Chapter 1: Rosannah the Alive

Rosannah is living out her last days in the mountains and a doctor who can't save her, falls in love with her.

Chapter 1. Rosannah the alive

It was the year of the newest plague and there was a perpetual shortage of gravediggers, who could now ask for a price of their own making. The troops of England had not known the black cough enough, they hadn’t really been crowded so much as in bazaars of India, where a whiff of someone’s breath could kill you, the poison coursing through your lungs like the dendritic river that flowed in the plains, desiccating the entire landscape with its powerful fangs. 

Years later, they’d engrave on the graves of dead patients the dreaded two letters:  T.B. But for now, it was the plague of the lungs, worse than any black magic and the only solution that anyone had for it was the clean air of the mountains. And now the hill stations,  places built to be away from the crowds became the refuge of everyone who wanted to live�"except Jeremiah who had an eternal desire to die in the mountains�"and for a brief moment, Kasmauli became a bustling town with more British residents than the natives. 

Jeremiah served as the doctor, healer, guardian, companion of the worst breed of patients�"the fatally sick interned at the Kasmauli Hospital�"those who still had the energy to wind up there. The old crumbling building had hurriedly been readied and looked much more like an out-way house than a hospital. Large halls, lit by damp lamps housed the beds of the dying, dirty curtains hung all around the bed, for no other reason but to contain the spiralling cycles of coughing. Yellow mountains shone outside, immune to time and diseases and yet, they were all too busy dying. Only one face stood out…and it was all in her eyes.  

Rosannah shone through the dim hopelessness of the interiors, her radiant face shimmering with a kind of light that was reserved for saints who had had a glimpse of God. Her radiance put to shame the place where she was going to spend her precious last days and the people of Kasmauli realising the guilt that humanity owed to her, put incense and vermillion powder on the window and cried years after she had left the place, even as her songs still continued to be heard, out of the love they had for her. In her last days, people left her alone, as couldn’t see her die. Being too close to her would’ve turned them into Jeremiahs, a community of hopeless angels.  

Jeremiah didn’t care because everything that he had learnt as a doctor was going to fail him. He could not cure a disease that was going to kill someone he had given his heart to and he had decided that he would leave behind his legacy of prodigal healing behind in a romantic gesture and die with the same disease as Rosannah, so that at least her germs would live inside of him for some time before he too died. No one could tell that she had only two weeks to live. No one could say that death was something that could even come to her, even as she was interred into the yellow chamber that was reserved for those who would now go directly to their graves.

She was pure fire contained in a translucent skin with eyes so transparent that you could get burnt by looking into them. He was the last person she had seen before they put her back into the chamber with the rest of them, all dead for all real purposes. It was inevitable somehow that whosoever entered that chamber should come back dead. And so, it was obvious that her clothes had already been taken by the maids who stood outside the glass room with the yellow wallpaper and yellow mosquito nets and yellow patients; the universal colour of consumption that permeates its surroundings like faded plaster. 

He was fixated by the verity in her eyes. For the longest time, as he had observed her in his professional capacity as the keeper of the ward and the frontline researcher of the plauge, he genuinely believed that either she had no reason to be there or that there were only six weeks left in her. It was most simply the only explanation that would fit with the happiness that left in dizzying waves, from her smile, the way that she held up her head, the way she walked, the way she spoke; the way that she was … all of it was at odds with the role of the dying patient, who was supposed to lie down and berate their luck for catching in air some random droplet that had that one strain of bacteria amongst trillions which would kill you in the most miserable way possible. She in turn loved the sad man who always forced a smile on his face whenever he encountered death. 

They met usually at the door, obviously, as she stood behind the heavy glass that was held in its place with the wax derived out of honey bees, so that whenever they met, they felt that were tasting honey. The others were jealous at first, for she was the one who was receiving all of the attention of the doctor. But then later, as the life left their bones and she remained the only radiant creature around them, they slowly made way for her, the only life that was going on around them. She was the queen of the resigned women, if only because she didn’t believe that she would die with her songs still in her. 

Rosannah sang, with a voice so powerful that it forced the sun to rise each day. The hills thirsted for her notes each morning like the dew that gave life to the plants, she gave life to those mountains. Those were the only things to look forward to in a world that had given in to yellowed despair. 

The yellowed door that gave access to the denizens of both the worlds had become discoloured with the hands, the breaths and the medical effluents that tried to cross over, from the glass door to the other side, but never did. Patients stared at the world they were offered, the glum, yellowed universe that had been kept for some other people to stay in and enjoy. Their balconies were different and opened directly into the mountain air�"the cold, piercing, rich air�"that was touted as the only cure. It was the yellow room to which they had been confined and would have to stay, for the good of those outside who hadn’t yet been cursed with the disease that they had. Of those who could go freely in and out, only Jeremiah stayed for long in the hospital and he did so with the memories of the sunsets he walked for miles to see whenever he wasn’t at the hospital.