The Parting Gift ( Part 6 )

" You need to think this over, Mr. Ganguly. I suggest you take you time."

With thee words, the doctor left Viren standing in the hospital hallway, feeling like someone had hollowed himself from the inside. He could hear his heart beating out of his chest. He found himself looking down at the floor. He could see his fine ,shiny black shoes. They were fine leather. Impeccable finish. He could have thought of anything, anything at all, but not about what the doctor had just said. 

This was their eighth visit to him and each one was worse than the last. Tests had confirmed that the leukocytosis wasn't going to get any better. It was going to get worse. Chitra had now visibly started looking pale. Towards the beginning, she used to be tired, but it never used to show up in her eyes.  She knew what she was up for, and refused to get hospitalized. " I want to be home. Not here." That's all she had told him, and he didn't know what to say. He couldn't decide how to make all this stop. He couldn't understand how he could make the world stay still for sometime, while he bent over the floor and gathered up the pieces of his life. He didn't understand how he could make Chitra live. For all he knew was, he'd break if their daughter wouldn't live any longer. He'd die too. 

He needed time to think whether to let her ebb away with each passing day in their home, or whether to put in all the strength he had to fix his daughter. He needed time. Lots of it. The sad truth was, the clock on the wall in front of him, and every other damned clock in this world was ticking the life away of that little bundle of joy he had held in his hands about 20 years back. His heart ached, and his eyes teared  up. He could not longer make out the floor and his shoes. He could hear a humdrum of noises. Noises that carried anxiety and anger, just like the voice running over in his head. This place was full of people who were scared. Only a few here were fearless. He looked up finally and turned his head to the side, when he saw Chitra from the door left ajar, sitting in the revolving chair inside the cabin. There she was. Acting all unaware, she swung from left to right in the chair, with her hair flipping a little every time she did. He couldn't let her fade away like a winter afternoon. He wanted her. He wanted this sunshine to never go down.

There inside the room, she was. Thinking to herself when they'd be out of this depressing place. She hated the smell here, and she was pretty sure she didn't want this to be the smell she took in with her last breath. She wanted it to be that of her mother's hands, pressed hard against her cheeks. They way her mother always smelled like a lot of cherries. She wanted it to be the scent of the aftershave her father used to wear to work. She wanted it to be the smell of the winter outside. She didn't want to go that way. She wanted to remember each hallway of the home she had grown up in, with all its windows, with all the drawings behind the doors she used to make as a kid. She wanted to memorize tile patterns on the floor and noise of the birds outside. As a kid, when she saw the movie 'Anand', she had thought to herself, how great it would be to have a life and death like that. Well, the life didn't turn out to be as that great. There were no songs in the balcony or on the beach, there certainly wasn't a doctor that resembled Amitabh, but there was a chance of a better way to fade away. She wanted to cash the chance. There was nothing to lose. She wanted to be so familiar with the cabinets and the shelves, and so accustomed to the photographs on the wall, that even if she wouldn't be there anymore, those things there, that little doll from Japan, and that wood carving that her mother had made, they would all have someone staring at them. Someone so familiar, that no one could say that she was gone.