I step out the waiting room and through the building housing the Intensive Care Unit. It is dark already and there is a chill in the air. I have been at the hospital for nearly eleven hours and should be tired but I am not. What I feel instead is gratefulness for the cool Pune night, the trees the hospital has planted in its compound, and the readily accessible tea at the canteen. I get myself a cup and settle down on a broad platform built alongside the building. In front of me, there is a man—so tall, at least a couple inches above six feet—walking up and down, murmuring into his phone. I cannot make out his words but I can see he is distressed. I half drink my tea, half watch him.

In the ICU, my aunt, who is the centre of my cousin’s existence, is fighting to survive. I worry for my cousin. Away from home, I miss my son. Only eleven. The centre of my life. How fragile everything is. The man finishes pacing up and down and sits down beside me on the platform. He is clearly agitated and fidgets constantly with his phone. I ask him what brought him here.

He tells me his father is fighting lung cancer. “He never smoked,” he says with that touch of bewilderment one feels before an unjust world. But it is also the bewilderment of a child facing his parent’s mortality. The doctors have told him there is no hope. “How can there be no hope?” he asks. “What will my mother do?” he wonders at another point. “I have a family, a job, a little kid.”

I nod. What will his mother do without her husband? Without a child dependent on her?“And she will have to deal with my sister alone,” he adds. I hold on to the last statement and try to make light of the situation. “Is your sister a handful then?” I ask, smiling. “She’s dead,” he says.

I recoil. I don’t want to be part of this conversation. In this world of saline drips and ventilators, where regular rules hold no sway, where mothers survive daughters and non-smokers die of cancers in the lung.

In the waiting room, there is another mother who has been coming in every morning for three months. Her son, twenty-seven years old, was hit by a motorcycle one night and brought into the hospital. In the hospital, his brain had to be removed from his skull and placed beside him. Now they are waiting for the swelling in the brain to subside so they can replace the brain in his body. I did not know such procedures were possible. It seems like something out of an implausible movie script written by a novice.

“She was nine years older than me,” the tall man says, speaking of his sister. “She used to come to my school for open days and people would tell me my mother was so young and cool. I hated revealing to them that she was my sister. I liked it that they thought I had a cool, young mom. And she was my mother too, in many ways. She liked taking care of me. Then she went off to Bangalore for some job she landed and there she met a boy.”

I don’t like stories where so much rests on sentences like—and there she met a boy—where love is the cause of death and yet, I am curious. “They fell in love,” he goes on, predictably. “The boy was five years younger than didi and my parents did not like him at all. My sister wanted to get married but my parents would not allow that. They thought he was too much of a college kid, young and irresponsible. No real job, no real earning. They wanted someone older for didi.”Oh my god, I think, did she kill herself because she was older than her boyfriend? Is this how we will keep stumbling and stumbling and stumbling? But of course, nothing is ever as simple or predictable as that.

“Then it was February,” he carries on, “and didi came down with a fever.” As though fevers are fruits of Februaries. “She took some pills and the fever went away. And then it came again, and went away. She did not want to return to Pune because of my parents. She really wanted to be with that boy. But the fever kept coming and going, and she did not tell us because she did not want to return to Pune. She did not want my parents to come to Bangalore either. And then, suddenly, it was almost the end of June.”

I have been in the hospital for a few days now, relieving my cousin so she can balance her job with caring for her mother. The other day, a family of Sikhs came into the waiting room. They were a grave lot, sophisticated in their silence. Then a young woman who was with them broke down into uncontrollable sobs. It was clear to everyone in the room that she hated crying in public and yet she could not help herself. She cried in a way that reminded me of blades and nails. Sharp objects stuck in her throat. We found out later that her husband had died of swine flu. It sounded so innocuous. Swine flu. To die of something that sounds like a curse word.

“She called us in the third week of June to tell us she was getting married on the second of July,” the man goes on, as though he must talk to someone.“That was all. Nothing about the fever that came and went the entire time. My father refused to talk to didi, but my mother and I went to Bangalore for the wedding. When we met didi, my mother immediately sensed something was wrong.”

“What about you? Did you think something was wrong?” I ask. He shakes his head to indicate he no longer knew what he had thought then. “She was thinner,” he says, “but girls are always trying to get thinner and my didi was a girl who liked to look good. I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought. But my mother knew and she asked the boy. The boy shrugged. She gets fever sometimes, he said, but there was no fever that particular day and so nothing at all to point at.”

“A day after the wedding, the fever returned with a vengeance. One moment it was not there and the next second didi was high and burning. Mother rushed her to the hospital and the doctors said she had dengue. Nobody said anything about the previous fevers. We did not know so we had nothing to say. It was only later that we found out, after didi’s husband told us about it. She died on the 31st of July. Exactly a year ago, not even a month into her marriage.”

He is quiet for a while after that. I have been married 12 years and it feels like a month. A month must have been a blip.

“You know,” he says, “it is very difficult to live the life of a single child after having had a sibling for so long. I don’t know how I feel about myself. I don’t know if now I am supposed to introduce myself as a single child or a younger brother.”

I ask him if he would like a cup of tea and he nods. We get off the platform and walk towards the canteen. “Cancer is a knot in you,” he says, “a knot that grows and grows. My father is dying of that knot, and my mother and I are the outsiders, unable to do anything.”

We drink tea in the canteen. There is a bulb on a wall behind him and its light hits his back, creates a grey haze around him. When we return from the canteen he says he wants to check on his father. “Thanks for the company,” he says, but continues standing before the door that will take us to the waiting room. “I think my mother envies my father. She wishes it was she who was dying and not my father,” he says. “She cannot see me anymore. She sees only my sister and my father.” Then he goes in, wearily.

I stay behind for some more time. When I finally return to the waiting room, it is like a railway platform, with beddings and bags pushed under solid, no-nonsense chairs screwed to the floor. I have lost my space. I squat down on the floor amidst other people, conscious that we are all waiting to hear about that particular person we love, now lying frail on a bed allotted to her or him, behind the double door guarded by a man whose power to deny us access to the loved one is formidable.

In this room that belongs neither to the world of health nor the world of sickness, this limbo, I pray for my cousin. For my aunt. For all of us marooned on this desolate island, waiting to see if there is a way out. If we were all boats in an ocean, my aunt in the ICU would be a paper boat—weightless and sinless—but we are not boats, and her frailty sits heavily within me.