Sometimes, you want him dead. Not in the heat of a frenzied moment or as a flippant, erratic thought. But as a need for the death to happen, wanting it over and over again.
It wasn’t always like this. In place of the frustration that haunts you now, there was love once. An all-consuming love like the disease he has. And just like his disease, love struck out of the blue one day. As true as the cliché, striking at first sight. His impish smile and your widened eyes. His quiet questions, and your silent answers. His sly touch, and your shy acquiescence. When you are young, your enthusiasm yet to be tempered by experience, the heart plays God. In that make-believe world of love, everything seems possible. Everybody else, expendable. You fight with your parents for him. You call their twenty-five years of married life, cattle trade. When they still do not concede to your wishes, you turn stubborn and reckless. You swear you never want to see their faces again, and declare with flourish, in what you believe is a crushing blow, that money has no value, where there is no love.
You yield gleefully to the joys of a new life. There is freedom, even happiness. You love and work hard. You make shoestring budgets and attend clearance sales. He says you are beautiful, repeats it often and buys you cheap but tasteful jewelry. You think it is the best gift you have ever had. What is earned is spent. You live in the moment because that is all you can afford.
Gradually, though, almost without you noticing, he starts to lose weight. “Don’t be this hard on yourself,” you plead. He barely eats and is tired all the time. Your worry makes you insistent and angry– “Cut back on that 10-hour shift!” you shout at him. Lost in his own, tired mind, he cannot hear you. You have your first fight about it.
Then, one day, he faints. Fever scorches his forehead. Homemade broth and warm sponges do not help (yet, you do it religiously every day). Days pass. Time stretches itself into endless hours of pain and delirium. Over-the-counter medicines provide small reliefs. At night, he shivers – frigid body rattling like a bag of bones.
The doctors shake their head in disbelief, order a battery of tests and anoint a fancy name to his disease, a name you can hardly pronounce, let alone remember.
He fills just a sliver of the hospital green rexine mattress. You peer into his wincing face and search for the cheeky smile that you fell in love with. Questions slur out from him in muddled sentences. “The doctors say you are going to be OK,” you say firmly. The comfort of a warm lie calms his petrified eyes a little. Many weeks, tests and scans later, the experts tell you that the disease has already started eating into his pancreas. And into the savings, you think and immediately shake the thought out of your head.
You begin to work double shifts. But still manage to spend the nights by his bedside. You talk to him when he is half asleep with numbing drugs. Sometimes he smiles, and you know you have reached him through the fog of pain. But mostly, you are alone at that bedside, battling your own helplessness.
Finally, the weariness creeps in, silent and furtive. Not in great sweeping revelations. But gently, it settles down on your skin, thin layer on layers, until it becomes too much to ignore. It steals over you when you have to catch forty winks on the deli floor. You feel it wash over you every time the landlord calls, hinting that it might be time to move out. It swirls in your gut when you pocket the hospital bread that he was too sick to eat. It throbs under your feet when you stand in long queues waiting for government assistance. It comes to you in small moments that accumulate into hours, days and months.
Yet, you try. You laugh at his morbid jokes and nurse him when the pain takes over. And through all of it, you keep up the routine lies.
“The new medicine seems to be working.”
“You look better than yesterday.”
“I love you, too.”
It has been a year now, and you are exhausted. “Anytime now,” the doctors say, almost sympathetically. But he still lingers. You find no strength to carry on. Every cell in your body hums with a need for this to be over. “Die already,” you scream in your mind. You don’t even chasten yourself. You want him dead, and you have no energy to hide it. Maybe once the inevitable happens, you can go back to your parents and cry and mourn, and get on with life.
Now, you stare at his parched lips, labouring each breath, tubes dripping food and medicine into his body.
His tired eyes open.
“Go home tonight. I think I will be fine,” he squeaks, his scared eyes begging you to stay.
For a brief, hysterical moment, you contemplate it. There is a madness inside you, urging you to take up the offer, to run down these corridors that smell of phenyl and death, and leave once and for all.
“Hush,” you hear yourself say. “I want to be here with you.”
Illustration : Suman Mukherjee
