Page 143 - Till the Last Breath . . .

you.’

She listened closely, waiting for her father to give more away.
‘I will tell you more about it later. I think you should go sleep now before
my son-in-law comes in!’ her dad joked.

‘Yeah, he can be a pain in the butt,’ she smirked and closed her eyes. Her
mind started to concoct images of her getting married to Arman in a huge

marriage banquet hall with all her friends and relatives lit up like Diwali in
their sequined saris, mixer-juicers and enveloped money in hand. In a red-

and-gold saree, she thought she looked resplendent while Arman looked his
dapper self in a white bandgala, tailored with golden thread. She wished.

Oh, how she wished! With dreams of a lovely, romantic honeymoon in the
bluish-green waters of Malé, which she remembered from the holiday-
package pamphlets, she went to sleep. For the first time, she fantasized

about kissing a boy and clutched her pillow tighter.
When she got up a few hours later, she saw her father pacing in the room

excitedly. The surprise?
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked groggily.

‘Nothing, nothing,’ he answered and smiled broadly. On the next bed,
Dushyant, who had been heavily sedated since he broke his arm, was

grunting in his half-asleep state. She couldn’t wait to tell Dushyant it was
she who had found out about his cadmium poisoning. After all, it was her
first diagnosis. After her own, of course.

Just as her father sat down, tired, the door of the ward opened and ten
familiar faces with big smiles came in, and crowded the tiny room. They

shouted Pihu’s name in unison and hurrayed. Seeing her friends from the
medical college again opened the floodgates of the happiness hormone in

her and she felt her heart would pump out of her chest. She hugged them
one after the other, Venugopal being the last one. He had the biggest smile,

and the most crushing grief behind the misleading eyes. They had not come
empty-handed. Similar rectangular boxes wrapped in yellow Pikachu
wrapping paper. Some of them carried helium-filled balloons which were

now kissing the ceiling and she wondered when they would come down