A begonia window & loss of a friend

Preeti Monga 

THE most beautiful window that I once had in my house in Mumbai was the one with begonia under the skylight in the west wing, where seven silver-dappled Rex Begonia made  a permanent rainbow, with their ruby, purple, orange, peacock, chocolate and tomato-red leaves. But how dreadful that window-garden became, with such hopelessness and despair, when I saw a smoker slowly dying before my eyes, again and again, for four loathsome months in a Mumbai hospital.

The friend had packed off her lungs, with 20 years of smoking every foreign brand she could get. The nights were sheer terror when she seemed to be in close contact with death, and an army of nurses and doctors mourned because cigarettes had won the war.

I was dismissed from the room of death in attendance from 4 to 6 every morning, while steroids and incubators worked madly. I wandered into the hospital’s lovely garden, where the scent of jasmine and a stray dog gave me innocent and comforting company. As I waited greedily for a perky little man to arrive with coffee, I began to steal one cutting of a gorgeous begonia daily to believe in life again.

I would hastily drink up five-six thimbles of the tiniest coffee mugs I have ever seen, to face that horrid blizzard of death — as it waited for its traveller. When it mercifully collected her, I came back begonia-burnished, Rs 600-odd saved from the most sorrowful begonia steal, but paid up with the loss of the best three-layered trifle maker in my world (delicious creamy pineapple, sugared and buttered temptation), the only person who could tell me the name of every new plant I discovered in England. Death pocketed that gold as well, greedily.

Her iPod came with me (having lost her speech she would touch her eye to remind me to keep it safe!) into those frozen nights, where I guiltily discarded my favourite Manna De and SD Burman after falling into the awesome new heaven of Mozart and Verdi, whose Requiem (surely the most heartrending, haunting music) warmed my soul.

I will never forget how cigarette can murder smokers so viciously. And every smoker appears to me as pitiful and pathetic, the saddest fool in the world. But now I know that in the loneliest hour of being stamped under death’s claws, when music begins to weep for us, we will finally somehow be safe. Even from the most bitter poison from your life’s creepiest ghouls and stealers, you will survive with the mystifying golden goblet of music.