Page 207 - Till the Last Breath . . .

‘Umm … Hi. How are you?’ she responded. Still so sweet!

‘I am good. The medicines seem to be working for now,’ he lied. ‘How
are you?’
He wanted to ask her why she had come to the hospital but didn’t know

how to approach the topic.
‘I am good, too. I came to the hospital that day,’ she said. Phew! ‘You

were sleeping, so I ended up talking to your roommate. Pihu.’
‘Yes, she told me. I wish I could have seen you,’ he replied. He wondered

if it showed his vulnerability, but he was allowed to be so. He was dying,
after all.

‘I wish so too,’ she said.
‘Can you come over?’
‘Now? Are you sure?’

‘Can you?’
There was silence on the other side. An unending, torturous time between

when he finished and she responded. He didn’t know why he had asked her
to come over. Was it because he had just seen Pihu come back smiling from

a date? Did he want the same? As he weighed the possibilities of his
womanlike proposition, Kajal said she would be there in a bit. He did a

happy little dance in his head. For the first time since he had come to the
hospital, he got up from his bed, dragged himself to the washroom and
looked at himself in the mirror. I hate myself. He hadn’t shaved in days, but

that wasn’t the only problem. Over the last month, he had lost a lot of
weight and he no longer looked the guy whose bench press had touched 190

pounds in his bodybuilding prime. He even tried flexing his biceps in the
mirror but a skinny arm stared back at him. No more of that protein-

supplement-pumped, steroid-injected-in-the-bum bloated hands that would
scream out of his XL-sized yet tight T-shirts. He shaved. Washed his face.

Twice. Still looked as bad as he did before. Exasperated, he even washed
his face with Pihu’s strawberry-flavoured facewash, which left his skin
surprisingly fresh.

He walked back to his bed and started to count time backwards. It hadn’t
been long when the door was knocked upon and Kajal walked in. In a blue