Excerpt from my novel -chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

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I woke up in a hospital bed with Dr. Swaminathan smiling at me again but this time a brief linear smile of surety that can only be achieved through countless years of experience in dealing with insanity. I don’t know whether I feel relieved or cheated by this second chance life gave me. I wish I had met my rebirth in a more neutral setting like a blind locked cellar or a lost ship on a horizon less sea or maybe the same hospital bed without the picture of Mother Teresa pasted on the wall and without Dr. Swaminathan smiling at me eternally. Whenever I close my eyes in search of some solace, I find Mother Teresa and a mad doctor smiling at me. Death have abandoned me like my sea and outside it’s life waiting for me to open my eyes, waiting to smile at me.

“Hello M, how are you feeling now ?”

Relieved or cheated ? Relieved or cheated ?..

I glanced at Mother Teresa for help but she seemed to be asking the same question to me. She was also smiling but a smile of empathy which is much worse than the doctor’s smile.

“I am fine ”

And without knowing I gave a short but a little bit curved smile of being fine. Smiles filled the room, good and evil, of surety and confusion, smiles pasted on wall and on faces, smiles bringing promises of pills, injections, pity and hope. Dr. Swaminathan being the most sane of the three of us stopped smiling first to disrupt this symphony of smiles which I was beginning to enjoy.

“Do you know why you are here, M”

No I don’t. People and pills nowadays ordain me to places I never intend of visiting like this room of smiling sympathies. I don’t know how I got here cause I was set for horizon less fields of uninhabited bliss. At least that’s what the bottle of blue pills I found in the storeroom of the institution promised to me when I first laid my eyes on it. It was a pretty cute bottle, let me tell you and what caught my attention initially was not it’s contents but the perfect simplicity of it’s design. It had a dainty neck and a label that was religiously correct to it’s contents , a testimony that it was made by people of good taste.

“methadone-analgesic and antidepressant”

I was neither in pain nor depressed as lunatics rarely are. I had no use for the bottle whatsoever but I was not ready to let go of it either. I stood there like a child who has found a toy but still haven’t figured out how to play with it. But then I thought , maybe I am depressed. Maybe I am in pain but I don’t feel it. Maybe my pain is like a colony of earthworms hidden beneath the dry sand , needing only a shower of monsoon to burst out in the open daylight. I wanted to be depressed just to see how the pill worked. I opened the bottle, took a pill in my hand, engulfed it and hoped for the rain. But the rain never came. Maybe the pill was too bland for me as I am used to much more potent recipes. So I took a second and then a third. Oh, My dear doctor, You don’t need to be so surprised. There is a tradition of audacity which lunatics all over the globe share, who inflict inhuman brutalities on their mind in hope of the numbness they never achieve. I emptied the entire bottle in me and I think I heard rain falling on a tin roof before falling unconscious.

“ That’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard ”

I like it when he looks at me the way he is looking now. A stare of disbelief at the surprises I give him or rather am capable of giving him. He relaxed back on his chair and folded his hands the way people like to do in order to look more intelligent. I derive a spiteful pleasure from his failure in classifying me , in confining me to one of the chapters of the thick books he reads. I can tell he don’t mind it either as he hopes to add a new chapter for me in those books someday if the existing ones fails to explain me.

He repeated my ordeal to me anyway laying special emphasis on the condition in which the staff found me lying on the storeroom floor, on the crusade the doctors went through in pulling me back and the slim chances I had of survival.

“It’s a miracle that you have survived !”

relieved or cheated ? relieved or cheated ?

Dr Swaminathan looks quite different from the kind of person he actually is or rather should be. His face carries no trace of any eccentricities inside and therefore he doesn’t look like a doctor at all. For instance, when he spoke the word ‘miracle’ it neither sounded overwrought nor impassive as either expressions would have entitled him of nominating something as miracle. Rather his ‘miracle’ sounded timid and hence more like an imposter. He doesn’t look like a mad doctor because he doesn’t look mad. His face is bland to the extend that it resembled the pencil faces we made up in school on white paper with our imagination going no further than two eyes, two ears, one nose, one mouth and some hair. It wasn’t a real face but rather a prototype of one with no discernable irregularities near his eyebrows or nose or chin. Everything is too perfect to be human. It’s only when he speaks or grins that some vagaries appear giving the indications of life beneath the surface.

“Why do you want to die, M ”

I realized that he is also scrutinizing my face for cracks and fissures just like I am scrutinizing his. We both are turning out to be enigmatic patients for each other and maybe we both will devote a chapter to each other in our own books someday.

“ I don’t want to die doctor, I simply don’t care ”

“ About what, life ? ”

“ Well, about anything ”

“Is it because of what you did in your life or because you are here, in an asylum ”

“ It’s neither , it’s just the way I feel now ”

I am not going to make it easy for him. I like to be unique, even in my madness. But he is a patient man, he will wait for the day till I crack up, till he can prove to me that I am a fool. That I am no different from the people whose faces I can’t remember. That my misery is in fact no different from the miseries of this world . It is either because of love or hate or guilt or failure or…

And he may be right.

“ Well, I have told the nurse to take good care of you. If you need anything , just let me know .”

I missed him after he left. Not that I can’t strike a conversation with Mother Teresa as with time I have developed an art of talking endlessly to even the most disinterested audience like posters stuck on the walls, hospital beds, lightbulbs, trees standing outside my window and even to myself. I call these conversations as “living my madness to the fullest”. I missed the doctor because I needed to know how long my detention in this room last. But that’s a lie. It doesn’t bother me whether there is a hospital or asylum outside this room. I have no intention of going out. It doesn’t bother me that maybe outside these walls there actually exists things like freedom and happiness. That there exists a world filled with happy families, lovers dancing on the tunes of soft Italian music , insane children dabbling in the mud , everything that gives the impression that god has created a heaven for it’s creations in the first place with tiny blots of hell which actually are loathsome rooms with posters of empathy, made for people who have died but still somehow manages to keep breathing.

But then why I missed the doctor ? I missed the doctor because in fact I missed someone else who don’t miss me nowadays. Does she know by the way ? Has anyone told her about the necromaniacal feat I have achieved by defeating death. I fancied imagining her hastily packing her bags, dispatching for a bus, train or flight to reach me, to see how much better or worse person I have turned out to be in my new life. But then, she never does anything in haste , nor does she visits painful chapters of her past.

A nurse, a young and timid one, came to meet me instead, a few hours later. She had a cowered look on her face as she brought pills for a gluttonous loner who already had one too many. She was not as beautiful as the bottle with the dainty neck but still I decided to take the pills. She placed a tray on the table beside my bed mincingly and was visibly nervous at being left alone with someone as capricious as me. Must have been a new recruit as the old one’s know very well that insane people are harmless most of the time. Her face was virgin and with mildly trembling hands she handed me two pills , a small but yellow one and a large but white one. I engulfed them both without hesitation and showed her my tongue which was unasked for as she was not suspicious of deceit like nurses normally are. Then she brought out an injection , tore it’s plastic and pierced it’s needle in a tiny bottle filled with colorless liquid. She did all this very conscientiously, careful not to leave any air bubbles inside the injection or miscalculate the amount to be administered. I tried to mollify her with my silence, to explain to her that such trifle things don’t matter, that error of any magnitude won’t be enough to kill me. I like the white buttoned dress and weird caps hospitals give to their nurses. It makes them look like chaste catholic nuns but still does not make it blasphemous to undress them with our eyes or hands. If I was what I used to be once, if I haven’t been exhausted by my escapades with death, if I had my sea with me, I would have derived so much pleasure in unbuttoning her starched catholic dress. How complete this hospital bed of mine would have been with a nubile nurse bouncing sacrilegiously on it and mother Teresa giving me an abashed teasing smile instead of an emphatic one. I could have finally put my madness to some use then.

The bovine nurse punished me for my amoral thoughts by piercing a needle in my arm. This way she also reminded me of the austere life that lay in front of me. No nurse, whether amateur or seasoned, would bounce on my hospital bed and the hospital bed won’t allow me to bounce on any nurse either. My new life consisting of hospital beds,asylums and Dr. Swaminathan would certainly deprive me of my most cherished addiction. After she left Mother Teresa, a renowned nurse herself, looked at me with avengeful mockery. But she was also renowned for being a ray of hope for countless needy people. So she gave me some consolation which was in fact no consolation at all. She finally broke her oath of silence to whisper this maxim to me.

“The only thing that can ever bounce on a lunatic’s bed is another lunatic”

No , any kind of smile won’t do this time. Her prophecy send me into a fit of echoing laughter cause the scene that came before my eyes was the most comically nihilistic scene that any era is capable of comprehending in it’s total interpretation.

Two homosexual lunatics taking turns to bounce on each other merrily on a hospital bed and substituting methadone for viagra.

Relieved or cheated ? Relieved or cheated ?