Disinfectant

Every day, on my way to Work and back, I walk past the side entrance of a somewhat busy hospital. An ambulance is always standing by. I walk on each morning as people with arms in slings and feet in casts make their way out of the hospital, dazed, scared, tired into waiting cars and auto rickshaws.

On some nights, ambulances are offloading frail, aged patients with mysterious illnesses. I catch glimpses of nurses wheeling their newest guests through a brightly lit corridor via the side-entrance and watch them disappear into unknown rooms.

 Every day, the hospital’s fluorescent lights reassuringly look out for those of us unfortunate enough to be away from the comforts of our own beds at those hours. Once every while, thanks to the curious behaviour of lurkers on the streets or inexplicable anxieties, fear catches up with me and my heart pounds until I’m in the safe refuge of the bright, alert lights of the hospital compound.  As the rest of the city sleeps, the hospital’s bleary eyed attendants wait on those who Providence chose to visit on the day.

On days(nights) when I drag my feet back home a little before midnight, ambulance drivers on night duty are welcome company where your only other options are stumbling drunkards who in between wails are emptying their stomachs onto the pavement.

I walked the stretch from the main road past the hospital again today. It was around 11 P.M and the street was quiet and cold. The ambulance was missing from its usual parking spot. Off, perhaps, to fetch some poor soul somewhere battling grim ailments; held hostage by pain and fear. The corridor leading from the entrance that opened to the road was deserted save for a couple of people who were carrying out a muffled conversation. The smell of disinfectant spilled out to the street; strong enough for the scent to dry the throats of passersby. Further ahead, a man stood by the parking lot, coughing, steadying himself by leaning on a wall and clutching a phone; making as if to throw up. It was repulsive and strangely mortifying.

I got home, craving warmth and somewhat angry at having to hear the terrifying wails of a man who had just lost someone he loved.

                                                                                                ***

I spent the summer of 2004 studying Trigonometry in a tiny little hospital in Jayanagar. My father was to undergo a minor surgical procedure. The thoughtful presence of his old friend, Diabetes, required him to stay in bed for two weeks to recuperate. Anna was intensely depressed. He would take any number of surgeries of whatever scary consequence with typical bravado and a few witty rejoinders, if need be. But the poor thing was horrified by the demand that he stay put and rest for two weeks. Two weeks after all was the average time it took to clock about 700 kms on the automobile he had deigned to drive that season. The thought only furthered the agony of the man known to possess wheels for limbs.

But Anna being Anna put on a brave front and took on the challenge head on.

 He lasted all of two days.

By day three, he was up, pacing the room and restless. He pretended to humor my regular commands to go back to sleep the first couple of days. Later, he’d growl and show me who was boss. I retaliated by complaining to the on-duty nurses about my father’s  careless ways and hinted to them that they should ask him to act his age. What an exercise in futility that was. Anna had effortlessly charmed every one of the eight or so attendants at the hospital and had all of them eating out of his hands. I would meaningfully point at his prancing around the hospital ward and how it was completely unnatural for a patient to be doing so only for the junior doctors and nurses to smile indulgingly and walk off.

This was a tiny little place in the very beautiful and somewhat high-end locality of fifth block Jayanagar opposite the beautiful parks on 4^th Main road . A small, private 'nursing home' where people came for uncomplicated procedures and vaccinations, and was owned by a bald sixty-something plastic surgeon, Dr.M.

Dr. M was a smooth talking, always smiling grandfather figure. A textbook old-school type who walked in on time for his rounds, always impeccably dressed. The hospital was a longitudinal building with rooms on either side of a long corridor and a tiny, functional Operation Theater at the end of it. Dr. M’s consulting room was at the beginning of the corridor, just past a small waiting area. Certificates of the various degrees he completed in England lined the walls of Dr. M’s officious room.

I stayed with Anna those days and kept him company with one large Math textbook while he grudgingly slept. I would take fifteen minute walks along the ghost town of Jayanagar fifth block only a few yards away from where Anna had taught at least a dozen people to drive their first cars. It was a locality of considerable privilege; filled with the beautiful inherited homes of long-term NRIs. All the houses faced a narrow park along the length of the road that was inhabited by canoodling couples and passed out drunkards in equal strength.

One afternoon that week, I finished my walk and returned to Anna’s ward only to find that he had assembled a couple of friends and brothers and the grey haired congregation was engrossed in a hotly contested series of card games.

I blew my fuse.

In spite of my protests, threats and pleas, Anna continued this rogue practice of carrying out card games in a solemn hospital ward. He played an angelic, enduring sick child while the doctors were on rounds and later began his sly games of Rummy or whatever else with whoever was around. I would peer from the top of my Readers Digests from time to time and look at my father laughing and chatting away and felt a little irrelevant. The man refused to accept care and attention even when  it was prescribed on paper with an Rx on top. I would later learn that this was a chronic problem.

But how long would it go on? (He may not have known it, but Anna was living proof that fortune doesn’t favor the brave). Anna was toying with his fancy box of plastic cards one evening(He’s the only person I know who played Solitaire with real cards. He was overjoyed when he finally learned to use a computer and found that his favorite game was a permanent fixture on Windows.) when Dr.  M brightly barged into his room and saw the offending pack of cards in Anna’s hands.

I grinned victoriously and prepared for sweet vindication.

Dr. M simply shrugged and asked Anna how he got hold of that brand of cards and asked he if he could please pick up a deck for him the next time and walked out, humming a tune. Leaving me defeated and with the only record of an instance in which fortune had indeed chosen to favor Anna.

***

It’s been five years and I don’t remember her name. She was from a security agency that deployed personnel to stores, offices and hospitals. She worked a day shift outside the Intensive Care Unit of a Cardiac care hospital on RV Road. Her job was to ensure the ICUs were accessed only by the doctors, nurses  and authorised supporting attendants. She was plump, dark0skinned, and wore spectacles. Her hair was oiled and braided and she had an unrelenting frown on her face. The ICU had a small waiting room with sofas that was, by strict orders, to seat only one anguished relative for every patient the ICU housed. The first evening, all of us had crowded in the ICU waiting area anxiously. Little did we know we had broken Her rules. The next day, we ran into the towering, screaming virago who put in all us pesky, waiting relatives the fear of God.

“Why are you crowding here? Are you doctors? Will you treat these people?” she would ask in her raw Kannada not expecting an answer. She sat on a tiny low chair and terrorized any group of people who dared crowd the ICU and directed all non-entities to the larger waiting area downstairs. We all eventually learned to accept that the fates of those past the insulated, frosted glass doors of the ICU would change little with our proximate presence. 

On Tuesday, she softened a little and asked us who we were there to see. We told her. She grimaced and got back to work, frown firmly in place. We were by then regulars and took turns to stay by the ICU to deliver food and medicines. We became familiar with the other people who like us sat all day near the ICU waiting area and chased down duty doctors in the hope of favorable updates. On Wednesday, She was in a cheerful mood. That girl whose mother was in there was smiling too. The Mother was recovering.

  

She lowered her guard and chatted us up. “Ayyo, aa nurse galige yenu ansode illa” she said, resting the palm of her hand on her temple. Those nurses don’t feel a thing. They can coolly sit down and complete a 

meal even if a corpse was lying beside them, she said with shock in her eyes, sounding like a little child.

Thursday was terrible. Two people in the ICU had passed on. Everybody was grim. The girl we saw the other day was weeping. Her mother’s condition had worsened and she had finally succumbed. I had gone in to the ICU the first time that week for a quick visit only to see him throwing up violently into a bag a stone-faced nurse was holding. People all around were on giant beds with beeping monitors surrounding them. Plastic tubes were insensitively stuck into nostrils and half open mouths. Some people made loud noises, their breathing was labored. I’d stumbled back out of that chamber of horrors and walked all around the hospital crying for an hour.  

She looked at us sympathetically and said she regretted having to shout at people who were so obviously worried for loved ones. What to do. This was her job. She was going to tell her supervisors at the Security firm. She can’t do this anymore. How can anybody take it?

I sat with her all day, sleepily looking at all the duty doctors who walked through the glass doors. One particularly good looking, smart young female doctor had me totally awed. I wondered if they’d let me switch from Electronics to Biology after having completed my first year. Never after sixth grade had I wanted to be a doctor so badly until that day.

We left later that week hoping and praying fervently that we’d never have to return. She too wanted to leave and never go back. 

She got her wish.