“I went into a panic. If his levels had fallen so much in ten hours, how much further could they fall? There was no question of going home — he could go into a coma. ‘I’m sorry my love,’ I said, ‘but you have to have a transfusion.’ I was panicking and not thinking that anything might be wrong. I had to find a donor quickly. My nephew rushed from Gurgaon to donate platelets. He was so sweet. He came as soon as he could. When he learned he had to give five litres of blood he went white, but he still gave it. He is like my third son now. I will never forget what he did.
“By the evening, everything was ready for the transfusion. Before going ahead, they did another blood test as per procedure. I demanded to see the results of that test. My husband’s platelet count was 90,000. Which meant it had never fallen in the first place! They had not given us the results in the morning just so they could sell a blood transfusion for 50,000 rupees [$1,000].
“During this whole time there had been a Sikh doctor in Texas who was monitoring our situation. He was a cancer specialist who had treated one of my friends. He was the only doctor who paid real attention to the reports I sent. Every evening he would call up at his own expense to find out what was happening. There was so much kindness in his voice. He knew what was going to happen and gave me advice about it. He said, ‘He could start developing fluid in his lungs — you have to be careful.’ So I told the doctors but they didn’t care about anything we said, the bastards — and then he got fluid in his lungs. The doctor from Texas told me to make sure he wasn’t given any steroids and then when he came to this hospital they started giving him massive doses and his system packed up.
“It was this hospital that killed him. They were so trigger-happy with medicines that they killed him. Before that, he had started picking up. When he went into the intensive care unit here — which is when I met Amit and Shibani — it finished him. I left him for a few minutes and when I came back he had tubes stuck in everywhere, and he was grunting and breathing terribly. He had burn marks on either side of his neck, which I never found an explanation for. I took him out of intensive care: I said he’ll die in my arms, not with all these strange faces peering at him. They’d put a central line in him because they didn’t have the patience to deal with the oedema from where the drip went in. I went back over the documents and saw that two minutes after they’d done that his heart had stopped beating.
“After he died I started my own investigation. In the early days I could only take a bit at a time because I would break down with the pain. But now I am starting to be much more serious. I am researching everything. Knowledge is never wasted. Money is wasted. Partying and merrymaking can be wasted. But knowledge, never.
“Twenty years ago, my husband’s sister persuaded their father to sign the family house over to her so she could sell it to developers without my husband’s permission. I went on a war footing. I had my own thriving business at the time but I put the whole thing on hold to throw myself into the legal battle. My husband couldn’t do it: he was ready to collapse, seeing his sister and father turn against him. For two years I did nothing else. I read legal textbooks and taught myself the law. I learned how everything worked. I learned to manoeuvre through the lawyer-judges nexus. And I fought the case myself. I was up against a big racket of builders and real-estate people but I won the case in two years. I made everyone’s life hell for all that time and in the end they had their hands together, pleading with me to leave them alone. No one could believe a case like this could be finished in two years — usually they take twenty. I had pulled out documents that no one could believe, ancient property files lost in Old Delhi.
“I learned the law then and I will learn medicine now. I helped at least twenty people after my court case and I will help many more when I find out what happened to my husband. I am hungry for knowledge. I worship knowledge. For me anyone is a superior person who can answer the questions that are troubling me.
“We didn’t have health insurance. We paid everything ourselves. The hospitals wanted to put him on a ventilator for a month so they could charge us 30 lakhs [$60,000]. They tried to put him on dialysis because they had a new dialysis machine. But there was nothing wrong with his kidneys.
“Terrible things went on. I met a woman who had come in for a heart attack. Her arms were blue from the wrist to the shoulder from tests. How many tests do you need to do to a woman with a heart attack? But you can’t ask any of those questions. Doctors have complete legal immunity: they ask you to sign forms at every stage indemnifying them. They are always offering you some wonder drug or other that will solve everything and will cost lakhs and lakhs. And after you have spent 40 or 50 lakhs and you are exhausted, they hand you a dead body and tell you to get out.”
Our coffee cups are cold.
Shibani and Amit are nodding to themselves. There is something remarkable about the complicity between these two cousins. Shibani is so meek in her appearance, and yet so powerful and impressive.
“You did everything you possibly could for your mother and for your aunt,” I say to them. “That must have meant something to her.”
Shibani glances at Amit.
“Actually we are not cousins,” she says. “We are in a relationship. But since we are not married, no one thinks I can play a legitimate role in this story of Amit’s mother, so we say we are cousins. The first doctors said to me, ‘She’s not your mother and you are not married to this man, so who are you to care for her?’ But I had to take care of Amit’s mother, because he was working.”
Aarti is surprised at this twist in their story, but she says nothing. The coffee grinder roars for a few seconds in the background. Everyone waits patiently through the silence in our conversation, not wanting to move.
Aarti says, “My husband was a tango dancer, a waltz dancer, a sportsman. He was a very hearty man. He was in love with life. When things started going wrong, he said to me, ‘If my legs go, I don’t want to live anymore.’ I said to him, ‘I’ll take care of you. We’ve been blessed with forty-three healthy years together. What does it matter if one of us is sick now? We can go on for many years more. I will give up everything to take care of you.’
“That’s what I did for those three months. He was never left alone. I never let them park him in a corridor which is what they always do. I said, ‘He is not queuing in a corridor on his bed where everyone can stare at him. He will stay in his room and come down when the doctor is ready.’
“But at the end, when I went into the intensive care unit here and saw him full of pipes I broke down and I said, ‘Go, go, my love, don’t stay in this world anymore. This is no life for you.’ And I took him out of there and back to his room. And I put on some beautiful devotional music from our Sikh tradition and I massaged his head all night. He was at peace, he was not grunting or making noises. He just slipped away. I stayed with him all night — but he did not die then. He knew that if he died, I would be left all on my own. He waited until the next afternoon, when everyone was there around us and he knew he could leave me with people who loved me. Even in death he was so considerate.
“I gave him a beautiful death. In all of this, that’s my only satisfaction.”
Aarti speaks with great matter-of-factness about all this. There is no outward emotion — except, perhaps, a certain zeal, for she is a woman in whom adversity releases great retributive energy.
“For forty-three years,” she says, “he gave me roses every Valentine’s Day. Once when we were in Bombay and he couldn’t afford twelve, he bought six. Other years he bought twelve or even twenty-four.