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“My mother is arriving from India next week,” she said, her voice weary. “But the chemotherapy sessions are grueling. I didn’t want her to see me like this before I had to. I’ve held on until now.”
She was managing the situation. She was thirty-two years old, sitting alone in a Budapest clinic, watching the poison flow into her veins from a plastic bag, completely isolated because she had tried to protect her loved ones from her pain.
“No,” I said, standing up and wiping away a sudden, copious tear that was running down my cheek. “You can’t manage on your own anymore.”
The return
I didn’t ask for permission. I didn’t act like the husband who had the legal right to be there, because I had relinquished that right sixty days earlier. But I acted like the man who still loved her.
I went straight to the nurses’ station, found her referring oncologist, and spent the next hour trying to grasp the medical reality I had blindly ignored. The prognosis was difficult, but the doctors were optimistic; she simply needed a compatible bone marrow donor and rigorous treatment.
When I returned to her room later that evening, it had been moved from the hallway to a proper bed. She looked at me with a mixture of fear and exhaustion as I placed my coat on the visitor’s chair.
“Arjun, go home,” she murmured, looking down. “The papers are signed. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I’m not here for a piece of paper, Maya,” I said, sitting on the edge of the mattress, observing her short hair and the strength of character still hidden behind her tired eyes. “I ran away when things calmed down, because I was a coward. I thought leaving was the easy way out. But a life without you isn’t easy.”
I reached out, took her hand again, and this time I didn’t let go until the warmth of my skin began to transfer to hers.
“You thought you were saving me by keeping this secret,” I told him, my voice breaking but firm. “But you didn’t save me. You just left me in the dark. Let me stay in the light with you. Even if it’s difficult. Even if it’s terrifying.”
The real contract
The next two months were anything but a love story. They were punctuated by medical records, medication schedules, nausea, and long nights spent holding a plastic basin by my hospital bed. I left my rented apartment and spent my nights on the cramped vinyl chair in room 412 of the Semmelweis Clinic, working on my laptop by the dim glow of the monitors.
I took a test. Rohit took a test. Our colleagues took a test…