Ennui and all that

It has  been the oddest of fortnight’s in one’s life, all 88 years of it– and  that would be  an understatement, like it or not. A weird 18 days of slipping into some kind of a coma, conscious, yet only. But for the most part feeling like a lost zombie. Comatose, some call the state, I found myself in at times when those flights of fancy took over, taking me as far away as Denmark for a six-hour dekho of a friend’s grand-daughter whom I had last seen when she was just one handful and more. She was looking after shared homes of sub-continentals, mostly Indians and Pakistanis, in addition to a deceptively mild looking ‘documentary’ maker who started with a short comment on one of his advertising efforts, obviously a pro govt. panegyric and  that insisted that I take the poison pill, literally, because I just had broken into his  secret empire; also because I had cheerily ended my comment on his ad spot with the observation that my normal charges for such healthy comments were a minimum fifty grand. I thought I had cracked a millions dollar joke but the man was immensely offended and made my life impossible on two subsequent encounters. He chased me for a day physically before I returned to my state of ennui, not knowing who I was and why. True or not, I am yet to fathom but I did find myself with a group of eight damned indivisuals surrounded by vessels of all sizes and shapes,all on the boil unleashing a  deadly vaporized poison and I heard some bearded Hindu youth blaming the Bombay suppliers for the poor quality of the vile stuff. They had been shortchanged and that was why the damned group in the dome had survived eight hours. This dome drill, lest you forget, had been staged to remind all unpatriotic Hindus of the foul designs of the secularista non-believers in the faith of the Rashtra. And to make sure all of us were blessed before our dues were delivered in flowery prose by the distinguished “ruler” of the State with band baaja in attendance. The macabre drill seemed endless and in some weird manner a bit way beyond ones imagination. From there it was but one hop to Denmark and sure enough back into the shared beds (that was real, for sure) in a Jammu hotel. I shared it with a young couple whom I always considered like my very own son and daughter. And there I was, all of me, in the middle of a makeshift bed. That too passed, for me to learn that most of the action I had seen, had taken place while I was admitted to one of Delhi’s prized hospitals. Incidentally this hospital had hit the headlines four years ago after the detection of a thriving organ replacement business there. There obviously was shortage of space and I don’t know why this was so, given the place seemed operated by an army of men. My journeying seemed an unending process, mostly ridiculous like my ending up in the VIP morgue somewhere near Jammu – it could well have been Srinagar. And why was I there to be told by the fauji Guruji that a VIP body was expected shortly. Meanwhile, I had a regular stream of unsought and unwelcome admirers, screaming death to me was the Pakistani agent and indeed the hotel had been kind enough to spare me further trouble by having put a card with the Pakistani insignia in the patients’ roll and stuck to my door as well… MLK Pakistani agent. I inquired from a nurse why was I so honored and why wasn’t my name mentioned as it rightfully deserved to be as a local patient, she had coyly told me that you can’t fight the crowd and besides the ID board in that part of the special ward was star-studded with at least seven Pakistan  government ‘visiting cards’. Non-cards really, for these bore no name or designation of any individual. A senior staffer said it doesn’t make a difference to someone like you. I said, yes, it didn’t but only the hate in the eyes that meet yours could hardly be ignored. The hospital finally shifted me to a shared room in another wing, where those with special health problems were attended to. For my partner I had a Nigerian Army soldier, half his face and, one side of the collar bone blown up,currently patched up,in hope. His aim, he said, was to get back into the Nigerian Army to be able to kill as many terrorists as he could. And very kindly he offered to make a start with me. You see, he had killed just one Indian on an expedition here two years ago and has since – so he claimed been brutalized – by participating in anti-Boko Haram expeditions in his country. He would obviously like to sharpen his skills by bumping off an easy target like me. For three days I kept repeating to him, “Bro, just one shot on the brow, don’t mess up with the looks God has given me”. He had two solid mouthfuls of vodka the time I spoke to him. He had run into good luck. But Bro was in a hurry and on the final day of my stay he managed to get me enrolled for a kidney operation which I never needed nor had asked for. Bro the enemy of Boko Haram must have been a charmer before losing half his face and brow and a little more here and there, given that he had a steady line of female companions, all but two local. He was playfully engaged, thank god, with two of them, when I escaped my shared medical ward accommodation with him.  Sadly for my Nigerian Bro, I broke out of my long bout of hallucination, and ennui of the past fortnight and parked myself in the nurses floor station, my brother from US who had dared to look me up at the hospital, was able to tear through the impregnable hospital security wall to persuade – a tough call, that – to take care of both Bro and my horrifying flights of fancy. And it isn’t as simple as that… some borders the Kafkaesque. Shall continue my individual research into why the poisoned dome did fail that day before it sent me to the Netherlands.

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