Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

  My wife and I would read all the printouts at night, she on her back, her legs raised on a pillow. And everything we read pointed to only one conclusion: that we had nothing to worry about: my wife was only twenty-six, this was by no means a late pregnancy. And there was no record of any congenital abnormality in either her family or mine. Her father, a businessman in Calcutta, had suffered one heart attack and her mother wore glasses – hardly a recipe for a gene scarred irreversibly. As for me, both my parents had died early, my father first, not because of any long-drawn-out illness but a rash bus driver who ran him over, in the morning, right in front of the school where he had taught for more than twenty years (a street intersection which he had boasted he could cross blindfold at any time of the day or night). My mother followed him, dragged down more by grief and loneliness than any specific ailment. So, yes, childbirth, like everything else, was a roll of the dice. But as far as we were concerned, the doctor from Riyadh told us, we could uncross our fingers and roll.

  So as my wife slipped into her last trimester, into her last few weeks, she began to exhibit, instead of jitters, a resolve that grew more pronounced by the day. She told her parents not to visit her until the child was born – thank you very much, she said, I can take care of myself, I have my husband and I have my home – and when I asked if she wouldn’t, like all first mothers, feel more comfortable with her mother around, she turned to me and replied: ‘My mother isn’t a doctor so is there anything I can show or tell her that I can’t show or tell you?’

  She began talking about redoing the second room of our three-room rented house. She told me she had lined up a carpenter to make a bunk bed, the kind they have in newspaper advertisements every Saturday in the Home and Décor section. She even, one afternoon when I was at work, called to say that she had hired a taxi and gone around the city looking for stars and planets to fix on the walls because she had read in some novel, in its first few pages, about a nursery painted blue, the sky on the ceiling, because the parents wanted to give the child a ‘hand-made heaven’. That was what she wanted for our child, she said. A hand-made heaven at home.

  If all this recalling appears detailed, even sentimental, blame it on the kind, gentle gaze of hindsight. For, of course, that night, standing at the window, I didn’t remember it in so logical a fashion, just as scraps of images, fragments of sound.

  The gynaecologist, the ultrasound, the cybercafe, the gynaecologist, the bed, the printouts, the swell of my wife’s stomach.

  And while my mind raced through this, my eyes kept looking through the window of the Maternity Ward on the sixth floor. And it was then that I saw the face.

  The Face.

  I am Ward Guard, I am the first one to slip into the footnotes to whisper my story which, to be frank, wouldn’t have been much of a story if I hadn’t been killed the way I was because I was no different from the hundreds, the thousands who arrive in this city from outside the state looking for work as I did five years ago, when I was twenty-three years old, when I came from a village near Udaipur, Rajasthan, and after knocking on all kinds of doors for more than three months, I got a job at Holy Angel as a security guard doing the night shift every day, seven days a week, only one day off every three weeks, even that off day spent washing my uniform, doing household chores, writing letters home, all at a salary of Rs 3200 per month, a salary not enough to bring my wife and three children – two daughters and one son, ages four, two and one – to live with me in the city so I left them in the village where they live with my parents to whom I sent Rs 1500 every month by money order, Rs 500 to my wife separately, and lived on the remaining Rs 1200, not so difficult since I had found a room-mate, a friend who works as a driver for a businessman, both of us rented one room in a slum for Rs 450 per month, it had a light bulb and a table fan, and while my friend worked the morning shift, it was my job to cook dinner every evening before leaving for the hospita and in return, my friend let me pay only Rs 150 towards rent, a convenient arrangement which helped me save a few extra rupees for my family, rupees that will be of great help now that I am gone which brings me to the last thing I recall which is the window of the house, someone standing there not allowing me to climb out, the heat and the pain, like boiling oil splashed into my eyes and all I could see then was the image of my wife, she is only twenty-two years old, she should not be a widow for the rest of her life, I hope a good man agrees to marry her, doesn’t behave like a stepfather with my children and then, who knows, maybe my wife wil have more children from her new husband, I hope he has a good job and can provide for her and my parents too because my money is going to run out, tomorrow, March 1, is payment day for February, the hospital does have the permanent address of my village and I hope they directly send the money order to my parents along with the lump sum, as compensation, about Rs 1 lakh, I think, for those who were killed plus my Provident Fund which should be around Rs 15,000 and if that happens, it will help my parents pay off their debts although I worry most about my mother because she won’t eat anything for days, she will sit up at night, crying, she will keep telling everyone that no, my son hasn’t been killed, he is safe, he is just busy and hasn’t called, he will return by the morning train but then days and nights and weeks and months wil pass, her grandchildren, my children, will grow and maybe, one day, looking at them, all grown up, adults, my mother will realize that I am not going to come by the morning train, she isn’t going to see me ever except those nights when I happen to slip into her dreams.

  2. Face By Window, Letters On Glass

  THE Face The Face The Face, that’s the only way I can refer to it right now, using the common noun, capping the T and the F, repeating the words for effect, because how else do I illustrate that, in a setting so commonplace – the view from an ordinary window of an ordinary hospital building – I saw something so extraordinary.

  For consider this:

  There was a lawn downstairs, less of a lawn, more of an empty space not used, draped in darkness, except its edge skirted the main building where the EMERGENCY neon cast a narrow flood of harsh white light, softened somewhat by the fine fog rolling in from across the main road. There was nothing to see down below, just the covered heads of a crowd of patients and visitors walking in and walking out, the black bodies and the pale yellow tops of several auto-rickshaws, parked in one messy tangle, like insects huddling in the rain. Right in front, across the lawn, was the other wing of the hospital building, rows and rows of windows, the ones in the middle, third to sixth, all lit; these were the patients’ rooms. The first two floors were dark; this was the administrative block, which closed at five in the evening. My eyes moved over the heads of the people below, up the lampposts, until they stopped at another window, a rectangle of light, greyed by the curtains.

  To this day, I cannot say what happened first, what followed what. Did my eyes take in this window in their aimless, desultory sweep? Or did something in the glass pane draw them there? Either way, there it was: a woman’s face looking down, peering out, a bit of her shoulder visible.

  How do I describe it without sounding fictional?

  It was not a face that you see every day in this city. Perhaps it was her hair, dishevelled, the strands splayed across her forehead, the face itself small and angular. Perhaps it was the way her hair was cut, short, setting off her face that made it appear so striking. Almost involuntarily, I pulled myself back. Had she seen me? Was I intruding? I looked again and there she was. I tried to follow her eyes by drawing an imaginary line from her window at the angle I thought her gaze was but in the darkness even that was difficult. Still, I tried. My imaginary line led to an ambulance that until a moment ago wasn’t there, a white van, dented, streaked with mud, parked just in front of the Emergency Ward, its engine still running. Two hospital attendants, in uniform, stood next to it, holding a stretcher. I think I could hear Ambulance Driver say something but that may just have been my ears playing games given the muffled chatter from the Maternity Ward, from the corrido
r behind me. And the voices floating from the lawn below, the sputtering of the auto-rickshaws, the idling of the van, the shout of the hospital staff.

  When I looked up again, back to that window, the woman had gone. The light inside was still on, the curtains slightly parted and through the glass, I could see a bit of something against the wall, a bedside lamp maybe, a cupboard perhaps. But what was that?

  On the window itself, a distinct smudge.

  It could have been the warmth of her breath, its vapour condensed on the glass but, if so, this smudge was unusually large in size. As if she had breathed six or seven times onto the glass, moving her lips from one end of the window to the other until enough of her warm breath had condensed to stain the glass. And in this condensation, she had written two words with her fingers:

  HELP ME

  All upper case, a gap between the two words. The size large enough for me to read clearly, even from so considerable a distance.

  Yes, I know, I know what this sounds like, what this appears to be: a lie, a cheap shot at a cheap thrill, the fevered outpourings of a male imagination, fired by the fact that he’s just been shown the price of fatherhood, that the baby will now be the centre of his wife’s universe in which he, his yearnings and his desires, will take a permanent back seat while the baby enjoys the ride. Wife gone, welcome Mother. And this realization frustrates this Male, this New Father, making him see things that are not there. A woman, of all things. Her face, a bit of her shoulder. And this woman asking him for help, when his wife is yet to recover from labour? Give me a break, even a pre-pubescent schoolboy could come up with a fantasy more delicate, more nuanced.

  Yes, I know, I know, I know.

  And that’s why my first impulse was one of disbelief – I turned to look away, look the other way. The van was still there, its doors still closed and Ambulance Driver was gesticulating furiously, telling the two attendants to go open the door. I looked up, again, at that window; The Face wasn’t there. But the words were.

  Maybe, and this was my first thought, these were words in my head that my eyes had tricked me into believing were imprinted on the window so I blinked once, twice, and looked again but, no, These Were Words Written On The Glass. As sharp and as legible as a moment ago, although I wasn’t sure how long these would stay this way given the creeping fog of that February night. I found myself breathing onto the window where I stood and drawing lines with my fingers. I was tempted to reply but checked myself; there were patients waiting, sitting and standing behind me, and although not one of them was looking my way, I didn’t want to be seen doing something as silly as writing on glass. And what would I write?

  A reply to something scribbled on a window by someone I had only vaguely seen?

  What if the streaks and the strokes that looked like HELP ME were just that: streaks and strokes, appearing not by design but by chance, by the accidental brush of the curtain against the cold glass?

  Or several brushes, more like it?

  A dozen or more, one by one, the first drawing the straight line of the H, the second bisecting it in the middle, the third an upward stroke completing the letter; then the fourth marking out the stem of the E, the fifth, the sixth and the seventh its three branches, the eighth and the ninth laying down the L, the tenth the downward stroke of the P, the eleventh its curve – and so on and so on?

  But, surely, that was improbable, a curtain writing in the glass.

  That night, however, even this explanation, bizarre it may have seemed, appeared more plausible, easier to understand and grasp, than the straightforward one staring me in the face: there was a woman in that hospital room who had seen me watching her and there was something else in the room or something outside she was perhaps afraid of, needed help with. And maybe because there was no other way she could get her message across – perhaps the nurse had been uncooperative or there was no phone in her room – she had chosen this option. Or there was no one she could send her message to and standing at her window, looking down, she had chanced on me looking at her. And when I pulled back, she had sensed my discomfort, my getting self-conscious, which must have come to her as confirmation that there was someone, this man standing by another window, who would see what she wrote on the glass, in her breath with her fingers.

  HELP ME

  She wanted me to read that.

  I looked at the window again. The words had begun to fade as the room inside must have got colder. All I could see now was E P ME, the E of the ME disappearing, and as I focused on the remaining letters there was the blur of a movement inside, I saw a form pass by the window, a hand reach out to wipe the glass clean, draw the curtains closed. I saw the lights switch off turning the window into a rectangle of darkness.

  So that I didn’t lose the window now there was nothing to make it stand out, I kept my gaze fixed. I needed to map this window’s coordinates, remember them, if I were to look at it again: five floors from below, I counted, the thirteenth window from the left. Fifth floor, and then maybe the thirteenth room from one end (assuming the inside was a faithful reflection of the outside, that there were no hidden rooms and alcoves).

  Fifth from below, thirteenth from the side.

  Should I go there right now? I thought.

  ‘MISTER Jay, excuse me, can we talk to you for a minute?’ The doctor was behind me, Ward Guard standing so close it looked as if his job was to protect the doctor from me, as if I would, any time now, lunge at him, tear his gown off, strangle him with the rubber tubing of the stethoscope.

  I followed the doctor to his room.

  There was another man there, sitting by his side. Perhaps another doctor; he didn’t look like an attendant because he was well dressed, had shoes on, his shirt was tucked into his trousers, he wore glasses. When we entered, he was writing something without looking up, as if he had begun taking notes even before we had started our ‘talk for a minute’.

  ‘Mr Jay, the baby has arrived prematurely, he didn’t get time to be fully formed,’ said Doctor 1. ‘The good news is he is alive, how long he will live – that I can’t tell you.’

  I sat there, listening. How long he will live – that I can’t tell you, the words seemed to float across the room to me. I wanted to swat them down, as if they were flies, but all I could do was watch them fall to the floor, word by word, until they had all gathered there, in a heap. Adjusted themselves, on their own, to spell out the two words I had just seen on glass: help me.

  ‘The bad news,’ Doctor 1 said, ‘is that he will not change.’

  He will not change.

  ‘What do you mean he will not change?’ I asked.

  ‘Whatever you see today, Mr Jay, you will see tomorrow, you will see as long as he lives. He will neither speak nor hear. He doesn’t have arms or legs. All he can do is to watch since his eyes are functional, we have checked. That’s a miracle given the state in which he is in. We have never seen something like this.’

  ‘How come there’s nothing wrong with his eyes?’

  ‘That’s what we have been asking ourselves.’ Doctor 1 pointed to an oversized book on Doctor 2’s desk. ‘We have even been reading. That’s Gray’s Anatomy, that’s our Bible, we even checked it again in case we thought we had got it wrong. The eyes and the eyelids form some time in the third month while the limb buds, that’s the word we use for the small elevations which grow to become arms and legs, these buds sprout at the end of the first month. Four to six weeks, maximum. How did this happen, how did the limbs not form but the eyes did? How did the ultrasound miss this? We have no answer, the book has no explanation.’

  ‘He can’t speak, he can’t hear?’

  ‘He can’t speak,’ Doctor 1 said. ‘He will make no noise. Normally, children who can’t speak do make a noise, when they cry. This child can’t even do that. He will be silent, for ever. We shall, of course, keep checking him regularly.’

  ‘What about my wife?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s what we were coming to. She is fine but
she has bled a lot, we have put her under sedation. It will take her a few days to recover.’

  ‘When can she come home?’

  ‘We have to do some tests,’ he said, ‘keep her under constant supervision. She needs rest. If I can suggest this, it’s better that you don’t tell her anything, nothing about this baby until she’s back on her feet, until she returns home.’

  ‘When can I take the baby home?’

  ‘Mr Jay, ideally, we should keep the baby here for at least twenty-four hours, if not forty-eight, under observation, that’s standard hospital procedure. But I am very sorry, it’s a busy night at the hospital and it seems it will get busier. We don’t have too many beds so the best course of action, in our opinion, and I have discussed this with Head Nurse, is that you wait for a few hours until she cleans him up, finishes the paperwork, and then you can take him home.’

  ‘But how do I take care of the baby? I have never done this before.’

  ‘You can rest easy, this baby won’t need much, just regular feeds and cleaning. Even the feeds, we will have to do it differently. With a tube, like a dropper. Head Nurse will show you how, it’s easy. She’s the best we have. And as we said earlier, this baby won’t cry. So no disturbance,’ Doctor 2 smiled. ‘Look at the bright side, Mr Jay, many new parents will envy you, a baby that doesn’t make a noise while crying. Won’t bother you in your sleep.’

  Perhaps, it struck him as soon as he had completed this sentence, that what he had just said, in an attempt to give me some comfort, had ended up being insensitive, almost callous. He instantly checked himself. The smile disappeared, he was back to being polite and formal: ‘I didn’t mean it that way, I am sorry. In the meantime, I have to go and check on your wife. Why don’t you come and take a look, we will be in there for only about five minutes.’