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.

****

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.

Shaken Roots and Broken Fruits

 

The overloaded tempo pickup, piled high with the provisions of a poor household stuffed in huge sacks made by stitching empty fertiliser bags, had to make an effort to move on another of its chugging journey. After all, domesticity carries weight, however limiting the situation and resources of the tenants.

So the small carrier vehicle, barely visible under the piles of clothing, bedding rolls, plastic cans, cheap kitchen utensils, plastic drums, a refrigerator, a bicycle, fuel wood, dung cakes, paddy chaff and much more, made the decisive move.

In the driver’s cabin, two small boys, one four and the other just over five, sat between the driver and their sister who sat by the window. The excitement of the journey making it almost another fun-game for the little boys. They were too small to feel the pain of getting transplanted again, like little saplings of paddy can be grafted at other place.

The girl was 14 or something. At this age she could feel the pain of this tearing: shifting from a home set up with so much of attention, focus and labour. She wore her school dress, white salwar kameez, maroon jersey and dupatta folded to form a V across the front. It was her last day in the school and in the village. With much effort and teary eyes she had said bye to her classmates and the teaching staff.         

It was 19^th of January and a close call to being able to complete the academic year. She thus missed her final exams in the village school just by a month or so. Before boarding the pickup, she was heard discussing the matter regarding the school leaving certificate. Just weeks to go for the year-end annual exams, it indeed was a close miss. Her serious expression bore the vestiges of this pain. Within the limited circumstances of their household, she had been a diligent student, taking her homework very seriously.

‘Bye, bye, bye....’

The children from the neighbourhood raised a see-off chorus among the plume of smoke let out by the vehicle as it made an extra effort to start the journey.

Most probably they won’t be meeting again in life. And the fact that till a day before they had played so wholeheartedly, totally absorbed in childhood oblivious to the bigger causes and worries, as if life was just endless fun with the same friends at the same place, brought tears in the girl’s eyes. She tightly held the huge bag of books held in her lap.

So in the days to come, the excited voices and shouts of the playing children won’t involve the ones who just left. The two little boys were tireless, voracious elements of childhood fun and frolicking. Still beyond the shackles of schooling, they just drew out every ounce of untamed energy to loiter around, picking out any opportunity to turn it into a game.

The house which saw the provisions taken out again acquired its melancholic look like it bore before they had moved into it.

Another carrier tempo arrived at the small square in the village neighbourhood. With a tangible feeling of sadness, the women from the locality gathered to see the family off.

Charpoys were laid over the carrier railings, a buffalo and two calves, one very small just born a month back and the other from the previous delivery, were straggled up onto the back under the charpoys, some more bundles were piled on the charpoys forming a platform over the carrier’s railings. Now was the time of departure for whatever was left behind by the first vehicle.

The women embraced the pretty girl. Since females were involved in this see off, a few eyes had their share of moisture. Even a rented house takes roots. And when someone, especially forced by situations, gets going, suddenly cutting the routine life in a friendly neighbourhood, you feel the pain of it.

The girl was medium built and had big eyes which seemed to take a parting, nostalgic pan-shot to take it to the new place. A woollen dupatta tied around her face, a nose-pin exotically adoring her shapely nose, she looked suitable for a matronly parting kiss on her forehead and a blessing on her head.  

The mother, worn out by the excess load of multiple children and labour in the fields, appeared more agile than her situation may have allowed. She took leave of the ladies, holding the hands of the ones with whom she had become really close, the friendship cosily hatched during the free hours that offered the opportunity for the typical female gossip. She climbed into the cabin followed by the girl in light green salwar kameez. The girl had a pair of badminton rackets in her hand, which she held against the windscreen as her younger brother, younger to her by a year or two, climbed into the seat and shut the window.

The vehicle moved. The father would follow on his bike, pillion ridden by a boy relative who had come to help them in this hurried shifting. The family patriarch, forty or something in age, wore a black piece of cloth tied around his head. He had a full, dense salt and pepper beard. There was pinkish glow on his cheeks doused with freckles of worries and recent suffering. He walked with certain calculation in steps, as if feeling chained to some restrictions, as if a careless step would give him pain somewhere, especially the posterior.          

The vehicle moved. So did the bike. The square got empty as the children dispersed to play and the women got into their household chores with a touch of sadness.

All through the process of loading their provisions, in unmaking what he, his wife and the elder son and daughter had made with tireless work, the family patriarch bore a sombre expression. One could even trace some faintest sign of a mysterious smile on his face. It but wasn’t a smile. It was the print of acceptance, of surrender, of unquestioning acceptance of the piece put by destiny in your bowl as you toil to survive. This state has its own unique regality, and may be mistaken as a smile.

The bike was gone, turning around a corner in the street. The house was padlocked. A rundown house having enough space for a poor family and their buffalo to knit them into a sheltered unity to fight for better days, or at least a life at the same level, if not worse.

The owner of the house, who stayed in a big, newly built house at the village periphery, padlocked the main wooden door which opened into the barn, followed by an inner yard, two rooms at the back and one upstairs. It will see a lonely night today and they will lie down among their packed provisions at their new destination tonight.

****

He was here in this village of Haryana for almost a decade. Just like water naturally trickles down from the higher to the lower surface, so do the people driven by the hard situation of poverty. They move from the areas of limitations to the ones having better resources. The family belonged to western UP. The region’s agro economy was a few rungs below Haryana across the border; the boundary formed by a recalcitrant and famished Yamuna. With its more intense agriculture, the region west to the river was the natural point of movement for those feeling it hot to survive in the east.

He was a tough worker, so was his wife who matched him in cutting down lines after lines of harvesting furrows. They shifted from their predominantly Muslim village in western UP to this predominantly Hindu Jat village in eastern Haryana. They arrived with three daughters and a son and straightway got into the never-ending offers of agriculture labour in the wheat and paddy fields.

If you keep your head down, don’t speak more than required, don’t make your presence felt more than the barest minimum required and that too only at the places where you are supposed to be, and work almost double than expected in lieu of the daily wages paid to you, then survival flows like time flows through inanimate objects.

The migrant couple just worked and worked. The best known fact, apart from their stand-out religion, was that they cut unbelievable acreage of golden ripe wheat under the scorching sun in April, May and June. Respect is difficult to come by for a migrant agricultural labourer, but even the sturdy local work brutes had to fetch out a few words of appreciation in this regard.

The eldest girl was married. At the cost of litres of sweat under the sweltering sun, the family’s fortune showed better prospects. A tireless worker can ask the almighty for as much luck as would be sufficient to get him continuous work. Of this there was aplenty in the village.

Even the snail-paced society of a village has its faint rumblings and churning events. There is always someone or the other moving to the city. Someone having a class three or four government job and a little holding of land, both of which combining to take his prospects to buy a house in the nearest town, leaving the village house either under the care of relatives or renting it just at nominal rates to someone like our migrant from the neighbouring state, doing it not for money primarily but basically to have somebody to look after the property, for it’s believed that an unoccupied house sees its decay in just a few years. There is always some nostalgia because old roots go with some fight against the foot soldiers of time. His time had been spent among three or four such houses in the village.

Poverty has its own caste, class and religion. So in the usual routine of life, it was as subdued and unassuming a family as any other in the non-Jat communities in the village. The Jats carry humungous attitude. One has to be careful not to puncture it. There is a tacit social understanding. Allow and help the Jats in keeping the crown of their ego on their head and there won’t be any problem.

It thus went well. They got mixed at the rung of any other non-Jat household in the village. He never missed to join people whenever a Hindu pyre was lit in the cremation ground. The children added their share of energy to the limitless tomfoolery the village children engage in. The wife had a little circle among the peasant women. She had an agile tongue and could rapidly recall harmless anecdotes to please the local women. The girls mixed with the girls of their age.

All seemed to go well. Or was it?

****

Cow protection became one of the driving forces of the state policy with a nationalist party coming to power. Well, nothing wrong with that. In the changing agronomy, cows have been replaced by more economical buffalos, leaving poor cows to stray around, eating garbage, dying of hunger on the roads. But then an issue, in its political version, remains just a populist rhetoric serving partisan purposes instead of helping resolve the problem. The cause of gau mata was enthusiastically taken up by the vagrant youths caught in the chasm of ‘the will to do something in life’ and ‘the capability or guidance to get something really done on the ground’. The gap is easily picked up by the misguiding hands that brainstorm the young flagellant self to get into some funny show of bravado, patriotism and nationalism.

A boy from the village took the clarion call of cow protection too seriously. He got funds to operate a small veterinary hospital to treat stray cows. The hospital, run from a depilated one time ice-making unit, whose owner had decamped after defaulting on his loan, leaving it abandoned and in the clutches of insolvency and auction laws, became the den of entertainment for a group of youngsters who needed an adda for drinking and co-related forms of fun in the category.

That is the problem with extremist politics. The decent people stay away. The excitement of crossing the line seduces those who have the groundwork of illegalities, a position wherein they very conveniently interpret their escapades as valour, guts, bravery, patriotism and nationalism. The most important thing is that they are ready to hate, and even kill.

A cow is one of the most evolved quadrupeds, definitely deserving all the love, affection and care that the Homo-sapiens can manage. Its mere presence purifies the surroundings at the level of energy field. No wonder we worship it. But how many of the political careerist Hindus know about the real worth of gau mata beyond the grand plans of communal polarization? The vision of a cow-full Hindu Bharat Rashtra is one matter. It can be interpreted as a form of deshbhakti as well. But I have seen cows and pigs sharing the same garbage at dumpsites. Rhetoric and sloganeering gets votes in cow’s name but hardly makes any positive change in the life of millions of stray cows. They suffer as they have been doing for decades.

Now when the buffalos had taken the place of the cows in the agrarian economy, the issue of cow at the debating stage was the shiny occupation in demand. Anything related to cow gave you good image and if managed properly, and with a stroke of luck, one could even catapult oneself from the fringe to the centre-stage of political power.

The young nationalist in the village was all absorbed on the surface turbulence regarding the issue of cows and saving India from the evil-minded minority. As for the service to his private self, the proclivities such as over-drinking, visiting brothels, including paid sex services to a docile, feminine homosexual official in corporate in Delhi, was something that could be put into a separate compartment, closed, beyond the pricks of conscience. For as long as he could hate Muslims from the core of his heart, and thus assured of his patriotism, no other deed of his could put him in the dock questioning his errant ways.

There was hardly any communal fodder to reap in this part of Haryana. But he was not the one to miss the little chances available to bring his patriotic theories into practice. His Facebook page was always waiting for some first hand, real life contribution to the cause of nation building.

Just outside the village, by the road, there was a mound on a patch of Waqf property. The plot of land still reminding that the village had Muslim families in the past who left for Pakistan in 1947. The rest of the Waqf land had been taken on 99-year-lease by some influential farmers, leaving this mound and the small chunk of land around it, as an abbreviation, as an assurance to the secular fabric of India.

A Muslim friar had set up a blue-tiled peer shrine, reinforcing the fading facts that Muslims once stayed in the village. They had houses, they had land, but the partition-time storm changed geographies and demographies. 

A hunting lion preying upon a grasshopper, for fun, for amusement, but more importantly to satiate the inner hunger, to keep the faculty of hunting alive, also a reminder that things can be grabbed by might.

To save the Hindu honour, the gau rakshak thrashed the fragile shrine keeper who had started to have some notes and coins in his purse. The dalits, starting with the bhangis, had started to pray at the peer shrine, perhaps hoping for more kindness by a Muslim fakir who didn’t believe in caste. To the overzealous foot-soldiers of Hindutva, of course there was danger to Hinduism here with a Muslim shrine cropping up on the mound. He swung into action. Getting some slaps and a wrestler style throw-down, the old and frail Muslim ran away. The honour of the land was saved. He installed Hindu Gods in the freshly tiled tiny shrine room. All this was gloriously displayed on his Facebook page. And congratulatory messages poured in hundreds.   

On the social media there was always something to sharpen his Islam-phobia. His little crusade, shared with pictures and live footage, got long trails of likes and comments on the FB page. Life seemed to acquire a purpose. He even thought of moving onto becoming an MLA in future. However, it was far way down the line and a lot many things to be done meantime.

He was on the lookout. As much as he believed in the cause of quenching his carnal desires, he believed in the cause of the nation also.

****

Apart from the side that wants us to excel and get highlighted as someone exemplary, using the clichés and prevailing prejudices, there is, alongside, a part which pulls with its raw force, driven by the basic instincts.

The cow vigilante eyed the young beautiful Muslim girl who went to the fields with her mother for wage work in the fields. Her big eyes, oval face and nose-pin mixed the two parts, the passion to get recognised as a famous rightist from the area and the carnal force of unsheathed passion. In fact it became the one and the same thing. Taking a chance at the modesty of a Muslim girl, apart from obeying the call of blinding passion, could well as be taken as a chivalrous deed on communal grounds.

He pursued her, first subtly, expecting her to get the point and surrender to his youthful handsomeness, and later, in the face of her being completely unaffected and nonchalant to the cooings of his desire, pretty directly. It went to the extent of grazing his shoulder against her as the girl evaded and just moved on as if nothing had happened. The girl, advised by her mother, just saw through his overtures. It was safe for them that nothing of any sort surfaced that would put them in the spotlight.

On his part, even some reaction to the side of denial would still have kept the dog on pursuit even though on a leash. But this complete impassivity, as if he didn’t exist, as if she won’t think of him more than a roadside stone, made him feel insulted, sent his soul sizzling with jealousy and hate.

Spurned, he was waiting for an opportunity to strike. India is but decently secular. Unlike Pakistan, here one cannot take outright liberty with the minority, however overpowering the blizzard of desire and communal motives. There have to be reasons, and appropriate ones by the way, otherwise there were enough farmers to question such behaviour amounting to mistreating somebody, whoever it was.

Helpless in failing to pursue the direction of his desire, and believing himself justified in his communal rant against the minority, he was heeding time to strike.

****

The local culture was driven by the agricultural push and pull. More than being condemned for your religion, you stood a better chance to be appreciated for your hard work. So, miyanji, as he was called by the villagers, spreading his identity to an almost nameless, see-through transparency, of being just like that, simply, earned loads of praise for his unrelenting stamina to work in the fields and thus raise his brood of children with his sweat. More the harvesting lanes vanished, the more furrows he vanquished with his sickle, the bigger fodder bundles he carried, the villagers, if nothing more, gave him unqualified words of praise.

The family just worked tirelessly, so tirelessly that even the most pun-prone villagers didn’t take a jibe at their having many children.

That’s how you develop roots at a new place. You aren’t supposed to create ripples in the fluid picture. You must add to the local values exactly in the manner they exist. And for God sake please, please don’t experiment. Just increase the proportions of the existing values. Do things exactly the way they want it. You have to dissolve the outstanding edges on your persona and merge in equal proportions in all directions and all individuals. You shouldn’t be someone’s special friend; you can’t simply afford to be anybody’s enemy, it needs no repetition.

So the agrarian society didn’t feel any disturbance even in the wake of the social media’s communal propaganda and the world-over prevailing Islamophobia.

In the marriage-time community feasts, his brood of children would go uninvited, and people just took it as normal as somebody who been cordially invited.

Miyanji would be seen among the mourners as the Hindu pyres were lit in the cremation ground. They were here to share all pain and happiness that occurred to the villagers.

How simple this world would become if the train of life could run smoothly after picking up with pain and much efforts.

One thing is guaranteed that after becoming the target of somebody’s hate, you already become a victim even before the real consequences born of the hate-driven actions start. It’s simple cause and effect, like someone throwing stones into a pond. There will be shaking of the waters.

We sometimes, voluntarily or involuntarily, with an imperceptible force driving us, barely giving us a chance to do the real calculation, end up changing the lanes where the mundane life was comfortably chugging ahead. Do we do it to shake off the monotony which becomes boring? Do we do it with the spirit to get into something adventurous? Or is it just unavoidable push and pull of the destiny? It’s not even that the old track was too unbearable. Still we just end up changing it willy-nilly. It stays a mystery why we suddenly change the track and almost topple the cart. Maybe to take the short-cut, to make it a bit more convenient, and hardly realise before overstepping many lines defining our small but safe world. It may even involve crossing the legal lines. Not that we are monsters and biggest of sinners. The transgressions are humane, much as they get us temporary, facilitated gratification, these land us in trouble also.

And nobody falls off the line in complete awareness.

For the last few months, miyanji was making more than usual trips to his native place in western UP. Unusual in the sense that a daily wage earner, having set up his home and hearth at a distance from his native place, should have hardly any reasons to waste wage days, time and money in being off the scene, unless under exceptional circumstances.

The trips became almost weekly in nature. Better clad, bathed, off work and far happier in look, miyanji somehow stood off. The anonymity which hid him in the grit and grind of agro-work now got dispelled. The result was his visibility.

‘He is up to something!’ many eyebrows got raised.

Now here is a common known fact about his native place. It’s ill-famed for illegal country-made weapons. With Haryana almost upstaging UP and Bihar in terms of directionless youth biting the illegal bullet, the illicit pistols found a ready market to the west of Yamuna.

Even to the simplest of a farming brain, it was a case of two plus two making four.

The gau rakshak got the opportunity to hit the nail on its patriotic head. Boiling with his nascent nationalism, he ran to inform the police.

With greater enthusiasm miyanji was picked up by the police, tortured and made to eat the bitter side-fruits of the tasty pie he had come to like for the last few months. Some country-made pistols were recovered from the vagrant youths in the surrounding villages. The wires were connected to the supplier. It was substantiated.

Majority of such cases don’t reach the courts. It gets settled well before that. The police are even more enthusiastic in getting it settled ‘outside’ as it’s more lucrative to them. So all the facilitation done, a limping miyanji, carrying the marks of vengeance by the cat-o-nail on his bum, purchased his deliverance from the clutches of law at the first stage, and walked for some weeks morosely. Meanwhile the gau rakshak, his onslaught having been justified, launched his communal fusillade.

He had an argument to slap in the face of anyone who asked him to tone down and leave the limping miyanji in peace.

‘Vaah, vaah so much for your kindness! Do you take a guarantee on his behalf? Now illegal pistols, tomorrow he may shelter some terrorist. Bolo, bolo, will you be answerable then?’

So not many had the zeal to put up a roadblock to his patriotic fervour in contributing to the cause of Hindu rashtra.

‘I will leave no stone unturned till he leaves this place,’ he declared with point-blank finality.

Father of a young girl who had to go with her parents to the fields to help them, and given the odd hours, times, location, everything convinced miyanji that it would be a struggle now.

So off he went, packing their stuff in rucksacks and bundles, to a place which he considered safer for small illegalities that a local person, surrounded by his own people, can engage in without getting burdened with the fear of consequences.

There is a lesson though—a decade of diligence can be undone by some moments of mischief. It takes just a moment to fall and get undone.