Siddharth Kumar

The alarm buzzes on the bedside table for a minute. It buzzes again. Someone is frantically banging on the door. It’s not just the sound of the alarm anymore. Ambulance, police sirens, and construction workers drilling, and then Leela starts barking. She wakes up panting in a dark room full of silence. No alarm clock on the side table, no horns or sirens and the workers suddenly stopped drilling. It’s a calm afternoon. Her head hurts. She gets off the bed and moves to the kitchen. Leela whimpers and jumps off the sofa and starts licking her feet. She scratches her forehead and kisses her. After popping some pills kept on the table, she checks her phone. It’s 5 Dec 2019.

She moves to the shower. Her frail hands move over her body. It hurts when the soap bar reaches the back. She tries to feel her back but her hands ache when she tries to bend it. She drops the soap on the bathroom floor. The shower is still running and water is flowing into the drain washing blood drop from the soap bar. She gets in front of the washroom mirror and turns around and tries to spot the patch in the mirror. There are lesions on her entire back. She doesn’t remember getting hurt. Something else catches her attention and becomes a bigger cause of concern. There’s a zit on her forehead. ‘Oh god!,’ she gasps. She rushes to the fridge, waddling and leaving drops of blood on the floor. A sudden gust of cold wind makes her shiver when she opens the fridge door. She finally finds a lemon and comes back to the bathroom to somehow get rid of her zit. Leela starts sniffing the blood drops. Somehow she has gotten rid of the zit but her back hurts. She resumes the ‘Rupert Holmes – Escape (The Piña Colada Song)’ and starts getting ready for her date. Confused to dress up or make it casual, she decides to just go on with her baggy jeans and a crop top. ‘Gate No. 7, Rajiv Chowk Metro Station, 7 pm sharp’ a notification reads on her phone. She refills Leela’s water bowl, gives her belly scratches and leaves.

She arrives at the Metro gate on time. The guy hasn’t come yet. She loiters around the hawkers’ zone. It’s 7:15 pm. She suddenly notices the guy she had come to meet going to ‘Burger Singh’ with a lady. Her back starts burning and her heartbeat rises. She was petrified. She gathers some courage and walks past the burger outlet to catch a glimpse of the woman he is meeting. Too embarrassed to be caught, she doesn’t try to wade inside. However, the woman was sitting with her back facing the see-through glass door. She tries to reply to the 7 pm message sent by him but the text shows delivery failure. Her back starts hurting again, this time becoming unbearable. But nothing compared to the pain of seeing someone she loved so dearly meeting another woman. She tries to reach her back over her shirt and can feel dampness. Her lesions are bursting. Unable to breathe from the lump forming in her throat, she gasps and sits on the sidewalk.

The sound of ambulances, police sirens, and drilling start again. This time louder. The noise reaches deafening levels until everything becomes blurred and a huge thud almost mutes everything. There’s absolute silence as if the atmosphere has vanished. There’s no air to breathe or carry the sound. She hears a dog barking and another loud thud follows. Everything goes back to normal. The order of the world has been restored. She can see a dog barking across the street looking at her, but she can’t hear it anymore. As if the dog is trying to warn her about something. Her attention shifts to the excruciating pain on her back. Gathering some courage, she gets up and starts walking towards the metro. She takes out her phone again and tries to message him. ‘Delivery failed.’ She then tries calling Shreya. The call does not go through, instead an automated voice says ‘Your number is out of service.’ She doesn’t understand, she remembered recharging it recently.

She reaches gate No. 7, looks at the board for a moment and reads the message she had got in the afternoon again. ‘Gate No. 7, Rajiv Chowk Metro Station, 7 pm sharp.’ The lump in her throat gets bigger, and her tears start smudging her eyeliner. The zit on her forehead is now red. After a minute of waiting, she boards the Yellow line to AIIMS. Thankfully, the metro card was still working. The 15-minute arduous ride felt never ending. People kept on alighting and boarding but the destination seemed farther away. As if the train was circling around in a tunnel. She notices an advertisement on the metro coach panels. ‘Please fulfil your civic duty and cast your vote on 5th February.’ Somehow it felt weird to her. Not that she cared about it right now. She notices a baby on its mother’s lap sitting diagonally across from her, playing with her mother’s fingers. The baby looks at her and smiles. She manages to fake a smile in return. The child blushes and gets back to playing with her mother. ‘Next stop is AIIMS. Doors will open on the left.’ She gets up after the announcement. Suddenly the ambulances, police sirens, and drilling start again and piercing her eardrums. Everything appears hazy. The train finally stops with a jerk and the noises subside. She gets off the right side door of the metro and paces towards the exit, checking her phone for one last time but there’s no network. Her lesions are now leaking and sticking to her shirt. She catches an auto, ‘Bhaiya, trauma centre’. ‘Rs. 60 madam.’ ‘Haan, jaldi chalo.

She reaches the entrance of the JNPA building. Clueless where to go, she asks the security guard who directs her to a counter. The guy at the counter asks her to fill out a form and directs towards a corridor. She keeps on reading the names and labels on the door trying to find where the concerned doctor sits. After moving through mazes of corridor she finally finds her unit. An attendant asks her to wait for her name to be called out. She takes out her phone, there’s still no network connectivity. She gets up and moves towards the end of the corridor in hope of finding connectivity. She notices a man looking similar to the guy she was to meet earlier, walking into a room. Her back pain erupts again however, there were 5 more people before her to be called out. She decides to follow the man. He enters the ICU but the door is ajar. A woman is lying on the bed with an oxygen mask on her face. She can’t make out who she is. The man keeps flowers beside the bed and sits on the steel table, covering the woman’s face. She sits on the bench in the corridor beside the wall and adjacent to the door.

There’s silence inside the room with the man not speaking for a minute. ‘Remember, I used to joke that you should die first so that you don’t have to go through the pain of seeing my dying,’ the man says. ‘I don’t have the courage to let you go. But the doctors say that you are unlikely to get better,’ the man barely manages to speak amid the sobbing. ‘But I think it’s time to let you go,’ the man says, clutching the woman’s palm. ‘Aditi has finally started walking.’ The man caresses the woman’s forehead.