It was the fourteenth day and the boy was still sickly. For the first nine days, when the boy had been burning with fever, as he still was in the fourteenth, Ranjeeth, the boy’s father, and the village’s main doctor, sat beside him, day, and night. He tried all the medical potions he could think of, used all his experience, and contacted his previous friends, whom he thought were superior to him in the field of medicine, but were not. No one could help. No one could understand what was happening to the boy, except that slowly life started to drain away from him. Cheeks turned white. “My boy!” his mother wailed. “My boy! What evil fate has befallen you! My Boy! Whose burning rants! Whose cold-tongue! Whose malicious wishes have taken you down from the healthy spirits you were bestowed with!” She could not stand or sit. She kept walking all day, and fell asleep, tired, at night. Occasionally, she gained her senses and tried everything she had learned as a household maiden to bring back the lost health of his precious son. “His cheeks! His rosy cheeks!” he held the shirt of Ranjit and shook him. “They are losing their color! Do something about it!” she begged him. Ranjit set up a table collected all the medicinal plants and ingredients, and started to work in the boy’s room itself. Ranjit’s wife visited all the temples in her village and the neighboring villages. She went over herself and visited the local mosque and the church that was newly being built. She prayed in every way she knew. She visited the local lower-caste saint and sought his blessings and his assurance that everything would be fine consoled her heart, only until she returned home and saw the boy having a fit and spilling saliva violently. “Your useless instruments!” She swayed her hands in a wild swing and pushed all the apparatus off the table, sending them away, clattering across the rooms and down the stairs. The relatives that were in the house strode towards her, holding her by the shoulder, and seating her into a chair. She started to break down into a crying spree. She cried and cried and cried. Ranjit came near her, after picking up all the apparatus with some help, and sat before her, holding her hand gently. She fell on him instinctively and wept her heart out. “I am sorry, I am so sorry!” she wept. “I am afraid. I am terrified. My boy! Our boy! Is he dying? Tell me is he dying? Can nothing help him? Tell me.” Rajit gently stroked her head and looked across the room to find the wheezing boy sleeping on the bed.

Ranjit had helped many. Beyond count. Many people who thought would die were walking in the streets, going about with their work, carelessly smoking tobacco, and sipping alcohol, just confident that he would save them all again. And all of them needed him. The nine days he had locked himself in the room of his boy, the villagers queued before his house, waiting under the tents, calling out for him to come out just once, and to help them ease the pain. He had not come out. Not that the shouts did not reach him. They had reached him all the time, and they tore his ears and heart. But it was his boy. The light and love of their house. The heart of his wife. What if something happens to him and then to her? Who would help him to ease his pain? He meticulously worked without being distracted, except to help his wife feel better, which seemed not to happen in any. He knew only the boy getting down from the bed could better his wife, and he put all his powers into it for nine days, but on the tenth, it was different.

A girl of eight years was brought to his house, hanging in the arms of her father, and her family wailing, pleading, and begging Ranjit to come out and help her. “No one but you!” they were screaming outside his closed doors. He could not sit anymore. Under the cold gaze of his wife, Ranjit stood and started to walk outside.

The doors opened. The audience waiting before his house rose in unison and joined their hands with elated hearts and anxious minds. They strode towards him, and Ranjit’s assistant organized the crowd according to the priority. Ranjit prescribed and administered the medicines to the girl, and asked the family to have her sleeping in his house for the next two hours. So, they did. In the meanwhile, he checked all the patients who were waiting before his house. Once, when he looked behind, at the upper story of his house, he found his wife standing in the sun, staring at him. He could not get what was on her face, but he knew what was in her heart.

That night was tormenting. She took a scalpel and put it on her throat, thrusting it into her skin, screaming at Ranjit that if he had wanted her dead, he should have told her so. As he kept on persuading her again and again, that he was helpless and it was his moral duty to help the needy, which he had been avoiding for more than a week, he took the scalpel off her throat and gave it to him.

“Kill the boy,” she said.

“What?” He asked, astonished.

“Kill our boy!” she insisted.

“What are you talking about?”

“Just KILL OUR BOY! You KILL OUR BOY N.O.W!” She started to scream.

“Radha, just stop! What are you doing? Just stop!” he started to plead.

“Will you kill our boy or not? Kill him! Kill him now! When you do not care. . .”

“Radha. . .”

“. . . about him. . .”

“. . . please. . .”

“. . . then at least. . .”

“. . . stop this exhibition of madness!”

She stopped. She was fuming. Her chest was rising and falling with her large breaths. “Exhibition of MADNESS?!” she screamed at the top of her voice, her voice breaking at its height. “Then what was yours? Then WHAT WAS YOURS?!” she continued her shouts. “Exhibition of KINDNESS? Are you a GOD?!”

“. . . Radha. . . Please. . . Understand. . .”

“You saved her,” she said. “You saved that little girl. She came out of OUR house, JUMPING, happy, healthy, while OUR boy! Our BOY! Is sleeping here like a CORPSE! SHE was SAVED!” She broke down. She collapsed on the floor, into a fit of uncontrollable sobs and whimpering. Ranjit fell beside her. He lifted her head, had her in his lap, and started to promise her that he would set everything right about the boy. “I promise,” he said. Radha held his hand and kissed him with his wet mouth, happy and believing him. “I am so sorry!” she said. “I am so sorry!”

The next day Radha woke up Ranjit and helped him with the morning coffee and getting him ready for the day. She was positive about helping the needy. “Their blessings will help our boy, don’t they?” she asked with a weak smile. Ranjit looked at her face with some amazement. How much she had changed, he wondered. How much? She did not look like herself at all. It was not just the boy he had been losing, he understood, it was the mother too.

For five days he had served the public, and on the kindly request of Radha, he concluded his service only till the afternoon, and from the afternoon, he was with the boy again, helping Radha and others to make him better. But, on the fourteenth day, he understood that all was being lost.

When Radha was thus wailing, on the fourteenth day, about the loss of the color of the boy’s cheeks, Ranjit was ushered outside the room by his elder brother and was softly told that it was better to make arrangements. Ranjit stared at him in disbelief.

“You might be a doctor, son,” he spoke. “But I know death when it walks into a house. Death is lingering over these walls,” he sighed sorrowfully. “The boy is lost. Will not last more than a day.” That was a line Ranjit had told several parents before. He understood that it would be utterly painful. But he did not how much that hurt was. Before he could think of himself, his heart silenced. He turned back to look at Radha falling at the feet of the bed, praying all the gods she could think of, pleading with them to save her lovable son.

The boy had died. At midnight, or on the early morning of the fifteenth day, the boy stopped to move, respond, and respire. The house was still. With wide-opened red eyes, with hair gone all awry, lost in maddened mutters, Radha sat beside the bed. Someone was singing a lonely lullaby, to bid farewell to the boy to his peaceful, eternal sleep. The villagers gathered outside the house, and in the silent, strong sun, stood, sweating from head to toe. Many wept. Many just sat defeatedly on the floor, knowing the joy of that house was not to be found ever again. Ranjit, after weeping for hours, staying beside Radha for a couple of them, started to engage the arrangements. He walked around the house, looking like everything was going well for the funeral of his boy. When he was thus walking inside and outside of the boy’s room, Radha muttered something. Ranjit stopped in his tracks.

“Murderer!” she said.

Rajit turned towards her, with teary eyes, and a frown so pitiful, and looked at her, as if asking for her love and not her jabs.

“Murderer!” she said again, this time looking straight at his face.

“What are you saying, Radha!” Radha’s father and mother intervened, along with many other relatives. “Stop this madness! He was the father of the boy! Doesn’t he have the pain? He was equally devastated as you! Stop this!” they lectured her thus, in many more ways.

“Murderer!” she said again, amid an uproar of disapproval, and Ranjith was not able to take it any longer. He started to walk out of the room.

“MURDERER!” he could hear the scream of Radha behind him.

When people entered the boy’s room to take the boy’s body away, Radha could not take it anymore. She hugged the boy’s body, pulled it, screamed, shooed everyone away from the body, and threatened that her body should also be dragged away from there if the boy’s body needed to be gone. Ranjit entered the room and intervened.

“Save him, save him, please! Please save him! Please! You saved so many! You SAVED SO MANY! Save him! I beg you! Please save him! Please! Please!” she hanged to Ranjit’s collar begging him, pinning him to the floor without letting him move. All he could do was to hold her face and cry looking at the maddened mother. He repeated her name several times, but he could not say anything further. “Or do this!” she said. “Or do this!” Everyone fell silent. “Send him back to my womb,” she started to press her vagina on her saree, showing how to send him back. “Send him back! I will save him. I will keep him safe. I will keep him safe here. Send him. Send him here! Send him into my womb. Send him back! Send him!”

Time was being lost. The body had to be taken. The ladies of the house held Radha’s shoulders and pulled her away. Amid the mother’s screams, the boy’s body was dragged away. It was lifted on four shoulders, and the body was prepared for the ultimate journey of life. Death.

The body was burnt. Cremated.

Three days after the cremation, Radha packed her bags, summoned a horse-cart, and left the house and Ranjit in silence. He was standing there, amid all other relatives and villagers, tired of the pleading of the past two days. When someone asked her to consider and stop and be with her weeping, heartbroken, and red-eyed husband, she looked at Ranjit. A look that welled out the deepest hearts of both.

“If I live with the person that burnt my son,” she said, still staring at him. “I will destroy him and destroy myself.” And she was off.

Ranjit stood there all day, hoping she would be back, but she had not.

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Epilogue:

Radha returned to Ranjit after three years. three years of roaming around the country, visiting countless villages, listening to sermons, serving God-men, and helping the needy and the poor whenever she could.