Water

by Sambhu Ramachandran

Anu woke in a cold sweat. It took some time for her moist eyes to attune themselves to the semi-darkness of the room. She looked at the clock. It was half past nine, which meant that Alex had already left for his office in Panampilly Nagar. She could feel beads of sweat rolling down the frayed collar of her T-shirt into her armpits. She wondered why she had been having the same dream for the past three months. Was it time for her to consult a psychiatrist?

The dream would begin every time with her standing before the leaf-hung mouth of a cave from which the insistent cries of a newborn could be heard to resonate. She would take a series of frenzied steps forward, and then lianas would untangle themselves from the gnarled branches of nearby trees and tie her down onto the forest floor with a ferocity of grip that left her struggling maniacally for release. The dream would end without exception at the point where she extricated herself and groped her way into the pitch-black opening. The baby’s implacable cries would also subside then, and an irrational fear gnaw at her solar plexus, making her curl into a fetal position. She had tried to interpret the dream many times but failed miserably.

***

Anu swayed into the kitchen where she knew Alex had laid out her breakfast. She flipped a dosa onto her plate and watched it disintegrate in a puddle of chutney. When she began to eat, she was put off by the lingering taste of mint-flavoured toothpaste that surged through her mouth. She remembered the weeks after their wedding when she and Alex used to breakfast together. The thought of those hurried moments when she would surreptitiously feed Alex as the housemaid’s back was turned and the alacrity with which he tried to repay her solicitude, though always making a fool of himself in the end, brought a half-smile to her lips. It was a long time since they shared that kind of intimacy.

Alex was no longer the man she had married. His bubbling laughter and carefree nature were buried under a patina of gloomy reticence. He kept to himself most of the time and, besides exchanging casual glances with his acquaintances, barely talked. On some nights, he would lie sobbing in bed for hours and provide no answer when confronted about the cause of his misery. Though it made Anu distraught, she did not believe Alex was unhappy on her account. Rather, it was his relentless work schedule replete with countless Zoom meetings that loomed in her mind as the culprit. Whatever it was, Anu thought, he could talk to her. She could always turn herself into a receptacle for Alex’s troubles. But she did not press the issue either, fearing it would be hurtful to Alex if he thought she was somehow imputing the fault to his diligence.

Alex worked as Creative Director in an advertising team and had to work round the clock to meet a series of improbable targets. When the pandemic hit, everyone except him was given the option of working from home. His bosses were a bunch of fuddy-duddies who believed it did not bode well for business if a ‘CLOSED’ sign adorned the front door of the office for months on end. Someone had to keep it running. And being at the top of the ladder, it fell upon Alex to appease his superiors. Though he found the arrangement largely unsatisfactory at first, there was in his manners something to suggest that he had changed his mind about it later. For one thing, Anu knew that Alex considered every moment he spent away from her a reprieve from some imminent catastrophe. But what? She had no answer.

***

When Anu got up from the table, having finished her breakfast, Tipu was standing pensively on the kitchen countertop. He swished his furry tail and let out a captivating ‘meow’ when she opened the tap. As the water spurted onto the chutney-stained plate, he inched closer to watch.

It was Alex who had named their cat after that formidable ruler of Mysore on observing its stocky build and regal bearing. It had wandered into their flat one day just like that. No one knew if it had an owner or if it was a stray. Though Alex put up an ad in the local newspaper, no one came forward to claim it.

Tipu tried to bend his agile head around the faucet and catch a jet of water in his mouth. His whiskers twitched under the pressure of concentration. But Anu teased him away, “When did kings start growing so desperate?”

The cat seemed to take heed, for it paused for a moment before blinking in approval, and pounced off. 

***

Anu was in the bedroom checking the messages on her phone. She often wondered how she would have survived the pandemic if it had not been for this wonderful invention that connected her with all her school and college friends with surprising ease. Her fingertips lingered fondly over the WhatsApp chats that popped up at the top of the screen. Most of them were forwards. One of her friends had just sent some inspirational video about not giving up on one’s dreams. The thumbnail showed a brawny sprinter and a race track gleaming under a truculent sun. Since such videos never failed to get on her nerves with their mix of aggressive optimism and simple-mindedness, she did not care to download it. Instead, she sent back a bunch of inane emoticons showing vigorous approval.

What she really expected to see was a message from Alex. But there were none yet. Usually, he would message her soon after reaching the office. Since he knew Anu was paranoid about road accidents, he knew better than to keep adding to her worries by keeping mum. It was a ritual that he had to learn with great difficulty ever since their marriage. Whenever he went anywhere, she had to know he had reached the place safely. If he forgot to message her, his chatbox would be flooded with interrogation marks which grew more menacing the longer he took to respond.This time too, Anu felt a wave of anxiety enfolding her. She would have no peace unless she knew his head was buried deep in some new advertising project. She had just typed in the first two words of a querulous message when she heard a loud crash somewhere in the house, followed by Tipu’s repentant meows. She put the phone down on the pillow and swung back into the hall.

She had taken only a few steps when she slipped on a film of water and came crashing to the floor. The fall was so sudden that it took her a moment to realize that she was lying in a recumbent posture, her head pressed against the coolness of the tiles. For a moment she felt like her consciousness had been disconnected from her body and that it was being swaddled in something minutely thorny and soporific. Her head ached severely, and a thin stream of blood trickled out. Through half-open eyes obscured by matted lashes, she could see Tipu standing to her left unsure of what to do. There were glass shards under the small of her back and feet. When she tried to lift a shoulder, she heard a soft eggshell-like crunch that sent a sudden jab of pain through her nerves.

She had fallen right upon the fragments of the glass jug that Tipu had shattered as he swashbuckled around in some exotic cat-and-mouse fantasy of his. It was a wonder that she had failed to spot the broken jug as she came into the hall. The impact of the fall caused the water that had collected around the glass pieces to soak through her floral skirt and settle between her thighs. Scenes from the dream— the cave, the baby’s cries, and the lianas—were now replayed in her head fleetingly through a process that was richly associative and disconcerting at the same time. Her body spasmed frightfully and her hands went numb. Her eyeballs rolled up, and a spurt of darkness clouded her senses.

Something was happening to her.

Suddenly, and before she lost consciousness, she felt she was not lying on the floor but on a hospital bed, surrounded by uniformed nurses mumbling something incoherent among themselves. The doctor looked like a seraph in white coat and gloves. She could hear the clatter of empty oxygen cylinders being rolled around and see, though imperfectly, scalpels and scissors gleaming on a sliver tray. She could also feel excruciating pain between her legs. Someone was asking her to push harder, and she was hanging on to those words like a climber on a cliff face would to a shelf of rock.

And that was when, in an overpowering surge of memory, everything that had happened during the past two years came back to her.

***

Anu was already into her sixth month of pregnancy when COVID-19 assumed the proportions of a global menace. She had watched the news about people falling dead like flies with vicarious apprehension. Alex was also worried. He spoke to his bosses about Anu’s condition and requested to be exempted from coming in person to the office. When they turned down his request, he was furious for many days. But, as though to make amends for the callousness of his bosses, he began to take every precaution he could to make sure that Anu did not get infected through any negligence of his. He even dismissed the housemaid and took to doing the laundry and cooking on his own. Anu would volunteer to iron his shirts or make his favourite dish, but Alex would admonish her playfully and send her back to the coziness of her bed.

The doctor had advised complete bed rest for Anu ever since a case of placenta previa was detected in the 20-week ultrasound. Alex took Anu to a couple of other clinics on the off chance that there might be some error in the ultrasound. But when all the doctors concurred, he felt that fate had dealt him the first real blow. He did not know what to do at first. But when he saw Anu take the news without much perturbation, he began to overcome his anxieties slowly. Once, when he asked Anu why she was so calm about it, she said, “We have to believe in our baby. She will come out just right.”  Alex knew that Anu had already formed a deep bond with the child (whom she already addressed using the feminine pronoun) and that if something unexpected happened, she would be completely crushed.

Those were days when Alex really felt the absence of their parents. Since they had married against the wishes of both families, they had found themselves living an insular life from the beginning except for an occasional relation or two who dropped by more for sniffing out marital problems that were bound to emerge in cases where the girl and the boy had defied their families than for arbitrating any reconciliation. But caring for his wife, Alex had discovered many new strengths he did not know he possessed. For one thing, he could disabuse himself of the notion that only women could take care of housework. Cooking for Anu became for him more addictive than reading his favourite sports magazines. He had also ditched the one-cigarette-per-week rule in favour of total abstinence.

Although he was not superstitious at all, Alex believed the child was a sign of all the good things to come. He hoped sincerely that with its birth, their estranged families would finally unite.

One day, after returning from a routine medical check-up, Anu suddenly fell ill. The symptoms, which were initially mild, had grown worse in a matter of hours. She had a pounding headache and her throat felt so parched and sore that she could not drink water without a feeling of something raspy descending her oesophagus. She rang up Alex quickly. He had returned to his office after dropping Anu off at the flat. When he rushed in, she was ready to collapse into his arms. She whispered something about keeping his mask on since she might have contracted the virus. But he was in no state to care about himself. He took her to the nearest hospital where a nurse swathed in a suffocating PPE kit took her nasal swab. In an hour it was confirmed that she was COVID positive. Since she was pregnant, the doctor did not put her on any medication. She was sent back with instructions to take a paracetamol thrice a day.

The fact that Anu had not been innoculated emerged now as a cause of concern. It was Dr. Usha, their gynaecologist who had advised against innoculation since clinical trials involving pregnant women had not yet yielded any conclusive results. Alex phoned Dr. Usha with the news. He stammered through the diagnosis and waited for the doctor to speak up. Dr. Usha could sense the trepidation in his voice. She asked him not to worry: a lot of pregnant women were getting affected, but most of them were also recovering without any significant health issues.

***

It was on a rainy night in the second week of May that Anu’s water broke. Being too nervous to drive, Alex took her to the hospital in a taxi. Though it was another month till Anu’s delivery date, the doctor said it would be unwise to wait any longer. Alex knew deep down that post-COVID symptoms were to blame.

He sat up all night in one of the interlinked steel chairs outside the labour room without batting his eyelids once. Though he was not very religious, he found himself calling upon some higher power for help. When Dr. Usha came out through the swing door at quarter past five in the morning, he sprang to his feet at once though he was feeling woozy from lack of sleep.

“Sorry, Alex…we did everything we could… Unfortunately, we could not save the baby,” Dr. Usha spoke in a commiserating tone.

Alex felt a twinge of pain in his chest.

When he spoke, he found he was struggling to get the words out: “Is she all right?”

The doctor waited for a moment before answering. It was evident from her expression that the answer that was to follow was not so reassuring.

“She has gone into a coma. But it might only be temporary…Anyway, it’s too early to say anything,” Dr. Usha spoke quickly and ducked back into the operation theatre.

Standing there in the corridor animated by the cries of newborn babies, Alex felt as though his life so far had been nothing but a preparation for this devastating loss.

***

Anu sat propped up against the pillow. Alex was sitting beside her. His fingers brushed a few stray strands of hair away from her bandaged forehead.

He had found Anu sprawled unconscious on the floor on his return from the office. A few liberal sprinkles of cold water, and he was able to resuscitate her. For the half-hour they discussed the incident, Anu had proved to be extrememly recalcitrant. When Alex finally decided to leave her alone, thinking she needed to collect her thoughts, she said, “Why did you lie to me all this time?”

The question pierced Alex’s heart like a dart. When he feigned ignorance, she shot him a look so powerful he knew it was no use hiding anything now.

 A tear peeped out of Alex’s left eye.

“I was afraid,” he said, turning to face Anu. “I was afraid there might be a relapse… and I might have lost you forever then,” he continued.

Anu could read the guilt in his voice.

Already shattered by the death of their child, Alex did not know what he would do if Anu never woke up from her coma. He went on leave indefinitely and was prepared to resign if his bosses gave him any trouble. Anu’s recovery was agonizingly slow and painful to watch. Fortunately, she came round on the ninetieth day of her hospitalisation. But her memory of recent events had been completely obliterated. After conferring with Dr. Usha, Alex decided not to reveal anything about the baby’s death to Anu till she had recovered fully.

Many months had passed and Anu was slowly becoming her old self again. But Alex’s lips remained sealed.

***

Anu and Alex stood by the grave of their child. There was no one else around since it was very early in the morning. A sleek black crow flew overhead and crickets chirped intermittently in the thickets. Anu kneeled down and kissed the little tombstone on which moss had begun to trace an arabesque pattern.

Alex tried to fight back his tears.

“You know that dream I have been having,” she said to him in a firm voice.

“Yes.”

“I know what it means.”

Alex put a comforting hand over her shoulder.

“But I guess I won’t be startled in my sleep again,” Anu sounded like her mind was made up.

She had suffered a lot, but being deprived of the recollection of her loss was to her a fate worse than being reminded about the mishap till her death. Living in oblivion about the death of her child— a child she had no memory of carrying in her womb— was a disservice to its existence, however short it was.

A petunia with lots of blooms had shot up beside the grave. Its pink flowers brushed against Anu’s hips as she stood there feeling thankful for the grief that now inundated her soul. She fondled the funnel-shaped petals affectionately. They began to sway in the gentle wind as though overjoyed by her presence.