I lay there with my eyes open, almost stiff as a corpse, quite aware of my nakedness beneath the white sheets which smelled faintly of lime. The white sheets weren’t completely white anymore; they were in fact red, and quite wet, soaked in my blood.
“Systolic 56, Diastolic 44, his blood pressure is falling Doctor!” exclaimed a female voice.
Many machines were beeping and droning at my bedside, some with colorful displays on their monitors. The machines had spread their thin tentacles all over my torso, and even extending a few down my legs. I could feel a cold sensation at the spots where they touched my skin.
“Look at this cardiogram, his heart has stopped beating!” said a male voice.
Soon two faces were bending over me. They were staring at me worriedly.
My left hand was resting on my chest, bandaged with a white gauge that had turned quite red. I tried to raise my right hand, the one that carried a band with “Patient Number 2051874532” written on it, but I simply couldn’t. They had pinned it down and had punctured its veins with syringes- one of them was connected to a pipe which fed in blood, and the other to some colorless liquid- saline or glucose perhaps. The fluids from the bottles were trickling down drop by drop into the pipes, and then down their entire length into my veins. I could feel my body gluttonously gulping down every drop of blood and the liquid. I tried to say something, but couldn’t even part my lips.
“His heart has stopped beating!” repeated the nurse anxiously. I could now see her round face, the two small shiny eyes on it, and the dilated cave-like nostrils of her little nose. I could finally recognize her. It was the same pig-faced nurse that I had seen in the doctor’s chamber previously.
I blinked.
“Oh look, he blinks! He is alive!”
“Is the machine working?”
“Check the pressure”
“The ECG shows his heart isn’t beating”
“Get the Doctor. Quick.”
I could see many creatures, dressed in green clothes and white apron, some with blue caps, gloves and ear-loop masks, running around me frenetically, and some of them occasionally stopped by to take a peep at me, as if I was some interesting animal lying there. Interesting indeed! An animal that is alive, but whose heart isn’t beating!
I lay there, turning the sentence over and over in my head: “My heart has stopped beating…My heart has stopped beating…”
However I won't say that I felt alarmed or afraid of an imminent death. Actually it didn’t even surprise me a bit. I knew that my heart had stopped beating a long time back, in fact many years back. Perhaps I could probably be best described as a ‘heartless’ person. I had locked up all my human emotions in some dark corner of my heart, and then deliberately lost the key to that inner chamber. That was the day when love and faith had deserted me; and that was the very day when my heart had actually stopped beating for me. Everything from then on has been ugly, hideous, and nightmarish. Everything! Yes, everything and everyone!
Yet there was a time, I remember, when the sight of slightest plight and suffering would move me deeply; my heart would thump frenziedly against my chest, making my mind heavy with grief till pristine drops of tears swelled up in my eyes, wetting my eyelashes, and crowding at the corners before rolling down the pale cheeks.
But I never cried since then. I had always been able to absorb the severest of all misery and torture without letting a single drop of tear escape my eyes. I became ruthless to an extent that I could even laugh at other’s misfortune- that actually entertained me; almost gave me a fresh breeze of life. I had loved to see others suffer; suffer the same way I had once. I held them all responsible for my lifelong pain.
I looked down and saw the pig-faced nurse busy in removing the suckers of that octopus-like machine from my body, carelessly tearing away tufts of hair as she removed the tapes and bandages. Soon I could see the lights on the overhead ceiling appearing and receding fast from my view; they were wheeling me down the corridor to another room. The fat pig-faced nurse was running on my side, panting for breath, and looking back at times to catch a glimpse my blank eyes. Another doctor and a nurse were running on the other side, pushing the bed. The bottles were hanging from a tall bedside stand, and they swayed and occasionally clanged with each other. I saw hazy figures moving aside to clear our way.
I could suddenly hear the scream of a newborn at a distance. That terrible, wretched wail! The wail seemed to shatter the peace of my hour of death. I could clearly imagine that mean, little, ungrateful creature emerging out of nine months of darkness, bringing upon its mother as much pain as it possibly could, deliberately withholding itself from coming out, and then later on trying to earn everyone’s affection with inane, charming smiles. I could picture its small body, still mottled with its mother’s blood; its round red face, with two slits and two little nostrils, and a large open mouth with which it cried and wailed menacingly, announcing joyfully its existence in this wretched world, and defiantly throwing around its clenched fists and legs in thin air as if preparing itself for the forthcoming struggles for survival in this world.
I had always hated to live, and perhaps that’s why I also hated those who were alive, and those who bring forth more life on this planet in an effort to perpetuate this disgusting human race. I recalled with horror the sight that I had witnessed when they brought me to the hospital by force. I had kicked and fought with the doctors in the ambulance. They had then kept me tied to the bed with belts to prevent me from escaping. They probably thought I was mad. But they never realized that the very sight of sick people coming to hospital for cure repelled me the most. They had sedated me with injections and brought me inside the hospital lobby, where much to my disgust, I came across a horde of wrinkled, old people, scurrying about in wheelchairs, earnestly waiting to be cured. These senile creatures were breathing only to cling onto life with a never-ending desire to live on forever.
Thereafter while I was passing by the maternity ward, I saw something that was even more repulsive. There were mothers sitting on the bed and feeding their newborn babies. The newborns were clinging onto their mother, greedily sucking tasteless milk down their throat, and to me they seemed to be growing bigger and fatter every moment. There were hundreds of them, suckling on like leeches, getting larger and stronger. 'Disgusting creations of Satan,' I had shouted aloud like a madman, and they had hurled me off into a doctor’s chamber where I met that fat pig-faced nurse. She is a bitch, a real one. She had given me some injection that had left me unconscious -completely defenseless against their aggression on my body. She had laughed when I was shouting and yelling with pain- the pain that was entirely mine, and only mine to bear. Nobody had ever got to understand or feel my pain, yet some of the more treacherous ones would try to sympathize, or even show pity! To most of them I was a crazy fellow, a laughing stock. The doctors knew nothing about my pain, yet they wanted to perform some therapy on me; they thought they could cure me with medicines and surgeries! What fools they are!
But I had no wish to give the nit-wits a chance to experiment with me. After a while when they had left me alone, thinking that I was asleep, I had got up stealthily, and slit my left hand vein with a sharp object that I had found lying around in the room. I hadn’t cried. My stoic heart had felt no pain; I had just lain down on my bed, letting the blood gush out, and soon I had become unconscious once again. Those fools fortunately hadn’t got to discover me soon, and I was probably lying there, bleeding for a long time.
But now I could see many doctors buzzing around me like flies, desperately trying to save my life, or rather to make my heart beat once again. They were hurrying me down the corridor. The doctor on the side reached out for my right hand and tried to feel the pulse. “His heart isn’t beating” said someone from the back. I smiled secretly as I thought, “I am a man who is living but whose heart isn’t beating. I have finally escaped life, leaving it astound, outwitting the Machiavellian strategies that it must have laid out for my future. I can now live without ever having to be physiologically alive. I am not a part of the human race anymore; I am not a part of life anymore. Finally my mind is at peace, finally I am free!”
“Emergency. Move, move out of the way”
“No, his heart isn’t beating”
“Hurry, hurry, we can still save him”
I could see the lights of the corridor ceiling flashing by. Two anxious faces were staring at me, hoping that I will blink again. But I was too tired to play their games. I just lay there, stiff and still, with my eyes wide open, watching the ceiling above.
Light. Dark. Light. Dark. Light. Dark….
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