Sometimes the heart brags of human bondage

Thimphu at 6 am in the morning

The half completed assignment was still lying on the desk. The page of the book was perfectly folded and stacked away in the shelf waiting to be read again. The daily favorite tv shows were missed. Everything came to a complete standstill when I left for the hospital. I had an unfinished love affair with my assignment, my book and the tv shows. The hospital ward I had to live in for 5 days became an entirely new world. I was then Alice in Wonderland. 

I had the least of the knowledge that the world I would be living in for the next 5 days will be the one where sorrows, frets and frustrations were everybody’s everyday’s chores. 

Etherized on the hospital bed, my mother had yet to regain her consciousness and return to the reality of pain from the surgery. The water had completely drained from her pale face and she looked ghostly thin. 

Pungent air filled the ward. It fatigued me and made me sick at the pit of my stomach. I wondered how the patients were able to breathe in the air. But they were so much in pain that the pungent air was nothing compared to their pain. 

Dressed in pink and blue pants and shirts with their mouth carefully masked, the nurses came and checked the patient’s blood pressure and gave doses of the medicine as and when required. 

Opposite to my mother’s bed, a middle aged man was tending to his old wife. They had just returned from her chemotherapy treatment from Kolkata, the husband told me. The wife had lost all her hair to the treatment and she looked like a ragged doll. 

Next to their bed was an elderly couple. The wife had just done her surgery the day before my mother was admitted. A urinary plastic bag was attached to her bed and she could not walk. 

The husband was kneeling on the bed beside her and he looked at me with sympathy. I was exactly sitting in the same position like him. He could understand the pain of my mother. 

Through our eyes, we nodded at each other and understood each other’s struggles-struggle to see your loved one go under the knife, that moment of waiting outside the operation theatre and now the moment of waiting for my mother to regain her consciousness and for his wife to heal post-surgery; for her to be able to walk, eat and smile and go back to their village. They came for the surgery from their village, I was told. 

In another bed, a lanky looking man was tending to his wife who had undergone Cesarean Section to deliver the baby. She told me that this is their fifth child in a row. The husband had no job and they had no relatives. “Being poor is difficult, because there’s no one to look after when you are sick.” she said. 

The husband was juggling between the pediatric ward where the baby was kept and to the maternity ward where the mother was. 

The next day, they were discharged from the hospital. An old woman replaced the bed. Surprisingly, she also had no one to look after her at the hospital. Her left part of the body was paralyzed partially. I helped her with her coma to wear the kira and get her meals. She didn’t have a cell phone and couldn’t read or write to have noted down the numbers of her family. 

Everywhere I looked there was agony, hovering with large hollowed eyes. Human bondage is so powerful; even if I wanted to escape it, I couldn’t have gone far. My mother could never have escaped this surgery. 

Soon darkness started seeping in through the ward’s window. I looked outside, the cars flew past, and people were hurrying all bundled up in scarves and warm coats. Everybody had a destination to go to. Anxious they must be to reach the comfort and warmth of their homes, hurrying to feed their hungry and wailing babies at home, excited to see their loved ones. 

Anxiously, I also waited for my mother to talk to me, for her to reach out her hand and tell me to moisten her dried lips at least for she was not allowed to drink water. Often times, the irony of life hit me hard. Today you are here, tomorrow you may be gone. 

Soon silence overcame the darkness. It depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. 

I longed for the comfort of my bed, a cup of steaming tea and a comfortable place to sit on and doze off. For a big time sleeper like me, eye bags had already started to appear under my eyes. 

Just another night and a new hope would dawn upon, I thought.The hope of going away from the ward excited me. The new dawn indeed brought me hopes. Mother was doing a lot better than expected. 

After another four nights, we were finally going home. The warm autumn sun welcomed us crisply. It was a different feeling for my lungs to breathe in fresh air. 

Outside, everything was perfectly normal, as if nothing grave is happening inside the hospital wards and the whole concept of hospital is non-existent. 

I took a deep breath, inhaled the fresh air as much as I could and my smile was the largest. Largest because there’s so much irony in life.