I love you... more (published)

Chapter-21

Hey baby! Where are you? It’s too late. Your classes must be
over till now’, she asked in a very concerned tone on the
phone call.
‘I need to understand some topics in chemistry again so I will take a
doubt class session today’, I answered.
‘Oh! Did you eat something?’, she asked as if she was my caretaker.
‘No baby.’
‘Why? First go and get something to eat’.
‘OK. I have to go now. Bye.’
‘
Bye. I love you.’
‘I love you more.’
A little later after we hung up, my phone vibrated again.
‘Don’t call or message Megha. Her mom caught her talking to you’,
her aunt messaged me. I went restless. I wanted to ask her if
everything was fine but couldn’t. My doubt class went in vain. I
didn’t study a single word. All I thought was of her.
It was November 6, my cousin’s birthday. The day which changed
my life.
I was present physically at the birthday party but mentally I was faraway, somewhere praying everything to be fine.
My phone rang. It was her mom.
‘Listen! I am coming straight to the point. Don’t you even dare to
contact Megha ever in your life again’, she exploded.
‘Aunty, listen to me once. We can sort it out’, I tried to handle it with
care.
‘Sort out? I already sorted it out. You guys are not going to meet
again. Simple’, she was being a devil.
‘Aunty... listen...We...’, I heard a beep. She disconnected the call.
I called her mom many times but no one picked up the phone. I was
furious. It felt like someone has taken away everything I had. I sat in
the park alone.
An old lady offered me her handkerchief.
‘Wipe out your tears child’, the old lady said in a broken voice. I was
crying. I couldn’t believe I was crying. I discovered a fountain of
tears bursting out from my eyes with its full potential. The lady
hugged me and I shed some more tears. I re-joined the party but
couldn’t enjoy that.
My phone rang again. It was her mom again. I picked up the phone
with trembling hands.
‘Imran...it’s over now, please don’t try to contact me again. I don’t
love you. It was just a time -pass thing for me. I am sorry for that’,
Megha said and disconnected the call. I was shattered. I just had one
question in my mind. ‘How can she say that?’.
It sucked. I was sad. I felt lonely. It was heart-breaking, it was life changing, it was painful, it was tragic, it was pathetic, it was
depressing, it was devastating....it was just so damn bad. I felt as if
my life will never go on. The emptiness in my heart, the numbness
pounding my brain, the salty tears that flowed unchecked from my
eyes, the shear nothingness that now took hold of my soul
threatened to engulf me entirely.
I drank that day. I drank like a tanker. Then I picked up the car keys
and drove away. I didn’t know where I was going, I just drove away.
I wanted to go far, far away from this world.
I was furious, I was sad, I was crying like a baby. It was a roller-
coaster of emotions. All the moments we shared together, each and
every lovely memory flooded through my mind.
****
I heared my own screams piercing the air as I sit up on the bed with
a jolt. I woke up in a dim beige room with soft light peeking in from
the window where the blinds were drawn. Some kind of a mask
slipped down my face and I found myself struggling to breathe, as if
I just ran a mile. There was a faded baby-blue blanket over my legs
and tubes ran from beside the bed up under the blanket. I looked
around, to find myself sitting in what looks like a hospital bed.
Semiconscious and calm, I was full of solutions. Emergency rooms
need to be bright and well-lit but someone should have remembered
that all the sick and injured people were lying on their backs, scared
and disoriented and staring into rows of fluorescent lights doesn’t
help. I will mention it to someone.
There was some medical equipment in the right corner of the room
and the monitor displayed something I did not understand. There
was a forceful talking and the beeping of machinery. I saw a detailed
chart of my injuries and other things hanging beside me. Right in front of me was a closed cupboard, above which a TV was hanging
from the wall. People surrounded me. All of them had a panicked
look.
And because they looked so panicked, I imagined something terrible
has happened. They had put an IV in my arm and a beady eyed
nurse with the word ‘Anita’ on her badge said that she put morphine
into the IV bag. But she was a liar and a sadist. I could tell from her
pinched face, which could not even approximate a look of
compassion. I knew from the feeling in my left leg that there was not
a single drop of morphine in that ridiculous plastic bag.
‘What happened?’ I asked frantically.
Nobody seemed to pay any attention to a word I said. There were
five other people in the room and all of them were walking towards
me looking intently at me, but no one listened to what I was saying.
It was like I was the centre of attention—but nobody was paying
attention.
I panicked even more. ‘WHAT IS WRONG?’ I shouted again,
imagining an earthquake or a fire.
There was a short, middle-aged lady wearing a blue cotton saree, a
lean, slightly balding man right next to her another much thinner
nurse with ‘Priya’ written on her badge and a tall doctor with no
badge.
‘Imran! You are okay! Thank God … you are … back …’ the lady in
the blue saree suddenly looked warmly into my face.
‘Umm …’ I didn’t know what to say.
I looked around and saw the doctor coming towards me, looking at me suspiciously. He read something on the monitor and peered
intently into my eyes. He looked at my leg in a way that worried me.
He was touching parts of my enormous techni-color ankle. My leg
was now a column, the same size below the knee as above.
‘How are you feeling?’
Before I can think of a response to that, the nurses came up on
either side and the slightly balding kind man held my hand and
asked, ‘Imran, are you okay? Does it hurt?’
‘Please say something, Imran,’ the doctor without a badge said and I
saw five pairs of concerned eyes peering at me, waiting for a
response.
‘I … I can’t breathe…’ was all I could say before the nurse called
Priya shoved an oxygen mask on my face and the nurse called Anita
pushed me back on the bed to make me lie down.
‘Just try to calm down. Now, breathe into the mask and slowly
breathe out. It’s going to be okay,’ the doctor said and started
checking my vitals. I breathe as he instructed and he started asking
me some questions.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Umm … confused?’
‘Understandable. Where does it hurt?’
‘My head … and this arm …’ I pointed to my left arm and the lady in
the blue saree, who had been holding my right hand all this while
suddenly went in alarm.
‘Do you know how you got here?’
I tried hard, but the only memory that came to me is of me driving
the car or something like that and waking up with a jerk to see those
five people rushing to me as if there were a fire or an earthquake. I
figured there was no fire or earthquake after all. It was just me. I
shook my head. I noticed everybody watching me even more
seriously.
‘You were in an accident and suffered a moderate level injury. Your
parents are on their way to the hospital.’
The doctor told me the whole story how I banged the car in the
boundary of a fly-over. I got multiple fractures in my left hand and a
splinter jutted my mangled thigh. A rod bored in my left foot. My
left leg was purple and scarlet and mustard yellow. It would be
grotesquely beautiful but the rod mark and splinter embedded in the
flesh ruined that effect. If broken legs felt like this, people would not
have them so often. I had seen enough medical dramas to know that
when doctors try to save a limb, it gets amputated. When I went to
hospitals, I got stitches or an air caste, not an amputation. If my leg
was amputated, I would either be a bitter, one-legged old servant or
else I would have to troll around on the internet and join some sort
of online groups for half limbed people. It was painful but the pain
of losing my love was much more than those injuries.
****
My family members and friends came to know about my accident
soon and they started to visit the hospital.
‘Imran! what the hell you did to you man?’, Alwaz shouted as he
entered the hospital room. He was the best brother in the world.
Although we were brothers from different mothers but he was more
than a brother to me. He was elder than me but short heighted and the best thing about him was that he was a student of Delhi
University, a place I adored very much. He was the best among all
my cousins. He was caring and understanding. He was a helping
hand to me. Sometimes I wondered if such good-hearted people
really exists?
‘Nothing bro. It was just a minor accident’, I replied feeling the pain
in my leg.
‘Nothing? Man... nothing? Your leg looks like a swollen bread and
you are saying nothing’, he shouted in a low pitched voice. I shifted
the conversation and we started talking about our days when we
used to giggle and roam around in the whole city with no worries in
our minds. Each group of friends has that one friend whose laughter
is funnier than the joke itself. In our group, that person was him.
He started visiting me very often. Whenever he got free time, he
used to come to the hospital to make me laugh and to make that
time go-easy for me. He was a real brother.
I was lying still on the bed with her memories and suddenly he
entered the room.
‘God... what happened? Why are you crying?’, he asked.
‘I miss her’, I replied in a crushed voice.
‘Miss who? Megha?’
‘Hmm’
‘Listen Imran...It will start slowly, the way these things often do. It
won’t feel slow; in fact, it will seem sudden- you’ll wake up and look
over at the space next to you and think that something must have
snapped in the night. But it didn’t happen there. It couldn’t have.
You’ve long since abandoned the possibility that anything could
happen in your sleep. It’s good for you to move on. Holding on the
things can tear you apart if you are not careful, and slowly you will
forget how to stitch yourself back together, how to return at end of
the day and fit yourself back in this world again. You will be over
her.’
‘I am trying but these memories are the real culprits. They are not
letting me to move on’, I trembled.
‘We are only humans and we pick at wounds and scabs, and see wet
paint and feel the irresistible need to touch it. Because we are
curious, because we can’t leave well enough alone, because when we
see friction, we want to see the reaction’, he probably cried.
‘Friction? Reaction? I hate physics, you know that…Right?’, I tried
to make it funny.
‘Arghh! I am not joking. I am telling you how will it happen. You can
do it. You can move on. It will happen in indifference, in that quite
little fear that manifests itself as slowly, you begin to care just a little
bit less, day by day. It’s not as though you meant to, as if you were
looking to bring something to a close. Things run their course
whether or not we are done with them. Roads end. Sometimes there
is not enough fuse. It is nobody else’s fault that we came
unprepared.’
‘You are right. And trust me I am trying to move on.’
‘Good for you. Now I have to leave. It’s too late. Bye.’
‘OK. Bye’
He left me in despair; I realized that I was doing no good to myself
by holding this. He was right. He was always right. I kept thinking
about this the whole night. I tossed and turned up in the bed. I
couldn’t sleep the whole night.
****