There’s a new lady on the bed next to me. Just arrived with what looks like a broken leg. Four people are moving her from the stretcher to her bed and the scream that she barely is able to hold is glaringly visible in her eyes. I feel I now can listen to people’s silence and the pain behind their silence. I have been in this hospital bed for almost a month now. Each day I see all around me people with all sorts of illness, all sorts of accidents, struggling in these hospital beds. This has been a new normal for me now.
She just smiled at me. I can sense the perpetual sadness in the deep recess of her face. I have devised that most people are generally sad. Wretched by the society, carrying all the anguish and pain and destruction; enough to damage them all over again. I smiled back, that’s the only courtesy I am able to offer these days. Making friends is easy here! With just a smile and a few wave of hands, we are able to communicate our mutual anguish. My best friend has been a nine-year-old boy with a broken arm. I call him Rafael Nadal, or just Nadal sometimes. Every time he has to take an injection needle, he reminds me of the sound made by Rafael Nadal when he hits the Banana Forehand shot. I chuckle myself at my cleverness to name him Nadal!
Back to the lady, we’ve been exchanging smiles for a couple of days now. It’s amusing how we people can connect with such few words exchanged. We’ve been taught numerous methods to communicate in our MBA marketing class and yet here I am able to connect with these people around me with such few exchange of words. How ironic is that! I think all the marketing people should spend at least a month in a hospital bed and notice how a few words are enough to know people. But There’s something different in her smile, unusual. She smiles a lot like she is hiding something beneath her exaggerated smile.
A lot of cricket players are here today to visit her. They’ve brought her a miniature cricket bat as a gift and kept it straight up aligned to her bed. Nadal gazed upon the bat like it was his. He swung his hand with his own imaginary racket and his imaginary ball pierced through the wind. What a cracker! I am proud of your shot. You’ve made justice to the name. I clapped for his astonishing shot.
There are some more visitors now, some of them are even in the cricket player attire, discussing how the game went today and how they missed their star player on the field. A sudden gust of blood rushed inside me, and it all became strikingly clear. She’s a sportsperson, a national cricket player who is spending what seems to be the most important time of her career in a hospital bed with a broken leg. A lifetime of an opportunity to play for the national team in the South Asian Pacific Games missed because of that damn leg! Now, I can clearly read her smile, her tears masquerading behind that wide smile, cheekbones stretched hard to squeeze the tears back. A team of doctors is here followed by few nurses and all of a sudden she is covered by white coats, checking reports, checking her leg. And then I heard an old doctor in a deep voice – “I’m sorry, we have no other option but amputation”.
I saw her face from a narrow space between two white coats. She still was smiling, but this time she could not hold her tears. Drops rolled down her cheek slowly with her closing eyes. Slowly the doctors and nurses left the bed. With the crowd gone, I looked at her. Her eyes were closed and her face still had a faint melancholy smile. The bat her friends left beside her bed was lying on the floor. I turned myself to the other side, staring at the window. A faint song by Indian singer Jagjit Singh was playing in a cafe nearby the window –
तुम इतना जो मुस्कुरा रहे हो, क्या ग़म है जिसको छुपा रहे हो?
How is that you are so smiling, What is the grief that you are hiding ?