The straight hard chair was by the bed. He had grown so used to it over the weeks. Dinshawji’s sheet rose in a sharp incline at the nether regions of the mattress. He glanced under the bed to see if the size twelve Naughty Boys were there by his trunk. Only the bedpan, its white enamel stark in the dark space. Beside it, the transparent flask-shaped urinal.
Not all patients were asleep. Some watched intently, keeping an eye on this healthy one visiting after hours, when he had no business to be here. In the dim night-light of the ward their eyes focussed fearfully, drifted, then refocussed. When would it be their turn? How would it happen? And afterwards…? Down an old man’s face, tears were rolling slowly. Silently, on to the pillowcase dull white like his hair. Others were peaceful, reassured, as if they knew now that it was the simplest of things, was dying. After all, the one who had joked and laughed in their midst for several weeks had shown them how easy it was. How easy to go from warm and breathing to cold and waxen, how easy to become one of the smooth white figures in the carts outside the gates of Mount Mary.
Dinshawji had been stripped of all the appurtenances with which he had clung to life. The metal stand, gaunt and coldly institutional when the saline solution bottle used to hang from it, now stood empty. Now it looked just like a wire coat-rack, harmless and domestic. The various tubes had grown in number with the passing weeks: one through the nose, two in the arms, somewhere under the sheet a catheter. All withdrawn. As if he had never been sick. Were the tubes removed carefully, the way they were inserted: skilfully, by steady hands? Or just yanked out — the useless wires of an old broken radio, like my Telerad. And then the tubes thrown away in the rubbish, like the coils and transformers and condensers littering the pavements outside the repair shops.
Dinshawji dismantled. And after the prayers are said and the rituals performed at the Tower of Silence, the vultures will do the rest. When the bones are picked clean, and the clean bones gone, no proof will remain that Dinshawji ever lived and breathed. Except his memory.
But after that? After the memory is lost? When I am gone, and all his friends are gone. What then?
The eyes of the wakeful patients were still on Gustad. He found it disconcerting if their eyes met. So he kept looking at Dinshawji’s surgical bed. The iron frame, painted creamy white. Black in places where the paint had peeled. Three sockets for the wooden-handled crank. The first raises the head — I used to wind it when Dinshawji’s dinner arrived. Crankshafts and gears, just like my Meccano set. Second socket for the feet (I raised them once by mistake). And the third for the mid-section. Strange. Why should stomach or pelvis be higher than the rest of the body? Only one reason I can think of. And not a medical reason. Unless the interns and nurses use it for playing doctor-doctor. Wish I had thought of that earlier. To tell Dinshu. But he would have come up with a better one himself. His hospital song. O give me a home where the nurses’ hands roam…
‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,’ he whispered in Dinshawji’s ear, and smiled.
Dinshawji’s wife appeared in the doorway. She looked around, then strode into the ward in a way that made it clear she was not to be trifled with. She saw Gustad’s smile before he had time to wipe it off, and gave him a withering look.
Alamai was a tall woman, far taller than Dinshawji had been, with a carpingly stern face that would willingly find fault with the world, especially its inhabitants. A termagant if ever there was one. Her scrawny neck deliquesced into narrow shoulders which were perpetually raised, slightly hunched. No children and a wife like Alamai, thought Gustad, and yet such a sense of humour. Or because of it. His domestic vulture. He almost broke into a smile again as he recalled the favourite line: ‘No need to take me to the Tower of Silence when I die. My domestic vulture will pick my bones clean ahead of time.’
‘Alamai, please let me know if there is anything I can do,’ he offered, after expressing his condolences.
Before she could answer, a pasty-faced young man burst in. ‘Auntie, Auntie!’ he called in a high-pitched voice which disembogued in part through a nose eminently suited to the purpose because of its shape and size. ‘Auntieee! You went away while I was still in the bathroom!’ The patients in the ward opened their eyes. Gustad estimated the fellow’s age to be at least twenty, and wondered who he was.
‘Shh! Muà donkey! Close your mouth at once! You boy-without-brain, sick people are sleeping here. You were going to get lost in the bathroom or what because I left?’ The boy-man pouted at the scolding.
‘Come and meet Gustadji Noble. He was Pappa’s best friend.’ To Gustad she said, ‘This is our nephew Nusli. My sister’s son. We never had children, so he has always been like our own son. In private he calls us Mamma and Pappa only. I brought him along to help. Come on, come on, what are you standing and staring! Shake hands with Gustad Uncle!’
Nusli giggled as he offered his hand. He was skinny, and stood with stooped shoulders. A single-paasri weakling, thought Gustad as he shook the clammy hand, wondering how a vulture’s sister could spawn a milquetoast like Nusli. Perhaps it was inevitable. He repeated his question to Alamai. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
‘I phoned the Tower of Silence while Nusli was in the bathroom. They said the hearse will come in half an hour.’
The patients who had decided to close their eyes after Alamai silenced Nusli, opened them again. For Nusli chose to speak once more with his high-pitched instrument. ‘I am so scared, Auntie!’
‘A-ra-ra-ra! Now what are you scared of?’
‘Of the hearse,’ he whined. ‘I don’t want to sit in it!’
‘You boy-without-brain, what is there to be scared of? It’s just like a van. Remember, we all went for a picnic in the van last year with Dorab Uncle’s family to Victoria Garden? And saw all the animals there? A van, just like that one.’
‘No, Auntie, please, I am so scared.’ He cringed and wrung his hands.
‘Marey em-no-em! God knows to collect what dust I brought you along! Thought you would be a help. Help, my head!’ and she struck it hard with both hands.
Gustad felt it was time to intervene, before more patients were awakened to the nightmare in their ward. ‘Alamai, I will be happy to come with you in the hearse. To help with everything.’
‘See? See, you lumbasoo-baywakoof, listen to Gustad Uncle. He is not scared, is he?’ Nusli gazed at his feet and pursed his lips as though to blow spit bubbles. She thumped him on the back, and he lurched forward. ‘Look at me when I talk to you!’
‘Yes, yes, he will come,’ said Gustad. ‘He will sit beside me. Won’t you, Nusli?’
‘OK,’ said Nusli, and giggled.
‘I don’t want any of your khikhi-khaakhaa,’ said Alamai. But Nusli permitted himself another short paroxysm of giggles before heeding her injunction.
She turned her attention now to Dinshawji’s trunk under the bed. ‘Come on, come on, Nusla! Don’t just stand there! Come here and pull it out for me. I want to check everything that Pappa brought from home. Cannot trust these hospital people.’
Gustad felt it was a good moment to disappear. He could return at the hearse’s appointed time. ‘Excuse me, I will be back in a few minutes.’
Alamai, engrossed in taking an inventory, granted him leave with an imperious wave of her hand. He caught a glimpse of Dinshawji’s black Naughty Boys in the trunk. Empty of their owner’s feet, they seemed larger than life.