Perfect Nights

 

He doesn’t try to see the entire sea; he merely looks at a drop. It’s not that he isn’t happy about the sea. The little fact is that he simply understands the value of a drop. Drops make the sea, not the vice versa. In the same way, he isn’t worried about millions; instead he is bothered about a single rupee. Lots of one rupee coins make a million, not the vice versa.

In addition, being busy like a bee collecting tiny bits of pollen gives him a clear conscience and a satisfaction and belief that hard work gives one a long, peaceful and undisturbed sleep, so much so that a new dawn looks like the freshest chapter of life, a new life literally. And he would always remark that a sound sleep is the main takeaway from all the honest drudgery during the day.

‘I sleep like a King!’ he says to anyone who brings to mention the role of hard-working nature in defining one’s life.

He is in early forties, but like anyone lynched by poverty and deprivation, looks a decade older on any day. Short, thin and black, he is easily recognised with his Bhojpuri accent in this Haryanvi town where he stays in a rented accommodation with his wife. His little children stay with their grandparents in native Bihar.

He is a kabadiwala, a small-time scrap and garbage collector who roams around in the streets of the villages around the town. His carrier rickshaw is full of cardboard boxes, newspapers, redundant stationary, recyclable plastic, bottles, iron discards and much more. It’s a huge pile. One may wonder how this small kabadi manages this kind of load on his rickshaw. While he roams in the streets, shouting kabadiwala, he can go to the last ounce of his strength to get more discards. After all, it is no small matter to earn a living from something that has lost its utility. It’s like drawing life out of the dead.

Mention this big-hearted effort on his part to scuff out morsels of economic survival from the trash and he proudly smirks, ‘Oh, these few hundred rupees are nothing; my main reward is my perfectly undisturbed, long sleep after the day’s work! My nights are perfect despite so many imperfections of the day. But I’m lucky, not too many people have perfect nights, especially the wealthy people have very poor nights.’

He fights at many fronts. He has to squeeze out each and every faculty managed by his brain to beat the scrap owner in terms of price and measurement. The per kilogram price has to be low, but not so low that the owner kicks him out straightway. It has to be the lowest in the acceptable range. His fight is not over rupees, but over paisas per kilogram. Even from the rounded figure he tries to nibble away some 50 paisa, a small cut, to make some rupees at his end. Well, that’s what a small-time scrap dealer is all about, creating the chances of some odd rupees from the junk piled in front of him.

As he moves with his huge pile on his carrier rickshaw, heaving it like a huffing-puffing skinny bull struggling with its laden cart, commend him on his laborious endeavour and promptly comes the reply, ‘Honest hardwork cleanses the soul, one gets the best of a sleep, like I do.’

Well, listening to his main takeaway—the best of a sleep—people sometime even wonder it surely must be a ‘special’ sleep.

Apart from his bargaining tongue, it’s the rusty iron scale that helps him like a faithful instrument in his humungous task of drawing pennies out of the gutter. He has worked very hard on his weighing scale. It’s a subtle trick to save him from a direct measurement scandal. Here again it is a small kitchen knife that helps him to cut the owner’s pocket in small amounts, bit by bit, like a mouse nibbles at the bread that you come to know in the morning.

During the absorbing and highly engaging phase of bargaining, sorting, weighing and calculating, the talk between the two parties has intermittent reference to that special sleep of his. He is really proud of it. Let there be no doubt about it anymore.   

The hand-held weighing scale’s pan where he prefers to put the purchased discards, in normal condition hangs above the other one where he puts the iron measurements. This slight off-balance saves him many grams without being caught. Then during the act of holding the scale aloft, he ensures that the commodity pan gets a bit more of the discards in lieu of the measuring weight put in the other pan. It’s done by expert manoeuvring with his fingers.

In this way he earns a bit of extra profit among the showers of curses and abuses by the farmer. Even a kick cannot turn the scales in the other direction. That is his sacred law. After all to earn a living from dead things is no small matter. To all the accusations of tricks during weighing, he says matter-of-factly, ‘I am honest, just hardworking in my elaborate task. If I cheat, I won’t get such a sound sleep.’

Suppose he is weighing the discarded agricultural tools like sickles, shovels and scythes, he dupes the owner by exaggerating the weight of the wooden handle that won’t be counted with the iron. He knows how many grams he saves in that. He has the very same assessment in plastics. A cycle tyre pump, for example. He forces the owner to sell it at the price of cheap plastic because it is made of almost useless, thin sheet iron. In fact, he says that he has done the owner a favour in taking it at all.  

‘It’ll just add to my load without fetching me a paisa. I’m just taking it away to save your house from the clutter of negative energy,’ he elucidates the big favour he has done in taking it away.

He tries to assuage the scrap owner’s bruised self by saying, ‘And due to all these small bits of service, the God always ensures that I get a better sleep than most of the people possessing huge wealth. This is a proof of my good ways!’  

Then he scores the number of kilograms to even sums, thus saving a few hundred grams in that regard. After calculation, like a maths wizard, he rounds off late forties of paisas into perfect forty. His each and every thought and movement is guided by the goal to earn an extra paisa here, a paisa there, which would make a rupee, and some rupees would pile up to make a perfect hundred. He is very patient. He just doesn’t see anything beyond all this. It’s such a fight, a fight that gives him perfect sleep.

His wife is seventeen years younger to him and very fair. Being petite and delicate featured, she looks far younger than her years. She draws a special attraction from most of the persons of the opposite gender. Among the scarp lying around to be sorted she looks worth coveting. They stay in a rented room at the outskirts of the town where a village has merged with the urban sprawl. There is a longish yard and a row of tiny rooms. The owner is a portly sixty something farmer, who drinks daily, and allows them to dump the collection in the yard.

In the third room from theirs, there is a 30-year-old local man from some other district in Haryana. He works as a salesman in a wine outlet nearby. There is special bonhomie between the owner and this chap because of the common factor, wine.

The property owner takes his lecherous share by shamelessly staring at the kabadiwala’s wife. The poor scrap dealer is well aware of the old man’s tendency to have an eye-feast even at this stage of life.

‘He has a bad worm in his mind. I don’t think he can sleep peacefully like I do,’ he observes to his wife sometimes. The charming wife gets a faint smile around her lips and stays mum.

Well, the wine salesman has a bigger role in the scrap collector’s sound sleep, bigger than any purity of conscience born of hard work. All along he has been helping his neighbour sleep soundly after a hard day’s work by providing decent stocks of sleeping pills to his wife who in turn serves it lovingly to her husband. So the hardworking scrap collector sleeps very soundly while his wife and her paramour most often have busy nights, or we can say ‘poor nights’ in the scrap collector’s lingo.     

Runaway Husbands

 

And then one fine day, in the beginning of October in 2006, I decided to shed all hypocrisy, like a snake casts away its slough, to sleekly shine with the sparkle of truth. I knew that it will create multiple layers of personal, social and professional upheavals, putting me in critically sour soup. It even appeared like going naked out of the house. Clothing seems like a necessary and practical hypocrisy, saving our skin, helping us keeping the secrets safe, allowing us to pretend totally the other way around than what is really going inside.

I decided to be entirely true in my behaviour and words with my wife. She had been reasonably happy with my funny falsehoods and little lies so far. Sometimes I came very close to shatter the castle of her domination by uttering the heavy-headed truth but refrained from it, feeling it prudent to maintain the status quo.

To tell you the truth, I had started to get scared of her by now. It was no more that feeble irritation that most of the husbands feel while staying in close quarters with their wives. She was by now fully convinced that the only way to manage the household was through her iron fist and screeching voice. During the few physical scuffles that had taken place recently, she in fact gave it back the way you won’t expect even from the most fearsome of a female demon. The last skirmish earned me a bluish bump on my forehead.

‘I banged into the doorpost,’ there I went telling a lie to protect my honour.   

The life was thus turning into a big lie. It was suffocating. I wanted my freedom. I was craving for my truth to give me company right there in the open. So I prodded it out of the inner recesses where it had been hiding. 

I chose to bring my inner thoughts on parity with my behaviour in office. They held me in high esteem, so far, given my shrewdness, which I took as a shortcut to hard-work, but they viewed it as smart-work.

I resolved to be all truthful in my dealings with my social and friend circle also. So far they found me a nice gentleman to mix with. They could afford to have some expectations from me and I from them, a kind of socializing give and take in which none of the parties felt cheated.  

Then, out of the blue, the arrival of my sworn point-blank bullets of truth. Slayings happened, I tell you. In less than a month, I mean by the end of October, the world had changed irretrievably. The naked sword of truth, unsheathed from the shiny scabbard of civility, etiquettes and practicality, had cut through the moorings that had held me anchored in the bay of my life. Now I was drifting away, carried by the exciting waves of the open sea, a kind of morphed freedom.

The scene of war completely changed in the house. My wife was seen seeking escape from my barbed self. It was a sinister revolt against her sovereign entitlement to come out right regarding anything to do with the art and craft of domesticity. I immediately turned out to be the meanest fellow, the worst husband. She carried nice imprints of my fingers on her cheeks and I, in turn, carried finely patterned handwork by her rampaging brothers on my entire back. It was just on the verge of divorce.

With my fake self gone, I became the rascalest employee who comes to office to spoil the entire organisation, a severe challenger to the vast set of protocols and tomes of discipline. As if the protocols are only there to support the falsehoods! There were serious discussions of firing me outright, a kind of bloody beheading of my career.

My friend circle thought I had gone mad, insulting and selfish, my head gone into parleys with the demons. They found it advisable to avoid my bites.

Truth is a rasping slab on which the rough rusticities of one’s persona are whetted away to get a sharp edge. It then slays thoughts, emotions, sensibilities, conventions, and much more.

It soon turned into all the rest versus me. Lest they condemned me as a ‘gone case’ fit for a mental asylum, I ran away one night. The autumn was saying a gentle bye and the cotton soft flakes of an early winter lingered over the misty nights in Delhi. I sneaked away at night carrying just a light backpack stuffed with the bare essentials of a short trip in a hurry. As a mark of my freedom I left at night without informing anyone.

I don’t have any destination in mind. I am just allowing the deeper self to guide me of its own. It seems as if there are two me, one running away and the other taking me away.

I see myself reaching the ISBT and boarding a late night bus. I am not much bothered where it is heading to. Anything out of Delhi would qualify it as running away, a kind of my revenge against all of them for plotting against me. I also say ‘one Dehradun’ as the passenger on the seat in front says the same. To the hell with life’s calculations and planning, let it unfold of its own. The routine is stifling.

So to Dehradun I go by the rickety bus, its entire metallic length perilously buzzing on the not so smooth roads in western UP. The morning twilight sees me getting down to the same smoky, fried, yawning tea-smell at the bus station at the so called ‘destination’ of the bus. But to me it’s no coming home. When you are not after a particular destination, each step turns a new beginning and the next one a still fresher goal. I am not planning anything. The worried me now surrendered to the deeper me, the observer of all this drama in me and around.

I find myself having tea and a babaji looking at me expectantly. I offer him a glass of tea. Among sips of the piping hot beverage, uninteresting bits of conversation follow. I see him taking up his shoddy bundle containing few of his provisions. The deeper me sees me following the sadhu to a shared auto. He looks at me sitting by his side in the rickety three-tyred means of transport.

‘Where are you going bachha?’ he asks.

‘Somewhere,’ I reply nonchalantly.

‘Take care son, somewhere sums to be nowhere most of the time,’ he says wisely.

‘Nowhere is better than being at the wrong place,’ I say, not to win an argument but just as per the wild stream of the current of life that seems to have broken over the embankments and flow into the fields around, to taste a bigger sense of being, a kind of expansion.

I get down where he does, not with any particular intention, just that his getting down reminds me that I have to get down too. One cannot keep rolling around in a shared auto unless one has the sole motive of spending the entire purse in the fun rides in a jumping tin box.

I take the same direction as he takes and walk a few paces behind him. He is curious and even suspicious, a kind of tension creeps into him as if he is raked by the question: ‘Why is this stranger following me?’

I can sense this anxious feeling in him, so deliberately increase the number of paces between us so that he can move more freely. But strangely I know I will somehow follow the path taken by him. After all, his getting down here triggered my leaving the auto as well. There is already a kind of vague connection. No wonder, we are social animals.

He walks in a brooding manner, the surety and freedom of his steps gone. He peeps over his shoulder now and then to confirm whether I am still on the trail or not. I try to look sideways to make it appear like I have forgotten about him. See the power of habit! I have already forgotten the point-blank, naked truth. I am getting into the make-believe world where it isn’t even required.         

I read Garhi Cantt on a signboard. It clings to Dehradun’s margins like a child holding onto its mother’s lap. Now it gives me a sense of going somewhere. It’s a little peaceful world in a small market having tiny shops selling petty items. A quiet boulevard circuiting finely, almost imperceptibly. And the cutely undulating terrain at the threshold of the Himalayan foothills. It is remarkably free of noise. Maybe as travellers we are looking for likeable milestones on the sides. I but don’t consider myself a traveller. I’m a runaway husband at the most.

The sadhu isn’t now too much bothered about me. Maybe he thinks I’m someone in the initial stages of being someone like him, loitering around without any specific purpose before finally hitting the purposeless road full time.   

The place provides some solace to my impassive, benumbed senses. The houses on both sides of Tapkeshwar road, as I read it on a roadside marker, stand in a splendid isolation accentuated by vegetable and flower gardens. Small concrete houses, sheltering the cosy post-retirement world of army officials and many other decently standing civil servants. A groomed isolation so near the main hustle bustle of the capital city. One can surprisingly see wild flowers among the wayside bushes, ferns and clumpy undergrowth, the effect of the Himalayas looming over the horizon at just six or seven kilometres of crow flight.

The foothills seem to entice the journeyman from across the misty distances. I feel an urge to go running into them and surrender my bored, bruised self into their open arms. But then the great mountain seems daunting as well. It seems that I would be lost in its vastness. This little road at this small place, and someone with whom I had recently something to do—like sharing tea, having some words and then that auto ride—is also on the path. After all, the mankind is a social animal at the most. That seems a safe option for a runway husband.  

The road is named after a temple, so it must be a big place of worship, I think. I haven’t heard much about the temple.

‘It appears like Tapkeshwar temple’s majestic solitude and holy aura permeates through the surrounding area,’ I reflect.

The devotees are trickling in. They come slowly without shooing away the temple’s cool silence in this first week of November. Starting at a distance from the stone gate—biscuit coloured with dark strips of paint running artistically—the path is lined with tiny tea stalls and the vendors of puja provisions. In front of the main gate, at both ends, there are two massive trees, the trees of Indian spirituality and mythology: banyan and peepal. The peepal has given a good chase to the banyan in its many-trunked, mossy rise into the sky.

The sadhu tugs at my sleeve under the banyan tree.

‘Are you sure you aren’t following me?’ he asks with distinctly visible traces of irritation and suspicion.

All of us have something to run away from our past. Even on the free path of mendicancy, we prefer to avoid those past milestones coming hurtling from behind. He is worried. I can feel I have already given him enough reasons to smell something fishy in my walk that looks a pursuit to him. I deny to the capacity of my shake of head and reticent tongue. He doesn’t seem convinced though. He moves on and I try to appear absorbed in the tree’s canopy.  

The peepal’s radius has reached several meters. Its trunks, sub-trunks, branches, sub-branches and boughs shelter a horde of supposedly good and bad spirits. The main trunk is surrounded by a brick and concrete circular platform—the tamed religiosity. Little alcoves around its perimeter are used as the shrines of devis and devatas. The trunk has lost its colour and acquired a strange pigmentation, the colour of faith and prayers. People have smeared their offerings here. The colour of prayers is criss-crossed with red cotton threads, the mauli dhaga, the string of faith, holding the kite of prayers to keep it flying at a manageable height. My mind is reading all this information about the sacred tree.

On the platform, an old bespectacled sadhu, bearing a silvery beard, wearing a woollen cap, sits in half-worldly, half-contemplative mood. He finds me suitable for some free time and easier purse strings that can be opened with a bit of pious cajoling. He beckons me and slaps a hearty blessing on my back as I bow down to him.

‘You have a wife who prays to God to have you as her husband in the next hundred births. You have a job where they say the office will fall to pieces without you. There are friends and relatives who won’t be able to survive without your help,’ he expects a handsome big bank note for the glorification of the false in me.

I cringe under the impact of his verbal as well as physical strike at my back. I offer him a one-rupee coin and his eyes turn red and he takes away all the glories and I stand exactly as I am in reality.

‘No wonder, not many people like you,’ he summarises after deglorifying me.

For one rupee I get my truth but for hundred rupees I would have collected a bagful of lies about myself.    

The babaji whom I have followed to this point is standing under the banyan tree at the other end of the gate, keenly watching all the happenings taking place under the peepal tree.

The banyan tree has an ancient charm about it. It looks old and wise, its sturdy leaves carrying ears that can hear what we cannot. In the majestic hunky dory of its beard, it looks like a bridge between this and the other world. It has a squarish curb around the base of its main trunk. A vendor of puja provisions has managed to pitch up a tent on it. His little shop is stacked with framed images of Gods and Goddesses, puja thalis, flower garlands, ritual offerings, religious trinkets including cheap amulets, rings having glassed images of Gods and scores of small-time religious souvenirs. Nearby, on the curb itself, a crouching clay lion roars, its tail half in air, just about to jump at any other encroacher on the holy platform. It seems to be tamed by the vendor. And now by the babaji as he puts his hand on its back as the conqueror of all worldly desires and fears.

I don’t have the heart to just cross over and enter the main gate, especially as the much worried babaji is staring at each movement of mine. So to allay his tension and undo what I have done, I take the role of a firm believer in Gods and go to the vendor and purchase a full puja thali. Seeing me buying the thali, and a bit relieved, the sadhu sneaks into the temple premises.   

I walk in tow, I mean I don’t mean to follow him, just that his choosing of the twists and turns comes to precede my time and space by just a few seconds and some paces. Just marginally ahead of mine. Idiosyncrasies of the power of coincidence is all we can say about it. Now if that comes to confine my endeavour to be viewed by him as a deliberate following of him then I cannot help it too much.

One thing is pretty clear now that both me and him have become very conscious of each other’s steps. The onus is on me to make my presence here just like any other pilgrim moving around without any motivation other than seeking God’s blessings.

A very old sadhu is somehow managing his shaky steps with a crooked stick. A bright red cloth with golden trimmings at its borders is tied around his neck. An open-fronted soiled-grey woollen jacket is keeping him safe from the traces of early winter. He does not look homeless here. He can claim his ownership just by spreading a raggish cloth on the floor and lie down on his back for a cool, solid support for survival mouthfuls, rest and even respect. The shade of religion saves many a homeless soul.

I stop by this sadhu and have a few words about Gods and prayers and puja so that the other sadhu, I mean my sadhu (see how effortlessly our sense of belonging evolves), would find it normal. I just forgot that my sadhu had done exactly the same in order to while away time as I bought the puja thali. Now I also do the same to bide some time, expecting him to move in the mean time. Too much of coincidence, agreed. Now he has stronger reasons to spot me as a black sheep. He doesn’t move and waits for me to approach as I move on a bit guiltily now.

‘You have been asking about me to that old sadhu, mister! Whatever you have to ask, ask me directly!’ there is tartness in his voice.   

Nearby, at the head of a little row of stalls, there is the Tourist Information Centre. Neat, clean and whitewashed, it’s a cotton imitation of Victorian architecture. There is a perfect replica of the red-tiled sloping roof of the British Raj period. The interiors are clean. Surprisingly. More surprisingly, it has internet facility for the visitors. Internet access was a rarity during those days. 

I have hardly any words in reply. To evade him, and make it appear the case of an educated but lost soul from the cities who is grappling between faith and reason and doesn’t have much clue about temples, I take brisk steps to the tourist information centre and thrust my head into the peep window, contriving serious inquiries about the place.

It’s a big temple complex. An institution of faith of its unique kind; a holy trade of its own type. Near the both sides of the main gate, there are two little shrines. The marble tiles inside add to the spiritual respectability. A better seat of God in comparison to those outside on the platforms. As the sun peeps through the misty morning, some taxies come to halt and groups of tourist-devotees troop out. The day has begun.

I know that the baba and I can have our own separate ways without causing much inconvenience to any party. All it needs is a bit of common sense and support from the coincidental factors. So with my puja thali in hand I loiter around the information centre, waiting for the baba to move on his path. Little do I realise that I appear more of an ill-advised detective, holding puja thali and standing near the information centre with ulterior motives. 

Things take their own course. Presently he has a serious business to stop now and then and look suspiciously. I have the business to avoid a perception that I’m following him. I expect him to go, he expects me to cross over and move ahead. Neither happens. I see him standing at the end of the steps, keenly observing each of my movements.

From the main gate, a flight of broad marbled steps descends to again rise to the better parts, the main parts, the shrines of blessings. On the side walls, each step has a marble plaque bearing the names of the devotees who donated money for building that particular step. Each step has a name. I have read books and know that these commemorative plaques make a nice reading. So I simply start reading the names and dates and years. The puja thali is still there in my hand. The little backpack is on my back.

‘There is something really fishy about this chap,’ the sadhu must have thought.

Above the commemorative slabs there is a series of covered terraces having cement floors, with shelves along the back walls. Anyone bearing the invisible coupon of mendicancy and beggarship can take a free shelter here. Almost all the places have been claimed. Their humble belongings bundled in sack-clothes are put in the shelves. Proper houses in order. They have a common roof but no partition. Lines of trust hold the domesticity. Violations lead to verbal and sometimes physical fights. An iron hand-rail runs through the middle of the broad flight of stairs, separating those to-be-blessed from the blessed ones coming the other way.

My reading is over and he is still waiting at the end of the steps. So I decide to talk to a few of the mendicant friars resting under the sheltered terrace by the side, looking at him now and then to see if he has moved on. He but is now rooted to the spot. He isn’t even bothered about any alms that people offer. Finally, I myself decide to cross him and melt into the crowd of the pilgrims.

‘You have been asking those beggars about me! Ask me straight I tell you!’ he is nervous.

I pretend that I haven’t heard him.

As one steps down the descending entrance way, religiosity seeps in through chiming bells, murmuring crowds and buffets of incense smell. There are sadhus on both sides, very poor semi-mendicants asking for alms, and scores of plain beggars. Well, in reality all of them might be simply beggars, just sadhus in the name of having some saffron colour on their clothes, haggard looks, long beards and flying locks of hair. I hope to be lost among their hackling voices.

I have already mentioned about the absence of destination in my journey. I am footloose and no destination binds me. I just try to move on with hurried steps. I find myself near the holy stream that gurgles through the temple complex. There are raised covered platforms running along the staircase. Idols of Gods line the wall to draw attention of the visitors to turn them firm believers and pilgrims. Some alms or donations are expected to be the kindest act. It is about salvation. Donation to the poor brings salvation. It is a huge belief.

I increase my pace. I know he is following me. On a wooded slope, visible through the break in the series of terraces, a sadhu is cooking something on a coal stove. He is rubbing something on his palm. Fraction of a beneficent smile is visible on his bearded face. His clay smoking pipe is awaiting a fill. The smoke of liberation waits in anticipation. Nearby, on the back wall of the series of terraces, the framed pictures of Gods stare down at him. Close at hand, another sadhu, wearing cheap thick-framed spectacles, is engrossed in chanting hymns from some scriptural pamphlets. He seems to be practising some mantra recitation. Probably some assignment is at hand for a private religious ceremony.

I take refuge in their company. The babaji waits at a distance. I have forgotten to use the puja thali in my hand. He must be sure by now that I am a detective who is after him for some reason. After a while I cannot see him, so feeling it safe I move on.   

Further on there is a little marble shrine by the side. Through the grilled opening the mythical writer, the ancient writer sage Balmiki looks at you. It does justice to the reputation of the revered writer of Ramayana. It’s a full bearded face in spiritual trance. The eyes are very big and look at you with curiosity. The lips are painted red and a smile lurks with a know-all aura. His full squarish face is pinkish. Nose is perfectly straight, cheeks are healthy. The face of a very handsome man, indeed. His long locks of hair are tied at the top of his head with a string of holy beads. Time is frozen around him as he sits there in a meditative posture, a silky yellow robe covering his torso. There is a garland of wilting flowers around his neck. The flowers are few days old possibly. Flowers are mortal. So they cannot stay in the loops of frozen time in the little shrine. The shrine has been dug into the hillside along the flight of stairs. Its roof seems to be hanging in antiquity as mossy, muddled outcroppings of stones stare down, suspended in time to maintain the mythical aura of the holy figure.

I feel faithful enough to offer my puja thali to the revered writer. After all, I also once wrote to the extent of gathering a few dozen rejection slips from the publishers. My wife then saved the pile of rejection slips from acquiring further thickness by ordaining no more foolish scribbling as long as she was there in the house.

I respect the great sage writer, so genuinely do the best I can manage in performing the rituals. Life seems better without a suspicious baba peeping at you from around the corners. Coming home it feels, I tell you.

The flight of steps comes to an end at the doorstep of a towered shrine. It is built on a raised platform emerging from the bed of the stream cutting through the tiniest of a valley. The main complex overlooks the stony, rippling course of the water channel chiming musically, as if it is boosting the holiness of the place. The path reaches a fork. To the left, it goes along an almost vertically cut slope. Stony, mossy crags and boulders jutting out amidst the roots and the trees holding onto their perch almost miraculously. There are tiny shrines in the awnings below the overhung cliffside. In the maze of the stony roofs, one can see pigeons perched upon the littlest projections. There is a huge clay statue of Lord Hanuman in a meditative posture on the floor, His head almost touching the hillside. The expression on His face evinces an effort as if he is supporting this dugout like a mighty pillar. The alkaline rocks have bleached and look whitewashed.

And here my hopes are dashed. He is also trying to make it appear like he is busy in worshipping Lord Hanuman. He must have thought that I’m playacting to offer prayers to Sage Balmiki. Why would someone simply pray at the Balmiki shrine bypassing all the greater Gods of Hindu mythology, he must have thought.

A turn in the path goes along the stream’s upper course to pass over a tiny bridge over the stream and then continuing its course on the other side over an elevated platform erected on pillars raised from the stream bed. It has almost a roof of the overhanging thick foliage of trees. It then leads to the main temple shrine overlooking the gurgling brook. On this side of the path, leading to Tapkeshwar Mahadev temple, concrete is being dumped in huge foundation holes to erect pillars to support further construction.

I run among these modern ruins of continuous construction.

The mountain stream has cut its course almost vertically. Its channel is narrow and if you look upwards into the slim valley, you see trees on both sides almost shaking hands in spiritual unison.

The main shrine is dug into the hillside. Massive blocks of the stony hillside have been cut to make a path leading to the shrine. The path circuits the overhanging ledge of the upper slope. It looks dangerously overhung. But I look more restlessly behind to confirm whether he is following me or not. Now I feel only our faith shelters us from such pitfalls. I pray to the God that he gets lost in the maze somewhere. Given a choice, I would prefer meeting my wife at that moment but not him. Life is full of challenges. And not meeting him is the challenge now.   

Just opposite the main shrine, a huge block of bedrock creates a small waterfall in the course of the stream. The water falls with a murmuring thrill which mixes with the chimes of temple bells ringing nearby. Incense-dipped air blows across the channel and kisses the lapping water-drops. The air seems to have a dewy sip before moving heavenwards carrying the prayers and many a message for divine intervention. It’s a peaceful little world. But its meaning has lost its feel now as the mind is occupied about the pursuit by the sadhu.

The riverside foundation of the shrine complex is made of roughly hewn stone blocks. Further downstream, there is a pillared veranda at a height of one storey from the streambed. It serves as a balcony to the temple. The main shrine is visible through grilled doors and windows along the inner side of the veranda. The floor is cool, made of clean marble slabs. Atop the pillared veranda there are series of rooms for the resident friars. A row of glassed windows overlooks the stream from the residential dormitories. It is two-storey high and the view is great.

His eyes are peering at me from one of the windows. I see him clearly. I decide to set it square with him by talking out straight, just like I had talked it square with all those whom I knew before my escape. But before that I feel like bowing my head in full reverence to the Lord.

The main shrine comprises a low-roofed cave complex. The finely undulating roof has been artistically painted and seems like a cavity to the known and the unknown at the same time. The devotees need to keep their heads low against bumping into some jutting stone and lose faith there itself with the arrival of a bump. One is supposed to be humble, head bent, remember God and look at the ground.

The innermost part on the side, deep into the hill, is quite low-roofed. Along the inner recesses, small niches have been further dug into the sides to portray different aspects of Lord Shiva and Ma Adi Shakti. The flooring is made of exquisitely polished marble slabs. To the other side of the shrine hall, a flight of two steps leaves one with the roof hanging a bit higher. Here one can move without caring for the head. Two massive brass faces of Father Lord and Mother Shakti are indeed godly and draw reverence just from the mere look of it. There is a third plush section as well. Its roof is manmade after projecting out from the dugout. Here the priests rest, taking a nice break from their ritualistic labour.

With a far lighter heart I move now slowly without any effort to hide. I am sure he will come following me and then I would beckon him. He is but nowhere to be seen.

I am near the place where I had met the babas, one holding the chillum and the other reading scriptures.  There is a sobbing sound.

‘She wouldn’t allow me the peace of my soul! Now she has sent a detective after me!’ he is crying among the stormy hiccups of sorrow.

I present myself and he jumps in agony, brandishing his finger at me.

‘He is the one. She has sent him to track me and catch me!’ he seems to be at the sharp edge of a nervous breakdown.

I hold a parley with the sadhus and now it comes to light.

‘He was a well-to-do man but his wife is a tyrant so he ran away. She keeps trying to catch him,’ the easy-spirited, chillum-holding sadhu informs me.

‘I’m nobody’s wife’s ambassador. In fact, I’m myself running away from my own wife,’ I say in all seriousness.

But they cackle with laughter, taking it to be a joke.

I walk with slow steps and marvel at the coincidence, ‘Two men running away from their wives end up running away from each other as well.’

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.