As I look at the empty bed next to me and the missing books and the absence of her chirping laughter, I feel the world has permanently become a little darker, a little sadder. All I remember of her are her last words to me, ‘I will be back. It will be okay.’
Well, she lied. I don’t think I am forgiving her for that. Not now, not ever.
She left us behind to miss her, to yearn for her, to find things to distract ourselves from missing her. She is not there. She is not around us. I will never see that smile. She will not be on the next bed trying to irritate the hell out of me. She will not talk till my head bursts into little splinters and then irritate me some more. I have not met Arman, but over the last few days I have heard stories. He told Zarah that he was sure she smiled at him long after her heart rate dropped and the lifeline drew a flat line on the monitor and the doctors failed to revive her. Zarah tells me that Arman had spent the night at the morgue standing outside her frozen casket because Pihu was afraid of the dark. She tells me he had to be forced out before he caught pneumonia or something worse. She tells me how every night Arman comes to both the room and the terrace where they had gone on their first date. She tells me how her mother had fainted when she had come back to the unlucky room no. 509 and how she had to be pulled from Pihu’s bed by her father. She tells me her father looked like a walking corpse when he heard the news. She tells me how both sets of parents had cried arm in arm. She tells me how her father comforted my crying father (crying!) when I was battling for my life while their daughter was dead. Zarah tells me that her father has not said a word since the day Pihu passed away on the operating table, lying on her side with her back cut open and a smile pasted on her face. It was painless, Zarah tells me.
Does knowing that it was painless make me feel any better? It doesn’t. She was no stranger to pain. She was strong and she would have picked pain and life any day over comfort and death. People like her aren’t meant to die. They never die because people don’t forget them. Did she give us enough moments together? She would never have been able to even if she had died a hundred years later. People like her just don’t live enough. No matter how long, how fulfilling their lives, how painless their deaths are, people miss them. Like I miss her, and I hardly knew her. We weren’t even friends; we were room-mates.
She dies. I live. I cry. Where is the sense in that? I didn’t even want to live. I thought the procedures, the medicines, the doctors and the drips were nonsense. All I wanted was to get injected with a few extra CCs of morphine in my drip and I would pass on to the next world, painlessly. I didn’t want this. I hated pain. I have done everything to run away from it. I used to numb it by injecting and snorting everything I could find. I hated pain and I hated life. I get nothing, she gets everything. Nobody wanted this. How do you think I will feel when I look at her parents, childless, grieving at their loss? How do you think I will feel when Arman crosses my path? We were in the same room. Same room! How difficult was it to have our fates switched? How wrong can God get, if there is one? We were right there. How could he not see?
Did I find a donor? Yes, I did. It was her. The perfect match. We were room-mates.
But that’s not the only thing she gave me. Fifteen days after my surgery when I was shifted back to my room, the bed next to me was empty but for a little note on top of it. I opened the note and it said:
‘You were the best room-mate ever. Now, we’re 2-2. Don’t waste it.’
I cry.
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THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN METRO READS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Grapevine India Publishers 2012
Published in Penguin Metro Reads by Penguin Books India 2013
Copyright © Durjoy Datta 2013
Cover photographs © Getty Images
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-143-42157-3
This digital edition published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-9-351-18295-5
Till the Last Breath . . . Page 22
