Bugs Bite

CHAPTER TWELVE: Lifeless

She just didn't want for him to have a life like hers. Marrying the wrong guy, spending years in perpetual torture, then ultimately ending up staying upright on the shoulders of better people: synopsis of her life. SSDD. Oh, to be young and to be free and to be able to make all these mistakes. If only she could face those youthful dilemmas, those big juvenile decisions again. If only.

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Come September, Shweta was again in the hospital for two days. The doctors had to check on her and see if everything was fine and whatnot. So Avish was alone at home with the house-maiden and his grandma.

A lot happened in those two blasted days.

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He was asleep at first, he was sure of that. Disturbing dreams that he couldn't decipher or remember woke him up.

At, but obvious, two in the morning. Or night, as is preferred.

There was no fear. There was no heavy breathing, no sweat, no feeling at all. He was just . . . conscious. Things were too colorful, too lively.

Everything was too vivid.

(no)

And suddenly he knew what was going on. A hunch told him, clear as a fertile grassland.

'Momma,' he muttered absent-mindedly, but it wasn't him, Avish the fifteen-year-old Avish the Dad-injurer; it was Avish the thirteen-year-old, Avish the weasel.

But Momma wasn't here. Momma was in a hospital, and Momma was not coming to the rescue, like that uneventful night.

Nursing an aching head, Avish robotically jumped off his bed, twisting an ankle. It did not hurt much. What hurt was the knowing in him, the knowing.

Barefoot, each step timid against the cold wooden ground, Avish moved towards his nightmare. Literally.

_*_

'Miss me,' Bibi said to the portrait of her husband, 'and I'll miss yah.'

She limped away - she felt sick, terribly sick and emotional. Her bones, she thought, had large gaping holes in them - that osteoporosis Mrs. Gupta had informed her of. But her muscles were no better; they groaned at even the slightest of contractions, then refused to relax. She hadn't slept for two days in a row now. She found herself unable to lay down without worrying about the clutch in her gut and, especially, the cruel pain in her chest. It felt at times like her sternum had cracked, and it had cracked on purpose. She could almost see her breast-bone snickering at her: Take that, sucka! If you're an oldie, then I'm the Queen Bitch!

Age had never been as bad a disease.

But this wasn't ageing. This was something else, something she knew would eat her alive.

Meanwhile, as she left, another frame - a taller, leaner, fitter frame, barefoot and troubled with deja-vù - crept up to the silver-rimmed portrait.

Avish couldn't help himself. Looking at his grandpa, holding that sleek cane and posing so classily, reminded him overwhelmingly of his childhood. Of Bhoo.

He did not hear the painful moans coming from the adjacent living room.

_*_

To think that it was possible for her to get lost in her house where she'd been living since the last god-knew-how-many years. But it happened. In all her pain and the ruckus going on up there at her upper apartment, Bibi somehow ended up in the living room instead of her own "bedchamber".