Yanni pushed his hand through his thick blond hair and sighed again. Typically, rheumatology rotation didn’t involve psychiatric consults, but the midnight shift was famous for its many exceptions. And psychiatric issues were certainly not unknown to downtown Toronto hospitals. He reached for the phone by the bed, but Persaud intercepted with his skeletal hand.
“Boy. Please listen.” Persaud’s eyes were those of a doomed beast, pleading upward from the abattoir floor. “Yahhhm is comin’ here. Tonight. Right now.” His eyes slowly drifted to the hallway, to the open window at the end. Instantly, from the street below, there was a loud smashing noise, followed immediately by the sickly sound of bending metal and the unmistakable screams of humans in distress.
Yanni and Meera raced to the window. From the other end of the hallway, the shift nurses were also running to windows, so loud was the noise. Down below, like a report from the evening news of any unnamed metropolitan center, a scene of traffic horror unfolded. Two delivery trucks had collided and were blocking traffic on all six lanes of University Avenue, sprawling across the pedestrian median and had even knocked down one of the ghastly statues that usually stood watch. One truck was on fire, and police and fire engines were miraculously already on the scene. No casualties could be seen through the press of onlookers, who continued to stream in from nearby Queen Street, likely drawn by the sounds of disaster; but no doubt the emergency room below would soon be pressed into duty. It was an excellent ER, Meera knew; one of the best in the country. Still, a part of her wondered if she should rush down to help.
Persaud coughed loudly and beckoned them to the bed. Meera came back to his side. “Yahhhm,” he said, as if in explanation. “Death comin’. Na got too much time. Got fo’ tell you m’story first!”
“Look at all the people down there!” Yanni called from the window, amazed by the flow of late-night disaster voyeurs descending on this otherwise unpopular street. “I know it’s a horrible thing, and I hope everyone’s all right, but what a show it must be on the ground!”
Persaud stroked Meera’s face then fondled her stethoscope. “You so young to be among we so old. And dis,” he indicated the end of the stethoscope, “dis does give you comfort? You med’cine cyaan stop Yahhhm when Yahhhm want fo’ come.” He grinned an awful toothless grin that slitted his yellowing eyes and widened his gaping nostrils. But there was nonetheless something attractive and familiar about him. “How old you be, child?”
Meera said nothing.
“Is okay,” Persaud said. “No need fo’ answer. You daddy dead, right?” She nodded, almost zombie-like in her silence. “Is okay,” he soothed. “We all got fo’ dead. Is okay.” Meera’s face hardened. Whatever slight spell the strange old man had cast on her was now fading, chased off by the invocation of her father’s sacred memory.
“Dr. Rostoff is right,” Meera said. “We have to get you back to your room. Then we’d better go to Emergency to see if we’re needed.”
Persaud’s lips tightened and he studied her carefully. He turned to Yanni, who was still bewitched by the scene of carnage on the street. “You, boy! Tell me you see Yahhhm.”
“What?” Yanni, annoyed, waved Persaud away. He kept looking through the throngs on the street. To a man, each was enthralled with the heroic acts of firefighters hosing down flaming trucks and pulling bodies from crushed vehicles. But there was one...
Persaud called to Yanni. “You see him, na? Tell me!”
Yanni was silent. But he kept his eye on this one special man on the street, this one man who was not watching the carnage. Instead, he was looking up, directly at the window from which Yanni now peered.
“Describe he!” Persaud ordered. But Yanni remained silent. The watcher continued to stand apart from the crowd, his hands in his jacket pockets, locking eyes with Yanni. Yanni’s fingers yellowed as they gripped the windowsill more tightly than was comfortable, but he snorted dismissively at the watcher.
Meera gazed over at her friend and colleague, and was at a loss. She was torn in many directions, ripped apart like one of the vehicles in the street. Competing responsibilities and desires jockeyed for priority. Yet the balance of her focus remained on the strange old man in the bed next to her.
“You is Indian,” Persaud said. “You go undahstand. Dat is why you been sent fo’ hear m’story.”
Meera shook her head slowly. “Mr. Persaud...” She paused, knowing that further appeals to him to return to Palliative Care would be met with stolid refusal. And with the emergency outside, it was unlikely she would find sufficient help to move him against his will; not without sedating him.
She fell into his gaze, so sad yet intense. His yellow fishlike eyes bent into that sad configuration, and the spotted skin on the sides of his face drooped in its losing struggle against time and gravity. He looked so familiar, so sadly familiar. “I’m not Indian,” she said. “Well, I’m of Indian descent; but I was born in Kenya and grew up here in Toronto...”
“Doesn’t mattah,” Persaud said, shaking his head forcefully. “You is Indian. Like me. I was born in Guyana. Never been to India.” His accent seemed to be thickening as the evening progressed. But Meera had no trouble following. His gravitas commanded complete focus and understanding. “Never been to India,” he said again. “Don’t know m’caste or m’daddy’s caste. But I is a pandit just the same. One priest of God!”
Meera reflected, was tempted to smile. Her own father, whom this man so wished to resemble, had hated religion. He had refused to raise his children with religion, had thrown his wife’s idols from the home, and had famously quipped, “When things go well, we thank the gods. But when things go to hell, we blame everybody but the gods! What bullshit is this?” Yet in the end, even he had asked for a priest.
“You were a pandit in Guyana?” she asked him.
“Yes,” Persaud said. His face darkened and his eyes deepened. The sounds of the street seemed to retreat then, isolating Meera alone with the old man, cushioned from Yanni, the window, and the rest of the world. “I is a pandit now, and I was a pandit then.” He paused and stared at her meaningfully. “I was a pandit of Kali.” He spat the last word.
Again Meera smiled. “I didn’t know Kali was so popular outside India.”
“Kali be another face of the same God,” Persaud said, screwing up his own wizened face in mock dismissal of her seeming ignorance. “Goddess of blood, she. Goddess of glorious bittah red wine that pump in we veins. She scare the white people, na. But we know: She be a mama just like any lady. We respect Mama. We respect Daddy. And when you is a slave or servant in the cane fields of Guyana — back when the white man tek all you history, all you possessions, all you beliefs, and give you Jesus Christ instead — when you is a slave or a servant, you need cling to you mama and you daddy with greater force!” His gaze intensified, as did his hold on Meera’s hand. “Because dat is all you got, in the end. Dat is all you got.”
It was then that Meera noticed Yanni was being uncharacteristically quiet. She looked to him and saw only his back, with his untucked plaid shirt whipping in the wind from the window. “Yanni,” she asked, “are you all right?”
“He’s just staring up at me,” Yanni replied. He continued to look down into the mêlée below, red and yellow flashing sirens reflecting off his expressionless face.
“Yahhhm,” Persaud intoned. “Tell dis old man, please, boy. How the god of death look? He tall? He old or he young? How black is he face? When he come, I not go see he. He go tek m’soul and I not go see he face.”