Page 111 - Till the Last Breath . . .
P. 111

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?’
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