Poetic Stories

Twenty years have passed
Since I last wrote about her.
We are still alive, but feeble.
We still are like children, but old.
Our bond has passed the test of time.
We have survived the harshest nights.

She doesn’t get aroused by my touch.
Her kiss doesn’t get me excited anymore.
But it’s a warm blanket on a windy night.
It’s like a cool breeze under the fiery sun.
I don’t know if I still love her. I know I don’t
Like mad men, like the old days.

I wait for her as she got slow.
The sugar had got one of her kidneys.
She goes through dialysis time-to-time.
I wait outside, helpless, like a limbless man.
I was unable to do a thing for her.
It seemed like the time that we part.

I lose my high pressure pills, everyday.
I lose them, everyday, god knows where.
She knows that. She knows all,
All about my silly mistakes, my weird habits.
She knows my arthritis is worsening.
She knows where I kept my pills.

She would tell me, “Are you stupid?
You are getting more senile, every morning.
You always forget you are getting old.
You had to eat two samosas yesterday!
Now suffer, suffer with an upset stomach.”
She would hand me over an antacid.

Then one day she scared me,
She collapsed in the garden.
She was trembling and seemed paralyzed.
The neighbours rushed her to the ICU.
Doctors performed numerous tests.
Tests after tests, days after days, I waited.
No one let me visit her in the hospital.
They said, “We will keep an eye on her.
Uncle, you take care of yourself.”

How can I tell them, she was the reason
I am still alive? Without her
I can’t even tell the colour of my pills,
The headlines of Anandabazar Patrika,
The buttons on our washing machine,
Or, the safe way down the stairs.
I guess I’m finally the senile old man
That she kept mocking me for the last ten years.

I waited for days and weeks.
Finally she came back with a bald head.
We cried together. We hugged each other.
It was a cerebral stroke.
Yet she survived. To save me.
She thinks I am too fragile without her.

The next day we went to a seaside,
Like the day of our first honeymoon.
We sat on a beach and watched sunset.
Like the evening of our honeymoon.
It was the most beautiful end
Of the most beautiful day ever.

The next day under the most beautiful sunrise
There was an uproar in the empty beach
People gathered to see what has happened
Some people came and cried out loud
“Someone call the ambulance
I think the old couple is no more.”

We were still there lying hand-in-hand.
Our bodies intertwined like a maiden braid.

Please check the previous post The Bond We Shared (I) to know more about the characters. This is a continuation of their life after the previous post.