Almost four years after the first alarm bells over the spread of the novel coronavirus were sounded, collective memory seems to have largely moved on from the world-historic event of its global spread. The Patient in Bed Number 12, Raj Kamal Jha’s latest work of fiction, revisits those months of ubiquitous tragedy and surprising humanity, in stories populated by characters many will recognise.
An old man lies in a hospital bed marked number 12, tubes carrying life in and out of his body as doctors and nurses hover. There is not much to be optimistic about: he is slowly approaching the end, and though remarkably resilient in the face of bodily decay, he knows just as well as the hospital staff that his days are numbered. He waits for his daughter Nisha and his granddaughter, using every ounce of strength to keep himself alive in the hospital so that he can see, for once, their shared life before he passes – a life he has never been privy to before.
It is not, however, only the story of an elderly man’s longing for familial comfort; as the book progresses, we learn more of the amends he is due to make: for throwing out Nisha for marrying by her choice and out of her faith, and for never once turning around to look at what became of her life in its aftermath.
Private fictions
As he waits for their arrival, stories of the world around him flood the pages. Structurally non-traditional, The Patient in Bed Number 12 is less the story of filial strain, and more of an attempt to capture the still of a moment from when days blended into each other without distinction, and how that unravelled carefully built lives and precarious livelihoods. There are points where this gamble does not pay off: as we zoom in to stories and then out, the arrangement sometimes feels like an impediment to what the book could have achieved; some of the key dramatic build-ups of the novel don’t quite deliver the punch as expected.
We get the impression that the stories are, in a way, a look at the world through the eyes of an old man, but they are neither told in the first person nor touched by any individual moral conscience; in a way, they are like figments of private fictions we make up about the passersby when sitting by a window at a cafe, or the balconies of our homes. And yet, their interiority is well-developed, the small and big ripples of emotion that pass through them perceptible. A woman battling cancer thinks about the mango pickle she forgot to gift her doctor as she returns from the hospital; a family of migrant labourers walks back with their lives packed up and loaded on a bicycle; somewhere else, two brave young lovers plot their escape.
The characters, though, are not only their miseries – beyond the hardships of the moments that the narrative finds them in, Jha weaves around them a life of hopes and memories, seasons and routines. Sister Shiny, for example, the primary attendant to our narrator, is empathetic, patient and entrepreneurial on her job, and at the same time a single mother who spends much of her time worrying, occasionally nagging, often praying, all for her only daughter. Each chapter highlights a new character; in their spirits and losses, they are all flesh and blood, and this is impressively done in the course of the few pages within which each story must be told.
Slow poisons
The political mood of the country is alluded to, sometimes in passing, other times by sketching out in some detail the cruelties that have begun to lose their shock value as news headlines because of their recurrence. Nisha’s husband, for example, is a hard-working man, a father with hopes for his daughter, but he has a name that gives away his religious affiliation clearly; his ordinariness cannot protect him or his family from what is revealed in the contents of a video teased throughout the novel.
In a book brazenly honest about the ugly social realities that make up our present day, however, any political name-taking is conspicuously absent. When people despair about the state of their lives, the extent of their outbursts is limited to incriminating those around them. There is no anger towards systems, figures or establishments that have brought these days to pass; in fact, for the most part, there is not even their identification. Things are grim, yes, but that is just how it is; either the desperation of their positions forces them against the application of any causal logic, or the author has decided that on balance, it is better to not risk the cost of pointing that arrow.
These vignettes of a slice of long, interconnected, complex lives in The Patient in Bed Number 12 offer more than a fleeting glimpse of the different ways in which the spread of coronavirus and the resultant lockdown altered took away the luxury of making plans for the future. In its moments of success, the book is also a portrait of the fraught conscience of a nation, of the fraying edges of its social fabric, sincere in its conviction that the slow poison of hate finds its way to all of us.
Patient in Bed Number 12, Raj Kamal Jha, Penguin India.
