Chapter 2

2. The Sanatorium 

The old professor had known everything that was worth knowing by science, logic, and history. So stuffed was his brain with the things that he already knew that there was no space for another thing, not even the disease that he was going through. Consequently, he had remained coughing, bleeding, suffering for a lot longer than the need be, his pain not being strong enough to push him off of his  library, till he would collapse, at the end of every day. No book contained the cure for what the professor was going through, but now the books contained a complete case history, with his saliva on the Complete History of Indian Hill Rajas showing the early stages and the Principles of Steam showing where the going got tough and the Modern Sanskrit Dictionary containing samples where the disease had really hit its stride.

It was to him that Jeremiah went most often seeking for advice that he proffered willingly to his only student. 

“Do you think that the French Revolution has had an impact on the colonies?” 

“It’s too early to tell really” 

“Did you take your syrup?” 

“Ah, yes, I took the damned thing.”

“So how do you put the entire  Vaishnava traditions in the light of christian teachings” 

“If you look deeply enough, you find more in common than any robe clad jesuit or pony tailed brahman would care to admit.” 

“How’s the pain in the throat?” 

“It has gone raw and bloody with these empty coughs.”

“That tends to happen for a couple of days. Do you want my flower medicine?” 

“No, no need.” 

The professor was the only one who didn’t want the flower medicine-  as if he had accepted already that darkness which was to envelop him once he closed all his books and notes. 

“You know that they’d die? The flower’s analgesic effects would wear off and then death”

“It’s not going to be a hopeless death… all that I am trying to do here.”

“Men and their pointless hope” 

“When is you book going to be finished” 

“Hopefully before time” both of them laughed, probably for no reason. 

He would sit near the window, even when it was the coldest month of the coldest year and recite long forgotten texts of which he was the only source and only the coughs would interrupt his steady flow of diction that would be taken down by another patient, so that all the later works of the professor contained long streaks of “ahoo ahoo” that only a terminally ill patients would be sincere enough to put.

“There would be one flower that provides the cure. There is something out there. Easy now, easy” 

The professor’s coughing started again and he had to be laid on his bed, back to sleep. 

“Don’t go around wasting your time. There’s nothing that these flowers can do”

There’s a germ at the root of it that can only be buried when you are. 

 

A cough interrupted his speech, but Jeremiah signalled with his hand for the Samovar. The professor was sputtering blood, otherwise he would never have allowed them to put the flower tea in his mouth. As the hot contents went into his mouth, he coughed the warm, yellow stuff all over the place. The professor coughed again at the foolishness of the idea of a flower curing a disease and then kept on coughing till to his shame and embarrassment and to the utter surprise of Jeremiah, the cough stopped. 

The same process happened one by one to all the patients of the Hospital, sometimes even before the medicine had been administered to them, out of the sheer excitement and the inhalation of the vapours. 

The patients danced, sang and talked with great vigour, as if to compensate for all the years that they had lost to one night of festivity. Only Jeremiah remained aloof, thinking about what had just happened. 

Flush with dance and euphoria of recovery, Rosannah landed in front of Jeremiah drunk with her recovery. 

“Aren’t you going to ask me out?” Rosannah wasn’t the one to wait for an offer. 

“Do you think you’d be able to climb an entire hill?” 

“It is possible, yes. But are you talking about an actual hill or…?” Her giggles filled the corridor with a delight that this corner of the hospital wouldn’t know for years. 

They walked, hand in hand-going over the hill, through the meadows and into the forest where the cage lay. Jeremiah could feel each pore of his body lighting up with her presence. He told her about the forest, the birds, the little pathways and the grapes that he had planted. He talked until the pungent smell of death hit his nostrils. He could tell that it was a monkey that had died. Soon he saw it’s body on the trees, stuck there as if it didn’t even have time to fall. 

They walked in silence for the rest of the way, until they reached the wiry cage and went directly to the box in which he had stored his medical material. Shuffling around the box, he tinkered with it’s contents without speaking.

“Ahem… what happened?” 

“I am just thinking about the monkeys” 

“The ones you gave the tablets to?”

“Yes. They were fine till a week back and suddenly today, two of them died.” 

“Could be anything in the jungle”

“That’s what I am hoping that it is… but I won’t be certain until I can ascertain what the cause was and for that I need to check and … “ 

Jeremiah always lost his train of thoughts in presence of Rosannah. It was as there was something in her that transported all his thoughts to some other world. Rosannah came closer, closer to the various glass dishes on the shelf with small piles of red, yellow and green in them.  

“What’s this that you think that you’re doing?”

“This is nothing, I’ve segregated the different parts of the flower-to see what works” 

“What if what works isn’t just the flower, but the person who gives it” 

“You see, there’s a scientifically established way to do these things, precisely because of the reason that you just mentioned. People will have any number of assumptions that they’d make and its up to us to develop a method by which we can test those and…” 

Clink…. clink… clink… clink 

Rosannah walked barefooted, touching the vases containing the samples of the lung, each one of them with the part of a flower inside it.

“It’s as if you want to pay homage to every tiny bit of the disease”

Jeremiah looked up from his work, fully submerged into the eyes of the woman who could’ve drowned oceans had she looked at it with such furious interest. Her fingers lingered over each surface, teasing, taunting, without touching him. Her eyes were somewhere else, searching the edge of everything she touched. 

“Do you think I am not cured?” 

“No. Yes, I … I mean, the study has to go on for a while now and only then we’d be able to say if it has worked” 

“hahaha” Rosannah laughed and began humming, while she swirled around his small labortary. 

His feet were growing clammy with the effort of keeping them in their place when a storm was raging around him. To hold her, to be able to finally touch her lips, to be consumed by her…Jerry had dreamt of a day when all of it would be possible. It might just be possible now that she was cured, or at least she beleived she was. 

She picked up the tiny flower, its geometric petals arranged symmetrically against the circular middle and tiny brown tendrils emerging from its sides, like hair on the smallest possible scale. 

“What do you see?” 

“Nothing, just that I’ve seen this flower grow for years and I never once thought about eating it and this turned out to be the cure” 

“It’s not known for sure, yet. This might be a relapse, some sort of weather related change, a shift in the nature of the disease” 

“Jerry, it isn’t anything of that sort. You’ve legitimately invented a cure for an incurable disease… allow yourself a little pride” 

“What cure, what pride? I am a hoax for all I can tell. Iv’e cured no one. It was a flower that has eased your cough for now, but what if it has not cured anybody. I can’t bloody tell without one of you actually dying and if that happens, then I’d be wrong in any case. It’s a complete disaster, because I don’t know for sure, I can’t tell, can’t use my methods innit” 

“ How can you be so blind to what is in front of you. Those people, with all of their thankful faces and their cough gone. Don’t you think that it counts for something. At the very least you have a drug that helps them deal with the cough and die with dignity, which I hope would happen twenty, thirty years later.” 

“But they’d have died by that time already, even if they didn’t have the disease” 

“Exactly” 

The confusion in his eyes wasn’t confined just to the way in which she spoke to him, bold and without a flicker of reserve, but the way that she came forward and looked into his eyes- and then he realised something. Her fears had been cut away by the brutality of the disease. It was then and there that Jeremiah, who had not found an ideal way to fling his life away found the most beautiful peak that nature could’ve conjured to jump from, her lips. 

If the disease was still there, as he suspected it was, it would kill him too and having had overcome his fears about not having a proper death, Jeremiah kissed her back with a vigour that can come only for those who will never die. The monkeys cooed as they crushed the grapes under their weight and dared not come any closer to the cage even as the juices bursted out and trailed outside. They would wait for their time, they would wait in the trees and cough. 

The deaths at Kasmauli started happening 6 months after the night of the cure. They were as swift as they were brutal, the dead having no clue when the fatal hand of death would strike as they walked through their lives unharmed. Most of the patients had gone back home and another set of patients were undergoing the tea therapy, so it was unlikely that the ones who were getting cured would know about the fate of the alumnis. Jeremy knew, because he had been following up with each one of them and Jeremy knew that most of the 19 patients out there and the 2 sitting in the hospital still didn’t have much time. 

Sitting in the dark mortuary, with a lamp on his table and the slices of monkeys in glass bottles surrounding him, Jeremiah was lost in a thoughts. Rosannah’s ghungrus clinked on the stony floor as she arrived in the sanctuary to which Jeremiah had retired to. 

“What do you think you’d find by sitting here all night?” 

“There’s some truth to the unctuous sights, truth that I know not, there’s a germ that has gone blind, but lives on” 

“There you go again. What is it with you and your morbid poetry sessions. Do you want to enact the role of a doctor in front of these dead?” 

“Hahaha, hahaha, ha… you’re right. That’s what I’ve been doing so far.” 

Rosannah looked at him, hundreds of similiar conversations flashing in front of their eyes and the knowledge that this was going to be another one of those. She sat down besides him and joined him, staring at the dead monkey, still gleefully smiling through the glass jar as if death hadn’t been a bad thing at all. 

By December, Jeremiah was sure that Rosannah too would die. She would die at any given day and the only thing that he would be able to do for her was to be there with her, but he wasn’t. The more the realisation of her death hit her, the more maniacally he tried to find the reason that the monkeys were dying and so were the people his medicine was supposed to save. The more time he spent trying to prevent her death, the less time he had with her and the strain was tearing him apart. 

Days went by and the hospital still bloomed with patients, ready in unwavering lines to fill the coffers of the hospital with dead bodies to be spliced open and their cause of death to be recorded in neatly lined books. Jeremiah had stopped his experiments on the monkeys and now would administer different doses of the flower medicine on the patients. The medicine worked erratically, saving some completely and leading to the death of others, faster than what the disease would’ve done and so they continued-they continued to give the medicine and to study the dead. 

In life that is fraught with death, the tiny gestures meant a lot.  The hospital was viewed as an in between place between life and death, not entirely gruesome as heaven or not entirely beautiful as heaven, but a place that accommodated both the flavours-in case the travellers would be going either of the ways. And where they were situated on the crossroads of the entrance often determined where they went. 

There were the people who still moved and looked forward to talking with people and drinking endless cups of teas as they looked on at the mountains outside their windows, calming them, soothing them. The ones whose beds oversaw the morgue were so focussed upon their end that when their time came, it would be easiest to cut open their bodies, almost as if their skins had turned to paper- and so they were named the frails. In due course of time, despite everything that could go right, everyone became a frail. 

The frails who inhabited this place of incessant death had come more or less to terms with their fates. In the avowed resignation towards life, each one of them wanted only to be left alone, preferably in a stupor that precluded any fight, any desire to change things as they were- and all that the frails wanted, was to be lead in a clear line to the only thing that gave them relief from the certainty of death-opium. In processions that rivalled the religiosity of the Vatican or the mecca, these tourists upon earth waited for each of their turns with the designated Samovar and an outsider might have thought that they were praying when they stood in line. When there was no hope, when everyone knew that going to the hospital meant death, then the people focussed upon spending their last days in worship, in their arts, in rising above the need for life and fear of death- but now that there was hope, they could only think about the life they were about to lose. 

The dramatic effects of having your life shorn in some weeks, days or hours was that none of them were too interested in the world around them too much-even if it was that they were going to lose soon. In summers, as the sunlight filtered in through the sulphur infested mounds, it was as if the light had reached inside of some grave. It was able to illuminate with certainty only one face that had throes of life still in it and whose face was crimson still- Rosannah the alive. 

Rosannah’s songs hadn’t stopped even with the indescribable deliciousness of the hope that all of the patients had augured at the behest of the flowers. Her songs hadn’t stopped when the cure seemed to falter and fail and in each one of her songs, Jeremiah remained ceaselessly alive.