For those friends who asked,
fo' a murder tale gruesome and grim,
'ere, have your fill, and while at it,
acquit me for a fancy whim!
It was cool that October night, unusually so, for even Dusshera had not been celebrated yet. It is one of the two things I remember most vividly from that night - the cold like a slow setting of yogurt, a gradual chilling of limbs progressively unable to move; and the scent of lemon. The windows of the ward had been open, and uncurtained for the most part, so through the grime of the unwashed panes and the obscuring tangle of wires outside, we could still glimpse the dusty trees of the nursery across the hospital wall. We were lucky in ward 54 that way, to have something other than walls and roads and other windows to look at, a view.
The last round was over, later than usual, owing to the unexpected bleeding in the last surgery. Well, perhaps that should have been anticipated, that bleeding, for it was a massive tumour, and it was, after all, right next to the IVC, but that is neither here nor there. But that was not in ward 54, and technically, not a murder. The only relation it had to this story was this - it had made the consultant late. And so the evening round had been one long torture for all: the junior consultants, the residents, senior and junior, and those clinging to the lowest rung of the ladder - the interns. Perhaps it was his way of atoning for the death in the OT, or perhaps he was just too tired to make judgements and decisions quickly. Or, if the rumours were true, he could just have been trying to avoid facing his wife who was said to have found out about his girlfriend. Who knows? At any rate, it was well past nine when the procession left the ward, the single assiduous intern leading her group of straggling slothful comrades as a sort of giant full stop at the end of a moving sentence.
Like I said, it was a cool night. As soon as the doctors left, the ward nurses sprang into action, trying to catch up to their evening routine. You know the drill. Their rounds were, if anything, worse than the ones that preceded them, all full of injections and medicines and thermometers and so on. Whether the autumn chill lent an extra vim to their movements, I couldn't say, but it certainly made them deviate from that routine enough to insist on closing the windows. It was not an easy task, mind you. I expect the matron would have, in the ordinary course of events, got someone to oil the hinges within the next fortnight, before the windows needed to be closed nightly, but this level of frigidity was unseasonal, and therefore, dangerous. There was quite a bustle that night. As the wardboy went about laboriously pulling the shutters close, complaining against the rust and dust while raising clouds of each in equal measure, he managed to provoke a couple of patients into coughing fits. Oxygen cylinders and their festooning tubings were brought in by others just as the dinner trolley arrived (late, and much awaited despite the horrendous food it brought) and while these two narrowly avoided collision, someone managed to topple a bedside table on which had stood a pitcher full of water. Naturally this called for more staff, for cleaning up. It wasn't anyone's fault really, that while the spill was being mopped up on one side of the bed, the nursing aide on the other side stepped on a banana which had somehow managed to roll or slide across from under the bed. His glide across the ward width was stereotypical, ending in a forced landing on his bottom, which was good for his health, but unfortunately, not for his dignity. He called the cleaner a moron for not being able to clean, and in turn was accorded other names, and if the relatives and nurses had not intervened, there would have been rather a spectacle for the patients to watch. Both staff members were removed from the scene expeditiously, however, as the night matron arrived on her rounds. No matter what they might have thought of each other, neither cared for a ticking from the strict superintendent, so when the dust settled after her round, the ward was getting ready to sleep, apparently at peace with itself.
But death always delights in hospitals, choosing, as it were, which delicacy to quaff today, and tomorrow. When you are a patient, you live with it, hoping it won't be your turn today, tomorrow, or the day after and being thankful when it isn't. Illness at least has a reason, a kind of logic to explain that quenching of breath. Not so murder.
Plates had been cleared away, medicines dispensed and blankets distributed to those who wished for more. The lights were dimmed, curtains drawn, and only a single nurse now remained visible with a stack of registers while her colleagues withdrew for their own meal. Patients were beginning to doze, albeit with difficulty because the attendant of bed 9 had a tendency to snore. The bright industrious intern popped in with her own register and sat with the nurse for a while before making her private round of the ward. But she did not disturb the night, quietly touching a hand or feeling for a pulse before moving on, and so the ward sank deeper into slumber. Even the midnight recording of pulse and temperature and blood pressure, so annoying a habit otherwise, somehow was easier tolerated this night. The night was still, and cool, and smelled of lemons...
For in the frenzy of activity earlier, one window had either been forgotten, or had swung open again after being closed. Being at the far end of the ward, there was no patient nearby to complain of a draught, and a dark wind blew the scent of lemons from heaven knows where. Certainly the nursery opposite had no blossoming lemon that we had seen. No light was on in that part of the ward. Shadows merged into shadows, and if there was one shadow more active than the others, that moved not with the wan moonlight but free of it, no one saw it. The hours ticked on.
They say it is toughest to stay awake at 4 am when you are on night duty, and it is true. That is when the night work is done, the morning work prepared for, and with no adrenaline rush to prop it up, the body slumps, craves sleep. And so it was that those who should have been awake were asleep too, uncomfortably perched on chairs and heads hanging at odd angles or cradled on tables, and there was not one witness to the grisly suffocation of that poor innocent.
In the end, it was just the wind, that rising evil black wind, which called attention to what the night had wrought. As the far end window pane shuddered and smashed into the sill, the sounds merged into one another. The roar of the wind, the distant thunder, the banging of the windowpane, the sharp shattering of its glass and the girl's scream.
A little away from the centre of the ward, just beyond the pool of light that had illuminated the central nurse's desk, lay the limp body, and, perhaps that was a small pool of blood near the throat.
The entire ward was awake now, startled, shocked, stunned, hearts racing from the scream that had dragged them away from dreams and slumber. Tousled heads turned towards each other, wondering, asking, questioning. And yet it felt like nobody moved, that the whole ward was frozen. Fingers pointed till one by one, till their lines of sight tautened like spokes around a single point in the ward: the girl who had screamed.
It was only she who stared still at the floor, and when she spoke, she broke the shell of stillness that had appeared to envelop everyone. With outrage and disgust in her voice, she exclaimed, "Who killed that cat in the ward?"
fo' a murder tale gruesome and grim,
'ere, have your fill, and while at it,
acquit me for a fancy whim!
It was cool that October night, unusually so, for even Dusshera had not been celebrated yet. It is one of the two things I remember most vividly from that night - the cold like a slow setting of yogurt, a gradual chilling of limbs progressively unable to move; and the scent of lemon. The windows of the ward had been open, and uncurtained for the most part, so through the grime of the unwashed panes and the obscuring tangle of wires outside, we could still glimpse the dusty trees of the nursery across the hospital wall. We were lucky in ward 54 that way, to have something other than walls and roads and other windows to look at, a view.
The last round was over, later than usual, owing to the unexpected bleeding in the last surgery. Well, perhaps that should have been anticipated, that bleeding, for it was a massive tumour, and it was, after all, right next to the IVC, but that is neither here nor there. But that was not in ward 54, and technically, not a murder. The only relation it had to this story was this - it had made the consultant late. And so the evening round had been one long torture for all: the junior consultants, the residents, senior and junior, and those clinging to the lowest rung of the ladder - the interns. Perhaps it was his way of atoning for the death in the OT, or perhaps he was just too tired to make judgements and decisions quickly. Or, if the rumours were true, he could just have been trying to avoid facing his wife who was said to have found out about his girlfriend. Who knows? At any rate, it was well past nine when the procession left the ward, the single assiduous intern leading her group of straggling slothful comrades as a sort of giant full stop at the end of a moving sentence.
Like I said, it was a cool night. As soon as the doctors left, the ward nurses sprang into action, trying to catch up to their evening routine. You know the drill. Their rounds were, if anything, worse than the ones that preceded them, all full of injections and medicines and thermometers and so on. Whether the autumn chill lent an extra vim to their movements, I couldn't say, but it certainly made them deviate from that routine enough to insist on closing the windows. It was not an easy task, mind you. I expect the matron would have, in the ordinary course of events, got someone to oil the hinges within the next fortnight, before the windows needed to be closed nightly, but this level of frigidity was unseasonal, and therefore, dangerous. There was quite a bustle that night. As the wardboy went about laboriously pulling the shutters close, complaining against the rust and dust while raising clouds of each in equal measure, he managed to provoke a couple of patients into coughing fits. Oxygen cylinders and their festooning tubings were brought in by others just as the dinner trolley arrived (late, and much awaited despite the horrendous food it brought) and while these two narrowly avoided collision, someone managed to topple a bedside table on which had stood a pitcher full of water. Naturally this called for more staff, for cleaning up. It wasn't anyone's fault really, that while the spill was being mopped up on one side of the bed, the nursing aide on the other side stepped on a banana which had somehow managed to roll or slide across from under the bed. His glide across the ward width was stereotypical, ending in a forced landing on his bottom, which was good for his health, but unfortunately, not for his dignity. He called the cleaner a moron for not being able to clean, and in turn was accorded other names, and if the relatives and nurses had not intervened, there would have been rather a spectacle for the patients to watch. Both staff members were removed from the scene expeditiously, however, as the night matron arrived on her rounds. No matter what they might have thought of each other, neither cared for a ticking from the strict superintendent, so when the dust settled after her round, the ward was getting ready to sleep, apparently at peace with itself.
But death always delights in hospitals, choosing, as it were, which delicacy to quaff today, and tomorrow. When you are a patient, you live with it, hoping it won't be your turn today, tomorrow, or the day after and being thankful when it isn't. Illness at least has a reason, a kind of logic to explain that quenching of breath. Not so murder.
Plates had been cleared away, medicines dispensed and blankets distributed to those who wished for more. The lights were dimmed, curtains drawn, and only a single nurse now remained visible with a stack of registers while her colleagues withdrew for their own meal. Patients were beginning to doze, albeit with difficulty because the attendant of bed 9 had a tendency to snore. The bright industrious intern popped in with her own register and sat with the nurse for a while before making her private round of the ward. But she did not disturb the night, quietly touching a hand or feeling for a pulse before moving on, and so the ward sank deeper into slumber. Even the midnight recording of pulse and temperature and blood pressure, so annoying a habit otherwise, somehow was easier tolerated this night. The night was still, and cool, and smelled of lemons...
For in the frenzy of activity earlier, one window had either been forgotten, or had swung open again after being closed. Being at the far end of the ward, there was no patient nearby to complain of a draught, and a dark wind blew the scent of lemons from heaven knows where. Certainly the nursery opposite had no blossoming lemon that we had seen. No light was on in that part of the ward. Shadows merged into shadows, and if there was one shadow more active than the others, that moved not with the wan moonlight but free of it, no one saw it. The hours ticked on.
They say it is toughest to stay awake at 4 am when you are on night duty, and it is true. That is when the night work is done, the morning work prepared for, and with no adrenaline rush to prop it up, the body slumps, craves sleep. And so it was that those who should have been awake were asleep too, uncomfortably perched on chairs and heads hanging at odd angles or cradled on tables, and there was not one witness to the grisly suffocation of that poor innocent.
In the end, it was just the wind, that rising evil black wind, which called attention to what the night had wrought. As the far end window pane shuddered and smashed into the sill, the sounds merged into one another. The roar of the wind, the distant thunder, the banging of the windowpane, the sharp shattering of its glass and the girl's scream.
A little away from the centre of the ward, just beyond the pool of light that had illuminated the central nurse's desk, lay the limp body, and, perhaps that was a small pool of blood near the throat.
The entire ward was awake now, startled, shocked, stunned, hearts racing from the scream that had dragged them away from dreams and slumber. Tousled heads turned towards each other, wondering, asking, questioning. And yet it felt like nobody moved, that the whole ward was frozen. Fingers pointed till one by one, till their lines of sight tautened like spokes around a single point in the ward: the girl who had screamed.
It was only she who stared still at the floor, and when she spoke, she broke the shell of stillness that had appeared to envelop everyone. With outrage and disgust in her voice, she exclaimed, "Who killed that cat in the ward?"
