A Life Apart (2 page)

Throughout the dust-blown journey to the hospital, the second driver had his arm out of the passenger window and flailed a filthy red cloth, in all probability the one used for cleaning the
taxi. This was the Calcutta equivalent of the warning wail of the ambulance. The hope that traffic in this city would stop or make way for a taxi with an insignificant red rag flapping out of one
of its windows was risible and infuriating at the same time. How many people knew that a red rag meant a car carrying the seriously ill to hospital? Ritwik certainly didn’t until now.

The taxi went down Anwar Shah Road, turned right at Deshpran Sashmal Road, with its straight, uninterrupted stretch of tramlines, and made its way to Kalighat, its wheels sending up a dense
cottony billow of yellow-grey dust that, mingled with the exhaust fumes, kept blowing into the vehicle through the open windows. It snagged in Ritwik’s mind as another worry: his mother
really shouldn’t be breathing in such visibly polluted air at this time. The roads on either side of the tram tracks were dug up in places and it was a bumpy, convoluted ride, all straight
lines from one point to another becoming two oblique diagonals taking in a distant, third point. With each jerk, Ritwik feared the clot in his mother’s head was oozing out more blood, or her
frangible brain-lobes juddering with the impact and disintegrating like some delicate pudding that could barely hold its shape.

At Kalighat, the taxi took a left turn and went past the crematorium – the same crematorium where his mother had performed the last rites for his father nine days ago – on its way to
the medical centre in Alipore. It was one of the busiest crossroads in the city. Pedestrians and traffic flowed into each other like indiscriminate waters; there were no demarcated spaces for
either, no rules about their separation. A cow stood, calm and transcendent, in the middle of this barely moving, lawless sea of people, bicycles, autorickshaws, lorries, cars, buses, stray dogs
and trams. A woman with stainless steel kitchen utensils balanced on her head shouted out her wares and tried to cross over to the other side towards Gariahat. All these registered in
Ritwik’s head like separate photographs, without syntax. And above all this incessant noise of traffic and horns and human living, he could hear, as an abiding bass-line, the raucous cry of
crows. He just had to shift the focus of his ears, from foreground to background, to hear the harsh, continuous cawing welling out over everything, like the slow, silent beginnings of a flood.

And now that it was all happening, how would he live? Throughout his teenage years, he had forced himself to think about his mother’s death, as if that willed act could deprive fate of the
power at least to seize him with the suddenness of tragedy. It comes to him easily, the line,
Readiness is all
. Lying on the floor, between his mother and Aritra, his father on the pallet,
night after sweat-saturated night he had taken himself ruthlessly through the worst scenarios and when it had all played out in his febrile imagination up to a point beyond which nothing, no hope,
no solace, no consolation, nothing remained, he went one step further. It became a slowly forged shield through which the vagaries and surprises of events could scarcely touch him for he had
already imagined and lived inside the worst.

What
would
life be without her? In some amorphous way he had always thought that all his happiness would come to an end with her death. But what if it released him instead into a
terrifying new life, unshadowed by the prospect of her ageing and dying in slow degrees? What if that freedom was given him so early? If he could only push the inevitable away to some unspecified
point in the future when he was old enough, a proper adult, he would be able to deal with it efficiently and well, but no, it really was happening now. It wasn’t the luxury of a safe mind
toying with dark imaginings in terrified fascination any more. At thirteen, he thought twenty-five was the right age for dealing with Big Events like the death of a parent; now, at twenty-one, the
notion of a safe age turned out to be a mirage, receding further and further into the distance as one approached a moving boundary. Perhaps there really wasn’t any safe age for loss.

And his father had just died, leaving him as the theoretical head of the family. Following the ineluctable laws of Bengali hierarchies, he was now in charge of their family of three, responsible
for his mother and his younger brother. It was this that ate at him more than his father’s death, this swift alighting of burdens and responsibilities when he was so unprepared, so green. How
was he going to provide for them? On that deceptively small question, everything foundered. Families were based more on subtle ties of provider and receiver than on any intangible emotional
bonding. If he had been ten or twelve at this moment, he wouldn’t have had to think about all this; something would have been arranged by the other adults in the household until he came of
age. But he couldn’t hope for it now. If he could become invisible, or just cease to exist, be whisked away to a different country, a different continent . . . It wasn’t the first time
he had had such fantasies but now, looking distractedly out of the taxi window at a group of strutting pigeons pecking at some spilled grain on the roadside, at two slum children just sitting and
staring blankly at traffic and passersby, their eyes opaque and unreadable, he felt guilty about letting thoughts of money enter his head. He should be thinking of his mother, her well-being, not
costing it down or ledgering family relationships.

All those fears of his mother dying and leaving him alone were really his fears of a parent in hospital with no money to pay for medical bills, doctors, nurses, medicines, tests. But for now his
pockets were heavy with borrowed and given money. He had been sharp enough to grab the bulging wallet which his mother had held so close to her in her week of mourning, a wallet filled with money
from relatives, his own friends, Aritra’s friends and their parents, people who instinctively knew that that would be the greatest necessity now that her husband, the family’s sole
earner, was dead. Soumik’s mother, Uncle Adip, Mrinal, all had come forward with generous wads of cash, which they had embarrassedly pushed into her hands, or had bypassed her altogether and
had given Ritwik and Aritra instead. Taking possession of his mother’s wallet had come naturally; as soon as the taxi had arrived outside the front door, he had picked it up from beside the
bed. If he had been less alert, it would almost certainly have been stolen by one of his uncles and, when asked, they would have denied ever having set their eyes upon it. It was the story of their
lives in Grange Road. It had been clever of him to get in there first and prevent the money from going missing. That opportune seizing brought temporary redemption from more begging, more debts (he
knew the money would be spent in a matter of days) and more shame. At least for now, he wouldn’t have to call on Mrinal for a handout for the first things – the doctor’s home
visit, the taxi fare to the hospital, the admission charges.

The hospital was new, swanky, and built and run with the dirty money of Marwaris. Everything seemed to happen swiftly and efficiently here, to Ritwik’s amazement. He had grown up with news
coverage of innumerable hospitals in Calcutta where cats roamed and pissed in the wards, dogs came in and walked away with newborns or wandered around licking the wounds and sores of people lying
there with no hope of escape. But here there were silent lifts and the white noise of functioning state-of-the-art medical appliances. The insistent air-conditioning goosepimpled his thin arms, the
floors shone with the zing and ardour of the new. Money changed hands as he signed the requisite forms – he noticed there was a clause absolving the hospital of all responsibility should the
worst happen and wondered if it was true of hospitals everywhere – and his mother was wheeled away by uniformed nurses and attendants to an intensive care unit on a floor high up in the
building.

Tabbu’s obtrusive altruism now took the form of an iterative chanting of, ‘Nothing’s happened, everything’s all right, everything will be OK’, and Ritwik started
counting on the digits of his fingers how many times he repeated the saving formula. Both he and Tabbu were chain-smoking in the car park just inside the entrance of the hospital, as if what had
happened had released them into a new permissiveness. For Ritwik, the act of smoking in front of his uncles still carried a minor charge of flouting accepted codes of behaviour: it was almost a
dare on his part, a gauntlet thrown down to his uncles. He had already begun to show them that, just because his father was dead and his mother in a perhaps terminal coma in hospital, he
wasn’t going to be bossed around by them. It was best to make things clear from the very beginning. But the cleanly triumphant feeling he had been hoping to be rewarded with didn’t
quite arrive. Instead, it was clouded by tiny motes of betrayal: his mother had worked so hard to ensure that the boys didn’t fall prey to the bad habits that so characterised her brothers
and here he was, indulging in the very thing she had tried to protect him from, to score cheap points. The cigarettes left a woolly burn along his throat and lungs. He had a taste of the futility
of her life and his heart turned over.

Ritwik carefully folded away the very short encounter with the doctor the next morning in the hope of deliberately expunging it some day in the future. Everyone assembled at the hospital awaited
the doctor’s arrival with varying degrees of apprehension. They had all been told who the doctor was and their irritatingly frequent questions –
when will he come down? when will he
let us know? will he be long?
– had been answered with exemplary patience.

When the self-possessed doctor did arrive, everyone rushed to him like pigs to the feeding farmer. Ritwik composed his face into an expressionless nothing as the doctor said, ‘We
can’t say anything with absolute certainty at the moment except that we have to keep her under observation for seventy-two hours. She’s in a coma and we can’t say when she will
come around. Obviously, the cerebral stroke she has suffered is huge and extremely serious. Both sides of her body are completely paralysed and even if she does recover, she will remain paralysed,
in all probability, for the rest of her life. Of course, that might well change . . . We need to conduct a few more tests – an MRI scan of the brain, a CAT scan . . .’ Fluent,
articulate, utterly detached.

Ritwik nodded impassively as the onslaught of information battered through his insides. He recalled Dida, his grandmother, another semi-paralysed stroke survivor who had hobbled her bitter way
around the flat, skulking in corners and shadows, occasionally beaten up by her own sons, a twisted and hating figure, till her second cerebral stroke had sent her into a two-month coma from which
she ultimately never recovered. The doctor’s words burnt out a clearing in his head: like all clearings, it contained both ash and space.

The next day, during visiting hours, he took the lift high up to his mother’s room. She seemed conscious, her eyes opening wide as if she had just woken up from a long sleep and was having
considerable trouble easing herself into the unfamiliarity surrounding her; the world of her sleep still inflected the hospital room. She struggled to get up, looked at her son, and said,
‘Home, I want to go home. Why am I here? What is this place?’

Ritwik answered, ‘Yes, of course, you’ll go home, but you’re not very well at the moment, Ma. As soon as you’re better, we’re going to take you home.’ He
spoke very slowly, articulating each word separately and distinctly, as if he was simplifying something complex to an inquisitive child.

Buffeted by some barely articulable unease, she tried to raise her head against the pillows again. She looked like a strung-up marionette that hadn’t quite come to fluid and easy life
because the puppeteer had only just begun and was going through his hand and finger warming-up exercises. One of the monitors attached to her showed a jagged green graph, like a curious, moving
snake, forming and reforming, arcanely measuring out her life in electronic signals.

Ritwik, remembering what the doctor had said about extensive damage to the brain, asked her, ‘Can you recognize me? Who am I?’

She answered him correctly, an emptiness in her face, perhaps trying to work out if it was a trick question, but the look of blank confusion could equally have been the effect of the stroke.

She tried to lift her hands, in an eerily lost movement, as if they had acquired an unmoored yet independent life, no longer governed by the directing brain. The words came out truncated and
random, ‘Pain, headache. Here, here, no here’ – her hands, nowhere near her head, flailed about, unsuccessfully trying to locate the exact spot – ‘please massage my
head, it’ll go away. Just a headache. And then you’ll take me home.’

Her eyes were wide and unfocused; they didn’t seem to be registering anything.

Ritwik had to find out if her ability to perceive and recognize objects had been impaired as well. From his sidebag, he took out the book he was currently reading –
The Complete
Illustrated Nonsense of Edward Lear
– held it in front of him and asked, ‘Ma, can you tell me what I’m holding in my hands?’

She rolled her eyes towards him but didn’t manage to fix them either on him or on the book. ‘Book, a book’, the words tumbled out like an erratic spill of oranges from a paper
bag. ‘Why are you asking me these questions? If you press your hands on my head, head, here, here’ – this time she didn’t even manage to raise her arms –
‘it’ll go, really, it will.’

He said, ‘The doctor will make it go away. You’re in good hands.’ The lie jangled so shrilly in his ears he looked up to see if she had heard it.

She had shut her eyes and was mumbling, ‘Like you used to massage my temples, forehead, with Amrutanjan when I had headaches, like that, it’ll go away. When you were young.
It’s a very severe headache, you know?’

He felt as if something had gone through the centre of his torso, entering through his navel and boring its way out back through the spine. The duty nurse came in and saved him. ‘All
right, that’s enough. You mustn’t tire her out.’