Such A Long Journey (30 page)

ii

Visiting hours had ended. He explained to the nurse on duty why he was there, and she accompanied him to the ward. ‘When did he pass away?’

She consulted the watch pinned to her chest. ‘For the exact time I have to check the records. But about two hours ago. His pain was too much just before he became unconscious. We had to give him lots of morphine.’ Her voice was sharp, it echoed along the cold corridor walls. A chatty one. Usually they have no time for the simplest question. Rude as rabid bitches. ‘Very unfortunate, no one was here with him,’ she said accusingly. ‘You are brother? Cousin?’

‘Friend.’ Poking her nose. None of her business.

‘Oh,’ said the nurse, in a tone that withdrew the accusation. But the barb remained, goading his flesh, along with the others he had twisted in himself. On Dinshawji’s day I went with Malcolm. Left him to die wondering why I did not come.

‘Here we are,’ said the nurse.

‘He’s still in the ward?’

‘What to do? If empty room is available, patient is put there.’ She pronounced it ‘avleble’. ‘Otherwise nothing we can do.’ He wondered about the way she used patient—he would have expected ‘deceased’ or ‘body’. ‘That is why we like relatives to come soon to make arrangements. Beds are in such short supply.’

‘His wife is inside?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ said the nurse, halting at the ward entrance.

Gustad entered hesitantly and looked towards Dinshawji’s bed. The figure of the woman he expected to see, seated in vigil, was missing. He gazed absently upon the rows of sleeping patients, heard their breathing and snores.

And if I did not know Dinshawji is gone, he would also have the sleeping look. Strange feeling. To stand beside his bed, and he cannot see me. Unfair advantage. As though I am spying on him. But who knows? Maybe Dinshu is the one with the advantage, spying from Up There. Laughing at me.

The straight hard chair was by the bed. He had grown so used to it over the weeks. Dinshawji’s sheet rose in a sharp incline at the nether regions of the mattress. He glanced under the bed to see if the size twelve Naughty Boys were there by his trunk. Only the bedpan, its white enamel stark in the dark space. Beside it, the transparent flask-shaped urinal.

Not all patients were asleep. Some watched intently, keeping an eye on this healthy one visiting after hours, when he had no business to be here. In the dim night-light of the ward their eyes focussed fearfully, drifted, then refocussed. When would it be their turn? How would it happen? And afterwards…? Down an old man’s face, tears were rolling slowly. Silently, on to the pillowcase dull white like his hair. Others were peaceful, reassured, as if they knew now that it was the simplest of things, was dying. After all, the one who had joked and laughed in their midst for several weeks had shown them how easy it was. How easy to go from warm and breathing to cold and waxen, how easy to become one of the smooth white figures in the carts outside the gates of Mount Mary.

Dinshawji had been stripped of all the appurtenances with which he had clung to life. The metal stand, gaunt and coldly institutional when the saline solution bottle used to hang from it, now stood empty. Now it looked just like a wire coat-rack, harmless and domestic. The various tubes had grown in number with the passing weeks: one through the nose, two in the arms, somewhere under the sheet a catheter. All withdrawn. As if he had never been sick. Were the tubes removed carefully, the way they were inserted: skilfully, by steady hands? Or just yanked out—the useless wires of an old broken radio, like my Telerad. And then the tubes thrown away in the rubbish, like the coils and transformers and condensers littering the pavements outside the repair shops.

Dinshawji dismantled. And after the prayers are said and the rituals performed at the Tower of Silence, the vultures will do the rest. When the bones are picked clean, and the clean bones gone, no proof will remain that Dinshawji ever lived and breathed. Except his memory.

But after that? After the memory is lost? When I am gone, and all his friends are gone. What then?

The eyes of the wakeful patients were still on Gustad. He found it disconcerting if their eyes met. So he kept looking at Dinshawji’s surgical bed. The iron frame, painted creamy white. Black in places where the paint had peeled. Three sockets for the wooden-handled crank. The first raises the head—I used to wind it when Dinshawji’s dinner arrived. Crankshafts and gears, just like my Meccano set. Second socket for the feet (I raised them once by mistake). And the third for the mid-section. Strange. Why should stomach or pelvis be higher than the rest of the body? Only one reason I can think of. And not a medical reason. Unless the interns and nurses use it for playing doctor-doctor. Wish I had thought of that earlier. To tell Dinshu. But he would have come up with a better one himself. His hospital song. O give me a home where the nurses’ hands roam…

‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,’ he whispered in Dinshawji’s ear, and smiled.

Dinshawji’s wife appeared in the doorway. She looked around, then strode into the ward in a way that made it clear she was not to be trifled with. She saw Gustad’s smile before he had time to wipe it off, and gave him a withering look.

Alamai was a tall woman, far taller than Dinshawji had been, with a carpingly stern face that would willingly find fault with the world, especially its inhabitants. A termagant if ever there was one. Her scrawny neck deliquesced into narrow shoulders which were perpetually raised, slightly hunched. No children and a wife like Alamai, thought Gustad, and yet such a sense of humour. Or because of it. His domestic vulture. He almost broke into a smile again as he recalled the favourite line: ‘No need to take me to the Tower of Silence when I die. My domestic vulture will pick my bones clean ahead of time.’

‘Alamai, please let me know if there is anything I can do,’ he offered, after expressing his condolences.

Before she could answer, a pasty-faced young man burst in. ‘Auntie, Auntie!’ he called in a high-pitched voice which disembogued in part through a nose eminently suited to the purpose because of its shape and size. ‘Auntieee! You went away while I was still in the bathroom!’ The patients in the ward opened their eyes. Gustad estimated the fellow’s age to be at least twenty, and wondered who he was.

‘Shh!
Muà
donkey! Close your mouth at once! You boy-without-brain, sick people are sleeping here. You were going to get lost in the bathroom or what because I left?’ The boy-man pouted at the scolding.

‘Come and meet Gustadji Noble. He was Pappa’s best friend.’ To Gustad she said, ‘This is our nephew Nusli. My sister’s son. We never had children, so he has always been like our own son. In private he calls us Mamma and Pappa only. I brought him along to help. Come on, come on, what are you standing and staring! Shake hands with Gustad Uncle!’

Nusli giggled as he offered his hand. He was skinny, and stood with stooped shoulders. A single-
paasri
weakling, thought Gustad as he shook the clammy hand, wondering how a vulture’s sister could spawn a milquetoast like Nusli. Perhaps it was inevitable. He repeated his question to Alamai. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘I phoned the Tower of Silence while Nusli was in the bathroom. They said the hearse will come in half an hour.’

The patients who had decided to close their eyes after Alamai silenced Nusli, opened them again. For Nusli chose to speak once more with his high-pitched instrument. ‘I am so scared, Auntie!’

‘A-ra-ra-ra!
Now
what are you scared of?’

‘Of the hearse,’ he whined. ‘I don’t want to sit in it!’

‘You boy-without-brain, what is there to be scared of? It’s just like a van. Remember, we all went for a picnic in the van last year with Dorab Uncle’s family to Victoria Garden? And saw all the animals there? A van, just like that one.’

‘No, Auntie, please, I am so scared.’ He cringed and wrung his hands.

‘
Marey em-no-em
! God knows to collect what dust I brought you along! Thought you would be a help. Help, my head!’ and she struck it hard with both hands.

Gustad felt it was time to intervene, before more patients were awakened to the nightmare in their ward. ‘Alamai, I will be happy to come with you in the hearse. To help with everything.’

‘See? See, you
lumbasoo-baywakoof,
listen to Gustad Uncle. He is not scared, is he?’ Nusli gazed at his feet and pursed his lips as though to blow spit bubbles. She thumped him on the back, and he lurched forward. ‘Look at me when I talk to you!’

‘Yes, yes, he will come,’ said Gustad. ‘He will sit beside me. Won’t you, Nusli?’

‘OK,’ said Nusli, and giggled.

‘I don’t want any of your khikhi-khaakhaa,’ said Alamai. But Nusli permitted himself another short paroxysm of giggles before heeding her injunction.

She turned her attention now to Dinshawji’s trunk under the bed. ‘Come on, come on, Nusla! Don’t just stand there! Come here and pull it out for me. I want to check everything that Pappa brought from home. Cannot trust these hospital people.’

Gustad felt it was a good moment to disappear. He could return at the hearse’s appointed time. ‘Excuse me, I will be back in a few minutes.’

Alamai, engrossed in taking an inventory, granted him leave with an imperious wave of her hand. He caught a glimpse of Dinshawji’s black Naughty Boys in the trunk. Empty of their owner’s feet, they seemed larger than life.

He walked down the long cold corridor and down the stairs. Through the reception area, through the lobby, till he was outside, in the hospital grounds. The lawn was slightly damp, there was a pleasing fresh-cut scent in the grass. The grounds were dark except for the dim light from an ornate cast-iron lamppost by the walkway. He headed for the little garden with the arbor where he had sat many Sundays ago, when Dinshawji had newly arrived at the hospital.

The bench, like the lawn, was damp. Too early for dew, it must have been made wet when the
maali
watered the flowers. Gustad spread his handkerchief and sat. The exhaustion he had kept at bay now overtook him. He felt drained, emptied of the last bit of energy that had got him through the day, took him to Crawford Market and to Mount Mary, that kept his limp under control, that made him suffer Alamai with forbearance.

It was cool on the bench under the trees. Peaceful. Like the countryside. Or a hill station, with the nocturnal insect sounds. Matheran, when I was eight years old. Where Pappa had taken the entire family: Grandma, Grandpa, the younger brother’s family (the one who was to betray Pappa’s trust and ruin him), and two servants. They had reserved four rooms at Central Hotel. It was raining when they alighted from the toy train that chugged slowly up the hill. Everything was damp as they arrived by rickshaw at the hotel. The manager was Pappa’s personal friend. He sent cups of hot Bournvita to their rooms. When it got dark and the lights went on, the mosquitoes came. It was the first time for Gustad, sleeping under mosquito nets. He slipped in through the opening, then his mother tucked the flap securely under the mattress. It was strange to say goodnight-Godblessyou through the gauze-like material and then listen to her say it. Her voice came clearly, but she looked so insubstantial behind the enveloping veil, far away, beyond his reach, and he was all alone, under the canopy of white, entombed in his mosquito-free mausoleum. It had been such a long journey, and he fell asleep.

But that picture. That picture of my mother—locked away for ever in my mind: my mother through the white, diaphanous mosquito net, saying goodnight-Godblessyou, smiling, soft and evanescent, floating before my sleepy eyes, floating for ever with her eyes so gentle and kind. That was the way he chose to remember her, when he was eighteen and she was dead.

And there had never again been cornflakes as delicious as the ones he ate at breakfast in Matheran. Or toast, with roses of butter, and marmalade. With the jabbering brown monkeys always waiting to snatch what fell or was carelessly left around. One had even grabbed a packet of Gluco biscuits from his hand. There were pony rides. Long walks in the mornings and evenings, to Echo Point, Monkey Point, Panorama Point, Charlotte Lake. With walking-sticks. Pappa bought one for each member of the party: freshly carved, with the smell of the tree still strong upon it. The cool, crisp mountain air filled their lungs, driving out the city staleness. At dusk it was chilly, and they needed pullovers. The manager told them stories of tiger hunts he had been on in these hills. And on the last night, the chef made a special pudding for them. After it was eaten, he came out to say goodbye, then pretended to be disappointed that they did not enjoy his pudding. They thought he was joking, for the bowl had been licked clean. But the chef picked up the empty bowl, broke it before their startled eyes, and distributed the shards in their plates, eating one himself to demonstrate. Everyone laughed at how well they had been fooled, crunching the pieces moulded from sugar and gelatine. ‘Now this is what you call a sweet dish,’ said Pappa.

But Gustad sat silent and downcast throughout dinner, thinking of the morrow, the end of the holiday. His father had tried to cheer him up, saying they would come again another year. And then, the bowl was broken and eaten. There was something so final and terrible about the act. He refused to eat a single piece of the flavoured sugar and gelatine.