Page 188 - Till the Last Breath . . .

read it cover to cover. Always a quick reader, he had an advantage in all the

examinations he took for hopeful CAT aspirants. Questions on long essays
were his strength.
He started reading the book. Just after the first few pages, he saw the

book was heavily underlined, sometimes with more than a single
fluorescent stroke. It was a book written by a seventy-year-old man’s

student who was seeing his teacher slowly dying of ALS or Lou Gehrig’s
disease, on how he coped with the affliction as slowly, every bit of his body

became paralysed, shrivelled and useless. ALS stands for amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis, but she had cut those words out and replaced them with her

own version—Always Live Strong, followed by a smiley. With the flip of
every page, he got more anxious and started to put the pieces in place. Pihu
had told him she was losing sensation and that it was nothing serious. She

was lying! Instead, she was dying. He wiped the beads of sweat from his
brow as the old man in the book got weaker, now not even able to eat on his

own. He had a pipe inserted into his abdomen and his legs had shrunk to the
size of a kid’s. The last days of the old man were painful—his muscles were

wasted, he had bedsores, he had pipes for food, for excreting and for
breathing. One day, he slipped into a coma and two days later, he died.

Dushyant’s heart sank. His eyes glazed over and the guilt of being rude to a
dying girl came crashing down on him.
The book couldn’t have been a coincidence! It was underlined and there

were tiny coloured slips on pages where the disease of the old man had
progressed. What did they take her away for? Maybe there was a treatment

now. After all, the book was written years ago and a lot had changed since
then. Surely, there was a cure now. Frantically, he seized his cell phone and

searched for any information he could google about the disease. Blood was
sapped out of his face as he read more about ALS and he was aghast at the

unfairness of the whole deal. How could she die? She looked just fine. He
forgot about his own pain and felt terrible for her.
All of a sudden, everything that had happened between them played out

in a slow, excruciating replay and he felt crushed for having treated her the
way he had. He had chastised, been rude to, disparaged and insulted a dying