Alive
He watched her as she picked out the dirt under her nails. He knew where her hands had been.
Looking up she said, ‘They are responding you know? I can see the change…can’t you?’
‘I can’, he said. He had to keep her beliefs going, or she was going to break.
Sarojini had been diagnosed with stage four metastatic melanoma that had spread to her heart, liver and lungs. And now there was talk of a tumour in her brain.
She went to the hospital because her plants told her to: ‘We are dying because we are feeding the cancer cells within you,’ they told her.
She says they told her.
She had been talking to plants for months and Arjun couldn’t spot the abnormality till late.
People talk to their plants, why some even sing to them….it’s what they do, these naturalists, he vented silently.
But Sarojini was doing more than just talking to her plants. She was having real conversations with them.
Later that night in bed she attempted to make light of it all and said, ‘My plants always tell me what I want to hear…maybe they need a few tricks to pick a fight…care to spare some?’
‘Do they tell you I love you?’
‘They don’t..’ She moved her head onto his chest and smiled, while tears rolled down her cheek.
‘But I know,’ she added later.
He was looking beyond the darkness around them.
The next day morning he caught her by the dahlia patch. ‘Come get ready. We are getting married today,’ he told her.
‘Really? Why…?’
‘Because today is the day my life begins. Today is when I become a man, a husband and I become accountable to someone beyond myself. To you.’
At the registrar’s office, he held her hand while they waited.
‘You have got to get admitted tomorrow…you remember?’
‘Yes I do. They told me I shouldn’t go if I didn’t want to save them…what does that mean?’
‘I don’t know. But, you might die, and I will tell them if you do’
‘You will…? And what if they die, instead of me?’
‘We will live then. Live till we are alive.’
****
