Chapter 44
Blue was the colour behind his closed eyes.
And blue was the colour when he opened it.
As usual, she sat there on a small chair, dressed from head to toe in ice blue scrubs, cap and mask on, dozing for a change.
Samar observed her, feeling like the most helpless man on the planet as her chin dipped without a headrest. He did not have the hands to hold it up.
Or to offer his shoulder. He did not have the words to make her feel better if he woke her up either.
The pain inside him was excruciating, the fear unencompassable.
What would tomorrow bring for him, he didn’t know.
He was taken in for two, sometimes three surgeries in a week.
That would be the case for the next month.
He didn’t know which one would be his last. He didn’t know which table he would collapse on.
And he didn’t know how to handle her grief with his own mortality.
A moment of making peace with death was acceptable, a lifetime spent excruciatingly painfully in every passing moment closed in this room? Worse than that momentary death.
She made a snoring sound and startled awake. Cerulean eyes popped open and broke into a smile the moment they met his eyes. She sat up.
How was she able to smile at a man who had done nothing but scream at her?
“Have you been sleeping well?” He cleared his throat, hearing his words come out scraped.
“Yes,” her smile widened, nodding back at the chair.
“How many visiting hours are there in a day?”
“Thrice a day.”
“How many?”
She shrugged. “Three hours each.”
“And what do you do in between those hours?”
Amaal pulled her chair closer to his face and narrowed her eyes at him — “I am the Press Secretary of a very busy government. What do you think I am doing?”
“You are not eating well.”
Her smile stuttered.
“You are not sleeping well.”
“Sama…”
“This is going to go on for long, Amaal.” He interrupted her. “And that is if I make it.”
Her eyebrows went down.
“I see what you are going through but here is an option for you — leave.”
Her eyes teared up.
“Don’t cry.”
She whimpered, making his chest scream out. He had never seen her cry and now that he had made her cry multiple times, he could not console her.
“Don’t make me!” She wiped her tears on the sleeve of her scrubs, keeping her sterilised hands fisted because she clearly wanted to touch him at some point.
“I am not the man I was that morning I drove to you. My mind has drowned again, my body might not be even working healthily, forget looking the same again. I am hearing my mother singing to me from when I wasn’t even old enough to remember memories,” he laughed out bitterly.
“I am seeing my life’s sins play out in front of me and the only thing I realise when I open my eyes and see you here is that those sins are too big to be nullified by the good you see in me.
” He cleared his throat again as his voice thinned.
Water ran down the bridge of his nose but he didn’t look away from her eyes, needing her to see this reality.
“My fears, my drawbacks… my shortcomings… I had believed I would work over them but they are back in front of me, showing me the mirror. My sins are far greater than your goodness, Amaal.” Samar blinked his eyes to clear them.
Tears blurred them even more. Two soft thumbs came over his eyelids and rubbed them like he was used to rubbing sleep out of her eyes.
His throat swelled tight. She massaged his eyeballs and gently lifted them, bending down to him so that they were nose to nose.
“They are not greater than my hope,” she said.
“What are you hoping for? I am a dead man. I was born dead. I have never felt alive other than those few years belonging to my unit. I have never really hoped for anything in life. I only ever went with the flow, needing to survive any way I could. My father named me Samar. Imminent death. There is no other fate for me.”
“You are not death,” Amaal spelt out. “You are life. You gave Iram and her twins a life. You are a man of action who redeemed himself…”
“There is no redemption. I didn’t do it for that.”
“Why did you do it then?”
“Because that’s exactly what was supposed to be done.”
Her eyes sparkled with smile and tears. “Life.”
“Why don’t you go?” He asked, exasperated.
“Would you?”
That took every thought, every argument, every word out of his mouth. And like the sharp girl who had walked into their makeshift party office seven years ago, she pounced on the opening and kept advancing.
“If I were there and you were here, would you leave?”
He stared at her, tongue-tied.
“If I did not have any hope to make it, would you leave?”
He did not answer, because he didn’t like how it was toppling his cards.
“If I asked you to leave in this situation, would you fucking listen to me?” She asked with such tenderness that tears burst and kept flowing quietly down his nose.
Amaal held his face between her palms and rested her nose on his. Lilies. Dipped in sanitiser.
“I am fighting so much all at once, Samar. I have moments in a day when I am crushed thinking about all the what-ifs where you don’t return to me.
Please don’t add onto them. For now, please don’t add onto them,” she broke down.
“Please,” she sobbed, her tears too flowing down the bridge of his nose.
“Don’t cry, I can’t do anything to stop it…”
“You can,” her voice was breaking between tears. The vibrations of her body were stilling what little life remained in his face.
“Amaal, don’t cry…”
“Don’t push me then, accept me. Please, accept me. Whatever this will become, it will become with us together. Please, accept that,” she pressed her mouth over his, just for a second, and pulled back. Their eyes met. “Please, Samar, I will not ask you for anything else.”
“Not even to stay if I have to go?”
Her face crumpled. More tears made their way down her cheeks. The cheeks he hadn’t held enough. The cheeks he hadn’t kissed enough. The dimple he hadn’t pressed enough. Amaal shivered with a hiccup, but proved what a fighter he had loved when she nodded.
“Kiss me.”
She closed the small space between them and took his mouth into hers.
————————————————————
The moment he had asked Amaal to let him go if the time came, Samar had made up his mind to stay. He would not let a time come when she would have to make this decision again, even though he had prepared her for it.
After that, something shifted inside him.
He did not go into surgeries thinking this might be the last.
He went in planning for what would be the next graft and how long it would take.
That changed how his doctors approached him.
From treating him like a fragile patient, they began to engage with him as they were supposed to from the get-go — like a patient who was also a peer.
His grafts were discussed in depth with him, his reports were shared with him, he began to see gaps in his own recovery and work towards filling them, actively keeping himself ready and positive, bearing the pain with lowered painkillers on his chart because that would mean faster healing for his kidneys.
He began to move his ankles and wrists on his own, keeping himself on the line of movement as they let him sit up slowly, then sit on the edge of the bed as days passed.
Pain was a constant reminder of his mortality, but there was a bigger reminder that sat in front of him thrice a day for three hours every day.
The reminder of his immortality. How death could be cheated.
How end could be turned into a pause. How something new could be started, despite everything.
Amaal helped him with a sip of water, then held his bandaged arm as he lay down on his back.
They had grafted his back first and it had healed enough for him to be able to lie down on it again.
Samar hadn’t seen what it looked like, but he felt the reduced sensation, as if numb, even when not on painkillers.
They told him that would be a toss up, either numb or a gradual return of 50-70% sensation.
He did not linger on it. He wasn’t a man to linger on looks or feel.
But he thought about Amaal, and what kind of a man she deserved.
A man who looked good, who felt her touch just as deeply.
“Good?” She asked, her hands still clasping his bandaged elbow that he was unable to feel. Samar nodded.
“What’s going on outside today?”
“Summer is in full swing in Srinagar, tourists are creating a happy pandemonium, and Badamwari has opened up for a Summer Fair. My team is in conversation with the Film Institute of Pune to screen the oldest originals of Guru Dutt from their archives on Dal. But there is some ideological friction. They are left-leaning, and looking down upon us, especially after how some of their fraternity members keep criticising you guys for strengthening the Indian army in Kashmir. But I’m going to keep at it.
Atharva and I have worked too hard for this to be shelved. ” Amaal smiled.
“Aaj ki taza khabar samapt?[136]”
Her mouth dropped open. “You cracked a joke? Are you going to die soon?”
Samar held back the chuckle. It was painful if he let go. She was making it incredibly difficult to hold on.
“And Iram?” He asked.
Her face fell. She shook her head. “Atharva is quietly doing something behind the scenes but nobody knows. He wouldn’t tell me either.”
“To keep plausible deniability intact.”
Her brows drew together.
“Yathaarth?”