A Bizzare Incident

Last Friday or should I say early Saturday. I am not quite sure myself. But BigGeek was in his hospital bed, I was trying to sleep on the broken recliner close to him. BigGeek had a temperature that was freaking me out. The nurse came in every two hours to check his vitals, taking care not to disturb his sleep. Another patient down the hall screamed his lungs out. “Help, help. Someone please help me, help help.” I drifted in and out of sleep, not sure if the cry for help was real or imagined. Real because I could hear it loud and clear. Imagined because I could hear the faint chatter of the nurses at the nurses’ station. How could they not hear this man? I thought to myself. Surely they won’t leave him in pain. I remembered how earlier that evening, a nurse had rushed in less than 5 seconds after she heard a crash in our room when BigGeek knocked down a cup. The nurses were attentive. Could they not hear this man?

It was close to midnight, I was tired, yet alert, my body must have been producing massive amounts of adrenalin. BigGeek was soundly asleep. His breathing rapid. I closed my eyes and settled into a surreal slumber. Everything was so still. Everything. Except when punctuated periodically by the old man’s cries.

I was aware of the clock. I could see it in my mind’s eye, slowly ticking away. I was waiting for 2:00 am when the night nurse would be back to see if his temperature was down. All I wanted was BigGeek to get out of this, to be well, to thrive. Just about then a very strange thing happened. I don’t quite know how it began, but I have a distinct memory of someone talking to me. It’s quite hard to put this experience into tangible words. It just felt so real then, but so bizarre later. Perhaps it was my tired, stressed mind making up stories. Who is to know? But a voice was heard. It was grandmotherly, yet so young. It was affectionate, yet slightly detached, like a friendly neighbor. It had authority- you got that feeling- you simply could not refuse it, but it was so casual, like a friend. It felt like my own voice, but it was not. All it said was (in Marathi) “Ekda yeoon bhetoon ja” (Come and meet me once). Very casually. Yet with a little urgency. Like what an old teacher would say when meeting a student unexpectedly in the middle of a crowded street. I felt the voice’s presence (not a person’s presence, mind you, I knew the voice was there) even before it spoke to me. I knew what it would sound like even before the words actually materialized. I knew that the voice, bizarrely enough, was Vaishno Devi’s. This is truly weird. I kept asking (I don’t know to who) why not deities I am more familiar with? Like Tirupati Balaji or one of our family deities. Why Vasihno Devi? Who I have always associated with sappy Hindi movies and devout Punjabis? I am not a religious person. Not in the conventional sense. My questions were not answered, but the message was repeated twice and it stopped. That’s it. Nothing more.

It was close to 2:00 am. The night nurse wheeled in her paraphernalia. She stuck a thermometer in BigGeek’s mouth and proclaimed his temperature was down by a degree. An hour later, he broke out in sweat and when the night nurse came back at 6:00, the temperature had returned to normal.