Page 187 - Till the Last Breath . . .

‘I think I need to sleep for a bit now. Thank you,’ he said.

‘My pleasure,’ she said and smiled.
She held my hand? He rubbed his hands together and looked at them and
even smelled them to find traces of her. Dushyant rolled over to the other

side and imagined what last night would have felt like had he been awake
and not been an asshole like the last time. He would have got to hold her …

maybe she would have cried, maybe not … Maybe she would have told him
she loved him, maybe not … Maybe she would have told him that

everything would be all right, maybe not. He scolded himself for thinking
the way he was. The only reason she had come back was because he was

dying. If not, then what had changed after two years of ignoring him and
acting like he didn’t exist? Two years of treating him like an outsider?
Maybe he deserved it, he thought.

He was absorbed in the concocted scenarios where the two of them
would be together, when the door was pushed ajar and three ward boys

walked in. He thought they were coming for him but they walked to the
other side and swiftly wheeled Pihu away. The knitted brows of the ward

boys and the stiff face of Arman who stood at the door made him anxious.
He wanted to say something, a part of him almost reached out to stop the

ward boys from taking her away but he couldn’t move. A terrifying feeling
gripped him; it felt as if he would never see her again. Pihu had just smiled
as they took her away. Restless, he looked around and fidgeted with the

tubes and the drips. Were they discharging her?
He tried to sleep to dull the pain in his body but it wouldn’t come to him.

The tense, edgy faces he had seen were still fresh in his head. He rolled
restlessly on his bed from side to side. He got up and, leaning against her

bed, started to sift through the books that Pihu had been reading. They were
stacked neatly on all the tables the small ward had to offer. Most of them

were as thick as his wrist and repulsed him. In the corner he saw a book, a
rather thin one, named Tuesdays with Morrie. With nothing else to do, he
picked it up and got back into his own bed. He was feeling better that day.

He could move around without passing out from the pain. The book was
hardly 190 pages and he knew it wouldn’t take him more than an hour to