vomit.
“Don’t look,” Uday anna cries, laying a hand across my eyes.
Through his fingers I see
shredded skin, misshapen muscles. Mine.
Feel sticky blood pooling
below my right knee.
Pain swings me away.
The stench of burnt rubber.
Flashing lights. The hysterical wail of an ambulance.
Garbled voices.
Cold. Mangled sounds made by masked figures.
Darkness.
WAKING
Each breath is an effort.
Every part of my body aches.
The air stinks of ammonia.
I push my heavy eyelids open.
Above me
patches of paint peel off the ceiling.
Bandages scratch at my skin.
An IV tube sticks into my left arm.
I struggle to sit up.
“Let me do that for you. Lie back.”
A nurse
starts cranking up the back of my
hospital bed.
Against the wall, Ma sits dozing.
Beyond Ma, a glint of steel—
a wheelchair.
Fear slices through my dull brain.
No. The wheelchair
cannot be mine.
I see an ugly bulge under the sheet covering my legs.
Yank off the sheet with what’s left
of my strength.
My right leg ends
in a bandage.
Foot, ankle, and nearly half of my calf,
gone.
Chopped
right off.
“No!” The nurse pulls my sheet
back over the leftover
bit of my right leg.
But I still see the
nothingness
below my right knee.
Ma jerks
awake,
leaps up from her chair,
runs toward me.
Her eyes scared as a child’s,
she clutches the metal rail
of my hospital bed.
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
“About
everything.”
I turn my face away from Ma,
away from the cold metal gleam of the wheelchair
in this puke-green hospital ward.
Outside the window, I see the gnarled trunk
of a huge banyan tree.
Its thick branches sprout roots that hang down
shaggy as Shiva’s hair.