Elysium

Chapter 5

It had been seventy-two hours since the dreadful accident. And Meerab had surprisingly settled well into the new routine. Her day began and ended here on the bystander's chair. Waqas and Anila had decided to stay back until Murtasim came home. The family had been shuttling between the hospital and Haveli for the past two days but was unable to make today's commute as they were stuck at home due to the raging storm.

She looked at Murtasim. The nurse had removed his oxygen mask. They had weaned him off the sedatives, and his body was recovering its autonomy. The nurse had told her that he might wake up in the next couple of hours but may not be coherent and might slip back. She was warned not to panic. It was a natural side effect of prolonged sedation.

His impending awakening had triggered a floodgate of emotions and apprehensions. Meerab had had time—too much time, in fact—in the past couple of days. And after the initial brain fog, her overactive mind kicked in, trying to dissect every emotion, action, and reaction of hers to make sense of the situation they had ended up in.

Meerab has always taken pride in her bravery. She was never one to back down from a challenge or be intimidated out of a conversation. She took the bull by its horns, and she had honestly believed that was what she had been doing for the past few months. Maybe it was the neutral environment of the hospital, where she was far removed from elements that reminded her of her present life and carried faint traces of her past, that had helped her come to the striking realization that what she was doing was the exact opposite of bravery. She was acting like a coward, refusing to acknowledge her situation and the multiple factors that affected it and were affected by it.

She would not take back any of her past actions. They were justified in one way or another, as were her emotions. But she had to admit that all along she was just trying to run away from reality. The first step to finding a solution to any problem is to acknowledge the problem, to acknowledge its existence. She had failed to do both.

When Ma Begum announced her marriage to Murtasim, it triggered a chain reaction. Her parents' betrayal would remain at the top of the list of the most painful moments in her life. She had always wondered how her parents, the ones who had claimed that she was their world, could turn their backs on her. She had not just seen a closed door that night; no, she had seen flames—white-hot, raging flames that devoured every bit of a life she had mistaken for her own. It was as if every door and every path were closed off, leaving her bereft of shelter and warmth.

When she was younger, one year in Karachi, the storm had intensified to the point that there were flash floods, and their gardener had brought home a kitten, sodden and shivering, at the doorstep of death. It was her mama who nursed it back to health. She would sit in their courtyard with the kitten bundled up in the softest of soft towels and gently coo to it as she fed it little drops of milk. The storm had raged on for a week. She had named it Milo, her sweet soldier brave enough to weather a storm. And then the storm passed. Milo was a ball of energy, flying left and right in her house. He was untamed and wild, but always down for treats and pats. He was her spirit animal.

But one day the broken vases and pots became too many for her mama, and Milo was thrown out. Just like that, unceremoniously. The pats and treats had stopped long ago, a warning of the imminent event, but Milo had ignored it, playfully refusing all the acts of training and taming her parents were trying to impose upon him, refusing to bend to their will. Maybe Milo had started believing that it was his home, a place where he had the right to be whatever and whoever he pleased. But unlike Aliya Mami, who catproofed her entire house for their kitten, her parents just decided to dispose of the supposed nuisance.

It used to break her heart when Milo used to come to their door, their closed door, waiting and scratching at it, hoping that it would one day open again for him. It did not. Her mother's reason was sound enough. They had not planned to keep him forever. They just stepped in for the time of need, and now that the storm had passed, he had to return to wherever he had come from.