Waiting To Go Home

            The woman sits there, eyes downward, lips muttering a prayer. She seems oblivious to the footsteps around her or the nervous tensions. She cares nothing for the women discussing the new born baby of their friend. She just sits there, waiting, watching, hoping…

            Her husband should be out soon, she knows it. It’s just a minor surgery, no more than a few hours. And it was just three days back that he had been admitted.

            Hustling and bustling, clattering and clanking, hushed voices, noisy children, urgent cries; she absorbs it all. Nothing seems more morbid, however, than the fact that her husband will not live to see another day.

            Hush! Silly thing to be afraid of. He will be just fine. Just fine. Just fine…

            7, 8, 9, the hours pass by. The crowds thin, the voices become less urgent, the noisy children vanish. And yet she sits there, staring into empty space, remembering…

            A kind-looking face taps her shoulder. She seems to say something the woman can’t understand. How can she possibly go home, knowing full well that her husband is here? She thinks the woman is senile and just smiles at her. She should remember to tell Fred to lend her some money. After he is discharged of course. Which shouldn’t take too long, now that you think of it.

            Some more people approach her, all with compassionate faces, showing bewilderment and tension. They tell her to go home, but she refuses to budge. She will only leave with Fred, no more and no less.

            What is this they say? No, no they must have mistaken her for someone else. “I’m Mrs. Smith”, she says. They repeat. But that’s impossible. She met Fred just a few hours ago. Where can he disappear to?

            She brushes aside the ‘well-wishers’ and hurries on, searching for Room 401. She would find him lying on the bed and then explain to them, make them see that her husband will soon be discharged.

            401 is locked. Oh bother! They must have taken him for some tests. No problem, she would wait patiently. Wait for however long it takes for Fred to come.

*******

             Finally the ‘well-wishers’ give up. They shrug and let the woman wander around and play with her hallucinations. Fred Smith was buried two weeks ago and he could not rise from the dead.

*******

             She finds a bench and sits and prays again. Let my Fred be discharged soon. Jesus! Watch over my Fred.

            As the stars carpet the inky-blue night sky, she goes to sleep with a prayer on her lips, sitting on the pew in the hospital chapel, waiting for her Fred to get discharged, so that they could go home to a nice, hot dinner of boiled potatoes and rice; and lie beside each other on the soft bed; to greet a new, happy day together; where there will be a new, healed Fred.

            Only a matter of time now. She will see her Fred soon…