Till the Last Breath . . .

by Durjoy Datta

  ‘They have been working here for years now. They know when they are needed and when they are not,’ she explained. ‘There.’ She pointed to the MRI room.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No. Not really. Arman had asked the ward boys to keep you off any kind of sedatives.’

  ‘Why? Why would he do that?’

  ‘He doesn’t like you.’

  ‘A doctor hating a patient? That’s new. Well, fuck him.’

  He was sure he saw Zarah smile. For the first time, he saw an expression on her face other than her constant icy stare. A little later, he was frisked for metallic objects and asked if he had any plates or screws in his body. Despite the multiple fractures his body had sustained from falls off stairs, bike accidents and such, his bones still held up on their own. Bones of steel and a heart of stone, he thought and smiled.

  ‘Now, this will take a while. Don’t move while you’re inside and shout out if you feel strange. Am I clear?’ she asked.

  Dushyant nodded. He felt a little ashamed in Zarah’s company. In the outside world, he would have talked about her with his friends and wondered if she was single. Maybe he would have fantasized about her a little. But now, he was naked in a robe, helpless and at her mercy. A pretty girl’s mercy. His body ached for a smoke. He felt defeated. Like he had when Kajal told him she never wanted to see him again. That day was a cursed day; a day he never wanted to remember. A little later, he was swallowed by the gigantic circular dome of the growling MRI machine. He felt unsettled. His head ached and he wanted to scream. You’re a grown man. The words came back and he stayed shut. He didn’t want to shout like a scared pussy in front of her. Why did he care?

  ‘Did you always want to be a doctor?’ he said, just to distract himself.

  There was no answer. A little later, a voice answered back. ‘More or less.’ The voice echoed. He felt better.

  ‘This thing is bloody noisy.’

  ‘I know it is,’ Zarah said. ‘Let me concentrate on the unflattering images of your brain.’

  ‘How does it look?’

  ‘It looks perfect to me. Though we will have to take Arman’s opinion on this. I am no expert.’

  Dushyant stayed shut for a while. The white shell made him claustrophobic.

  ‘Are you okay in there?’ Zarah asked.

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Just a few more minutes,’ she said.

  He closed his eyes and tried to relax. He thought about Kajal and the other guys in college. The guys he had got sloshed with that day. None of them had called, let alone visited. The sound slowly came to a stop.

  ‘Done,’ she said and instructed the ward boys to pull him out from the machine.

  His eyes never left Zarah’s lithe body as her shapely behind sashayed in front while he was being wheeled back to his room. Zarah was engrossed in the few printouts she had in her hand. The stretcher was pushed into a lift. Zarah followed; her eyes still hadn’t left the sheets in her hand.

  ‘Oh, by the way, your girlfriend called,’ Zarah said. ‘She sounded concerned.’

  ‘I don’t have a girlfriend.’

  ‘Well. I just guessed. Kajal, if I remember correctly. Sister? Friend?’

  ‘We used to date. She called? Here? At the hospital?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘We haven’t talked in years. She is dating her ex-boyfriend now. What did she say?’ he asked, desperately trying to hide how crushed he felt. Zarah’s eyes seemed to see right through him, her sharp gaze looking for their own answers. He felt naked, his secrets spilling out.

  ‘She wanted to know if you would live.’

  ‘What did you say?’ he asked. A montage of black-and-white Polaroid images of his life from two years back flashed in front of his eyes. He felt guilty. Ashamed.

  ‘I told her there’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No,’ she said, her frosty voice giving nothing away.

  Zarah left for Arman’s office after they reached the fifth floor. Before leaving, she said she would check on him in the evening and update him on his condition. He nodded. His mind was clogged with the sudden reappearance of Kajal, and the images of his brain in Zarah’s hand. What was that he saw on Zarah’s face? Concern? Was he dying? Or was she always this cold?

  The lack of answers from the doctors, the indistinguishable expression from Zarah and the battery of tests confused him. For the first time, he was scared. He wanted to see Kajal and tell her he was sorry. Then he brushed the negative thoughts away, cursing himself for thinking too much. He tried to think about the good things in life—weed, alcohol, poker and the young female doctor with caramel skin and taut muscles.

  As he climbed into his bed, he wondered what might have driven Zarah to try to kill herself. In the elevator they had taken to the fifth floor, he had noticed the tiny slit marks on both her wrists.

  Arman had left by the time Dushyant was in the room again. He was thankful and felt relieved. Next time, he would punch the guy in his face, but only after Arman figured out what was wrong with him. First they said liver and now the brain. He was freaking out a little. Hospital, MRIs, tests, diagnosis—you see these in movies; they never happen to you.

  ‘So, did they do an MRI?’ the irritating girl on the next bed asked him as soon as he was in his bed.

  Give me a break, he thought. ‘Do you just have to talk?’ he asked as the niggling pain came back. It started in the stomach, then travelled to the limbs, the tips of the fingers and slowly, his entire body started to throb with pain. ‘Do you have to play the nice girl? It’s just irritating! Don’t you have a boyfriend to call? Or anyone?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Pihu’s face shrivelled. The upturned lips didn’t melt Dushyant, for he hadn’t asked for her company. She, her parents and her effervescent happy, optimistic face made him nauseated.

  ‘I don’t want you to ask me how I am doing or what they did to me. I have no interest in talking to you or anyone around you. Just keep to your business and don’t bother me!’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You’re irritating me. So are your parents. Go, choose another room. Your mother will like it. She thinks I am scum and a bastard. Do her and yourself a favour and just fucking stop talking to me,’ he grumbled. Pihu cowered. He smirked. The girl scrambled for words, made a face, and pulled the curtain between them. Dushyant felt good venting it out. Little did he know that the cute ball of energy on the next bed was more persistent than he would have ever imagined.

  The outburst reminded him of the times he had shouted at Kajal. Kajal used to shout back and eventually break down into uncontrollable sobs. He thought he could hear little sobs from the other side of the curtain. Or were they in his head? What had Kajal wanted when she called?

  He didn’t feel pity for Pihu or sorry for what he had just done. Instead, he loved the silence. Of the medical equipment. Of the drips of medicine. Beep. Drip. Beep. Drip. His own uncertain heartbeat. Lub. Dub.

  It was late at night. Dushyant was writhing on his bed with pain. It felt as if his stomach was being ripped apart and hung to dry. He was sweating and the bed was wet with his perspiration. He had to adjust the temperature of the room twice. There was no relief. He had rung the bell twice for painkillers but no one had come. He wanted to drive a broken bottle through Arman’s throat. He wanted to jam an injection in his arm. Pop a pill. Snort a line of cocaine. Get fucked up again. He had tried getting down from the bed but had fallen. His body went numb with pain.

  He started to cough violently, and pressed the button twice. Reluctantly, he pulled the curtain away and groaned, ‘Pihu.’

  ‘Huh … Yes?’ Pihu woke up from her sleep.

  ‘I coughed.’

  ‘So?’ She rubbed her eyes, trying to shake the sleep off.

  ‘It’s blood,’ he said and pointed to a pool of blood at the foot of his bed.

  9

  Arman Kashyap

  Arman crushed the stress
ball in his hands as he paced around the room. He was annoyed. A few more patients had shown relapses, and Pihu would show the same signs too. The next step in their research—the stem cell approach—was progressing like bloody snails on a rainy day. No one in their hospital thought it would work. Treatments of the sort had been tried on patients in the US and a few patients had had their lives extended by a year or two. A few had died on the operating table. To make his day worse, the asshole in room no. 509 had just vomited more blood than he could have had in his alcohol-ridden veins. He, too, seemed to be dying.

  But even then, Pihu was top priority. He had noticed Zarah standing at the door with a file of reports, while he struggled with the analysis of the research results. It was one way or the other. The stem cell approach was a huge risk, a risk that he was willing to take.

  ‘Yes? Are you waiting for something?’ he asked.

  ‘Dushyant is not doing that well. He has a fever now. The pain in the stomach is getting worse. His liver is getting worse. He has had two seizures in the last two hours. His systems are shutting down.’

  ‘But the antibiotics made him cough blood.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’ she asked.

  ‘Exactly. I want an answer and I want it from you. And give him the sedatives. Make him shut up and take down a list of every drug that he has done in his lifetime. Let’s see if we get something there,’ he said without flinching, his mind somewhere else.

  Zarah nodded and left the room.

  Arman frantically pored through the research reports in front of him one more time. They were wasting time. People were losing to the disease without even a shred of hope. But he knew that it would take him and his team years, if not decades, to ascertain and prove that the stem cell approach could work. The girl he thought he had saved, the girl who thought she had been saved, would be long dead by then. He saw her file lying across the table and flipped through it. Pihu Malhotra. 19. Medical Student. The words floated in his head, refusing to settle down in an undiscoverable corner. Why was he so hell-bent on trying the treatment before it was time? Was it desperation? Was it the guilt from having someone believe that he had cured them? He didn’t know. With her file in his hand, he left his office and headed for the third floor. In the lift, he read through her file twice, nervously flipping through the pages, wondering if she had lost herself in the disease. He wondered if she, like the many patients he had seen dying, had let the disease define her.

  ‘I was diagnosed three years back.’

  ‘I first noticed it when I was driving.’

  ‘Is there a cure?’

  These were often the first responses Arman heard from his patients who had lost to the disease way before it eventually consumed them. From the little he knew of her, she was different.

  He entered the room and saw Dushyant lying on his bed, his eyes rolled over, sleeping under the effect of the powerful sedatives. Such a burden, he thought. On the other side of the curtain, he saw Pihu reading a book. Her mom was reading a book too.

  ‘Hi. I am back,’ he said and smiled. Arman knew exactly when to put his charm on. He was quite the guy to date back in medical school. Since he had grown up around medical books and people from medicine, expecting him to excel in medical school was like expecting a fish to swim. With plenty of time on his hands and with big wads of cash from his father’s hospitals, he was the perfect guy to be with. But the girls who dated him back in those days admitted that his charm didn’t lie in his wealth or his big brain. It was in his disarming smile and his perfect behaviour. Even as a college student, he dressed impeccably. Characterized by his crisp white shirts, traditional dark-blue jeans and white sneakers, one could easily spot him in a crowd. To this day, he had stuck to his dress code like a priest—white shirt and a pair of blue jeans. He wouldn’t be caught dead wearing anything else.

  ‘Hi, Dr Arman,’ Pihu said. ‘I see you are not wearing your doctor’s coat.’

  ‘I am off duty. This is my free time,’ he answered and sat beside Pihu.

  ‘I am glad you think of me in your free time.’ Pihu giggled, and Arman was sure she winked. Not like grown-ups wink, but like little kids do—closing both their eyes and smiling, hoping they have closed just one.

  ‘Are you flirting with me, Ms Pihu?’

  ‘I am just making the most of my time here,’ she said. Her cheeks were now a deep shade of pink, her eyes glinted with life and she bared every one of her thirty-two pearly teeth. Arman could no longer look at her like the diseased body he had seen the last time. Like a physical manifestation of the words in her file. He had looked at her eyes to look for imperfections, her skin for lesions and her body for flaws. But this time, he looked at her and saw a person brimming with childlike fervour. The cute face with the high cheekbones promising a beautiful woman in the future, the perfect eyes, the short hair that covered one half of her face, and the smile that never left her.

  ‘I am glad to hear that from you. Often patients lose hope a little before we would want them to,’ he said. He fell silent. Had he not felt Pihu’s hopeful eyes on him, he would have been a lot more comfortable doing this.

  ‘Is there something you want to say?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. In fact there is,’ he answered and paused. ‘Do you understand the progress of your disease?’

  ‘Yes, I do, Doctor. I was almost dead when you saved me,’ she beamed. Why did she have to say that?

  ‘I didn’t save you. A few more cases of relapses have been recorded today. It’s only a matter of time before you start showing the same symptoms too. I thought I should let you know. There is only so much that I can do.’

  ‘What you have done for me is more than enough, Doctor. In those days when I was dying, I used to stay up all night thinking that I would choke and I wouldn’t even be able to call for help. I was confined to a bed for months. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t even do the smallest thing without someone helping me … My body was dead. You gave me a few extra days to live. I don’t think you will ever know what that meant for me. I won’t ever be able to thank you enough for what you did for me. You had no obligation to save me. In fact, you could have lost your licence if you were caught. You still can get barred. I don’t think there is anything more you could have done.’

  ‘It’s sweet of you to think like that,’ he said, barely recovering from what he had just heard. Beneath the chirpy, smiling demeanour, there was a grown-up girl, armed to fight the disease with all she had. All of a sudden, he didn’t want to talk about her disease any more. He didn’t want to be responsible for snuffing out the glimmer from her eyes. ‘So, how was your college? Did you like being there? Why don’t you tell me about it?’

  Her grin got wider. After that, she was unstoppable. She told him everything there was to know about her fascination with medicine right from the eighth grade when she first decided that she would become a doctor. Arman heard her out patiently. Not much registered in his mind. Lost in the narrator’s boisterous laughter and enthusiasm, he couldn’t keep track of the conversation. Just to stamp his presence in the conversation, he started to ask her a few trick questions about medicine. After she got twenty of them right, she said irritably, ‘Everyone knows these!’

  Even I didn’t know the answer to a few of them, Arman thought and looked at her in awe. She was brilliant. She reminded him of a young him, who was hated because he was annoyingly brilliant.

  ‘How was yours?’ she asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Your college? You went to AIIMS, right? I’ve read all about you,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. And then I went to a medical school in New York. I worked there for a few years and then came back.’

  ‘Oh. How old are you?’ she asked with an impish smile.

  ‘How old do I look?’ Arman played along.

  ‘Your educational details say thirty-three, but you don’t look a day older than twenty-five!’ she blurted out.

  Arman chortled and tried to hide his
happiness on hearing that. It wasn’t the first time though. Arman had often had problems in the past making people take him seriously because of his boyish looks. Luckily, he was finally growing up.

  ‘So?’ she asked again. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘A little older than twenty-five, but young enough to date you,’ he said and smiled. He saw her blush and melt into giggles.

  ‘Let’s go out some time, then. You can carry the drips and the injections for me. I am sure it’s more interesting than carrying handbags. Plus, I won’t really take time to get ready. I have come to like this robe.’

  Arman nodded and tried to ignore the hint of dejection in her voice.

  ‘There is something I wanted to talk to about,’ he said. ‘I called up your college.’

  ‘You did? Why?’

  ‘I wanted to know about you. They told me that you were a brilliant student. Surgery, that’s what you wanted to get into, right?’

  ‘Yes. Since always. You have no idea how many carrots I ate because they told me that you need a 6/6 vision to be a surgeon. My mom always said carrots were good for the eyes!’ she chuckled. Arman laughed with her. She was strangely amusing for a girl.

  ‘You would have made a funny surgeon.’

  ‘Not with these hands,’ she said and pointed out.

  ‘We can get you all right,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Can you? Because I would hate to operate on someone like this.’

  ‘We are not sure though.’

  ‘I know what you’re talking about,’ Pihu purred. ‘The stem cell research, right? But that hasn’t been approved yet, has it? Has it ever been tried on anybody?’

  ‘It will take twenty years to confirm that the treatment works,’ Arman replied. He was impressed at the girl’s retentive power. The research website had published a few articles on the stem cell research and how it should only be tried on patients in their last stages because of the high risk involved. Arman never bought the argument and thought it was stupid.

  ‘So?’

  ‘We can do it on you,’ Arman weighed his words. He didn’t want Pihu to freak out since those articles clearly stated that deaths resulting from those procedures were far too many to try it on comparatively healthy patients.