It all began on 30th of January with the daawat at our place. I spent the following night expecting the discomfort, a little bit of rumbling in my stomach, to go away on its own but my expectations crashed the next morning. Whether it was the sheermaal, the cake or the baklaawaa that caused it, I don’t know; but what followed was clearly identifiable.
I was sick, terribly sick with food poisoning. All the minerals had drained out of my body and I was alone upstairs in my bed, too meek even to call my nani or masi downstairs. So, dear cell phone came to the rescue, as it had countless other times. I called my mom instead ( I have been living with my nani for over a year and my mom lives a three-minute-walk away ) because it’s easier to explain her things especially when you don’t have much energy to spare. Then, she called up my nani and I was sent breakfast upstairs. Too weak to wake up and brush up my teeth and too disgusted to eat the breakfast without doing so, I fell asleep again trying to get myself out of the bed.
The next time I woke up, the clock told me it was six in the evening. I saw my breakfast, marie biscuits and a glass of ORS, still lying there. I seriously needed help. Coincidentally, my nani, who was out of the house all the while, came to check on me that very instant. The next thing I knew; I was being taken to the hospital. Dearest nana, who is over eighty, drove me to a nearby clinic. I got a drip for a couple of hours on the clinic’s bed with my mother and nani taking turns being with me.
Objectively speaking, they weren’t actually doing anything to me to make me feel better but their presence… that’s something I can’t explain. Just then, I remembered a friend whose mother had passed away when she was 14 and imagined how I would have felt if I didn’t have a mother who could be with me when I was sick, who would comfort me when the nurse injected the drip in my vein, who could engage me in random talk to distract me from pain. More than I was feeling sick, I felt depressed at the thought. Right now too, it pains me to imagine how my friend must feel at such times.
I came back home, my mother helped me go to the restroom, with the cannula still stuck in my vein for future drips. She made me khichdi and laid my bed in the drawing room so that my nani could check on me every now and then. She sorted out the many pills the doctor had prescribed and wrote the directions for me to follow. She even watched a part of the show at DawnNews which I badly wanted to see and then left for her home just before midnight.
The next day, a Monday, a working day, was even more awesome because I even got to miss IBA and that too without using an absence! My mother brought me a nurse at home to fix me a drip from the railing of my curtains. She gave me khichdi again and set off for her job. Three hours later she left the kids at her tuition centre and brought another nurse to remove the drip. Yes, my mom’s a super mom. Then I watched The Addam’s Family and Facebooked a lot. For some strange reason, I felt like a second grader who had skipped school after pretending to be sick and was enjoying the day with Cartoon Network.
The day turned out to be even more awesome when I found out that all my classmates had ended up doing nothing at university because the campus portal wasn’t working and that disabled them from doing what they were supposed to do; registering themselves in courses of their choices for the current semester. Lucky I had got to be in bed with my supermom’s lovely love, tasty khichdi and later at night a burger, The Addam’s Family and hours of Facebooking and intermittent sleeping.
Few in this world have been blessed so much.
