Death is like a convincing con artist. If it were a human being, it would perhaps be like Charles Sobhraj, conning people at will, regardless of time, age and country of origin.
I took ill a few days back. My body temperature soared to 104.5 degrees and refused to come down. One night, I had a terrible shivering fit. My entire body was shaking, I just couldn’t will it to stop, memories from my entire life flashed in a blur. I was scared, what was happening?
My blood counts were low, my white blood cells were at a stage where doctors said I could acquire any infection easily. I was diagnosed with dengue and admitted to the hospital. Horrid visions of blood transfusions gone wrong played out in my mind. Just how many stories had I done on the ‘window period’ in blood transfusion which means that no blood can ever be guaranteed to be safe? Plenty. And loads of others on patients dying from dengue. I felt too well-informed for my own good.
But while these visions were playing out in my mind, Death was waiting to strike someone else.
R and S came to see me in hospital on the first day. They had come to see me at home too once, bringing me flowers and chocolate. They fooled around, trying to cheer me up.
The next day, they were supposed to get K, T and other people with them. R called in the afternoon, I thought he was just telling me they had left college for the hospital, but no, he said his father had suffered some kind of a paralytic attack. By evening, he knew it was brain haemorrhage. Ten days later, his father passed away. He never came out of coma.
The entire week before, his mother had been unwell. His father had no hypertension history, but that day, his blood pressure was at 220/140.
It always seems to happen that way. When Nana took ill last year, we had all been worried about Nani and a couple of falls she had had on the street. We had doctors run the entire battery of tests on her and then the next thing I knew, on a chilly winter morning, I was rushing him to hospital with half his face collapsed and his sugar level at a measly 25. Thankfully, he survived.
I was having lunch when news of R’s father’s death arrived. He was on the phone, crying. S started crying too and ran off to the monastery nearby.
The entire week after that, I kept getting reminded of the incident which happened while I was working. One night, I was returning home in an auto when P called. I could barely hear her, but I think she said something about her month-old niece having cancer and that she had been rushed to AIIMS. I made the necessary calls to help them out and sat back and wondered. A month-old child with leukaemia? What about all those theories of lifestyle and pesticides and carcinogens in food etc? You carry a baby for the full term of nine months and the next thing you know it’s got one of the deadliest diseases possible. And medical science has no clues about it.
I was too scared of asking P about the baby for the next couple of days. Finally, I did. She said she had passed away on Karva Chauth day, soon after her mother broke her fast. It still makes me shudder with fear.
When an elderly person dies, Nana always calls it ‘lifecycle completion’, a term I really appreciate, for it so beautifully conveys the meaning of a life fully lived. But what do you say to a person when he loses someone still very much in the process of fulfilling his responsibilities? Life, and the events thereof teach you that there are no such words.
So even though my Diwali this year was dull as usual and quite boring, I decided that I had a lot to thank God for. I had recovered from dengue without needing a blood transfusion and the hospital stay was much better than I had expected it to be. Yes, I hated the IV drip and was absolutely helpless when the dengue rash started appearing. My body was so bloated that I couldn’t even get into my bra and I still find it difficult to climb stairs. But yeah, I am alive and more than thankful for it.
