JUNE 10th - JULY 10th
“What’s her name?” cried the doctor as he stepped inside the hospital room, rushing to move the nurse away, getting hold of the patient’s chart, running his eyes through the heart-rate, her pulse, meanwhile his other hand firmly holding the stethoscope, his ears straining to listen.
“Darling Rose.” The nurse said, clearly nervous, she still tried to look calm and composed. In reality, though, she was far from calm, inside and outside. Her few months at the hospital hadn’t prepared her for something so cruel and gruesome. Hands trembling, she fitted the sheets to cover up Darling again, eyes averting the look of horror beneath. Sure, the body of the delicate seventeen-year-old had been cleaned. There was no more blood that one could see, but there were marks that signified loudly of torture, emotional and physical. Darling looked torn and tattered from everywhere, bruises visible on her cheek, her eyes, and around her lips, her left hip misplaced, and her arm had a cut the length of a bobble-head pencil found in the bag, which was thrown around her broken body when she was found.
The police had found her crying in pain at the far end of the city. She was barely conscious, and at every attempt of questioning her, she simply echoed ‘the cloud’, ‘the cloud’. On the insistent retort, the police thought it was significant of something that had happened to her, and had hence carried it along with her tormented body to the hospital. They had carried the cloud, despite it being drenched in blood and mud. Had they known Darling Rose’s story, they would have been able to hear the innocent shrieks of her voice too. But they didn’t know her story. All they found in the bag was an identity card, the pencil, a notepad, some cash, and a ragged photograph of a woman. The police scanned the photograph of the woman online once they had tracked her parents and had informed them of Rose’s whereabouts. The photo led them to a woman who had passed away some fourteen years ago, leaving them clueless and helpless until she woke up. To their utter disappointment, Darling remained unconscious for the length of eighteen hours straight, amid which words like ‘demons’, ‘love’, ‘mother’, ‘the cloud’, were repeated over and over again.
The cloud, which Rose was so affectionate towards, was a small souvenir made of wood but painted in exact colors of a vibrant and pristine cloud, just born, weightless and happy. That is, it looked just so, until the day before. Now, with blood having dried on it, and marks of snatching imprinted on the blue, it had turned the beauty into a gory mark of disgust and loathsome maroon, a cloud that looked full and ready to burst its rains, no more willing or able to hold the pain within. It had lost its charm of innocence perceiving of an end now. Had Darling been awake, she could not have recognized the soft curve, the feathery touch of the blue, the token of love, and the last gift of a mother, now long gone. It was this cloud that she had made a fuss about all those years ago in the middle of a fair. She had thrown a tantrum sitting down in the middle of the bustle, unwilling to move, stand, eat, or drink, but only to cry at the top of her lungs until her mother would buy her the said cloud. She didn’t understand that it was an expensive painting titled, ‘The Cloud’, that her mother did not have the money to buy it, that her father was already in debt. She didn’t understand then what poverty meant. She would soon. She would also know the meaning of an orphanage. Her father would run off, leaving them behind, his debt crossing all bounds. All debt having passed to her mother, one of the creditors would lose his temper and threaten to kill them. In actuality, he didn’t kill them. He captured them and exploited and abused her mother. Again. Again. And again. Ms. Rose was young enough not to understand what was happening, but when she found herself living in an unknown place, her mother coming back to her every time empty-handed, with food that was not enough to fill even one small stomach, with eyes full of emptiness, and was herself locked inside the tiny room all day long, she understood something was wrong. Something had changed. Someone had changed her mother.
Darling never knew exactly what happened. Except for that one night, she woke up in her mother’s arms, her mother running away, stumbling and falling every few steps. Darling believed only in what her mother told her then. She wanted her to know that she loved her, that her father had done something wrong, and the man whose house they lived in was bad. Her mother left her outside a doorstep, kept a small bag beside her, and reminded her of the cloud. She had told her that as long as the cloud was with her, her mother was with her, that she loved Rose more than anything in the world. Rose hadn’t said anything till then, but at that instant, she realized something dramatic was happening, something that couldn’t ever be replaced or undone, and just as realization dawned on her, she started crying, howling as loudly as she could. At which, her mother reminded her to shush, that someone was still following them. Darling couldn’t stop. She stifled herself with her hands, still sobbing, and made to run after her mother. Her mother indicated otherwise. Darling stood, broken and clueless. After a while, she heard a cry, a shriek, a muffled shot. She would never see her mother again.
She didn’t know how but she found herself on a clean bed the next day. She didn’t know there was a letter inside her bag. She didn’t know that from then on it would be a series of orphanages and foster homes until one day she would run away from a toxic father, the kind who shrieks, scolds, beats, spanks and locks up teenagers. Rose often wondered if it would be right to tell someone what happened inside the locked rooms, but her father had said not to mention it to anyone let alone her newest mother. She believed in her father when he said that it was the kind of punishment one deserved. That was all she could do after years of change and moving from one place to another, after no stability, next to no education, no friends and family, and only silence and unacceptability from everyone. Rose had come to believe that the day her mother left her, she took with herself a part of Rose, leaving behind an emptiness within her. She believed that her emptiness, her ache would vanish someday. She didn’t know how, she didn’t know when, but she was hopeful of a miracle, a magical life devoid of demons outside her body and inside. A demon that told her something contrary to her mother’s voice, a demon that told her she wasn’t enough, she wasn’t lovable, that she didn’t deserve what others had. She wanted to believe in her mother that until the cloud was with her, her mother’s love was with her, that she was the darling child of her mother, she was a darling after all, that she mattered, she was someone. She was enough. She was good. She could be loved too.
But instead, she lay on a hospital bed, a pretty picture of beauty mixed with terror. The bruises on her body were not an imprint of one night; it was an emblem of days at a stretch, of belt marks and razors, of nails and fingermarks. She had endured it all for months. Until one night, in a moment of frenzy, the father hit her with the barrel of a gun. That is when she realized he could end her. She could end and vanish in seconds. She could end up like her mother. So long she had refused to believe that life was in totality unworthy of living, that humans could be no less than demons. In what few years of schooling she had had, she was only taught the good; that kindness was a virtue, that parents loved their children, honesty was the best policy, you helped your friends, and that God was merciful. Despite her experiences, she believed in the concept of love. So when she saw death looming in her face, a man angry, drunk, and hungry with lust and rage, she escaped. Or she thought she escaped. Because on being found, the terror was truly torturous. But her courage still didn’t fail her. She ran for a second time, with her life in her palms, two hours after midnight. Darling could only make it a few miles after which she passed out under a tree. She woke in starts, crying and whimpering where the police car found her. If what she was taught was true, where was the good? Where was the miracle?
She woke up, her eyes barely visible under the bruise, her lips parting again to ask for the cloud. The nurse indicated where it was kept and looked away. Darling had not given it a thought when she had clutched it to her chest and had run away, that she was bloody, dirty, crushed, that the pristine cloud would be so too if she carried it bare-handed. But she had done that, ran away without a thought of where she would go, or what she would do, where she would live, if she could bear to live, and now the look of it was disgusting. The cloud symbolized love; it meant hope for her that her mother was there. But one look at it, and she retched and threw up, falling unconscious all over again.
When consciousness embraced her later, a police inspector was sitting on the couch opposite her. She was given water. She was asked if she could answer some questions. She barely nodded when her foster parents were ushered in. Darling shrieked the word ‘demon’, falling on the bed again. Her mother told the police she was clueless about what happened. She didn’t know why she was missing from the house in the middle of the night or how she was forced into this situation. The father told the police that she was a bit of a free bird and had always loved to roam around at night, but was concerned and worried about the state she was in. The parents were bewildered; both seemed to be concerned about their darling Darling.
Had Darling known what was happening outside the ICU, she would have been relieved that she would have no visitors until she gave her statement to the police. That they had smelled suspicion, that they wanted her to fight and still believe. But she wasn’t conscious, she wasn’t aware. In her dreams, she fought with her demons, she wanted to be loved, to be cared for, to be accepted for who she was, she fought with the urge to give up, and she fought to live a life that was unlike her mothers. She wanted to belong. She wanted the cloud. She wanted the cloud to back to what it was. But as seconds seeped into nights and mornings and evenings, she realized it was not to be. Love wasn’t for her mother. Love wasn’t for her. Love was between them. Outside their relationship, life was a chaotic conundrum of demons and misgivings, of different kinds of pain and trauma. The cloud was not to be anymore. Darling Rose was not to be anymore. On the third night in the hospital, Darling Rose breathed her last, drifting away as the softest feather, the lightest, and the happiest cloud.
Her death certificate mentioned the cause as excessive internal bleeding and lung failure.
#52
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