Amballore House (18 page)

While she was weaving in and out of consciousness, Kareena was overcome by self-doubt. She was under a siege of emotions that included moments of tranquility followed by violent outbursts
ripping through the net of composure. She questioned why she was born and blamed her parents for giving her a hurtful life. Her emotion-charged accusations against her parents erupted like a volcano. Though haphazard and incoherently delivered, her allegations carried unquestionable credibility, which Thoma and Ann were aware of. Nevertheless, they were surprised that their daughter still harbored hatred toward them. They were especially hurt when she told them that her suffering stemmed from them while alive and that she should be left alone by them, at the very least, at the brink of dying. They were not sure if the firework display was a manifestation of the fog of depression weighing her down. Maybe she was inventing some reason to be mad to forget the immediate crisis that was looming larger minute by minute.

They, in turn, tried to console her. “We apologize to you, dear Kareena. You may not know this, but for whatever it is worth, we both love you dearly and tenderly. Come out of yourself now, because you are going to an unforgettable land. You are going to a magical world of forgiveness and unconditional love,” both Thoma and Ann told their daughter.

The nuns from Mother Teresa’s charity mission came in for a visit. Kareena had stayed with them after she came back to Kerala. She donated her time and efforts to uplift the lot of the poor and the less fortunate that the nuns cared for. The mission gave her a purpose to live for, and she had immensely enjoyed it. That was when the disease came back, derailing her dreams.

Only a few relations visited her in the hospital. George and his family visited often. Tim also came for visits. Rita had left this world in 2004. Josh was too far away in Canada to pay her a visit. It was a tremendous relief for Kareena to see the nuns occasionally. They were her real family.

The nuns brought a bouquet of flowers that they set near Kareena’s bed. She joined them in prayer.

***

After the nuns were gone, Rita came forward and hugged her younger sister sadly and held her arm to infuse her with the courage
that she sorely needed. Her free-falling tears wet her younger sister’s chemo-altered hair. She asked her to prepare for her final voyage, which would be far better than the train journey from Kerala to Rajasthan.

Rita whispered to her younger sister, “The world you are going to is beyond the farthest cloud, it is beyond the remotest tip of the rainbow, and it is beyond the seven continents and five oceans.

“It is beyond the transient beauty of the starry skies of autumn.

“Believe me, it is a world without cancer, its recurrence, or its metastasis.

“It is a world without unreciprocated love, it is a world without shattered dreams, and it is a world where you can cast away your worries and suffering.

“So be happy! The world about to unfold in front of you is tread upon only by angels. It is beautiful beyond your wildest imagination.

“From today onward, your tomorrows will be brightly lit, devoid of darkness—trust me.”

Rita’s words carried credibility and assurance, since she herself had left this world one year ago, and her words came from her fresh experience with afterlife. She hoped to build up hope and dispel darkness from her sister’s soul.

Kareena held on tightly to Rita’s hand and wept. “I wish we were little children once more like in the old days, playing in our yard without a care in the world,” she told Rita.

“How true—isn’t it what all of us want!” Rita said.

In spite of the dismal upbringing all of them had, childhood still held magic. For no reason, Kareena suddenly remembered a specific incident of her childhood while living in the Mannuthy rental home.

***

Kareena remembered that the years spent at the rental home in Mannuthy were forlorn. Thoma’s countless children struggled to
survive. Thoma battled to support them, and Ann had skirmishes with God while haggling over the basic minimums of life that they needed. Life, to them, was like a sack with many holes, all in the family battling to patch them continuously but failing nevertheless.

Rita, Kareena, and their siblings usually joined Ann when she visited nearby rubber estate to fetch firewood to light up their clay oven. The group consisting of three boys, two girls, and a housewife was a common sight in Mannuthy, when they carried six sacks and paraded through the streets to the nearby rubber estate to pick up fallen firewood and dry leaves. This usually happened on Saturday afternoons and Sundays when there was no school. This endeavor would become a daily pilgrimage during summer vacation, since the children were free all the days of the week, with no school to attend. The children and their mom would return at the end of the day, carrying the sacks filled with dry firewood.

The landscape of the rubber estate was not safe. The ground was uneven, littered with hills and valleys. Climbing up the steep hills and fetching the wood bordered on danger and possibly death. Ann usually would assume a crouching posture and rest periodically during this outdoor expedition. She easily got tired during the outings. She used these intermissions to roll her rosary and pray, while the group of adolescents and teenagers tirelessly picked up the wood, some climbing up the trees to break the dry branches loose. Some other children from the village would also be there, accompanied by their moms.

It was during a fist fight among some children that a boy named Ramu lost control and started going down a steep hill. He was Thoma’s neighbor’s boy. The hill was so steep that Ramu started accelerating rapidly, unable to control his descent. Speeding up also was an unconscious act to keep his erect posture, which would prevent falling and rolling. While Ann and her children were watching this horrific sight, Ramu started screaming in fear, wailing for help. In a minute, the boy was overtaken by his immense speed; he toppled and started rolling down.

Ramu’s mom was beating her breasts, crying helplessly and screaming for help, but there were no forest rangers nearby. No one
could help him. There was no one at the foot of the hill, in the valley, to rescue him by stopping the fall. He tried to hold on to a rock, but with no success. The boulder started rolling behind him. Ramu was at last stopped by a rubber tree in the valley, and then it happened: the heavy boulder rolling behind him as if in competition came down heavily and crushed him to death. His screaming stopped. He joined a group of cows that had rolled over the steep hill previously, and been killed in the valley by the sheer force of their impact with the boulders.

The scary incident put a stop to the firewood-collecting enterprise for the time being. Ann’s clay oven was no longer able to burn wood. Thoma was forced to fetch wood chips from the timber factory to cook the family’s meal.

Kareena had often thought about this tragedy and had concluded that her life was similar to what she fearfully saw that day. He life was a dangerous trek downhill right from the beginning, gathering speed as she went down, the frightful end coming at her with lightning speed, while the world stood around her in silence, unable or refusing to help. Even though she and her siblings were lucky to avoid running to the arms of death that day, unlike Ramu, she realized that Thoma presented her and her family with steep cliffs of life that led to the valley of death. Life under Thoma was tirelessly beckoning them to sprint over the precipices of life, over the treacherously slippery slopes of life, and end in the embrace of death. She had to be careful both inside the rubber plantation and outside it.

She realized that the memory of this tragedy haunted her often and considered it a fitting conclusion that it revisited her now, when she was nearing her running to the gloomy valley of death.

***

The time came for Kareena to start the irreversible trip to a place of infinite possibilities, a place called heaven that she remembered through Sunday school and her visits to Saint Joseph’s Church in Amballore. She sought consolation in those memories. But then she would suddenly descend into depression, because her last moments
drove the final nail in the coffin of whatever hope she had in clinging to life. She grudgingly prepared herself for the foreordained. She knew she had reached the proverbial end of her road. She was going to be defeated in life’s chess game played against the invincible grandmaster called death.

Ann approached the bed and caressed her daughter’s body. She rocked her daughter in her arms, like in a cradle, suddenly remembering the first day she took her in her arms as a newborn baby girl. The lilacs and chrysanthemums in the flower vase at the deathbed bore witness to this moving scene.

The nurse who walked into the room at that moment screamed out loud and fled in panic at seeing Kareena floating above the bed. She obviously could not see the ghosts in the room and thought that Kareena was levitating while she was being lifted and caressed lovingly by her mother.

“Can cancer cause levitation?” she asked the oncologist.

He was unable to give an earthly explanation to the unsettling supernatural phenomenon. The running speculation among the hospital staff was that the overworked nurse, deprived of sleep, had fallen prey to hallucinations and was seeing things.

Before Kareena drew her last breath, the gypsy came to the hospital room. As usual, she was dressed in a pink sari and was chewing tobacco. Kareena recognized her immediately.

“My dear, I am your guardian angel,” she revealed to Kareena. “I am here, as I promised; be bold,” she said. So saying, she transformed into an angel, clad in a glowing white robe. She looked much younger than the eighty-year-old gypsy; she was incredibly beautiful. She had wings.

The guardian angel’s mission was to alleviate Kareena’s fear of death and to offer her solace and companionship, a prelude to Kareena’s final pilgrimage to meet her maker. Like Charon, the famous ferryman of Greek mythology, the angel would accompany her soul to the afterlife, offering courage and compassion on the way.

***

That magician in heaven, wheeling and dealing in human lives, finally decided to draw Kareena’s card — in an untimely manner. She left in the middle of the game of life, like a book whose last chapter was yet to be written and like a movie discontinued at intermission. Her plane never landed, but instead it got stranded in the big sky in a frozen state, unbelievable as it may sound. It was as if a highway repairman suddenly appeared in front of a motorist, flashing a sign that said “End of the Road,” even though many miles still lay ahead to reach the destination.

Like a vulture that can smell death from far away, fate had foreseen her end and came knocking at her door and made a final claim.

The death was not, however, unexpected; it did not come like a thief in the middle of the night, catching her unawares, if it is of any consolation. She was forewarned years ago. Ever since, the all-seeing death had been stalking her like a gray-eyed black panther from a tropical rainforest and finally pounced on her and finished her.

Her untimely demise defied logic.

Her dreams of a happy, long life were shattered. Little did she know that her attempts to continue seeking happiness would fail dramatically. No one knew at the onset of the disease that fate had tragic plans for her. Her life was deceptively plotted like a novel with an unexpected conclusion.

Rita, Thoma, and Ann stayed behind after Kareena’s guardian angel escorted her out of this world. The mother and daughter knelt in front of Kareena’s dead body and prayed. They together recited Cardinal Newman’s hymn:

Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom;

The night is dark, and I am far away from home.

I loved to choose and see my path, but now lead me on.

Your power will lead me on over moor and fen,

Over crag and torrent till the night is gone.

If Kareena were alive, she would have known that her mother and Rita were stooped at her feet, reciting the hymn from the famous cardinal. But, she had left this world before their combined act of compassion.

She had already departed for a world beyond the remotest tip of the rainbow, far beyond the farthest cloud, and into a land of everlasting tranquility that lay shrouded in a mystifying mist of unprecedented beauty, to a destination more riveting than a star-spangled autumn sky. She had already gone to a world studded with stars more mesmerizing than a thousand summer suns of Kerala. She had left for a world without cancer and its frightening recurrence. Out she went to a world where dreams never went unrealized. She joined a world where only angels dared tread.

Just as Rita had promised.

She left behind her care-ridden body and traversed to the land of bliss, with her guardian angel by her side. She rode in style, in a majestic chariot like a princess, along a royal boulevard bedecked with marigold flowers.

She charted out her own yellow brick road leading to a magical world far more intriguing and resplendent than the Emerald City that materialized in front of Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
.

The coconut palm trees lining the road swayed and beckoned her to keep moving along the majestic expressway to heaven. A swarm of butterflies resembling miniaturized angels hovered over her, celebrating the moment. In came Dorothy’s song, floating through the gentle breeze, over the palm trees and into the midst of azaleas and fragrant lavenders decorating her pathway. A chorus of skylarks and canaries cheered her on, relaying the song in a melodious rendition:

Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high,

There’s a land that I heard of, once in a lullaby.

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue,

And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.

She moved forward to her last destination. She was going to go over the rainbow to where the blue sky would welcome her with open arms; she was going to where her dreams would come true; she was going to go to the land far above, of which she only heard while being cradled in her infancy, just as it was for Dorothy.