A Liftman, A Job Well Done

Between the fourth and fifth storeys, he was alone in the lift. Just as the door closed, he placed his cap on the stool, aimed his palms to the floor, flipped his body over them into a handstand; his eyes watched the red numbers, upside down, on the panel, and as the lift reached the next level, a split second before the door opened, he was on his feet, cap on head, ready to help the next lot of passengers. Doctors, nurses, wardboys, walked in and out. It was visitors’ hour, there were a lot of people in the lift, so no one noticed the heavy breathing. Sometimes, he jogged on the spot, but at any given private moment, he made sure he exercised. When in the presence of another human being, he observed. Years of training had taught him to be silent and watchful.

“Dr. Singh doesn’t have too many patients these day, does he? I think he’s planning to get into private practice. I heard he’s taking his registrars along, too.”

“Every third patient in ICU gets septicaemia, yaar. I don’t know what these infection control guys do the day long. You remember that patient, Arun Rao, on the fourth floor ? Guy’s not responding to any drug. Developed bloody gangrene….”

“How dare Sister Lalyamma give Sherna an off when it was my turn this week? She’s the one who lost the file, you know, and she denied it. And I get the blame. Favoritism. What can I do if I happened to be on the same shift? Also, she’s been smuggling instruments…… she’s going around with that technician…whatsisname…ya,ya,ya, he’s married.”

“This hospital is dying, that’s for sure. Reports get lost, X-rays are misplaced, stents don’t come on time, implants are ordered late. Management’s made of morons, that’s all I can say.”

“Anand? From radiology? He’s admitted? Universal precautions ? HIV ! Oh no! Really?”

Rampal couldn’t understand loose talk. If you asked him the time, he’d reply cautiously, telling you just the hour, not even the minute. No more than was required. Loose talk killed. The institution, the country. This had been drilled into him during his uniformed years.

Unbelievably he learnt through the same loose talk about the saintliness, perseverance, enormous dedication to duty that co-existed at all levels. But an invisible liftman, he wasn’t particularly intelligent; yet, he was curious. He saw and he learned as he carried his wards up and down, eight hours a day. He respected the goodness that he witnessed. People who went out of their way to help strangers, patients, visitors. Visitors who helped each other or devotedly served their loved ones and did ‘dirty’ tasks unflinchingly. Patients who bore their pain with fortitude. The staff that put ‘service before self’. His loyal heart went out to those. For them, unknown to them, he was ready to lay down his life.

Rampal wasn’t tall, but his chest was like a barrel, his arms like thick bamboo trunks and as hard. His jaw was firm and broad, his neck thick, his eyes watching. His voice was surprisingly soft, caressing the patients as he spoke kindly to them.

Chairs with patients were wheeled in. He often picked them up, patients and all, and turned them around so they didn’t have to face the wall.
His strength surprised them. He could see it in their expressions, when they couldn’t or wouldn’t talk, when they had tubes going into their nostrils, taped to their chins, or needles attached to their necks, covered by gauze. Often, the eyes were blank. Or the limbs were in plaster. Each patient was different, the whole situation unfamiliar to Rampal. But all of them were helpless, and that dependency on others Rampal couldn’t bear. He had often played volley with Death, enjoyed it, too, quite a lot. Dying was an honourable thing to do, he’d been taught, for his country. He’d seen Death all the time since he was nineteen years old. But that was on the front, in the face of the enemy, not like this. This weakness, this thing called Disease, bimari, it frightened him. Fear was a new, incomprehensible emotion. From where he came, when men went to hospital, they were out of sight, until they were fit enough to tackle Himalayan heights. Else, they lost their jobs. There was no second chance. Either they fought for their country, or they languished. He sighed, either ways they perished, didn’t they ?

Once more, he was alone in the lift. This time, he did seventeen push-ups before the next floor arrived. He was trying to set his own record.
The patient on the trolley was to be transported to the Operation Theatre. She was trembling, praying. He put his fingers, hardened with corns, on her shoulders. In his previous avtar of paracommando, he hadn’t handled women, never been in their company. But these patients, they were genderless, just lumps of flesh underneath green or white sheets, attached to tubes, pipes, stands, to be physically shifted, alive, but not quite living.

He didn’t get a chance to do his secret exercise again that shift. So, after punching out at the time office, he entered the building again, then he climbed up all sixteen floors of the building, raced when no one was watching and stepped evenly when someone was, then trotted down again before briskly walking home, eight kilometers away. Sometimes, he sped, zig-zag, across the fast-moving traffic to test his reflexes. Unless he sweated, unless the adrenalin flowed rapidly through his system, he felt uneasy.

Today, his stomach was ready for bowls of dal and innumerable thick rotis. Onions broke the monotony of the meal. He didn’t mind the simplicity, the grass mat he’d had to sleep on, the toilet at the end of the corridor which he had to share with twenty neighbours, these things didn’t matter to him. What did was a sense of worth, that he was contributing to society, to his country. And that was what hurt: the medals that he had earned as a fauji, the hard training that he’d undergone, seemed so useless, so out of place when he opened doors of lifts, and punched buttons and waited, waited, waited the whole day long. How was he contributing to his vatan?. Then the resilience came back.

He thought, he was lucky to have got a job at all. One of the big advantages here was that he got lunch at work at a subsidized rate. He could eat as much as he pleased, of vegetables, dals, even curd, and sometimes fruit. Gosh, life on civvy street was so different. One never got the feeling that one had earned the meal. His colleagues kept grumbling about food. They grumbled about so many things. He often thought longingly of those he’d fought alongside and wished he could provide all these luxuries to them.

Here, everything was within closed doors. No maidans, no open spaces, no cycles, no heavy boots, no physical activity. People got tense about things like missing trains and took leave because they were expecting a gas-cylinder delivery.

The memory of Army life seemed like it was someone else’s. He couldn’t believe he’d lived with a sten beside him for fourteen years, day and night, in tents, on mountain peaks, in trucks, fields, everywhere, every moment. Amongst men, only men, doing manly things. Killing had been his profession.

Here, in the hospital environs, where all were concerned about saving lives, he was terribly out of place. There was so much illness, weakness, softness around. His had been a life of fitness, perfect health, vigour…death and dying didn’t bother him, he’d seen enough of it. No one could guess, not even the learned consultants, how he valued life. After Operation Blue Star, when he’d lost seventeen of his colleagues in five minutes, when his body had been counted as the eighteenth, until they discovered he was merely unconscious, life became precious, it took on a new meaning. If one wasn’t alive, if one wasn’t fit, one couldn’t defend the country….nor even oneself. He recalled the time in Sri Lanka, in the middle of a sweltering summer night, when he was ‘dropped’ by a helicopter, along with the others, upon a field they knew was infested with mines. When he reached the ground, and realized he hadn’t been blown up, he daren’t move a toe, nor hiccup nor sneeze nor take a deep breath…..every move was sanitized, cautious in the extreme. Each sinew was alert, every nerve on edge….God helped him survive, uninjured, to do better things in life, he believed. Though how he was going to do so by opening and shutting doors, by asking people for passes, he didn’t know. Each time he asked to check someone’s bag, he was accused of rudeness. His gruff voice scared them. There was vigour behind it. The killing instinct didn’t work in these environs, but the sternness, the nerves of steel came through strongly. When he asked someone to move out of the way, they did so, grudgingly, perhaps, and then, unable to withstand his gaze, went and complained to his superiors that he was discourteous. Instead of correcting them for their indiscipline, it was he who was forced to apologize. He reminded himself a zillion times a day, he needed the job. The pension he could live on, but it wasn’t enough to pay for his children’s fees. Retirement was still far away.

********+
“Floors, please, six, eleven, fourteen.” Even as he punched the buttons and sat on the stool whilst the doors shut and opened to allow the passengers to step out or enter, he inhaled and held his abdomen. Exhaled completely, breathed in deeply, clenched his toes within his shoes, relaxed them, rotated his head, held out the door, helped out an old man, wheeled out a chair, with no expression…. Time and again, his mind went back to the words carved above the door of his training school: ‘ We make men out of boys, ruthless, heartless men’. He’d been taught there to focus: that whatever he did, no matter how small or insignificant the task, it had to be done to perfection. He couldn’t understand how a hospital so large, so gleaming with marble and steel and fancy equipment, so rich and luxurious, could tolerate the badly tied shoelaces and sloppy postures from some of its staff. But part of his training had also been never to opine, so he kept his thoughts to himself.

“Fourteenth floor.” The staff went out, and from the corridor came a call, “lift, lift”. He waited. A young boy, tucked in his metal bed with the railings up, was being brought towards him.

“O.T. five,” he was instructed.

The two relatives with the boy, his parents, presumably, wished him well, just as the door closed.

“I want to stand and stretch,” the young patient requested. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, Rampal surmised. The ruffled hair indicated there hadn’t been a haircut in over two weeks. The whiskers were barely sprouting. He looked straight at Rampal as he made his request. He wasn’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer, that was clear.

Rampal hesitated to reply. What if he fainted, what if he wasn’t allowed to for medical reasons, no patient on his way to an OT had ever asked him thus. It was the last surgery of the day, which meant it was an ‘unclean’ surgery, not a nice word, not a nice situation. Rampal wondered what was wrong with the boy.

“What’s your name ?” asked Rampal, buying time.

“Ilyas Mahimkar.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen. Can I stand ?”

Rampal didn’t see any harm in it. The boy didn’t appear ill. Except for the hand, all seemed well.

“Yes,” he agreed, but was a bit alarmed when he saw with what josh the boy unvelcroed his strap and scrambled up. He didn’t want any trouble with a patient collapsing in his lift. Once, that had happened, and he hadn’t known what to do. When he called on the emergency phone, he was told to call for a CPR. He knew the code, dialed the numbers and stopped on the closest floor as instructed. Within minutes, a team of white coats had arrived and they wheeled the patient to the nurses’ room nearby, along with a cart full of steel utensils and bottles and other paraphernalia. He was mesmerized, he locked the lift (security considerations first and every time), followed them and watched as they put a balloon like mask on the grey face. The hospital clothes were ripped open, then someone banged on that prone figure’s chest, over and over, in rhythm, then someone else gave him a shock and the whole grey body jerked. He recalled the sound of a cough, and a voice yelling, “Call ICU, take him down, page for Dr. Sule, we got him just in time.” He remembered seeing the relatives afterwards, humped shoulders, red-eyed, not knowing what happened, waiting for the crucial forty-eight hours to
get over.

But this boy didn’t look ill at all. He only had a bandage on his hand, from fingers to elbow. He tossed off the sheets with a sweep and sat at the edge of the frame, railings still up, legs dangling knee downwards, over them.

“What happened to you?”

“On the terrace. Had to fetch the damp clothes. Raining. Clouds were dark and heavy. Pool of water there. Lightening struck. Hand stuck.” He spoke in a staccato tone, slightly nervous, but his eyes held Rampal’s steadily. In the moment he’d been speaking of, he was lucky he was standing on dry rubber chappals (they saved his life), but unfortunate that his hand had got burnt. Charred.

The surgeon was going to do something about it, he said.

The boy looked so bright, so tender, so naive.

“Are you in college ?”

“Twelfth standard.”

“Won’t you miss your exams, then ?”

“Doctor said I’d have to take a drop this year, this surgery will take time to heal.”

Rampal glanced at the patient’s shoulders. Under the mandatory, loose ‘uniform’, he could see the skinny arms, the muscles bulging as he gestured. Supple, he was no longer a boy, not quite a man. There was laughter in his eyes, not dampened by the forthcoming surgery. He crinkled his forehead, pushed his chin up and stared hard at the liftman.
“Uncle,” he said, addressing Rampal in the common, respectful way that all Indians do these days. “What’s that scar on your chin?”

Rampal instinctively felt it. Its origins were lost in or blocked out from an old memory. There was no need to reveal the details. Like many bad memories from the past, he’d blanked them out of his life. If they existed in his sub-consciousness, he didn’t know nor care about them.

“I was in the Army,” was all he said.

Ilyas’ jaw dropped. There was awe in his voice. “Did you ever fight an enemy?”

“Yes.” Curt.

“Have you ever killed a man?”

“Hm.” Non-commital.

Ilyas took that for a ‘yes’.

“Barehanded ?”

Rampal moved his head, more like a rotation of the skull than a nod.

Unresponsive. Ilyas asked him the question again, this time staring hard at the older man’s scar. He’d nearly forgotten about the surgery when the ‘ting’ reminded them both that the O.T. floor had arrived. On the other side of the door, green phantoms awaited the patient. “Folder,” one of them demanded as Rampal handed over the stiff document.

“All the best,” Rampal wished him courteously as he guided him out, once more wrapped and snug in his bed.

“Uncle,” he said as he the lift door began to close, raising his face, now contorted with a combination of confusion, urgency, reaching out. “I was selected for the Ranji trophy team, Bombay’s….just last month…practice begins next month….”

For all his manliness, all his experience in cruelty and killing, be it in the name of the country’s honour, Rampal was a gentle man. He’d seen too much suffering to be otherwise.The boy’s face and his last words stung him. His head reeled, tears dampened his eyes and there was a pain in his throat that traveled down to his chest and settled near his jigar. He felt an overwhelming sadness, like Ilyas was his own flesh and blood. A sportsman destined to be a one handed amputee. Rampal’s soul wept.

At the end of the shift, Rampal was informed that his reliever hadn’t come in, he’d have to continue. That was how, four hours later, he carried from the O.T. to the fourteenth floor, a semi-conscious Ilyas after his surgery. The green-clad O.T. staff accompanied him, adjusting the linen, the drip, the file. Rampal couldn’t bear to see, nor could he resist from resting his eyes upon the stump where, until this evening, Ilyas’ right arm was. Now, he knew, that burned and rotting flesh, hacked from the elbow, must be discarded in a black plastic bag, tagged with a copy of the death certificate, a legal requirement. If they wanted it, his parents could claim it to cremate or bury for religious rites. If not, it would go into the garbage, to be incinerated with excised tumours, other dissected pieces of flesh, bloody swabs of cotton, infected linen and other such items. The hand that might have bowled or batted to glory in a future Test match, was now gone. Its functions would be taken over by its mate, but not entirely. The body would miss it. Ilyas would
forever be incomplete.

The sleepy lids rose once or twice, and in a hoarse whisper, the lad indicated recognition: “Uncle”, he croaked, smiled crookedly as a nursing aid stroked his hair, then closed his lids again.

Rampal accompanied the O.T. group till his slot in the ward, followed by his openly weeping father and stunned mother. This was a sight he had never got used to, parents or young wives confronted with a loss either of life or limb. It should have hardened him by now. In contrast, it stoked an ember of emotion every time. As he stared at the boy and then at the parents, he resolved not to leave their side. As he’d never left his comrades’ before.
Late at night Ilyas asked for water. No, the nurse had said, not yet. If he’s desperately thirsty, let him lick an ice-cube, nothing more. Rampal held it for him, holding a napkin to his chin to prevent the drops from dripping upon the chest.

The next day, it dawned upon Ilyas that the deed was done. The amputation was over.

“It doesn’t feel any different,” he said.

Not yet, thought Rampal.

“I can feel the tips of my fingers, and my wrist is itching, my hand’s still there,” he said.

I know, I know what you feel, thought Rampal, but it’s not there, nevertheless. Aloud, he said, “You see, no hand, no problem. It’s all in the mind.”

Ilyas smiled broadly, for the first time since they’d met.

“I know I won’t be able to play cricket again. I knew it when I saw the burn on the way to the hospital, when I saw the look on our local doctor’s face before we got into the taxi, when I was told I’d have to undergo a surgery urgently. I don’t feel any different from inside, though.” The voice was controlled in spite of the tremor.

Wait, thought Rampal, until the bandage comes off, after the grafting, when the wound at the end of the stump stops oozing, and begins to shrivel and shrink. He didn’t say any of this to the boy, of course.

The day after, both had become acquaintances of sorts.

“My mother and father haven’t told any of my friends yet. They don’t want me to be seen like this. That’s what they say to me. I think they want to keep this a secret.” Silence. “How can they? And for how long ?”

“Do you want to keep it a secret ?” Asked Rampal.

Unexpectedly, Ilyas choked as if in agony. A hiccup, then another, and he recovered, as rapidly as he’d slid into momentary self-pity. Their eyes locked, and the elder man’s gaze penetrated the younger one’s soul and instinct drew them together, closer. As if they were sharing something. They, who had met only two afternoons ago, were strangers no longer.

A week and several dressings later, Ilyas was a broken boy. He had been silent for days. And when Rampal visited him for a couple of visits, each time, he merely acknowledged his greeting.

“Uncle,” Ilyas whispered hoarsely one day, “What am I going to do ? How will I eat, how will I live, how play, how will I earn a living ? What’s going to happen to me?”

“You,” said the older, stronger voice, “are a bahadur. That’s why you were good in sports. Not because of your hand, but because of what’s in your mind, your head, you want to win, you want to be challenged. Your hands have nothing to do with it.”

There was annoyance in the voice when the reply came: “I can’t bowl with my mind, I can’t bat with my bahaduri, can I?”

Rampal spoke evenly, pleased to note the return of the gussa: “No, but you can run like the wind, you have two strong legs, don’t you ?”

“ I can’t even get up without help. I can’t walk without help, I am a langda of sorts. What would you know about it ? Get out, go away, I don’t want you here.”

Rampal left promptly. That anger could work in two ways. Either the boy would give up his will completely, or he could channelize it to do something productive. Which way he’d turn only time could tell. No one could predict it. He knew that all the others in the ward, and Ilyas’ relatives and friends now crowded around him now and then, clucking their tongues, pitying his fate, softening any resolve he may have had to normalize. He could do nothing about it. Of all the patients he met, at night his mind would go back to this sportsman. He had the spirit of a soldier, a fighter. He had a life ahead of him. He must LIVE.

Every day, he’d sit with the boy during or after his shift, for a couple of moments, discussing the experience, the pain of grafting, the sensations,…..or just sitting in silence, not even looking at each other. Once in a while, the boy would ask some questions about Army life, which Rampal would answer sketchily.

Came the day of discharge. The physiotherapist came to congratulate Ilyas and advise him on what he could and should do to build up the muscles again, to get on with his chores with the use of a single hand. There was no expression on Ilyas’ face. This was goodbye to those who understood what he’d been through. At home, things weren’t going to be the same. There was embarrassment, awkwardness, irritation as his mother packed his things.

“I’m going, Uncle,” he said to Rampal when he came to say goodbye.

“I know, you couldn’t have stayed here forever.”

A cruel statement, thought those who overheard it.

“Won’t meet you again.”

“You won’t miss me or remember me either.”

There was a sniffle, and a turning away of the head.

“Come to the lift, I’ll take you down.”

“I can walk the stairs.”

“It’s fourteen floors, don’t be silly.”

“Ok.”

“Why does your mother have to carry your bag ?”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? You have one hand, don’t you?”

Then came the abuses, the curses, hurled loudly at ‘Uncle’. All the bitterness against Fate, Destiny, the inauspicious minute of the accident, and the taunt, ‘you have one hand, don’t you’ were concentrated as missiles….sharp and burning. Rampal loved it and it showed on his face. He loved a fight and he loved a fighter. He shoved him into the lift and took him down in silence.

It was somewhere between the fourth and the third floor that Rampal raised his trouser and whacked Ilyas’ head so he bent it to see: the prosthesis that he always wore, that none had so far known about……..the amputation that had taken him away from the profession he loved….the shock on the boy’s face, the shame, the confused uttering of ‘Unc..le’, all of it pleased Rampal. He had done something beyond the call of duty, he’d done his job well, he could rest in peace tonight.