Page 111 - Till the Last Breath . . .

Zarah smiled and motioned him to follow her. Together, they went to a

rarely used balcony on the sixth floor. Usually, patients want to get out of
the hospital as soon as they enter and don’t look for hang-out spots to
smoke. But Dushyant was different. The lack of direction or purpose

soothed him, made him feel unshackled. The need to get high and fucked up
ruled him.

Zarah took one of the rolled joints from his hands and lit it up. As the
pungent fumes snaked up from the smouldering joint and hid her face

momentarily, Dushyant stood there, ogling. The irritating girl’s words hung
uncomfortably in the air. The hot female doctor. With a lit joint in her hand,

a careless strand of hair wandering aimlessly around her face, she leant
dangerously close to the edge of the railing. An air of unabashed freedom
surrounded her.

‘You shouldn’t be smoking, should you?’ he queried. Zarah didn’t
answer; instead, she looked at the neon-lit city, her eyes already glassy from

the weed. She closed her eyes, let open the bun and allowed the breeze to
play with her hair. She took another long drag and let the smoke curl out

from her slightly parted lips. She is a regular smoker, he thought. Long
drags of a joint as potent as the one in her hand often made even old-timers

wheeze and choke. Not her.
‘Neither should you,’ she said and turned towards him. The joint was
working its way into her body. He could see it in her elegant and almost

sexual turns and the deliberate flips of her hand while managing the unruly
tufts of hair around her face. ‘You fought with her?’ she asked.

‘Her? Her, who?’
‘Oh, well. The girl who shares your room and the girl who came to see

you today,’ she answered. Another long drag. She wasn’t an amateur, even
by Dushyant’s standards.

‘I had my reasons,’ he said. ‘The girl in the next bed irritates me. She
behaves like a life coach. She fiddles with things, gets excited as if she has
just checked into a spanking new hotel suite and not a hospital ward. I can’t

stand her.’
‘And what happened with Kajal? The other girl?’