Just the Way You Are

by Sanjeev Ranjan

  The ambulance arrived. I rushed outside, carrying her in my arms. She had again closed her eyes, her breaths long and shallow. I sat beside her till we reached the hospital, murmuring empty nothings to her. I placed one hand on her forehead and with the other I covered my own mouth, to prevent my gasping sobs from turning into ugly howls. I felt helpless and a zillion thoughts raced through my mind—bad thoughts, crippling thoughts, thoughts that forced me back to the time before things went wrong and ugly, before everything became a huge mass of despair.

  ‘I am not your enemy. Talk to me.’ I remembered her words, when she couldn’t respond to me all the way to the hospital. I silently prayed that she would become fine and then I would do every single thing that I had not done for her in so many years.

  She was admitted into the hospital. The doctor took his time checking her and I grew impatient with every passing second. I paced up and down the corridors of the dimly lit hospital and was on the verge of losing my patience.

  After some time, I saw him coming out of her ward. I stumbled towards him.

  ‘Doctor, is everything fine?’

  ‘Yes, everything is fine. I think she fell down because of the heat and weakness. I have given her an IV of glucose but we cannot at this time detect if there are any more anomalies, or if she has had multiple deficiencies over a long period. We will have to do some tests and only after looking at the reports will I be able to tell you what exactly is her condition and how would we should approach it.’

  The nurse had taken Mom’s blood sample and the report would be coming in an hour or two. I could do nothing except wait.

  She opened her eyes after an hour and the doctor let me talk to her. She asked in a low voice, ‘How many days will you be here?’

  I knew why she had asked this. For the last four years, I had made brief trips home, only once staying for seven days.

  ‘I will be here for two months. And will only go after I’m sure you are healthy.’

  I chatted with her for a few minutes, and then assured her that I would come back after collecting the reports.

  As I turned towards the door, she called out my name. I stopped and looked back at her. She raised her head and mumbled, ‘I am not your enemy. Please talk to me always.’

  Tears rolled down my cheeks. There was a tight knot within me. Before it could uncoil into a storm, I turned my face away and left the room.

  All the reports were normal except for the blood test and iron test. The doctor raised his brows when he noted her iron and haemoglobin levels. He asked how come I hadn’t noticed the symptoms and chided me for getting Mom to the hospital at such a late stage. I felt guilty for being careless though I hand’t been living at home. Dad and Bhaiya too had been away, so nothing could have been done. My sister was too young to know anything. So, I chose to stay quiet in front of the doctor.

  He gave me a prescription with a list of medicines and asked me to take good care of Mom. He also made a list of foods that she needed to eaten regularly to regain her strength and stressed on fruit. While leaving, he patted my back. He had sensed my anxiety and told me not to worry. She would be fine soon.

  The next day, I took Mom back home. She was still weak. Dad and Bhaiya had both arrived. I narrated the whole incident to them and informed them about what the doctor had advised. Dad said me that he was proud of the sensible way in which I had acted. But they both had to leave that very day both and I had to take on the entire responsibility of the house as well as Mom. I wasn’t worried. Maybe I wanted it. This was necessary for us to re-forge our bond.

  As a child, I had toyed with the idea of being disowned by my mother. I didn’t know if it was love, protection, or her sense of misunderstanding her own child. Or maybe I had misinterpreted her actions. Whenever I went to the neighbouring aunty’s place to watch a serial or Chitrahaar, Mom not only rebuked me but also cribbed about me in public. ‘Don’t tell me, Sunita, all day he just plays around and does nothing and then sneaks off to your place to watch TV. Someday I’m going to peel his skin off. I don’t have any hope left for him.’ The entire neighbourhood was familiar with this harangue. I wondered who would say such things about her own son. While I was growing up, there were similar instances which filled me with bitterness against my mother. She always had something bad to say about me. But when I passed tenth grade with flying colours, she stopped. She did realize her mistake which, in fact, was a by-product of her own cultural upbringing. She didn’t know much about encouragement or inspiration. In her view, only gaalis and mindless reprimands sufficed and would do the necessary. Later, when she turned soft and her attitude towards me began to change, I was the one who became cold and unapproachable. I could see her pine for me even when I left home for college, but I didn’t feel anything for her. I avoided her calls and never wrote to her. The bitterness of past memories was now in full bloom, consuming me with its malice and arrogance. Even when Dad called, I made it clear that I would keep my communication limited to him and not bother with Mom. I became a stone and considered never going back to her or ever listening, until the worst happened. I was wracked with guilt. However, I was fortunate that I had caught hold of the dwindling thread between our hearts in time.

  A month passed by. Things became calmer. Mom and I bonded and her health improved. She was cheerful once again, both in body and spirit. I felt relaxed and as if time had turned back its wheel and mended every single wound, though I did feel a pang of longing for the lost days.

  Dad was back and was happy to see mom hale and hearty. He had come home for my cousin’s wedding. He insisted on taking Mom along with him, now that she was fine; she had not been out of the house for a long time. That night, I had my dinner early and went to bed as I felt weak and spent, though I had not done anything tiring at home. But sleep eluded me. I felt the temperature rising and my skin burning. I was feverish and my head felt heavy. I decided to call up a doctor friend of mine and he asked me if I had paracetamol at home. I had a tablet and my fever subsided over the next one hour. Yet, I still couldn’t sleep. I was instead reminded of another such day three years back, when I had been suffering from a similar bout of fever. Slowly my mind drifted into the void of the night and faded into the past. How long would it haunt me?

  It was during the days when I about to complete my MBA. The academic pressure had lightened and I was taken as an intern at Citadel Steel Plant. I had by then achieved several of my career plans and was on the verge of living a happy life. To add to my happiness, I had befriended a girl on Facebook who seemed to be enamoured of me.

  I was contemplating the lonely nights that had passed without my noticing in all these years and concluded that there are some nights when the soul seems to wander infinitely, searching for places, people, and lost memories, and seeks a future out of a silent storm. Then there are these nocturnal sufferers who cannot help but lie awake awaiting the dawn. I awaited a dawn in my life too, for I knew that every night, even the darkest one, is followed by the dawn. Light is victorious over darkness, the only thing being that darkness lasts longer. And it did that night, as I lay wide awake like an insect on its back, writhing in the heat, within and without. The fever was unbearable. The smog of the city, the concrete parapets, the humid, stale air—all of it added to the noxious atmosphere. My body felt roasted. I gasped at intervals for some fresh air, craning my neck desperately towards the window but the air was still and heavy. How would I pass this night? I turned back, thinking that the power of imagination is perhaps stronger than memory. For you believe what you want to believe and remember most what you would have given up, forgetting. Otherwise why do most people not like to talk or at times think of their past? There was nothing to do! I put my palm on my forehead and tried to gauge the temperature. How on earth would I feel anything? So let us imagine that since I didn’t feel anything, I was perhaps troubled by something else and not fever. The weather, I suppose. The festive season, maybe. Everyone, including my roommate, had left for Holi. The mornin
g would be full of colour. There would be happy faces marked with red, blue, and green. And I, wrapped in my sombre yellow bed sheet, would lurk around, trying to avoid phone calls from my parents and siblings. I had failed to get a ticket for home that year. A colourless year, rather. There was no excuse left to give either. What would I tell them? Should I complain about the ever-growing population of India proliferating like a tumour or should I tell them that such festivals were just useless in a country where people die like ants on the street? The fever was trying to get inside my imagination now, trying to force itself inside as memory does and make me believe that it was rising. I had no other tool to fight it except imagination itself. But heat makes the mind act like a thermos flask. It traps the mind and makes it vaporous and unclear. I got up fighting that aching realization and sat up like the Buddha, wrapping that bed sheet all around my body. The roof was the tree and heat compensated for the sun overhead. I opened my laptop and started browsing through Facebook. A usual, mundane activity. Bored more than ever, I flipped to the page where they post funny pictures, making a joke out of almost everything, and laughed to myself. I laughed to smash the fever out of my body. I laughed for it was the only medicine at hand with me now, but I wasn’t successful. Suddenly, I saw a message blinking in my chat box. It was from her. She would often leave a small, brief message asking when I’d be free to talk. Like all memories registering faintly in the periphery of fame, I had remembered her words of praise but failed to remember her many messages. She might have sensed it then itself, so this time when she pinged me her only query was: Do you remember what I had written to you last? I told her what I remembered. Actually, I was confused. She was quiet for a while and then asked how I was. I just typed F-E-V-E-R. The brief, anxious letters spurted like bees out of a hive. She started enquiring about my food habits, lifestyle, what I had eaten last, if I had had too much junk food. I was surprised at the concern she showed. I whispered to myself, Is she a doc or what? I rushed to click on her blinking icon. Yes, she was a medical student. By the time I returned to my chat box, she had concluded all her advice on what medicine to take and what to eat, what not to as well. She was caring and I felt very good with her benign affection towards me. I couldn’t say anything except, ‘Thanks. So sweet of you’. I then asked her a few questions about herself and she started telling me several things as if we were old, close friends meeting after many years. I started thinking that this was fortuitous as the chat continued and felt relieved after chatting with her for nearly fifteen minutes. But I then had to stop as I started feeling uncomfortable with the fever. When I shut down the laptop, a faint, wistful smile lightened my brooding mind and her chat and care soothed my burning body. The night would pass.

  Next morning, I woke up to shimmering sunlight. The fever didn’t seem to affect me as much anymore. And my mind was quite clear. After drawing in the dust on the glass of my window, I checked my mail. Nothing. And as usual, I checked for any messages left on Facebook, even before I dragged myself to the pharmacy! There was indeed a message for me, ‘Good morning. How are you feeling now? Let me know if you have taken the tablets. Be well. Shall be waiting to hear from you.’ It was from her. And my smile was back. I had been wondering how to pass the cruel night and here it was, this dawn, awaiting me with a new light, lifting me through the rain. I had a hope for a hand to hold.

  During the days that passed, we chatted continuously over Facebok. Her name was Tanvi. From the virtual world we graduated to talking over the phone, sharing everything that we could share—our aspirations, choices, desires, and many other things that made us fond of each other. I started feeling as if I had found a soulmate in her and was content to have someone beside me, though she was far.

  She would often call me, ‘Sameer, I hope I’m not bothering you …’That would always be her first sentence. I would smile and tell her that she could neither bother nor disturb me, that I always waited for her call.

  She gave me the belief that I was someone special to her. There wasn’t an iota of doubt that she had opened up her heart to me and let me be its sole carrier.

  ‘You know, it has become more and more difficult for me,’ she’d mock the situation.

  ‘Why? What’s difficult now?’

  ‘Well, you know I come back from the ward and attend to the clinic, read my books and then, in the middle of it all, I realize that the day has been a sheer waste. I have missed something important!’

  ‘And what exactly might that be?’ I would know the answer somewhere in my heart, yet I would not let on that I did.

  ‘You know it, right? I know you’re smiling. You dodo, it’s talking to you over the phone.’

  And we would laugh delightedly, continuing to talk for hours.

  We would share the best and the worst of her life. She would share her petty problems at college and how she had to work long hours at the clinic. She would go on about how she longed to see me. She would tell me about her friends and how they all loved her. At times I felt she had too many people in her life and wondered if I was just the right one to be special among all of them. But we never ended up being serious on that matter.

  After about two months, when my internship days were ending, she had her semester exams coming up. I refrained from calling her during those days as I wanted her to study well. I had it my mind that I would visit her once I was done with my MBA, of which I had barely some months left now. After her exams were over, called her. But, as time passed, I found her response colder and her spirit dwindling. Like all other tricks of fate, she too became distant and flimsy. All she talked about was her classmate whom she had started liking and the possibility of their becoming good friends in the future. I did not know how she could convert every single intimate detail into an area of common discussion. I still listened to her and consoled myself with the thought that she must be in a different mood altogether. Days crawled by with fewer and fewer words from her.

  It was a month since I had finished my MBA. On the last month after my exams I decided to visit her. I planned on taking the first train to her college and thought that I would surprise her. Maybe on seeing me, the dying embers of her heart would flare up. Maybe once she saw me, everything would come back to her and she would once again realize that I was the person she loved. Maybe on seeing me, every unsure feeling in her would turn into a certainty and we would end up together. But fate had other plans.

  She called me up just the day before I had to take my train.

  ‘Sameer, I need to tell you something.’

  ‘What is it, Tanvi?’ I had assumed that even before I reached there that she would tell me what I had longed for so many days.

  ‘I think I have found my soulmate.’

  ‘Me too …’ I blurted out.

  ‘Whoa! Really? It’s Rishabh, actually. The classmate I had been telling you about. Remember?’

  Her words struck me like an electric current and shattered every little piece of my world. I felt my knees crashing to the ground and the phone just slipped from my hands. For some time I couldn’t quite gulp down my shock. But then I held my legs and squatted on the floor. I felt weak and unable to move. I had never thought of her as a frivolous person while talking to her about my life and how I was in need of love. Then she had said nothing and had acquiesced to being with me forever. But I didn’t realize the change in her in a couple of months and that our bonding had become so mechanical. I felt broken, and more than that, I felt used. She, of course, knew of my feelings. Someone cannot be that ignorant as to not be able to detect the emotions in the voice of a person with whom she talked for hours, almost every day. If this was what she had in store for me, she either should have told me or should have never let me come so close to her so that I would lose myself. I wondered at the irony of this for days. Wondered at the incredulousness of people and how they could use others. Wherever I went, whatever I did, I found no peace. After having spent myself completely, I couldn’t take it any longer. Instead, I decided to
write a letter to her.

  Dear Tanvi,

  I am writing this to you with a heart that is weak with indifference. Within the last many months, seeing how close we had become, I had come to assume, and now too think, I know incorrectly, that you are the perfect person for me. You are perhaps the soulmate I was seeking since I was aware of something called love. But now I think this is causing me more harm than good. You have left me alone and vulnerable. You knew my feelings quite clearly as we had discussed them almost every day, that how desperate I was for love and my quest for love never seemed to end. Probably you are right in your own way, that you could not treat my feelings with greater perception than regular friends do. But in that process I was damaged somewhere inside. I became dark and unrecognizable, which I can no longer bear. It is definitely true that I need love and I pine for it, but that I cannot get it at the cost of chasing someone eternally and running after her without any hope. In the last few days I have observed your ignorance as well as your drifting away from me. I want both of us to be honest with each other and not make things ugly. You are surely lucky that you have loving friends to take care of you, the ones you have spoken to me about over the phone. I am happy that you have a life, unlike mine, where people are fond of you and want you in their life more than anything. But I cannot be a part of such a world. I want you as someone special, my special person, my beloved, and sharing you with others is naturally difficult. I have worked really hard to win people’s hearts and that, with more of failure than success. Sometimes I feel terribly lonely and miserable for being what I am. What if I remain alone till I grow old and perish? What if I die alone without anyone beside me to talk to me during my last hours? But then, I would not have compromised on winning love on the grounds of losing my self-respect and self-esteem. More so, force doesn’t work in a relationship. If it has to happen it will happen by itself. One cannot make it happen. For you, it must be easy to say that I was one of your good friends. But in my mind you had already completed and complemented me. I was already under the impression that we had given ourselves to each other. What, after all, is love if not giving? Perhaps that was a lie that I had been telling myself over all these months to keep myself from the reality but who can avoid reality? I was stupid. I have nothing much to say now. I feel broken. The thing that I wish for is to love and to be loved. I did my part honestly but you didn’t reciprocate in kind.