Room 23

by Kavita Basi

  When my father died, I was twenty-one, newly wed, and on that day was exhausted from a long day out with my cousin, who was visiting from Manchester. Deepak and I decided to rest, have an early night. We ordered in and began to watch a movie. We never did this on Saturday nights, but we’d spent all day by the Liverpool docks, admiring boats and catching up with my cousin and her husband.

  The phone rang just after the movie ended. Sluggish, Deepak got up to answer the phone. He moved a little too slow and missed the call. Immediately, the phone started ringing again. I figured it was his parents, who were out at a party that night.

  But through the phone I heard loud screaming.

  I sat up straight. Who’s screaming and why?

  He walked out of the room away from me to talk in private, like he didn’t want me to hear.

  “Who is it?” I asked his turned back. I was concerned. He didn’t respond, so I waited for him to come back into the room.

  He said a few quiet words into the phone, hung up, and then came and sat on the bed next to me.

  “Your father has been in a car accident,” he said, putting a hand on my knee. “We have to go to Newcastle, but we have to call my parents first.”

  I got up to get ready. He probably has a few broken bones, I thought.

  When Deepak’s parents arrived, he told me they were coming with us. I was impatient to go. I found him whispering with his mom in the kitchen.

  “We need to go now,” I said. “We need to go!”

  Suddenly Deepak’s parents’ close friends were also coming?

  “It’s a three-hour drive,” I said, imploring them to get on the road.

  I was anxious not knowing how my dad was doing. The drive was unbearable. I sat in the backseat next to my mother-in-law, who held my hand the entire way. I was so worried I couldn’t sleep. And when we finally arrived, I couldn’t understand why we went to my parents’ house instead of the hospital; I wanted to go straight to the hospital.

  Deepak grabbed my hand as we got out of the car. “Kavita, something terrible has happened.”

  I looked up at him.

  “Your father has died.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” I shook my head. “We’re going to the hospital after this?”

  Deepak looked down.

  I walked into the house. Everything was covered in white sheets and the only sound was wailing. I choked up seeing my sisters and brother on the floor, crying. When they saw me they got up to hug me. To my right, there was a picture of my father sitting on a low table, a lit candle in front of it. Some of my relatives were sitting around it and praying.

  “We need to go to the hospital,” I cried. “Is there any chance he’s okay?”

  “It’s too late,” Deepak said.

  My mother was mute and breathing poorly; the tragedy had awoken her asthma. She went downstairs with her brother and sister to sleep.

  As the oldest, I pulled myself together and gathered my brother and sisters. Together, we went to sleep in my parents’ room, with Deepak sleeping horizontally at the end of the bed, watching over the lot of us.

  It was the worst night of my life. My sleep was broken and interrupted with a mix of nightmares and reality. Deepak was half-asleep but constantly checking on us from the end of the bed.

  Now Jasmine was having to cope with a similar situation, and at an even younger age than I was when I lost my father. She later wrote me a note explaining what the day after my brain hemorrhage was like for her:

  I woke up with birthday messages on my phone. My birthday was the last thing on my mind. Walking into my classroom that morning everybody called out, “Happy Birthday, Jasmine!” I smiled at them, unable to speak. All of the emotions I’d been holding back came over me all at once. I walked over to Laura, who was chatting with all of my friends, and burst out crying. “It’s my mum, she . . .”

  I was able to escape into my routine but then spontaneous sadness would come over me. I didn’t know if you were coming home. When Dad came home, he didn’t give much detail. I had hundreds of questions, the main one: Is Mum going to die?

  Family and extended family arrived the next day, taking over the kitchen, making huge pots of food, not speaking or interacting. Mom stared at nothing, not knowing what to do.

  “He wanted Sunny and me to go for a drive with him to get fresh air,” she said. “Sunny wasn’t interested. And I was too tired. So he decided to get ice cream for us.”

  We couldn’t see my father at the morgue straight away because he had cuts and bruises and they wanted to make him presentable for the family. When we were finally allowed to see him, I went with my auntie and Deepak. I looked at his body, covered with a sheet, through a glass window. When I entered the room, I felt an overwhelming presence.

  Is that really him?

  They lifted the sheet from his face and he looked perfect and peaceful.

  My Daddy is gone.

  I broke down in tears, but I could feel his presence all around me.

  I worked out of my company’s Northeast office for two weeks as we looked after my mum and siblings. One day at the office I received a call that my grandfather—my mother’s father—had had a stroke and passed away. My mom didn’t know yet.

  This time walking into the house was different. Mum was sitting on the couch and seemed okay—happy to see me. I knelt down next to her and held her hand.

  “I have something difficult to tell you.”

  It had only been two weeks since my father passed. She was so fragile.

  Telling her that her father had passed away was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do, the same as when Deepak had to tell me my father had died.

  She screamed and banged her head with her hands. I tried to hug her but she pushed me away, letting out the deepest, most sorrowful sound. She’d lost the two most important men in her life in the span of two weeks.

  Deepak wanted my brother and sisters to still have some sort of father figure in their lives, so he insisted we drive to Newcastle regularly to care for them after my mom was institutionalized to help her deal with her grief. He tried to keep us all occupied, joking to lift our spirits, making us tea, and sending Sunny on errands on the new bike he’d just bought him.

  My mom couldn’t handle the difficulty of being a forty-four-year-old widow and grieving daughter. Her condition deteriorated rapidly. She pretended Dad was still alive.

  One morning as I woke slowly in Liverpool I saw a white, shadowy figure coming toward me. It was my father.

  He’s here.

  I felt calm seeing him.

  He leaned over me and gently pushed the hair from my face. “I know it’s hard,” he said. “But you’re the oldest and I need you to be strong and look after your mum. She needs you.”

  Now Deepak sat silent as he waited for word from the surgeon. He was cold and rigid and could barely speak. Self-sufficient from the time he was seven years old and an only child, he rarely let his guard down. He never liked to show his emotions. He seemed tough and composed from the outside, but he was trembling with fear on the inside. He wasn’t sure if he was going to lose me or not. And there was also tremendous pressure from our work.

  He made a call to let them know what was happening.

  “Just check in now and again with updates on what’s happening,” the HR representative said.

  Deepak’s priority was me. He’d make work calls and deal with his emails remotely.

  Dr. Holsgrove greeted my immediate family and a room full of cousins and friends after surgery. He pulled my immediate family aside to give them an update.

  “We managed to coil the aneurysm and stabilize the bleed from the hemorrhage,” he told them. “She’s unconscious. Deepak, you can come in and see her if you like. She’s extremely critical. You should be prepared. She may not make it home.”

  Deepak nodded.

  I was still unconscious and in a coma-like state.

  “It’s crucial that she respond within ten days,” the do
ctor continued. “This is the window that will tell us everything— whether she’ll have a seizure, stroke, need more surgery for recovery, or simply be okay.”

  When Deepak entered the ICU I was covered in wires and tubes; my head was shaved at the operation site and tightly bandaged. Underneath was an incision that extended from the front right of my head to the back and also extended up near the crown.

  Deepak held my hand and cried and prayed, “Please, God, let her be okay.”

  He sat with me for a long time.

  Eventually, the doctor came back in.

  “You should go home and get some rest,” he said. “She’s stable now.”

  Deepak was a shell of himself. He cried all the way home thinking I was going to die and never come home again. What if we never took another car ride together? What was he going to tell the kids?

  He got home just before Jasmine and Jay had to go to school the next morning. When he saw them he gave them both a big hug and sat them down.

  “She’s got fluid in her brain and is going to have to have a few operations,” he told them. “She’s not going to be coming home for a while.”

  This was the first time Jasmine and Jay had seen their dad cry.

  “I don’t understand,” Jasmine said. “Last night she was fine. She was wrapping birthday presents and hiding my cake.”

  “I know.” Deepak sagged. “I don’t know why this has happened.”

  After talking to the kids, he went upstairs, sat in the chair in our bedroom, and cried to himself. He wanted nothing to do with our bed; it was now a host of bad memories.

  The house felt empty, incomplete to him. The mother is the heart of every home, and his children’s mother was missing.

  As Deepak sat in the bedroom, deep in thought, the phone—the one he’d not long ago used to call Emergency Services—began to ring. After a brief pause, he raced to answer it.

  Dr. Holsgrove was on the other side of the line. “We’re going to have to perform another surgery. She needs a drip to help her release the blood buildup on the brain. Her brain isn’t cycling. Eventually the brain will train itself, but for now she’s going to need the drip.”

  “I wasn’t expecting another operation so soon,” Deepak said.

  “This is an easy procedure.”

  “Okay,” was all Deepak could say.

  We’d had comfortable, busy lives up to this point, but now our worlds were shattered.

  The drip from my brain was attached to a pole like an IV. As time passed what had started as a dark blood color would lighten as the blood sitting on my brain dissipated.

  When I woke up in the hospital, I didn’t know where I was. There were wires attached to me everywhere. I began to grab and pull at them, and eventually pulled out the drip they’d just put in.

  “We’re going to have to wheel her back into surgery,” the doctor said.

  After stapling the drip back into my head and stitching me up again, they wheeled me back to the ICU.

  Chapter 3

  The day after my surgeries I was awake—a good sign. I was still in that critical 10 day window.

  Deepak was by my side when the doctor came in and asked me a series of questions.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kavita Chopra.”

  I’d given my maiden name.

  “Do you know where you are?” the doctor asked.

  “I’m in the hospital, in the Royal Victoria infirmary, in Newcastle.”

  I was in Manchester.

  “What year is it?”

  “1985.”

  I was thirty years off!

  “Who’s the Prime Minister?”

  “Margaret Thatcher.”

  She was the Prime Minister in the 1980s.

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

  “I have just had a baby.”

  A baby? In 1985 I would have only been nine years old!

  I was still trying to make sense of why I was in the hospital. Deepak squirmed as I gave all the wrong answers. He wanted to correct me, but he was heeding the doctor’s orders: “Don’t be alarmed if she doesn’t recognize you. And you are not to contradict anything she says. Please don’t tell her what has happened to her. It’s very important that she doesn’t become stressed or agitated. Every day she will likely have the same questions and her speech may be slurred. And if she asks for a mobile phone or laptop, please do not give them to her.”

  “What about the kids?” Deepak asked. “Can I bring the kids to see her?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I’m concerned about bacteria. Let’s give her a little more time.”

  “Okay, I don’t think they’re ready to see her yet anyway.”

  One by one, Deepak brought my family members in to see me. My mom felt terrible seeing me there helpless, watching the dark, red tube draining blood from my brain.

  Then he brought in Rajni and Sheetal. I was in and out of consciousness and didn’t recognize them, but they talked and reminisced anyway, trying to include me in conversation, because the nurse had said it would help with memory recognition.

  “It’s so hard seeing her like this,” Sheetal whispered. “She likes talking as much as I do.”

  Knowing how important my personal appearance was for me—having traveled and worked in the fashion industry for so many years—Rajni applied cream to my face. She was upset that she couldn’t comb or wash the caked blood from my long hair.

  “Isn’t this restaurant nice?” I asked her.

  Rajni looked at Deepak, who nodded.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “The waitresses are very good to me. I’ve just had a baby.”

  I’d just been to see my brother Sunny and his wife Reena’s new baby—my nephew, Rohan. My sisters speculated that I was fixated on the idea of having a baby because of that.

  Deepak and I had gone to meet Rohan after returning from a work trip to Vegas. The trip was the first time Deepak and I had traveled together for work in the ten years we’d worked for our family-owned company. I didn’t know what to expect traveling for work together, but I was excited, especially since it was Valentine’s Day. The only thing I was less than excited about was the amount of pain I had been suffering, both in my back and my head. I felt like my health was deteriorating, but I didn’t know why. I’d had an epidural steroid injection (ESI) in my spine a few months earlier, and that had helped, but now it had worn off.

  “I’m going to have another injection when I get back home,” I told Deepak as we arrived at the hotel that afternoon. “Did you book a restaurant for dinner?”

  “No,” he said, “but we’ll find something.” He assumed there would be plenty of places to go.

  As we checked in I asked the concierge, “Do you have a recommendation for dinner?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “It’s the busiest time of year here, even more so than New Year’s . . . but let me see what I can do.”

  In the end, it took us at least thirty calls and our credit card concierge to eventually find us an available restaurant—but it was a beautiful one! Italian at the Wynn Hotel. I got my Valentine’s dinner after all.

  The sheer size of the MAGIC fashion trade show was overwhelming. It was being held in two convention centers, with a shuttle that took people back and forth. I’d been to plenty of fashion trade shows before, but the size and quality of this one was amazing. MAGIC brought together the most influential retail and wholesale decision makers, as well as fashion brands and forecasters. The show was veritable fashion heaven, from women’s and men’s to children’s fashions, including clothing, footwear, and accessories.

  As Deepak and I walked through the convention center to our stall, the room was bright and the energy frenetic. Fabrics of all sizes, colors, and styles competed for attention. We were here to meet new customers, showcase our international company, and strategize new business.

  Deepak and I worked from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. every night of that trip. We never recovered from our jet lag
because we got no rest. When we got back to the hotel most nights we were too tired to even talk. We ate at some lovely restaurants, but we couldn’t appreciate the nightlife like we truly wanted to.

  “Let’s try and go see at least one show while we’re here,” I said on one of our last nights. “How about David Copperfield?”

  Halfway through David Copperfield’s show, Deepak and I were nodding off. When I slowly opened my eyes again, Copperfield had moved from the stage to directly in front of our table! And we were three tiers up!

  I nudged Deepak awake.

  “Look into my eyes. Look into my eyes,” he said, staring directly into my eyes and moving his hands back and forth. As if to call us toward him.

  While we looked into each other’s eyes he performed a beautiful trick, turning a piece of paper into a ball of fire and then into a red rose, which he then passed to me.

  The whole experience was surreal.

  When we got back from Vegas we found out my brother and sister-in-law had given birth to a beautiful boy, and I made an appointment to see the doctor about my back pain. The doctor advised me to have a second spinal injection. I’d done it before, but I was still petrified at the thought of the injection, which involved having a very large needle inserted into the middle part of my spine.

  I thought I knew what to expect. But this time was different.

  This time, when the needle penetrated the bone, my whole body spasmed as if from electric shock.

  Something was wrong. What is happening to me?

  Even though I was in shock from the injection and felt like my health was deteriorating, I wanted to be there for my brother and sister-in-law. So, two days after my injection, we drove to Newcastle. The injection wasn’t working and I was in pain, but I wasn’t going to miss this celebration and opportunity to see my nephew. My brother was so happy. Everyone was. Only Deepak knew how much pain I was in.

  I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I had sciatica—the nerve from my hip to my ankle was agitated. I couldn’t drive because of my back and the medications I had to take for pain. I had to be lifted to and from the car by Deepak or my colleagues. I felt like an invalid. I was taking a combination of tramadol, ibuprofen, and gabapentin. My back was getting worse, and regularly traveling four hours in the car to see clients wasn’t helping. I chalked it all up to my body getting older and ignored the signs.