Supriya Prasanta

The Morgue

Dad breathed his last today.  

Just five days back, he was admitted to a private hospital in Bhubaneswar, my hometown. He was complaining of fatigue, cough, and edema. His abdomen appeared unusually swollen. His feet had swollen too. The lab tests had hinted at an alarming drop in albumin in his liver. Dad was an acute diabetic with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. The doctor had assured him that a week of hospitalization was what he needed. He would soon be fit, the doctor had said, there was no reason to worry.  

At the hospital, they tried to dry the accumulated water through medicated drips. On the second day, his feet had returned to their normal shape, but the abdomen remained swollen and tight even after day four. Apparently, the drips didn’t work. On the fifth day, they had to go for paracentesis. The nurse was putting a long, thin needle with a small tube into his abdomen when Dad had a panic attack. He was then moved to the intensive care unit and put on a ventilator. He wanted to say something through the ventilator; he looked hard at Mamma, who was attending him for the last five days in the hospital. At six in the evening, the doctor on duty said to my brother, “The next four hours will be critical for his survival.”  

Mamma was sent home for some rest. She hardly slept or ate when Dad fell ill. Mamma cried over the phone when she told me and put the receiver down. Mamma still preferred using the landline at home.  

I began sending Dad healing thoughts. I repeated positive affirmations to myself. Not for a moment did I allow my mind to dread—even when I rushed to the toilet four or five times due to the sudden onset of diarrhea. I continued sending him healing thoughts. I knew Dad would fight it out this time too. Six and a half years back, he was admitted to the hospital in a critical state. The veteran gastroenterologist had remarked, “It’s a miracle,” when my father had returned to consciousness from a state of coma. Indeed, he had. I knew Dad was tenacious; how often he proudly told us the self-made success story of his life, thanks to his tenacity. At around eight-thirty, I had a feeling Dad was now out of danger. I suddenly felt light. I ate my supper. I prepared food for my husband and seven-year-old son.   

At around half-past ten, my brother called. Pressing the green light on my cell, I asked him if the ventilator was removed. My voice, I could feel, was without a trace of apprehension.  

“Dad passed away.” His voice was filled with pain. I implored him to hand the phone to Suvash's uncle whom I could hear from the other side. (He was a very close family friend. Dad looked upon him as a younger brother). Obviously, I knew my brother would not lie to me, but still, I wanted confirmation.

“Uncle?”   

“Yes, yes…” he muttered through sobs.  

I disconnected the phone.  

Dad could not have gone like this. At such a time. We’re battling a Pandemic. We’re in the middle of a complete lockdown. I am in Electronic City, a township in Bengaluru.  

It was decided that the last rites would be held the next morning. Dad was being shifted to the morgue. It was then I saw Dad fleetingly over the video call. Wrapped in white, he slept peacefully.    

My cell buzzed; it beeped. The same words were shared over and over again. We howled in disbelief and shock. Strictly twenty people would be allowed for the last rites. Not many relatives would get a pass. Dad had wished his last rites to take place at his country farmhouse, which was some eighty miles away. The concerned authorities wouldn’t permit taking him there.  

Dad had earned some fame as a labor leader. As his passing was aired on TV, messages condoling his passing poured in. Our phones were never busier. His longtime colleagues helplessly expressed their grief on Facebook and on Twitter pages. Our immediate neighbor, it seemed, maintained a strict social distance, and did not even make a phone call. This apart, we discovered a few man-faced crocodiles in our midst, too! 

I zoomed in and looked at the death certificate on WhatsApp that my cousin had sent. Dad experienced severe circulatory shock. That was the cause of death. Time of death was mentioned five minutes past ten. I read the death certificate very carefully. Dad had retained nearly ten liters of water in his abdominal cavities. Had he been admitted earlier…? Could we have suspected it two weeks before…? How could Dad not have any premonition? 

My husband was now comforting my son, who was confused to find me crying hysterically over the phone through words incomprehensible to him.  

The night grew. It was clear to me that I couldn’t go for the last rites. Dad lay asleep inside a morgue for the time being. I must have passed a dozen times by this road, commonly known as the mortuary road. Never had this morgue seemed as warmly welcoming as it seemed tonight. The place always made me feel uneasy. On the backside of the main hospital road, to its left, stood an old banyan, its offshoots entering the earth. The letters in blue shone brightly against a white signboard: The Mortuary. Next to the signboard, a golden shower in full blossom shone brightly during the summer. The road was taken as a shortcut to avoid the usual traffic on the main hospital road.  

I Googled and some images of morgues flashed on my cell phone screen. One report of an incident caught my sight. This was back in 2016. A motorcyclist who was declared dead at the spot of the accident was found alive in a mortuary fridge the next day! A morgue worker discovered the person was still breathing when his family arrived at the morgue to identify the body. He was rushed to the hospital where doctors attempted to resuscitate him, but despite their best efforts, he was pronounced dead five hours later. To spend the entire night and morning in the mortuary refrigerator…  

A wavering thought, like a current, passed through me. A bubble of hope melted swiftly in the stream of despair. The doctor had shown my brother how Dad’s heart had stopped on the monitor before removing the ventilator from his face.   

I now knew the morgue was indeed a well-lighted place. It seemed comfortable for souls setting out on their journeys. Despite his failing health and food restrictions, Dad could never resist the lure of long journeys.  

The morgue was the place where I wanted to be right now.  

I found myself at the morgue door. I sat with my legs crossed, my head tucked into my knees. Dad slept, wrapped in a white sheet inside the freezing room. I slowly entered. Suddenly, I could feel a strange, peculiar smell invading my nostrils through the three-layered mask tied to my ears. There, in that chilled room, my dad lay on a trolley, wrapped in a white cover. I moved my fingers through his hair like I always did when he had a headache. I reached out to his feet, which were covered. I missed rubbing his feet. He always liked a foot massage in the evenings. But not today, now that he lay asleep painlessly. I looked at his face, calm and pale.   

I dozed off at the gate of the morgue. But my sleep was full of Dad—Dad talking, Dad walking, Dad laughing out loud.  And then, I found myself standing at the main gate of our house. Dad appeared and said, “Open the door, let me in.”  

I woke up with a start. Dad was not there. My son was fast asleep; he turned. The white walls of my bedroom glared at me. I drew the curtains and looked out the window. The night bulb stretched a sheet of white light on the road. Far in the sky, the moon was a pale ball of white. Suddenly, Dad turned into this white light. My gut wrenched. I tried to press my stomach fervently, but the crushing pain now rose and spread through my ribs. I was reeling in tears. I knew there would be no respite from an impending morning that seemed as wretched as my heart. 

Supriya Prasanta writes fiction and non-fiction in Odia, her mother tongue, as well as in English. She has translated a number of Odia classics into English, which includes Upendra Kishore Das’ Malaajahna (The Dying Moon, Rupantar 2006), Mohapatra Nilamoni Sahoo’s Abhishapta Gandharva (The Fallen Gandharva and Other Stories, Odisha Sahitya Akademi, 2016). She has rendered the 14th century Odia Mahabharata by Sarala Das into a modern Odia prose narrative. She has also edited and collaborated on several women’s writing anthologies that include One Step Towards the Sun (Rupantar, 2010; coeditor: Valerie Henitiuk), Spark of Light (Athabasca University Press 2016; coeditor: Valerie Henitiuk), Burning Mountains (Dhauli Books, 2018) and Contours of Salvation (Timepass, 2019). She hails from Bhubaneswar, Odisha, and now lives in Bengaluru, India.