What can you do?
He comes back from the hospital
after the transplant, a chance at a second life, and you are afraid even to
smile, to show how happy you are in case you attract the wrath of the gods. The
post-op at home goes well, except you are still in the adrenaline-charged
ultra-vigilant mode after it has stopped being necessary. You are afraid to let
go of fear, that’s your comfort zone. The Lakshman Rekha beyond which you
haven’t ventured for a long, long time.
At first you don’t notice
anything different, if his manner is a shade brusque at times you think nothing
of it, attribute it to the cascading pain that's part of recovery. But as the
pain diminishes, the difference escalates. The way he brushes off your hand
tucking his sheet, the way he brushes off your suggestion of sitting in the
garden. But still, you make allowances. You are used to making allowances. That
too is within the Lakshman Rekha, well-trodden, familiar territory. You are
filled with a love that can forgive anything. You're too happy to sweat the
petty stuff.
But it doesn’t stop there. The
eyes on the pillow change subtly, a totally strange patina of roughness,
direct, bold, searing. They follow you round the room silently and you end up
feeling as if a hundred eyes were on you. They are on you those hundred-irises,
a weirdly red-eyed Indra, when you are upstairs on the terrace, or in the back
garden hanging out the laundry, even when you are in the bath. You feel his
eyes and suddenly turn around when you are out alone at the pharmacy one
morning.
He starts speaking a language
you’ve never heard before. The characteristic laid-back gentleness
is gone, its place taken by rudeness. The tone changes, peevish and complaining
at the slightest perception of ill-use. You have no idea what you have done to
deserve this behavior, the constant accusations of neglect. The brushing off of
your hand changes to a sharp smack one day as his strength improves. He shoves
you out of the way on another. In a fit of pique at some triviality he calls
you a name so offensive that you are stunned to silence. But
he denies it when you do speak up finally. Looks at you as if you are deranged.
You leave the room, he doesn’t
call you back. You cry yourself to sleep that night in the spare room for the
first time in years. For the first time you wonder if life before this was
better? Is a precarious, medical crises-ridden life worse than this stable
recovery and a future wrapped in roughness? Is this how a quarter century of
love ends?
He begins moving around
independently. At the follow up the doctors are pleased with progress. He
speaks like his old self in the consulting rooms and you feel you must have
imagined the whole thing. The atmosphere is so normal that you can’t figure how
to get the consultant alone, to broach the subject at all. You both drive back
home, in the car he criticises your driving nonstop, your tongue-tied demeanour
at the hospital. You can’t believe the change that happens in half an hour, a
complete flip.
You can’t believe it either when
you come upon him in the garden, holding a pair of secateurs, running his
finger along the cutting edge. He says you need to buy a new pair. You
don’t tell him that you got the odd-job man to buy one just a few weeks ago.
Days later he is in the kitchen sharpening the cleavers. He looks at them and
then looks at you and you don’t know what to think anymore. A new fear clutches
at you, fuzzy, unfamiliar, beyond the farthest borders of all the Lakshman
Rekhas you have ever known.
You stop crying yourself to sleep
in the spare room, you lock the door at night. You visit a friend and talk
about the problem in the vaguest possible terms. What if the donor was...a
certain sort? She looks at you quite baffled and you can’t bring yourself to articulate
anything more.
You finally find the courage to
call the doctor privately and are less reticent with her. But she too is
baffled. No, that’s impossible, she says in a tone that makes it clear she
thinks you’re the one who is slightly unhinged. She suggests counselling, she
knows this most discreet therapist you could consider. It’s stressful looking
after someone who’s been an invalid for so long, Mrs Sen. Call if you need
anything. Don’t stress yourself. Goodbye Mrs Sen.
At dinner he is more than usually
irritable, questioning your whereabouts. He yells at you, nags you for being
gone the whole evening when you weren’t. But you jump when he raises his voice,
your hands tremble while serving the vegetables. Your nerves are shot. He
smiles smugly as if the tremors prove your guilt.
“Who are you seeing, why are you
away so much?” he shouts and tears into the bread with unnecessary force, while
you sit there incandescent with fury and heartbroken at the same time.
“This is insane, Mohan!” you
barely manage to whisper.
He yells even louder at you. And
he’s saying the same thing as the doctor only much less politely. You are the
one who is insane, not him.
“No, it’s you Mohan. Stop
yelling, it’s bad for you. It’s you who’ve changed. Your heart has changed
towards me. I noticed it right after you came home,” you finally screw up the
courage to say it. And as soon as the words are out you feel calmer.
“You crazy woman! A heart
transplant doesn’t change feelings! What’s your game exactly?”
Yes, Mohan, it does. It has. They’ve put some unknown criminal’s heart into you and you’re
behaving just like one. Who knows the chemistry of transplants and what affects
behavior? The ancients thought the heart was the seat of reasoning and emotions,
the source of all life force. But you don’t say anything.
What can you do?
