When Only Love Remains

by Durjoy Datta

  She flips to another page. It’s a picture of Chautala and her lunch-time group. She’s sitting in the canteen with her small group of nurses, and Chautala and his managers are looking at her from a distance. The picture is from a camera installed on the roof so it’s not clear but you can make out the faces if you can see them. Chautala has written . . .

  ‘I didn’t like her at first. She was a lunatic waiting for you to wake up. I was angry at her though my staff loved her! And it was irritating for me at first because they kept talking about her. But then I started dating her. We would meet for twenty minutes every day over a cup of tea. And now she’s like the daughter I never had. Her capacity to love and accept everyone is almost too good to be true. You can’t walk with her from one end of the hospital to the other end because she has to stop to talk to everyone. It’s irritating because when she’s around you feel like a bad, insensitive person. I felt like that. I felt jealous of the empathy she felt towards others. And then I started learning from her. Everyone around us did. She taught us how to be kind. Devrat, I have never talked to you, but I have listened to your music, and Avanti has forced me to like it, but I do want to thank you for bringing Avanti into our lives. I wish the best of luck to both of you.’

  Avanti sobs on the scrapbook. She looks at Devrat and says, ‘I’m sorry if you feel that I’m a bit self-obsessive reading these good things about me to you. But I just love it.’ She laughs on her own joke and imagines Devrat laughing with her.

  She starts to read again and it’s five in the morning by the time she’s done with half of the scrapbook. She’s on Devrat’s bed, her hand across his body, her face on his chest, crying.

  ‘If only you could listen to all of this,’ mumbles Avanti. ‘It’s been eight months Devrat and you have been sleeping. Please, please wake up. Can’t you just listen to me?’

  Avanti dissolves into tears, and soon she’s angry, and she’s cursing everything in the world and is begging Devrat just to wake up. Just to give her some sign that he’s awake. It’s one of those days when she throws a major fit, and is furious at Devrat.

  ‘PLEASE, DEVRAT! WAKE UP!’

  She’s pacing around the room, throwing things near Devrat’s bed, and she’s shouting at the top of her voice.

  ‘LOOK AT ALL THIS, DEVRAT! PEOPLE LOVE ME! Can’t you see that? Can’t you love me enough to at least tell me that you’re inside? That I’m not crazy to talk to you every day and you don’t listen to me! PLEASE TELL ME THAT YOU DO! PLEASE TELL ME THAT YOU’RE INSIDE. That all my words, that all my love isn’t for waste and you can feel it a little,’ howls Avanti and throws the scrapbook at Devrat. A few pictures spill out.

  Avanti’s on the ground now, by the foot of Devrat’s bed, holding on to it, crying, the cool metal of the bedpost touching against her cheek. She cries and she sobs and she curses and she goes to sleep. As she sleeps, she hopes never to wake up.

  A few hours later, Avanti wakes up to a crackling noise in the room but doesn’t open her eyes or move. It’s the embarrassing day-after of her breakdown. It’s not the first time this has happened. Avanti wrecks the room, furious at the unfairness of the world, the rudeness of Devrat for not waking up, for not listening, and the next day Chautala sends a few nurses to put the room back in order.

  She doesn’t want to open her eyes and face the truth. It’s been months now and she has been breaking down every day and, right now, she likes the darkness staring back at her. It’s better than the truth that lies behind it.

  The crackling noise of the nurse crushing the wrapping papers doesn’t stop. Avanti opens her eyes, faking a smile so that she doesn’t have to answer the questions about how she is doing today. Avanti looks around but there’s no nurse. The room is still in a mess. Lamps are upturned, books lie on the ground, the gifts the staff got last night are strewn across. The sound of the wrapping paper being crushed is still echoing in the room. Avanti looks around for a rat in the room and almost shouts for a nurse to help her in doing that. She starts to collect the strewn portions of wrapping paper, crushes them into a ball and dunks them in to the wastepaper basket. The sound doesn’t stop. She looks around and sees a wrapping paper move. It’s on the bed on which Devrat is sleeping. It’s lying near his hand. Gingerly, she walks over, her heart pumping out of her chest. She clutches the wrapping paper, tears already damming up behind her eyes and picks it up, hoping that it would be a rat, because she knows she might die if it’s what she thinks it is, and she throws the wrapping paper away.

  It isn’t a rat. It’s Devrat’s big thumb wiggling.

  Avanti falls to the ground, crying and kissing the thumb; she’s afraid she might actually die of happiness. She runs to kiss his face and his eyes are moving, they are wet and they are moving. Those puppy eyes are actually moving.

  Her puppy just woke up!

  Twenty-Nine

  It’s been a week and the entire hospital’s attention has been focused on the room Devrat is in. Avanti, her father, Devrat’s parents have spent hours seeing the doctors doing multiple rounds of nerve conduction tests to check if there are other parts of Devrat’s body that can move or feel sensation. For the past week, he has been answering questions by wiggling the thumb and answering in Yes or No. If he wiggles it twice, it means a No, if he wiggles it once, it means a Yes. Devrat has also learnt to do it with his eyes. Blink twice for No and blink once for Yes. The doctors have been assaulting him with questions, and he has been hearing them and answering them in simple Yes or No.

  Avanti hasn’t been able to tear her eyes off the thumb, like it’s a little newborn, who does tricks that are extraordinarily cute and novel; if that isn’t creepy enough Avanti has been clicking pictures of the thumb and videos of it wiggling around. The number of selfies she has clicked with Devrat’s eyes open run into thousands now.

  She hasn’t got the time to talk to him much in the past few days, and whenever she has, she has just asked just one question, ‘Do you still love me?’ And the answer has always come in one wiggle. And she has always replied, ‘I love you, too!’

  He’s learning to talk in Morse code. Avanti has been learning that, too, although Devrat can hear her.

  It isn’t that difficult to learn. She would hold his hand and he would tap her hand with his thumb. ‘A’ meant a small tap and then a long one. ‘B’ meant one long tap and three small taps.

  Morse code has tap sequences for every letter.

  So ‘I love you’ means: Two small taps for ‘I’, one small tap, one long tap, two small taps for ‘L’ and so on . . .

  This is till the time they get him a touchscreen and he can use that. But till then he has to get used to the basics, and so does Avanti. Never had she thought that a wiggling thumb can make her so happy.

  She’s already making wedding plans and all that. She’s thinking she can leave the hospital, with Devrat in a wheelchair, and talk to him all day long. The thought is slight funny in her head, too, but all said and done it’s not the thumb that is exciting her, it’s the fact that he’s alive, truly alive, someone she can talk to, someone whose hand she can hold and feel. It’s all going to come back. It feels like the first day of their relationship again! She’s nervous of what to say to him, what to ask him; she feels like he’s a new person, now that he can communicate. There’s so much that she wants to say to him, so much that she wants to hear from him. For the past seven days, she hasn’t been able to sleep from the excitement.

  The doctors, who had given up, now are hailing it as a small miracle, and are now thinking that there are chances of a full recovery. But Avanti doesn’t care about that, and for her, he’s already an athlete and she doesn’t care how and when he recovers.

  On the eighth day, the touchscreen comes in. Avanti’s not too happy about it. She liked holding his hand and talking to him; the touchscreen makes it impersonal. That’s the thing about technology, the closer you think it brings you, th
e further it pulls you apart. While Devrat is being trained and doctors are trying to subject him to tests, she’s trying to make lists of things that she has to say to him.

  It’s two weeks by the time the doctors and the therapists leave and hand over Devrat to the family. Devrat’s parents are the first ones to talk to Devrat and they talk for an hour. Devrat has a touchscreen pad with his thumb on it and it’s kept where he can see it.

  Avanti has dressed up today.

  She goes and sits next to Devrat. It’s like their first date all over again. She sees his pupils train on her and blink. Gingerly, she takes his thumb off the touchpad and takes it in her own palm.

  ‘I like it this way,’ says Avanti, tapping on his hand, and talking. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Not good,’ he answers by tapping on her hand.

  ‘Were you awake all this while?’

  ‘No, just a few days,’ taps Devrat.

  ‘Do you remember me?’ asks Avanti.

  ‘Clear as day.’

  Avanti’s crying now; she can die a happy girl now.

  ‘I love you,’ says Avanti, and puts her head to his chest. ‘I love you so much.’

  ‘More,’ comes the answer. ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Waiting for you to wake up, Devrat,’ says Avanti. ‘I have been learning to play your songs on the guitar. Though I’m too scared to use your guitar. Sumit gave me your first performance guitar but I can’t use that yet.’

  ‘Play,’ taps Devrat on Avanti’s hand. ‘Use my guitar.’

  Avanti gingerly picks the guitar like it’s fragile, tunes it, and starts to try strumming some of his songs. She’s not that good, she realizes that but Devrat’s eyes have welled up and a tear streaks down his cheek. Avanti wipes it clean. Devrat’s crying now.

  ‘Am I that bad?’ she asks.

  ‘You were imperfect. Like me,’ taps Devrat.

  ‘I like your imperfections. Your imperfections fit my perfect love story,’ says Avanti.

  ‘Play some more,’ taps Devrat. ‘And sing.’

  ‘No. You will sing. Not me, I’m not going to sing.’

  ‘I can’t talk,’ Devrat taps on Avanti’s hand.

  ‘But you will.’

  And Avanti plays some more. Devrat’s eyes are dry of tears and hours pass by like seconds. Avanti then goes on to show him panels of his favourite comics and reads them out, playing different characters with different voices and apologizing for doing the voices really badly. But she doesn’t pull back from showing off how much she knows about them now. They also play a brief comic book quiz in which she beats Devrat hands down and Devrat admits in a series of taps that he agrees that the master is now the student.

  There are small periods of silences where Avanti lets go of Devrat’s hand and wonders why Devrat’s not reacting when she sees his hand on the bed, his thumb moving.

  Devrat asks Avanti more questions about what she has been doing in the past year or so and Avanti skirts the issue. The doctors have categorically told her and others to try and keep Devrat as positive and upbeat as possible and she doesn’t want to depress him with the details of her long stay at the hospital.

  Four hours have passed by and it still feels like a blink of an eye. The doctors are at the door waiting for Avanti to leave so that they can resume their battery of tests and therapy on Devrat.

  Just before leaving, Avanti asks Devrat, ‘Is there anything that you want?’

  Devrat’s eyes well up and he taps on her hand, ‘You.’

  ‘I’m already yours. Is there anything else that you want?’

  Devrat doesn’t react, but his eyes are wet. He taps on her hand.

  ‘I didn’t get it. What did you say?’ asks Avanti and gives him the touchscreen.

  Avanti is looking at the screen, waiting for words to appear there. Nothing comes up. And then she hears a voice. It’s like someone’s being strangulated.

  She looks at Devrat and his lips are moving. Devrat tries to talk again, his face strained, and the words are more like air whooshing through a punctured piece of cloth, like an old man coughing. She finally makes out what Devrat’s trying to say.

  ‘Say it again,’ Avanti says, bringing her ears next to his mouth.

  ‘I want to die.’

  Thirty

  Avanti’s running through the corridors, her fists are clenched, the words she saw on the screen running through her head and in Devrat’s voice, her heart wanting to explode. She wants to kill Devrat and herself.

  She runs up the six flights of stairs, hoping the exertion would calm her down, but it doesn’t, and she’s banging at Chautala’s door.

  ‘Excuse me?’ the man who opens the door asks Avanti.

  ‘Get out of my way or I will smash your head open!’ shouts Avanti, tears streaking down her cheeks.

  Chautula now notices Avanti at the door and ends the meeting mid-way, sends the people out of the room.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ he asks, concerned. Avanti’s pacing around the room, holding her head, shouting and howling.

  ‘He wants to die.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘HE JUST TOLD ME! HE WANTS TO DIE! HE TALKED AND HE TOLD ME HE WANTS TO DIE!’ shouts Avanti. She catches hold of a plant and throws it along with its pot across the room, and it crashes into a glass cabin.

  ‘Did you ask why?’

  ‘You think I will reason with that? YOU THINK! I WAITED ALL THESE FUCKING MONTHS FOR HIM TO WAKE UP AND THIS IS WHAT HE DOES? HE WANTS TO DIE?’ bawls Avanti and trashes Chautala’s table, throwing things off the table.

  ‘You need to calm down.’

  ‘You’re asking me to calm down? You have seen everything! And still you’re asking me to calm down.’

  ‘Does he know you haven’t stepped out of the hospital?’ asks Chautala.

  ‘What if he doesn’t? What if? Now I won’t even tell him! Let him die and find out after he’s dead about that,’ says Avanti. She has slumped on the ground, her face in her palms, crying profusely. ‘How can he even say that? How can he just leave me like that? How can he do that to me?’ Avanti mumbles between sobs.

  Chautala walks up to Avanti and tries calming her down, making her sit on the couch, and tells her that it must be hard for Devrat to wake up one day and find that he’s confined to the bed.

  ‘Imagine yourself in his body. He has just woken up and he can’t move. He stares at the next thirty years of life like that. Can you imagine the quality of life? He’s bound to say that.’

  ‘Are you saying we should kill him? Are you saying that?’

  ‘No, I’m just putting an argument. It’s isn’t about what we should do because the law says we can’t kill him, but you can at least understand why he can want to kill himself,’ argues Chautala.

  ‘Why! But why! I can look into his eyes and he can emote and talk with me! That’s enough for me! Why kill him? I want nothing from him. I just want him to be around. How’s that too much to ask for? This is worse than cheating. And he said he loves me! HOW DARE HE SAY THAT.’ Avanti has slipped on the ground and she’s bawling, her nose running, her mouth open.

  ‘That’s his decision to take, right? It’s his life.’

  ‘It’s not his life! It’s connected to ours. And you can’t give a person who’s sick the right to choose his treatment. He’s sick! What does he know? Oh! Maybe that’s why he wants to die? The coma has affected his brain,’ retorts Avanti.

  ‘He’s not sick, his body is dead. He will have to live with a body that doesn’t work for years. He will want to do things and see things and feel things like others do and he wouldn’t be able to do that! What’s fair in that?’ Chautala argues his case. A trolley comes in with their trademark tea and he pours Avanti a cup.

  He hands it to her as she’s shaking.

  ‘Fair? So you mean just be
cause he longs for something, you will kill him? If someone loses a leg, you will kill him too? There will be longing there too? I cut off your hand and you will miss pouring tea for yourself. Will you kill yourself? Tell me where do you draw the line? Where?’

  ‘That’s just ridiculous!’ says Chautula in a firm voice. ‘You know where the line is. I have been in this hospital business since I was a child. I know the line when I see it.’

  ‘That’s a valid argument, isn’t it? I can see the line when I see it? And this isn’t business . . . this is human life. You’re not God! You’re not. You can’t decide when to kill people. You JUST CAN’T!’

  ‘Oh, please, Avanti, let me explain this to you. I’m not saying this is what we will do, but hear me out.’ Chautala holds Avanti’s hand. ‘Imagine there are so many people like Devrat, confined to bed, wanting to die. Imagine if we give the power to them to die, and they decide to do so, there would be that many more resources for people who die on the streets.’

  Avanti jerks her hands off from Chautala’s hand. ‘You mean you want to kill him and put someone else on his bed! Someone from the streets?’ Avanti adds after a pause, her face dug in her palms instead. ‘I don’t care how insensitive I sound. I just want him to live! And if he doesn’t tell me why he can’t live with me if he loves me so much, I will kill him with my own hands. I don’t care!’

  ‘You do care.’

  Avanti’s dissolves into tears again. ‘But why? If he dies, why can’t I ask for death, too? How you can you tell if his pain is more than mine? If everyone starts acting on their own selfish impulses, the world would end, wouldn’t it? Tell me? Why would you save me then? I would want to die as well.’

  ‘Why do you make it sound like death is bad thing?’