A Thatha’s Dilemma: Recover or Discover Beyond?

I have been somewhere else.

There were blinding white lights, disembodied voices, and rubber-gloved hands moving over me. Strangers shouting at me to breathe, to squeeze their fingers, to open my eyes. I remember none of it clearly. Or perhaps I remember too much, and none of it belongs to this moment.

Now I am here, in a bed surrounded by machinery. They tell me I have had an operation. I have spent days in a place they call the ICU. They say I am recovering.

Recovering from what?

My eyes are heavy. My ears no longer serve me as they once did. People speak, but their words arrive in fragments, sounds I struggle to decipher. The doctor speaks. The nurse speaks. The caretaker speaks. Different people, different languages, different purposes.

I come from somewhere else. I have my own language, my own memories, my own way of understanding the world.

Yet everyone seems certain of what I must do.

Eat. Drink. Sit up. Stand. Walk. Recover.

I close my eyes. Perhaps if I pretend the world is not there, they will stop asking.

They do not.

Someone brings food to my mouth.

Who are you? Why are you feeding me? Is it for money? Duty? Affection? What have I done for you?

My wife used to feed me. She knew when I was hungry, when I was tired, when I had something to say, and when I wanted silence. She could place food in my mouth without making me wonder why I was receiving it.

Where is she?

Gone, they tell me. It has been a year since she left this world.

But where was I when she left? Where was I when the world changed without asking me?

Now a stranger brings food to my mouth. My children visit. The caretaker stays nearby. The nurse checks on me. The doctor examines me.

Everyone has a purpose.

I seem to have become everyone’s purpose.

“Let’s try to stand, Thatha.”

The physiotherapist holds my arms and tries to lift me. I stiffen. I do not cooperate. He tries again. I turn towards the wall.

Why must I stand?

Where, exactly, am I going?

They say I must try. They say it is for my own good.

I am tired of trying. Or perhaps I am tired of being told what trying means.

I want to leave.

But where?

Home?

What is home without the person who made it home?

My children have their own houses, their own families, their own lives. They visit. They sit beside me. They want me to get better. They have lives waiting beyond this room.

My daughter has come. Someone tells me she has driven seven hours to be here.

When I see her face, something stirs within me. For a moment, I want to remain awake. I want to hold on to her face, to the warmth of her hand, to the fact that she is here.

Then the moment slips away.

My eyes close.

I know my son. I know my daughter. I recognise my son-in-law. I try to remain with them, but my mind wanders, and the present refuses to stay still.

Someone holds up a phone.

“Banumathy!”

I call out her name.

The room falls into a different kind of silence.

Who is Banumathy?

I can almost hear the question passing between them. My children exchange glances. The caretaker pauses. My daughter’s hand stills on the bed rail.

Banumathy!

Why does nobody understand?

She is my sister. Of course she is my sister. The one who used to wait for me at the end of the dusty street after school, the one who still called me by the name no one else used. Does nobody remember her? Or have I travelled somewhere in my mind where the people beside my bed cannot follow?

I do not know what they see when they look at me.

Perhaps they see a stubborn old man who refuses to cooperate. Perhaps they see a patient who is not making progress. Perhaps they see a father who needs to be brought back to the world.

I see faces. I hear fragments. I remember a house with a tiled roof and a neem tree in the front yard. A dusty street where people knew me simply as a boy, long before I became a husband, a father, a man with responsibilities.

I went to school. I worked. I married. We had children.

The usual story.

I lived. I worked. I carried on.

And now I cannot even decide when to open my eyes.

Is this a flashback, or is this recovery?

Am I looking backwards because I have reached the end of my story, or because my mind is searching for something familiar in this strange, white world?

The doctors speak. I close my eyes. The nurse adjusts something. The physiotherapist records my refusal.

I have no medical term for what I feel.

Perhaps I am afraid. Perhaps I am exhausted. Perhaps I cannot make sense of what is happening around me.

Or perhaps I simply want the world to stop for a moment.

Not to ask me to eat.

Not to ask me to stand.

Not to tell me what comes next.

Just to let me be.

Eventually, the room empties.

The doctor leaves. The nurse moves on. My children say goodbye. The caretaker settles nearby.

Visiting hours are over.

The door closes. The footsteps fade.

At last, nobody is asking anything of me.

I stare at the ceiling.

When will my visiting hour be over?

Everyone comes with a purpose. They want to see me recover. They want the man they remember back.

Then they leave.

I remain.

Tomorrow, they will return. The questions will return. The medicines, the instructions, the attempts to make me stand.

When will this waiting end?

A hand enters the room and adjusts the IV line. An empty bottle is replaced with a full one. Fluid begins its slow descent through the tube.

Another bottle. Another intervention. Another effort to keep this body going.

I watch the bottle.

How much of my life passed this way? One thing replacing another.

Now everyone is trying to keep my body going.

Is something finally loosening its hold, or am I simply too tired to participate in the world?

I cannot tell whether I am discovering something or losing my way. Perhaps I am not a philosopher. Perhaps I am just an old man in a hospital bed, trying to make sense of another day.

Perhaps the question itself is all I have left.

They want me to recover.

I want to know why I am here.

They want me to return to life.

I want to know what life expects of me now.

They want me to stand.

I want to know where I am going.

Perhaps I want the world to stop asking me to prove that I still belong in it.

Recover or discover?

Return or release?

Drama or trauma?

I close my eyes.

For a moment, there is no question to answer.

Perhaps my failing ears are a strange blessing now. As the room recedes, the voices become indistinct. The hospital seems far away. There are no instructions I can follow, no questions I must answer.

Only silence.

Then, a tremor.

A faint vibration travels through the metal frame of the bed. The room seems to change.

Has the door opened?

Is someone approaching, or am I listening to the pulse of my own body?

I keep my eyes closed.

The mattress dips slightly.

Or perhaps it is only a memory.

Beside me or inside me, I cannot tell.

I wait.

The next visit has begun.