- Dr. Adarsh Nath | Letters from the ER
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- Endless Monsoons
Please click "Read Online" at the top of the email for better reading experience.The Knock
She was twenty-five.
A bride, her vows still warm.
Vermillion streaked across her forehead.
Jasmine tucked in cupboard corners.
Laughter still echoing in the new house.
An argument.
Small and ordinary, perhaps.
But a blade to her spirit.
A locked door.
A saree knotted to the ceiling fan,
its blades slicing silence.
He knocked.
He begged.
The quiet answered,
a witness heavier than walls.
His shoulder met the door.
Wood splintered.
The world cracked.
She hung there,
swaying like a pendulum stopped.
Neck bruised purple,
skin cooling to the touch.
He screamed her name.
Tore her down.
Fingers fumbled the knot.
The ambulance swallowed them.
And when its doors opened,
he ran, her weight in his arms,
stumbling through hospital gates alive with stares.
Whispers trailing like smoke.
His feet bruised, his breath breaking.
He carried her like grief itself.
Like a coffin that still trembled.
The Long Between
She arrived gasping.
Half alive.
Eyes rolled back,
moaning a sound stolen from the wind.
“E2 V2 M3”
A score etched on her case sheet.
Medicine’s poetry is cold numbers.
We pushed the tube.
Metal past tongue.
Air past silence.
Forms stamped:
“Medico-legal case”
CT brain ordered,
gray shadows of anoxic ruin.
Paperwork,
as if a soul could be stitched back.
Then ICU.
Clocks don’t tick here.
They hum.
Forty-seven days.
Fevers stacked up like pyres.
Bedsores bloomed like decay.
Ventilator hissed its rhythm.
Hands turned her, cleaned her, suctioned her.
Eyes stayed shut.
A tracheostomy carved into her throat,
a wound that held her to this world.
Discharged, at last.
Not as a bride.
Not as the woman who chose bangles,
laughed at the monsoon’s first drops.
A body.
Bed-bound.
Mute.
Persistent vegetative state, M3.
Her husband took her home.
Carried tubes, prescriptions, debts.
Carried hope like a stone in his heart.
We wrote saved.
He lived shattered.
The Return of the Ghost
Months later, she returned.
On a stretcher.
Eyes dull.
Tracheostomy raw.
Oxygen saturations sinking.
Fever raging.
Her lungs had surrendered.
Infection crept back, uninvited.
Chest X-ray: Pneumonia’s white haze.
Antibiotics dripped.
Oxygen hissed through the T-tube.
Fluids pushed into veins,
as her blood pressure slid.
Back to ICU.
Machines greeted her,
knowing her name.
And him,
the man who broke a door to save her,
now broken in quieter ways.
Hair wild, shirt stained,
eyes red from prayers
that went unanswered.
He sat by her bed,
hands knotted like roots,
crying.
A grief without a grave.
A loss that lingered, breathing.
Mourning a ghost who still inhaled.
What We Call Saving
We call it medicine.
We call it life.
But mercy,
mercy was left in that locked room.
Before her saree tightened.
Before the fan’s blade stopped.
We stole her ending.
And gave them this.
A body that breathes,
but does not live.
A husband who remains,
but is not whole.
He presses his face to the sheets.
Inhales, searching for her scent.
His sobs are seasons,
endless monsoons.
And I,
in the fluorescent glare,
ask what medicine forbids.
Tell me,
what did we save?
A body tethered to tubes.
A life that drags like chains.
A man aging beside a phantom.
“Death is sometimes a punishment, often a gift, and for many a favour”
- Seneca
And I understood.
We denied her the gift.
We denied him the favour.
And still the rain falls.
Hard, relentless.
As if the sky itself refuses to stop grieving.
She breathes.
He breaks.
The world drowns.
The monsoon does not end.
None of us are free.
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More soon.
Another moment.
Another reminder that we are still, somehow, human in all of this.
Yours,
Dr. Adarsh Nath,
Letters from the ER
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