Infinite Night

My eyes were still shut, but I was fully awake. From the gentle rocking I could feel that I was in a vehicle of some sort, and I tried hard to remember where I was headed. Several minutes later, as I climbed out of my stupor, I looked outside, but could see nothing. It was pitch dark; no street lights, no signboards to give me the slightest inkling of where I was.

It looked as though I was in a horse cart from a century ago, but how it could actually travel on anything other than terra firma was really beyond me. I closed my eyes again, trying to recall whatever I could but nothing came through. My mind remained stubbornly blank, and I gave up when I found this was not helping matters at all.

All of a sudden a tree trunk with lots of branches but no leaves at all, whizzed past and then there was a cottage with a tiny flickering light some distance away from our path. I followed it with my eyes for a few seconds but not much longer because the cart appeared to be moving at great speed. There should have been a horse pulling the cart, but I could not see it because the only windows in the cabin were on the two sides, not in front.

The rocking movement had now considerably slowed, almost vanished – the only indication that I was now being carried much more slowly. There was still nothing to see outside, the inky blackness unbroken for miles together on every side.

“Don’t look down,” said a voice within my head, and within an instant, I glanced downwards into the dark. Way below was a room that looked like a hospital ward, in which a number of people were bustling about in great hurry, pushing hand carts and trolleys in every direction. In the center of the room was a person, lying flat on a table, draped in light blue, who seemed to be the center of all the activity.

As we came nearer, I could see the tense expression on all the faces, doctors and nurses in dull green overalls, peering at an inexplicable bunch of complex instruments, and talking animatedly with each other. There were a large number of tubes and other gadgets attached to the person.

Then it all came back. That person on the table was me!

In a flash, I remembered being wheeled into an operating room, scheduled for a heart bypass operation. The sonorous voice of the anesthesiologist telling me to count backwards and the overpowering urge to sink into a deep slumber – those were my last memories before I lost consciousness.

The horse cart continued to move, gradually picking up speed once again, and soon the mysterious hospital ward was left behind. Lights in the distance appeared more frequently, suggesting that we were approaching a town or village. But my thoughts were still with the puzzling scene that I had watched a little while ago. There was no sense of the passage of time, no way of knowing whether my journey until now had lasted several hours or just a few minutes.

We came to a halt at a single storied house that reminded me of my official quarters in my last job as a joint secretary with the government; soon afterwards, I had retired and moved to Kolkata. The house was lighted up from inside but the windows were frosted and nothing more could be seen. I found my way to a flight of steps at the end of which was a closed door. But as I began to climb the stairs, the steps began to lengthen endlessly, while the door stayed stubbornly out of my reach.

Finally, when I reached the door and knocked, I found my late wife barring my way. She was wearing the same sari that she wore when she was taken from our house for the last time. Standing just behind her was my son who had died of dengue when he was 33 years old. Both were smiling at me though it looked as though they were mocking me.

“Why don’t you let me come inside?” I asked.

“Because you have not done the right things in your life; you have left my son in the lurch although he looked after you for many years,” my wife said.

“No I didn’t. He has enough to let him happily for the rest of his life,” I replied.

“Why did you give his house away to other people?” this was my son, who had now moved a little bit forward to stand next to his mother.

“They were your wife and daughters! How can you describe them as other people?”

“After I came here, she married someone else, and adopted his name. Even the children don’t carry our family name any more. And yet you gave them huge amounts of money, funded their college education and helped her buy a house much bigger than yours!”

“But how do you know all that? It was after both of you had left the world.”

“We can see everything in the past and in the future. For us, there is no beginning and no end,” my wife said, joining the argument, once again. She began scratching the front of her head, just beyond the parting of her hair, just as she used to do, when she was agitated with life.

“But your brother also hurt both of us far more than you can ever imagine. He married someone without our consent, and rejected the girl we had selected for him,” I argued.

“And to make up for that, she gave up her job and career to look after you. Even now, she is sitting outside the operating room waiting for you to come out. Take a look,” my wife added. I peered down and saw her, a shadowy figure sitting alone in the darkness.

“Besides that, he and his wife treated me very badly after you went away. They would not talk to me for weeks and months, and rarely sat with me for dinner. Most days, I would eat my meals alone. Then they tried to poison the mind of my grandson, so that he would hate me,” I said.

“They would stop talking to you when you quarreled with them, trying to control their lives as though they were still children. And whenever he clashed with you, it was always on the behalf of his wife or his son. He gave them the kind of support that you gave neither me nor your children. That is why they are devoted to him,” my wife pointed out. It was quite clear that even after catering to her whims and fancies for an entire lifetime, she had still not been contented with me. Meanwhile, a cold wind had started blowing outside, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to stand on the steps and continue the argument.

“So what should I do now?” I asked.

“Go back and destroy the original copy of your will before she discovers it. She must never know that you had changed in her favor,” my son said.

“And make a new will that makes my son the sole owner of that house. Otherwise you shall be reborn as a pet dog and my grandson will be your master,” my wife said.

I winced. The one thing I did not want was to spend another life in that household.

I turned back and spotted the horse cart in which I had come, and waited patiently for it to start moving. As it approached the hospital, it headed straight for the operating room, and slowed to a crawl several feet above it.

The supine figure was still lying on the table. My soul entered the body, and I waited for the doctors to complete their job. Just before I did so, I found my wife and son standing just next to the horse cart.

Very slowly, as I regained consciousness, I felt myself breathing; then stopped short as a pain hit the side of my chest. My throat felt swollen, as if something had got stuck in it, but I was powerless to swallow it or vomit it out. All of a sudden, the thing stuck in my throat came out of my nose and everything was clear.

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was that my elder son and his wife were standing next to the bed, waiting for me to recognize them.