The Last Episode: Episode II

Neurology Ward, Manipal Hospital: The sunlight made a crooked entry through the venetian blinds, seeping through the cold tinted glass of the 11th floor westward window. The hospital was a throbbing, palpitating, gasping, flat-lining city in itself. A city for the ailing and the recovering, a city of prayers and high hopes.

The fuzzy feeling (and to some extent numb, thanks to all the anaesthesia) was slowly getting to me after I managed to put a dent in my skull and engrave a "lightning" scar between my eyes. Which, narcissistically speaking, I kinda like!

The doctors here speak in a hushed voices and sometimes tries too hard to quip….I guess to pave the way for far graver facts waiting for their hapless patients in the next corner. I was told to inform them as soon as I feel a salty fluid passing through my throat. That would be my CSF(Cerebro Spinal Fluid) leaking from my cranium, something that’s supposed to stay inside the think-tank. In short it would be something without which my grey cells won’t survive, if you keep aside my genocidic sense of humour.

My head was feeling heavier than usual (either it was the sedating medicine or all the concrete debris that has gone inside) and I decided to listen to some good ol’ music. As I was dozing off with Satch’s "Friends", I felt a pop between my ears. It was like a teeny soap-bubble soaring in its own wavering path all the way from nowhere and popping off at the mere kiss of my funny-bone!(such lethal it is, my funny-bone) And while I was trying to give myself a good reason for this unexpected phenomena, a puny warm-blooded snake slithered through the back of my nose and made its way into the throat. My whole world stopped with a grotesque clamor.

The music turned into noise, the subtle hum of the air-purifier turned into the rattle of a turbine. And without notice, the numb sensation from the scar spread all across my face as I broke into a cold sweat. My world was toppling down in a classic-dominos style, or so I thought. And I could do nothing more than to just sit and wait for the coin to fall on the right side. I tried with all my might to convince myself that it just a test flight of my imaginary. But sometimes your mind is your worst enemy.

If I press that buzzer the docs would come sweeping into the room. Then they would have to open up my skull and try to fix it, as they once mentioned casually. And it’s not a pretty thought.

I numbly pressed the buzzer. First the nurses came in, followed by the Gabriels in their white toggery. "Open your mouth wide, stick out your tongue. Look at this light, can you follow it?" The voices seem to be coming from the other side of the tunnel. After a couple of minutes, which seemed like half of my lifetime (and I was convinced that it was drastically and ruthlessly cut short), the doc looked down at me with an amused face. What a sadistic bastard! "Its just mucus flowing down at the wrong time!" A harmless booger played my spectre of death for a while, and gave me heejie-the-beejies!

But suddenly the humiliation stopped bothering me anymore. I realized that the day was brighter than ever, the sun shone like there’s no tomorrow. Correction, there is a tomorrow.

My feet wanted to run, run as fast as I can. My life rewinded back a decade and I was running back home before the streetlights were on, my father’s protocol. Fields, swamps, ponds zipped past me as I ran faster, harder. I was going back home. I really didn't care for any other truth in the world.