify their sex-starved senses with the sadistically hatched imageries of scandals involving the nurses and the doctors. The noblest of this profession carries the scars born of brutal prejudices.

Nurses almost invariably look good. They carry a vigour, a charm, a vitality which infuses life among the sickened spirits. They symbolise life, prevalence of life over death, of smile over tears, of recovery over ailment. They work for long hours, but their salaries are measly. Beautiful nurses carry the effulgent private health sector on the chariot of their smiles and care. The public health sector meanwhile trots on apathy and mismanagement.

In the conservative countryside, till a decade back, a nurse, though qualified in the genuine most human trait of ‘care’, did not carry a bright prospect on the scale of eligibility for marriage. Thankfully things are changing now. The profession now is getting its well deserved respect.

She too is of marriageable age. She also thinks about marriage just like any other girl of her age.

In India marriage is almost synonymous to life in case of a girl. It applies to girls of all castes, classes, colours, good looking, plain looking, and more. A girl has to be married at any cost, even if it means throwing her into a veritable fire of pain and suffering.

What else is there in life to achieve? You are good looking. You have studied and broken certain conventions in becoming a nurse—to be noted here, the events at this hospital of ours occurred a decade and half ago. A suitable match can be the highest form of achievement. The desire is so common, yet so unique in every individual.

She is supporting her lower middle class family. She is pretty faced, has the heart of gold, does not bitch in the typical female way, and doesn’t possess the characteristic jealous strain in her. Still the odds seem stacked against her. She stays on the hospital’s fourth floor where the owner doctor couple and their children stay. She belongs to the owner doctor’s village. After completing her nursing course, she is a recipient of this benefit of getting a job here. During the day, life on the lower floors bustles with war between pain and relief; meanwhile she has to catch up with the demands of sleep after her 12 hour night duty. She goes out very rarely. She sleeps through the major chunk of the day, managing her household chores in between. The rest of the few moments left, she spends in retaining the charm on the fatigued aura on her delicate features.

It’s the birth right of a girl to put an effort to look prettier. You, but, cannot look better unless you feel well. Our face is a reflection of the unseen world we carry inside us. She has more than one reason not to feel better inside. One can see a sorrow in her beautiful eyes. There are times when she feels it is a bad career option. Coming from her native place, just to be a working girl is the battle won. Options are beyond imagination. But now she sees women and girls placed in other professions and realises that life would have been better with those options. Her salary is just 4,000 rupees per month. But then free lodging is a huge bonus which many in her place would love to grab without thinking twice.

She carries the weight of marriage on her head. It is the extra weight; already she carries the weight of the entire ICU during those lonely nights. She feels like a normal girl sometimes, her heart beating like a typical young girl, her persona breaking the chains of the white smock, as she explores genuine love in the eyes of a good looking and decently standing young man spending a night because of the admitted relative in the hospital. A mature girl—who knows exactly how difficult it is to earn a livelihood—has to seek something more important other than love and lust in a man’s eyes. This is preconditioned love. It is realistic unlike the blind, instinctive love of a teenage girl. The initial rays of hope fade as soon as she explores deeper, beyond fine clothes and good features.

Also, whenever her reading of a character is about to reach the critical limit, there are other problems that gape though the chinks. During the day she has to be absent and in the meanwhile, through the vibrant and colourful day, they, those five glamorous stars of the day, swipe any trace of focus harboured during the night.

We live through the day and sleep at night. Hers is a reversed world. The half hesitant beginning lines of her love story come to an end even before a proper start. The day brings a completely new world. The night is forgotten. She is unseen during the day and loses her place in the world.

The day-time nurses are also very beautiful. Theirs is a straight world. They have their share of fun in a linear world. She knows their capacity to enjoy life. She also knows that they manage it well when it comes to managing both the professional and the fun parts. They carry flirtatious smiles and turn out the staid, scared hospital air, bringing in normalcy of common desires and the very same interest in life. They have even improvised their nursing coats. It’s sleeveless to make it glamorous. Also, they wear leggings of exciting colours. The bare arms and fine leg outlines make it a world worth living even in a hospital. The clicking sandals, stylish hair, glowing lipsticks and confident walk topple the cart of agonies and pain. Even the most ill patients cannot help staring at them as they carry the banner of life through the corridors. As the mornings wake up—and her night yawns come to rest—they arrive like a fresh gust of breeze with colours, perfumes, swagger and traces of life lived normally and enjoyed like anyone around. Theirs is a normal world, with mundane fun, so they look happy and contended.

Such contrast carries jealousy, and more importantly self-pity, on its back. The sulking beauty feels it. She goes into the darkness of her day to sleep with the pain that they will swipe away the lines of interest she thought have blossomed in a workable handsome guardian of some patient. She is exploring the prospects of marriage. A hospital and a reversed world perhaps are not suitable for the job. She commands respect from them for being their senior and they call her ‘deedi’. She has even no time to share the harmless fun of their common world because she has no days. She has only nights. She is only half-living her life, or even less.

There have been many flat NOs from the boys’ side to suggested marriage proposals in the deeply conservative place she comes from. People have dirty assumptions based on ill-founded fables about the profession. Ironically, most suitable to love and care, a nurse is counted low on scores for domestic life. It should be the other way. But then there are so many things in this world that should be exactly in the reverse order for it to sound justified. It however is not so. Mankind has created assumptions and presumptions with a very strange convenience.

The forlorn nights wear away, adjusting glucose bottles, measuring temperature, checking blood pressure, giving pills and syrups, giving injections, looking at the moving hands of the clock in an unchanging world. It is the same world, only the faces change. Further, pain, suffering and caring carry the same face. Her smile has come to perch automatically on her lips. She has to smile and assure the patients that all is well. She has to appear normal; that all is well and they will be perfectly all right. Below this make-up of her duty, the lines of concern are creeping in. The glimmer of her eyes appears to have dimmed considerably. A rose she is indeed. Undoubtedly. A rose in distress, its fragrance on the wane. The colour slightly on the paler side. The juice evaporating, for there is no sun in her life. It’s a fading rose, worse still, she realises it. It hurts more.

It is only passing in saying that the most noble become the most ineligible during these testing times. Perhaps the eligibility has come to be defined by the degree of deviance from being noble. From the tiniest trace of some lone tumble in the dim-lit rooms of civil hospitals on the dirty sheets—the neglected patients groaning in the background—the world sits down under the sun to weave mammoth tales of promiscuity and easily stripping bodies. The world is very creative in condemnation. It loses all its strength when one needs support though.

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God comes very close during a life-threatening crisis. People waiting outside the operation theatre can just feel Him around and whisper in His ears. The words of loyalty to Him, belief in Him—unquestioning. God is the biggest remedy. The operation theatre, though, is a big milestone in the medicinal and doctoring process. Here the doctors tear open the flesh to close down the gaps through which death may creep in. It has been very amply called ‘theatre’. The actors are green-aproned, masked and hooded. Doctors, nurses and surgery attendants replace the traditional actors who do theatrics in the usual drama of life. This is but a very serious drama here. It is a grave affair, a question of unfailing precision, a matter of life and death. Instead of the dialogue delivery, here the tongues do the minimum required. Gloved hands, surgical tools and medical instruments softly whisper in dissecting tones. The lights of a normal theatre are replaced by a huge one with its criss-crossing rays hanging over the stage on which the drama of dozing death is played in full focus. The air is germ free. Everything has been disinfected. It is a world cocooned in safety. It is silent. Even the soft insertions on skins are audible.

The doctors and the staff play their roles to cure, to nurture life, to avoid mortality. There are successes and failures. That is the drama metaphorically. The anxious relatives stand outside. That but is a world beyond. So near yet so far. Even their imagination is scared to sneak a peek. They just pray to dear God. After all, He must be somewhere nearby. When even the imagination fails, lot many burdens are shed from the conscience. Disburdened and light, the soul prays with a peculiar earnestness, a queer focus, with massive plight to turn the God’s face in their direction. Doubts about His existence fritter away. The souls chant devotional rhymes in unison with the purest of inaudible notes. Such urgent beseeching isn’t without results if we measure the ratio of success and failure in materialistic sense of the term. Do a survey among all those who have prayed anxiously outside operation theatres and count the number of those whose prayers were heeded against those who turned atheists because their fervent pleadings fell on deaf ears. The former numbers beat the latter by a big margin. In fact the former is a nice multiple of the latter. It only validates the efficacy of prayers. It also proves why do we need God. Prayers ensure that life comes back to normalcy from the operation theatre to the ICU and further to emergency room to private room to finally enter the routine corridors of life.