Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

  To get into the room where they had wheeled in my wife from the Operating Theatre, I had to take my shoes off, get into a green, disinfected gown, blue rubber slippers that had been used by someone very recently, were still warm.

  My wife was covered up to her neck, her face as if she had slipped into a sleep she would never wake up from. Several thick sheets were draped over her, rising almost a foot so that I couldn’t see the shape of her body. Tubes punctured her wrists. I thought I heard her move, let out a breath, but no, it was one of the machines in the room, its whirring like the sound of her breath. Her own breathing was so slow, so light, that I had to bring the back of my hand below her nose to feel the air. Had it not been for this, she would have passed as lifeless so still and silent was she, both her arms by her side, pressed close to her body, hands outstretched, palms up, fingers frozen in an unnatural curl, the time-tested, time-honoured position of the dead. I touched my wife’s fingers, their tips were cold, there was a bit of translucent tape on her thin wrist, smooth, wrinkled in just one spot where the needle from the tube pierced it.

  I touched her there.

  THIS had been our first touch, almost four years ago, my hand against her fingers and her wrist. It had been purely accidental and I would be lying if I said the touch was what started it all, no it wasn’t, no it didn’t. It was a brush with a stranger, one of those brushes that happen every day in any city in this world. And even if it had showed up on Mr Meeko’s webcam window, I doubt he would have noticed.

  We were sitting in the reception area of a recruitment agent’s office, on the second floor of a three-storey building, a restaurant below and a shop selling bathroom tiles above, the two of us among twenty or so college graduates who had come to be tested and interviewed. For five openings with a company that claimed to provide ‘research services’ for foreign trading firms investing in Indian stocks.

  What had brought me and, I guess, her and the others there as well, was the advertisement:

  Join the Business Process Outsourcing boom but no night shifts, no calls, no need to learn neutral globalized accents. We need graduates with analytical skills but no specialized knowledge, just a meticulous disposition, a desire to find out facts and details, research, an ability to work well with others, meet deadlines, attractive commission and bonus. Work for the movers and shakers on Wall Street.

  Rewritten for accuracy, this should have been: If you don’t have a fancy degree, if you don’t know what you are good at, if you have no place better to go, if you are young and starting off as a loser, come to us and try your luck for we don’t need any better. We need you to collect facts and figures.

  And although we sat there, with our CVs in plastic folders, looking as if we were ready, as if we had been brought into this world only to take it on, we were united by the tacit awareness of our desperation. For, frankly, other than two commerce courses which I had somehow scraped through in college, I knew little of stocks and shares, of the ups and downs of the market. (The previous night, in what I had thought would be a preparation for the interview, I had stayed up watching business channels on TV, the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen, the stock abbreviations tagged with electronic arrowheads pointing up or down. But all I could think of was how the arrows pointed right into the necks of the women anchors, between their black shirts, over their firm breasts, under their chins, to their painted lips from which rolled words like futures and options and derivatives and equity and yields. And all I could think of was how some arrows pointed down to where their legs would have been, their feet. And how irrelevant and ignorant I was, how hopelessly unprepared for the next day’s interview.)

  But that afternoon, sitting in the reception for about half an hour, looking at the worn-out sofa and the scuffed chairs, at the three interviewers walking in and out, each looking more washed out than the other – the most energetic one was a short man in glasses, with wavy hair, who rolled his r’s in what seemed to be an American accent – I wasn’t even sure if getting the job would be in any way better than leaving the room with nothing to show except a couple of hours killed. And maybe the memory of the unusually thin woman sitting beside me. A woman in black trousers, close-fitting, and a red sweater, long-sleeved.

  She had picked up an old magazine from the centre table and was reading it, her wrists resting above her knee. It was a film magazine, more suited for a dentist’s or a doctor’s waiting room than a place where they were looking for the next generation to keep the wheels of the markets going round and round. I could smell the jasmine perfume she was wearing, I heard the rustle of glossy, printed paper, her movements as she flipped the magazine. Our chairs were so close that our knees could have touched and no one would have even noticed. Not that I felt any urge to do so. I was waiting for my fifth interview in as many months, too tired to try a sixth, and the couple of inches my knee needed to move to the left to touch hers was not going to do anything for me. I needed something less fleeting, more tangible.

  Her hair was cut in such a way that with her head bent over the magazine pages, it covered the half of her face that was towards me. I did look sideways but more out of boredom from staring at the wall than any genuine sense of curiosity. Her arm was painfully slender, the skin sheer and pale, stretched taut over her entire frame, so tight that near her elbow there were no wrinkles. I saw her foot in red sandals, again so thin, the nails translucent, almost unnatural, that it was difficult to look at her and not conjure up the image of a skeleton, covered with just one layer of skin instead of the fat and the tissues and the veins and the nerves and everything else that go to make it human.

  They called my name and when I got up from the chair, almost instinctively she drew herself closer, to avoid our knees touching. My chair moved, she got up to let me pass but the moment I turned to walk towards where I had been called, her magazine fell. Feeling partly responsible for this predicament and, all the while, her thinness playing on my mind like a frailty, almost an ailment, that called for understanding, if not pity, I stopped. She was already on her knees, about to pick up the magazine, but it was too late for me to backtrack. What could have turned into a very silly, very awkward situation was saved by the fact that I beat her to the magazine (although later she told me that she had deliberately given me that extra couple of seconds) and when I handed it to her, my hand brushed against the tips of her fingers and her wrist.

  Our first touch.

  But because she was down on the floor and the entire sequence lasted for less than ten seconds or so, I still couldn’t see her face, her hair had once again kept it out of bounds.

  At the interview, the questioners, it seemed, couldn’t care less.

  They saw a man, Me, sitting across the table and perhaps that’s all they needed, a human being with two arms and two legs who knew how to write his name, who needed a job. (And I had, I think, impressed them with factoids I had gathered, like how India’s nominal GDP was expected to exceed one trillion US dollars by the end of 2007, how the Communist government in West Bengal was re-thinking its ideology to attract investment, how the Prime Minister’s highway project was going to connect the length and breadth of the country, how Dalian in China was being prepared as the next outsourcing centre to rival Bangalore, how I wanted this job ever since both my parents had died. And how I would never even think of leaving, I am not the kind of person who can handle two things at the same time, like working at one place and applying to another. Stuff like that. Self-pitying nonsense. But, I guess, it worked.)

  On the way out, assured that an appointment letter was on its way, I smiled at the woman with the magazine. ‘I will wait, you finish your interview,’ I said as she was called in.

  She didn’t get the job but she got me.

  And her face, which only then I could see clearly, would, in a just under a month, make me forget everything, make me tell her that I wanted to wake up every morning for the rest of my life, looking at it.

  Yes, I am digressing.


  But see how naturally this digression happened, how the recollection of the first meeting I had with the woman I married and who is the mother of my child comes within moments of recalling The Face by the window, the other woman? For, in a way, doesn’t this show the integrity of my intentions? Doesn’t it confirm that when my eyes fixed on to The Face, it was of their own accord, not any premeditated design on my part?

  HEAD NURSE stood in the doctors’ room, with the bundle. ‘Fill out the form,’ she said. ‘You have a name for the child?’ My wife had, indeed, chosen a name. So confident and assured she was that it would be a daughter that she had chosen only one name: Baaraan. She had checked, she said, in Persian, it means the sound of rain falling.

  I could have gone with it, so what if it was a boy, the name was apt since hadn’t the doctor said watch out for his eyes, that his eyes were the only things perfect? And that if he cried, there was no way you could hear him so you had to be careful, you had to keep watching his eyes because the only way you could hear him cry was if you could listen to the sound of his tears falling. Tears and raindrops. Both, in essence, the same.

  But, no, I had already made up my mind, my baby boy would be Ithim.

  And so I wrote: Ithim.

  ‘Just go with Head Nurse, Mr Jay, she’s the best we have, she will take very good care of you,’ said Doctor 1, stepping aside to let Head Nurse pass, showing her a respect, almost an unusual deference, that struck me as odd if not misplaced. (She’s the best we have, that’s what Doctor 2 had also said just a little while ago.)

  ‘What kind of a name is that?’ Head Nurse asked, staring over my shoulder at the form I had filled out, handing it to Doctor 1, who took one look at it, smiled, then passed it to Doctor 2, who read it, laughed.

  ‘Ithim,’ Doctor 2 said, pronouncing it as e-dim. ‘Does it mean anything?’

  Before I could reply, Doctor 1 stepped in: ‘Sure it does. It must. Let the father decide, what’s your problem?’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  Whatever name I gave my baby boy, it would anyways have been without his consent, entirely self-serving, so why not this name, this word that when split, divided the world in two, into those who would look at him and see an object and those who would look at him and see my son, my baby. Now when I think of it, I realize it wasn’t anything profound like that, it was more my way of distracting myself that night from all that had happened, the birth, the face by the window, my unconscious wife, my despair and my dread. And not just a distraction, I would like to think that it was also my act of defiant assertion that none of this had thrown me off balance. That if I could call him Ithim, if I could still play around with words, that meant I wasn’t all gone. That I had it in me to take it all in my stride because, in the heaviness of that night that was threatening to crush me under its overwhelming weight, hadn’t I just fashioned a little lightness?

  Ithim.

  It and him.

  Hadn’t I just signalled to my baby, in whichever language babies a few hours old understand, formed or deformed, that he was my necessary accomplice? That his condition at birth may have thrown the natural order of things into complete disarray but his subsequent naming by me, by his father, had brought back some sense into this chaos?

  How wrong I was.

  I am Doctor 2, I was twenty-eight, I was born in this city, I did my MBBS from Osmania University in Hyderabad and I wanted to do an MD but I couldn’t make it despite two attempts although the second time I did get into Biochemistry but I didn’t want that subject so I joined Holy Angel and although private practice wasn’t allowed, I saw about twenty patients every week in my neighbourhood because that way, I made about Rs 6000 extra, I needed that because my father died five years ago, I lived with my mother and my sister who is twenty-two, she’s just completed her architecture course – she is very bright, after the Republic Day earthquake in this city, she explained to my mother, drawing on a piece of paper, why cracks had formed in our house and how she would have designed it better – and it was her day off today, my mother told me not to go to work this morning because she had heard on TV the news of the attack on the train and how everyone said they feared trouble but the hospital had arranged for a van to drop us off home that night and I thought that would be very safe but it didn’t work out that way, the last thing I remember is Doctor 1 telling me to be quiet, a dozen people stopping the van, asking the driver our names, then letting the driver run away, I remember trying to open the van but they broke the windscreen, I could smell the kerosene being poured in, my glasses were the first to catch the heat, I could smell my hair get singed, I felt the skin peel and then it was all over, pretty fast, and now all I think of is what happens to my sister and my mother, the only hope have is my uncle, he’s my mother’s younger brother, he lives in Mumbai, runs a restaurant and a taxi service and I think my mother and my sister will move there to live with him because we have good memories of that place, when we were in school, my sister and I, we would visit Uncle every summer vacation and, on Sundays, he would give us a taxi with a driver who would take us to show filmstars’ houses facing the sea, his wife – my aunt – and my mother also get along very well, only last month, my aunt sent my mother two pictures of some girl in Mumbai saying in two years will be thirty so I should get married, the girl was attractive but I wasn’t so keen, wanted to firm up my practice, my sister joined the chorus, she said look at the picture, you won’t get someone more beautiful than this girl, but all that’s in the past, I worry about the future although I am sure Mumbai will be a better city for my sister, workwise, there are many more opportunities there for an architect, new cities with high-rise apartment complexes are coming up in the suburbs, she will miss her friends but she will make new ones, Mumbai is also safer, there are many more people there like us, there is strength in numbers when they single you out.

  3. The Empty Room, The First Picture

  STRANGE, how a hospital should go to sleep at night just like the healthy when, in fact, disease sits in each room, on the bed and in between the sheets, when death stands behind many a door, pressed flat against the wall, ready to walk in unannounced. But come night, the hospital has to sleep. So its eyes, all the doors to its rooms, close. Its limbs, the long flanks of its corridors, fall still and quiet. And the only thing you hear is its breath, the hum of the tubelights, the buzz of the machines.

  Soft and steady, soft and steady.

  So it was with Holy Angel that night when I stepped out of the doctors’ room and followed Head Nurse as she walked towards the paediatric Intensive Care Unit to deposit – that’s the word the doctors used, deposit – Ithim for a few hours.

  As if he were it, not him.

  ‘Mr Jay, you may stand outside the room and look through the window,’ said Head Nurse, walking briskly, each word thrown like a ball, travelling down the deserted hallway in front, bouncing back from the wall, grazing her shoulder, then grating my ears. ‘Hurry up, because you will get only a couple of minutes,’ she said, ‘then I will have to draw the curtains. My shift is over, I can’t stay here for ever. I am not even supposed to be here right now.’

  The walk to the ICU was long.

  And it was the sight of the floor, bare and glistening, stretching on either side as far as my eye could see, catching Head Nurse’s reflection as if it were glass, showing a certain cleanliness and order less evident earlier on in the evening, that made me realize how the hours had clocked by since I had first rushed into the hospital with my wife. Because except for a sweeper wiping a table and one male orderly, his eyes half-closed as he sleepwalked by, there was no one. As if during the time I was with Doctors 1 and 2, listening to their diagnosis of what had afflicted my child, a wind had blown.

  A wind so strong it had swept the crowd away, along with the trash and the litter, even sent flying the dogs that had strayed in, leaving the floor looking as if it had been just now washed with water and Dettol. And then mopped dry with clean towels.

&n
bsp; This sudden absence of clutter and noise, its suddenness more than its absence, seemed to have set off a kind of spring cleaning inside me as well. The rooms inside my head that were, the entire evening, flooded with the detritus of images and fears, imagined and feared, had also been swept clean. So while I followed Head Nurse, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of purpose, a spring in my step although I have to confess that I had little idea what that purpose was. Or where that step was leading me.

  ‘Wait here.’ Head Nurse had stopped in front of a hydraulic door marked RESTRICTED ENTRY; she was pointing to a tall, vertical glass window to her right, a window sunk so deep into the wall that I could not see it from where I stood and, therefore, had to walk right up to it.

  Through this window, I saw five glass cots in a row on one side. Three of them were occupied by babies, all asleep, all with tubes attached to their tiny chests. The room was dark except for lamps that glowed over each cot. Like table lamps, softer, more yellow. A nurse, much younger than Head Nurse, sat on a chair, her head leaning to one side, perhaps asleep. There were monitors all along the wall behind her where I saw the dancing points of light in their oscilloscopes, I heard their beeps. And, of course, there was no getting away from the constant hum of the hospital’s electric sleep.

  I watched Head Nurse enter the room, walk right up to the glass and wave at me as she put Ithim in the glass cot next to the window.

  Ithim was still covered and I waited for Head Nurse to remove the sheet so I could see my baby exactly as he was but she only reached out and pulled the curtains close. I tapped at the glass, at first gently, trying to draw her attention, then tapped again, this time louder, my fingers more insistent, the noise echoing in the hallway, magnified by the silence and the stillness.