Page 91 - Till the Last Breath . . .

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Zarah Mirza

Zarah woke up that day with a severe back pain and a blinding headache. If

medical school was tough, working in a hospital was a nightmare. While
hers was a 24/7 job, all her friends were now engineers and management

graduates with jobs that ended at six in the evening, allowing them enough
time to get sloshed, act silly and wake up in each other’s flats. Having said

that, hers was a satisfying job. Sometimes. Mostly, she was just
administering medicines. Being a doctor was tough; saving lives was a
different ball game. Often in medical school, she had wanted to quit and

aim to become a cosmetic surgeon. Or a dentist. Something that wouldn’t
put anyone’s life in her hands. There were no holidays or margins of error

in her profession. Other people’s sick days were her working days. She felt
guilty for thinking the way she did. She had not become a doctor for
making people beautiful but to relieve them of pain and suffering. But she

was too damaged herself for that responsibility.
She swallowed a couple of aspirins from the rapidly depleting bottle on

her bedside. Alcohol had been a steady companion for the last few years.
Over time, the sleeping pills had stopped working and doctors stopped

prescribing them to her, calling it a worsening addiction. No matter what,
she never visited a psychiatrist for her problem. Her hatred for men had

only aggravated as the years passed by and she could see the perverse,
animalistic instinct in their eyes every day. It was odd that she was at ease
with Dushyant, the patient with the liver disease. His eyes were cold and it

didn’t feel as if he was trying to despoil her in his head. He was one of the
few men by whom she didn’t feel threatened. Maybe it was because he was

weak and dying.