Part 4 (1/2)

Each breath is an effort.

Every part of my body aches.

The air stinks of ammonia.

I push my heavy eyelids open.

Above me patches of paint peel off the ceiling.

Bandages scratch at my skin.

An IV tube sticks into my left arm.

I struggle to sit up.

”Let me do that for you. Lie back.”

A nurse starts cranking up the back of my hospital bed.

Against the wall, Ma sits dozing.

Beyond Ma, a glint of steel- a wheelchair.

Fear slices through my dull brain.

No. The wheelchair cannot be mine.

I see an ugly bulge under the sheet covering my legs.

Yank off the sheet with what's left of my strength.

My right leg ends in a bandage.

Foot, ankle, and nearly half of my calf, gone.

Chopped right off.

”No!” The nurse pulls my sheet back over the leftover bit of my right leg.

But I still see the nothingness below my right knee.

Ma jerks awake, leaps up from her chair, runs toward me.

Her eyes scared as a child's, she clutches the metal rail of my hospital bed.

”I'm so sorry,” she says.

”About everything.”

I turn my face away from Ma, away from the cold metal gleam of the wheelchair in this puke-green hospital ward.

Outside the window, I see the gnarled trunk of a huge banyan tree.

Its thick branches sprout roots that hang down s.h.a.ggy as s.h.i.+va's hair.

Wish I could slide out like a cobra.

Hide amid those unkempt roots.

”You were in a van,” the nurse says. ”The driver was speeding.

A truck crashed into the van and ran it off the road.

Your driver hit a tree. He died.

Remember any of that?”

A pipul tree's pale trunk coming closer and closer.

Screaming.

The smell of vomit and blood.

”Your surgeon, Dr. Murali, did all he could to save your foot.

He is a great surgeon.

He tried to save it but he had to amputate.

Your foot was too far gone.”