Hari Hassan moves awkwardly in his hospital bed, and pulls out his intravenous drip by accident. The fluid splashes on the floor, and he looks at it with helpless irritation. They keep him on a drip because he doesn’t drink enough water – he tries, but he can’t. And so water seeps into him from one bag, and dribbles out of the tube inserted into his flaccid organ to another. The discomfort of the catheter is nothing compared to the unholy horror of moving his bowels; he feels envious of other patients with movements so loose that they can soil themselves in their sleep, and then get cleaned up like babies. Dying, like birth, is a messy, undignified business. ‘You piss in a bag and lose your mind, /Forgetting the ones you left behind,’ he thinks to himself. Doggerel verse comes to him so often now, he forgets what real verse is. He doesn’t write down these snippets of rhyme, as writing has become a physically arduous business; the posture it requires, the need for fine, repetitive hand movements which are now such a struggle for him to execute, the frustration as the pen scrapes and slides jaggedly on the paper; in his youth he had yearned to feel pain as he wrote, the anguished flame of genius as words were torn from his soul, and he had been disappointed that writing was so easy. Now he writes only from necessity; he writes letters to his son, or rather, the same letter, again and again, as his son has never yet responded; and the physical and mental distress of composing this letter, letting it burn in memory and rise like a phoenix, is a pain just as acute as the pain he had wished for when he was a young airman trying to craft his wartime experiences into luminous phrases, even more acute than that of his constipated bowels.
He lies to himself even in his doggerel – his writing has always been deceptive, not in a clever, academic way, it has just been taken for something other than it really was. It has occasionally even been insincere – when he wrote what he was expected to feel, rather than what he really did. He has lied just now because he hasn’t lost his mind, much to his regret, as losing his mind would make everything easier and him much less accountable. He imagines his mind as a persistently yapping dog, real enough for someone to throw a stick for it to chase: ‘Whose was that animal, which just ran out of here?’ Nurse might ask disapprovingly, and he would answer, ‘That old thing? That was just my mind. Don’t bother chasing after it. It’s happier out in the fresh air. I was hoping that some kind person might drive it into the forest, and lose it there. It wasn’t much use to me anyway.’ Although, of course, we never lose the things we want to lose, they linger and reek like dead bodies in the basement; Nurse will bring the mind-dog back, and chain it to his bed where it can’t escape. And the mind-dog, knowing that Hassan wanted rid of him, will look at him with doleful, resentful eyes, and continue to yap persistently, torturing him now subtly and now obviously, for his treachery. No, his mind remains in muscular good form; while the rest of him declines, stiffens, shrinks and fades.
Cancer, he thinks wistfully, cancer could have been quick. Aids, if he had refused the drugs, might have eaten his irritable mind into confetti. Alzheimer’s would have been gradual and provided absolution – he might have forgotten he had a son at all, and would have been freed from the guilt that this knowledge brought with it. A heart attack, so blissfully unexpected, a bolt of lightning, a benediction from the gods. A stroke, the first incapacitating, and then another, and then the final, deadly, stroke; if only he could whisper to Nurse to inject some air into his carotid artery, if only he had the means to make his murder worthwhile. All the ways he could have died, over the years, all the miracles that have kept him alive when worthier friends and rivals have passed on; he has survived a world war and Indian partition in the forties, years of civil unrest and then the civil war which led to Bangladeshi independence in the seventies. ‘We’re not dead yet,’ he had boasted to his best friend, Anwar Shah, some years ago, as though it were something to be proud of. If he had known what he would come to, he wouldn’t have been so smug. He would have jumped on a train line or walked under a bus, while he still had the wit and wherewithal to do it. In less than a year since his first diagnosis, he has gone from hale to helpless. On his admission to the hospital, following the drastic worsening of his condition with the full paralysis of his legs and the weakening of the muscles of his chest, he had hopefully signed a Do Not Resuscitate form, hoping that his next choking fit would be enough to finish the job, hoping that he might die swiftly from respiratory failure rather than waiting vainly for pneumonia to reach him in his antiseptic cell, but his son had rescinded it, suggesting that Hari Hassan was depressed and not fit to make the decision. His son paid the hospital bills, keeping Hassan in the luxury of a private room, and the administration agreed with his decision. Hassan was worth more to them alive than dead. He realized that his son intended to keep him as his private prisoner, as long as he naturally could, to extend his suffering as long as was legally viable.
Hari Hassan’s second lie was about forgetting; he hasn’t forgotten the ones he left behind. They are with him more urgently than anyone he sees on a daily basis, the nurse who changes his catheter and his sheets, the spicy-sweet scented Tamil woman who brings him his food and now mashes it, on advice, to avoid further choking fits, the elderly cleaner who clanks the bucket of disinfectant around, and who has so far not left it close enough for him to drink. His thoughts are with those who are missing; the son who has abandoned him, who once lisped with comic timing when no more than three years old, ‘Baba, you so funny, you so ridd-yik-ill-us!’ with an inexpert mastery of those last four English syllables that had made his heart swell with pride. His son Ejaz, his little Ejazzy-Jazz, who has grown up to loathe his father and write pulp fiction bestsellers in Singapore. Of the daughter he himself abandoned, over fifty years ago; when Nazneen died – they said it was eclampsia, but he had wondered later if they had simply killed her in the conveniently bloody aftermath of the birth out of familial shame – he had let them take the baby girl away, to be adopted, they said. He wondered if she had been quietly disposed of too, smothered softly, or sold into slavery or prostitution, or whether she really had been adopted, and had lived a good and happy life, had children of her own, and looked forward to dying of natural causes herself in a few decades, surrounded by friends and family. His thoughts are with Nazneen, whom he knew for just a year, his first and only love, with her unaffected laugh and her cigarette and her tailored man’s suit she wore as a costume; but he doesn’t think of his nervous, worthy wife, who devoted herself to him for almost thirty years, whom he looked after but neglected to love, before her death in a suspicious domestic blaze. Perhaps he deserves to be here. Perhaps, in the end, all men get what they deserve.
He presses the button by his bed for Nurse, and after a few moments she enters. It is the practical Malay one in her forties, whom he prefers to the sympathetic Chinese one in her thirties. ‘Selamat petang,’ she nods in greeting, and efficiently tapes back the drip. He likes the way that she doesn’t look at him, she just looks through him instead, as though he already wasn’t there. It gives him hope. ‘Apa khabar?’ she says in her crisp way, asking how he is, while making a note on his chart.
He sighs, and replies as she expects, ‘Khabar baik,’ although he is lying again, he is obviously anything but fine. He feels the urge to rebel, and annoy, and adds petulantly, ‘Saya tidak suka bilik ini.’ Complaining about his room, as though he had some choice in the matter.
‘So? You don’t have to like the room,’ responds Nurse in her native Bahasa, ‘It’s not a hotel. You’re here whether you like it or not.’
Hassan absorbs this insightful comment; in a few words she has summed up his predicament, and that of every other unhappy being on the planet. He had never had that economy of phrase when he was a writer. He’s here whether he likes it or not. ‘Nurse,’ he says, ‘I’d like to write a letter.’ Nurse rolls her eyes, but goes to his side, and props him up; he is as light and brittle as hollow wood, and she brings the tray to him, she presses a pen in his hand and places his hand above the paper. When she leaves, Hari Hassan scratches at the paper with intense discomfort; the letter, this same letter, changes in some details, but always ends the same way, with the same plea calling across the state border to the centrally located Singapore apartment where his son Ejaz lives and works. ‘Jazz,’ he will write, again, and again until he is heard, ‘we need to forgive each other. You need to forgive me. You need to let me go.’