Page 60 of Can This Be Love?

I picked up Dad’s previous MRI scan and gulped. The little shrivelled up thing in the top left corner of the cranial cavity was his brain. The darkness all around it was blood from the injury that he had sustained a month back while working in the shed. I will never forget this sight. Please God, please, please, let there be no more bleeding.

9.00 p.m.

An extract from ‘Pearls of Wisdom’:

Your brain is more powerful than you can possibly imagine. It is capable of taking you places. The highest of highs and the lowest of lows. It can make you see things – the most joyful scenes and the most miserable ones. It can, more importantly, also help you see the positive in a miserable situation. It can help you fight off the negativity. It can help you stay sane.

It can be your biggest support in a bleak situation.

Brain, please help me!

10.00 p.m.

I had drifted off to sleep, head in Anu’s lap, while Dad and Pitajee watched a cricket match on TV. Mum had returned to spend the night at home – a break for her before we take Dad home and she has to take care of everything.

I woke up to Pitajee and Purva talking to each other in low voices, careful not to disturb me. I squinted and looked at Dad; the TV was switched off and he was fast asleep. Purva was sitting on a chair that he had drawn close to the sofa on which I lay, half asleep.

‘Poor thing,’ Pitajee was saying.

‘This is actually the first time I have seen her sleeping since the operation,’ Anu said. I smiled to myself, feeling wide awake. Few pleasures are greater than overhearing your friends talk about you while you pretend to be asleep.

‘I am worried about her now. Have you seen the dark circles below her eyes? And she is hardly eating…’ Pitajee said.

‘The first night, she just sat on this couch and stared at her dad. Did not sleep a wink…’ added Anu.

‘Someone needs to talk to her,’ said Pitajee.

‘You know … I have never seen this side of Kasturi…’ continued Anu.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Pitajee. I felt smug, good to hear them talk like friends again. Like old times. And yes, even I was interested, what did she mean?

‘Have you seen how her eyes never leave Uncle? She is almost like a mother to her own father right now.’

‘She will make one paranoid mother one day,’ said Pitajee. I could hear him grin. This is another favourite pastime of his; imagining me as a mother, grandmother and more often than not, great-grandmother with a broken hip and missing dentures.

‘And of course, she fainted the other day...’ Anu said.

‘What? When?’ said a concerned voice, that had been quiet all this while. The low baritone of the voice made my heart skip a beat. Purva.

‘Yesterday. Late evening. She had not eaten anything the whole day. She was all right after one of the doctors gave her sugar … don’t worry,’ Pitajee supplied the information.

‘Why had she not eaten?’ Purva asked.

‘Have not you seen, Purva, that the girl is so beside herself with worry that eating is the last thing on her mind?’ said Anu, getting a little agitated herself as I felt a warm hand caress my forehead. ‘Now … don’t look so worried…’

My eyes were beginning to feel painfully heavy and before I knew it, I was dreaming about Dad’s second scan. It still had the brain looking like a shrivelled walnut and the cranial sac was filled with dark shadows.

I woke up, drenched in sweat.

Day 5 in the Private Room, 27 May 2013, 12.30 p.m.

They are wheeling Dad in for the scan. As luck would have it, I am alone with him. Mum and Anu are yet to return from home. Readying the house for Dad’s return, which includes cleaning up the house to ensure that it is free of dust and infection, has taken longer than expected. Pitajee, who is officially staying with his bua, is going to return after lunch when, if all goes well with the scan, Dad will be discharged.

Only Purva is in the hospital, but Dr Verma, who heads the hospital and had once taught Purva, has called him away for a quick catch-up before Purva leaves for Delhi tonight.

12.50 p.m.

Dad came out of the room, grinning from ear to ear. Apparently some doctor had told him another joke that began with – ‘Four doctors went to a pub’ – which, apparently, had had Dad in splits for a whole two minutes. I was too stressed about the report to bother to ask him to repeat the joke to me.

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