Room no. 209

The window of room no. 209 had a view, a serene view. Standing there behind the iron bars I could see vast expanse of lush green trees, heads straight, resembling those animated pictures of green hills of a fairy tale land, illustrated carefully in one of those lower primary English school text books. Away from the tiring city lights and ear-tearing traffic sounds, the hospital room felt more like a holiday retreat with a soul soothing aura of tranquility. I wish I could have stayed back for a few more days.

It wasn’t the first time I was hospitalized. Owing to pneumonia, I was admitted in the same hospital once before. Only then I had a smaller room with an even small bathroom, in the western side of the hospital, for I could see the sun slowly sliding down, making way for the dark night. That was a rather melancholy scene, one that is meant to pop up every time someone mentions something about a hospital. It was for five days, then; it has been seven days, now. And for some strange reason, room no.209 felt homely.

There was no dearth of visitors; doctor came and nurses also did, relatives came and so did friends. There was laughter, there was noise, there was whisper and then there was clatter. But nothing lasted so long as the two hours of silence and solitude that followed my mother’s departure, to home, did. Then, an inexplicable grief would tighten its claws around my arms, squeezing me, and would maliciously remind me of all loses and traumas I have had, leaving me breathless, weeping, trying to fight back the emotions that are a product of my own memory’s mischief. Every day when my mother begins packing her hand bag, putting back the flask and plates into it, the grief would come back, more or less like a certain kind of fear; the exact same kind that I felt when I was forcefully taken away from my mother to the lower kindergarten class, the fear I felt when I saw tears swelling up my grandfather’s eyes as we got ready to re-allocate ourselves to a place near to where my mum worked. And yes, that fear has many more dimensions, hence most unwelcome. Yet every day I surrendered, partly because I began finding refuge in those few moments of recollection and pain, because the pain I felt was so extreme that it was so real. Everything else was abstract and the pain only mattered. That way I re-lived, for a fraction of a second, those precious moments of my life.

Discharge sheet was signed and sealed; payments, settled. I smelled of antibiotics, the room smelled of mosquito repellents. Packing was almost done but Amma urged me to double check it all. When it was time to say good bye to the room where I spent seven nights and eight days, I had this bizarre feeling of having left something behind, something very important. And it took me a full good minute to finally convince myself that what I had left behind and couldn’t find out was a small part of my own self that had become so much in terms with the gentle ambiance of the room. I did not trouble myself with the task of taking that part home. The journey has only begun. Million more places to go and billion more faces to see and many more parts to be happily left behind.