For 3 weeks now, my sister’s life, my life, and some of my family’s lives have been spent in hospital corridors. Day in and day out, between waves of people being rolled in, between episodes of sheer joy of long awaited babies being born, between the soul crushing wails of families whose members went in with tubes attached to them on beds, and came out bare with just a white cloth draped on them.
Time wasn’t kept in minutes or hours by clocks on the wall. Time here meant the intermittent beeps of the machines, the only reliable signals to bank our hopes on.
White lights blanketed everyone uniformly, the aged and the children on rows of steel seats, watching the adults alternately stare into the floor and each other; tracking other strangers for some signs of progress or motion; a collective of humanity coming together to share confidence and strengths, while keeping their fears and apprehensions deeply hidden in the deepest parts of their souls and in the rare trickle of tears occasionally taking shape.
By now, the numbers on the screens have almost taken a personality. They are no more just digital pixels on a screen. They dictate the tone of the day for us. They oscillate between the yellows and the greens, and (thank god for it), rarely the reds. They welcome us in before we even share an eye contact with the one we love, they dictate the contours and the language of our questions, they decide the content of our meek whispers and in those moment, they also define how our pulses vary, even how hard we breathe.
The Doctors and their medical attendant waltz in, again harmonising themselves to the logs of the same numbers on sheets. Guarded diagnosis conveyed in the safest tones and diction (“let’s see how she responds tonight”) and we rearrange the whole of our emotions, our expectations, our insecurities and our being around “tonight”, until the next day, walking in with prayers for more greens on these screens than yellows, eager yet anxious about the next view of the signals .
Outside the gates, life seems to go on with almost an offensive confidence about mortality. The ones outside, the parts of family who couldn’t make it due to distance, the ones in denial that such could happen, the ones seeking status updates so they could have dining table conversations to distract from their dysfunctional halls; they all ring. An endless cacophony of calls ans messages, tracked like some punter’s track minute by minute stats on a betting sports. The universe of these people can be split in 2: one is a group that seeks “updates”, like the beeps on the machine owe them their dose of evening tea’s gossip. And the others who ask about everything else other than updates, walking on glass with their choice of words; cautious and unknowingly aware of knowing that the wrong question could just make us remind of our own helplessness here. These latter ones are the ones with love, the one that have seen and known, are mercifully patient with their need to know what’s happening everyday, and kind with the choice of their words in their queries.
Outside, the meetings continue. The emails happen. People discussed things that had seemed urgent to me only a few weeks earlier. There were plans, deadlines, money to be made, problems to solve.
Nothing had changed. And yet everything had changed.
The world had suddenly become very small. There is a bed. There is a woman we loved lying on it. There is the person sitting next to me. And there is one question:
What do we do now?
Not next year. Not after things settle down. Not when there is more money, more time, more clarity.
Now.
It is strange how efficiently mortality edits our point of view about everyday life. It crosses out whole paragraphs. Things I was worried about for months now suddenly have disappeared without a protest. Arguments on who’s right and wrong suddenly have lost their foundations and even their architecture. Personal needs and aggressiveness stemming from my ego has become quiet. Grudges that I held strongly feel silly and ridiculous. Even time is behaving differently.
A day in a hospital is just viscerally enormous. There’s always a continuous push and pull with your emotions, the emotions of the ones around you, the need to dissect soft language of doctors to identify critical truths, the prayers to sway the critical truths to a world that is filled with a pain-free, positive set of years for the one in the bed.
A year outside, before all this, could disappear without leaving much evidence that my emotions were there. And in these few weeks, I have lived more aware than I have done in years.
Hospitals also remove some of our prettier illusions about money. We live in a culture that says money is not everything. Of course it isn’t.
But in a hospital, money becomes brutally real and physical. Money is why we can do another consultation. Money is why we can get the specialists to come in and talk to us. Money gets the scan done. Money is why there’s a nurse 24x7 stationed to check. Money is why the machine can beep and a person is available to respond. Money is why the possibility of a healthy tomorrow is not shadowed or burdened by the questions of “what if we cannot?”
Money is why a family member can stop working for three weeks, fly across continents and sit beside someone. Money is the ability to hear a doctor say, “There is one more thing we could try,” and ask about the medicine before asking about the price.
Sometimes money buys nothing. There are real borders it cannot cross. But before those borders, it buys an astonishing number of possibilities.
It buys time. It buys attention. It buys choices.
And this is perhaps the strange tragedy of how many of us spend our twenties and thirties. We begin by wanting money because we want to protect life. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, we begin sacrificing life to acquire money to acquire materials that just build deeper liabilities and unaffordable burdens.
We say we want freedom, and construct lives in which our calendars belong to everybody except us. Our months are measured between weeks of EMI payments for the house we were told to buy, the fancy school for the social signals the kids had to carry, the latest phone whose most used feature is avoiding calls and messages and finding social distractions.
Somewhere along the way, the means quietly replaces the end.
And this is where the last few weeks have unsettled me the most. Because I am not suddenly disillusioned with money. If anything, I have perhaps understood its value more clearly than ever before.
I want money. I want the freedom and security it can provide. I want to build things. I want to succeed. I am relentlessly ambitious and willing to pursue it at the brutal personal cost it will take. But sitting inside a hospital for three weeks forces an uncomfortable follow-up question:
What was all of it supposed to buy?
If the answer was freedom, why are so many of us permanently unavailable? If it was security, why do our families sometimes get the smallest fragments of our attention? If it was to take care of the people we love, why does taking care of them increasingly feel like an interruption to the lives we built supposedly for them?
Somewhere in our twenties and thirties, life became extraordinarily measurable. We measured salary. Net worth. Valuation. Square feet. School fees. Holidays. Followers. Titles. Promotions. Credit card tiers. Club memberships. The number of countries visited before I turned 40. We built scoreboards for almost everything. And because the numbers are visible, we began mistaking what was measurable for what was valuable.
But nobody inside a hospital corridor really gives a damn what anybody else has scored. Nobody asks what car you drove in. Nobody cares what your designation is, what company you built, what apartment you bought, or how many people report to you. Nobody asks the square footage of your home or the land price in your gated community.
The accounting system here is different.
Who stayed? Who called without needing an update? Who knew when not to call? Who brought food because they knew some among you had forgotten to eat?
Who sat next to someone without feeling the need to fill the silence ? Who noticed that the person who had spent all day being strong had suddenly become very quiet? Who could take over for an hour and say, go sleep, I’m here? Who could make the one on the bed smile, even if it lasted only for a few seconds?
These suddenly seem like far more valuable measurable units of wealth. And none of this makes me think that the other things are meaningless. Not for one passing second. A nice house is nice. A holiday is wonderful. There is something deeply satisfying about building things, winning, becoming better at your craft, accumulating enough money that you do not have to worry about the small arithmetic of everyday life.
I still want all of it and will pursue all of it.
But perhaps I want to be a little more careful about what I am exchanging for it. Because if you are not careful, you can spend twenty years trying to buy freedom and discover that you have spent those same twenty years making yourself unavailable. I have already done that once and lost one of my parents. And it chips away at a bit of your soul every minute. Slow, steady and unending. So maybe, that’s what we need to be careful about in tracking. Are we still unavailable to our family because work is busy? Unavailable to your spouse because there is another call? Unavailable to your friends because you will meet after this quarter?
Unavailable even to yourself because there is always some version of you that needs to be built before you permit the current version to actually live fully.
Maybe the difficult question is not how much money we need. Maybe it is what exactly are we trying to protect with it.
And then, these past few weeks have made me think about another thing that I perhaps never spent enough time worrying about before: how casually fragile life is even when nothing dramatic is happening.
We like to think of mortality as an event. Cancer. A heart attack. An accident. Old age. I never assigned mortality risk to the ones who loved me and shaped me, to the ones who matter. Not to my dad. Not to my aunts. Not to my grand parents. Not to my friends who in my head, are all healthier and fitter than me, coz I have failed to even do a simple video check in and find solace in the memory of a call from 12 months back.
And then something arrives, the music changes, life becomes serious. Yet most of the risks around us are far more boring than that. You do not need a cancer or a cardiac event.
A pothole left unfixed. A badly placed electric cable. Someone overtaking on a blind corner. A medicine that does not contain what its label says it contains. Food whose packaging tells a better story than its ingredients. A doctor or a technician who has worked too many hours. A building constructed with the assumption that nobody will ever check. A child taught what to remember, but not how to question. A person confidently forwarding something completely untrue, because nobody ever taught them that confidence and knowledge are very different things. We live around these things so much that they have almost become scenery.
Until one of them becomes personal and causes irrevocable, deep damage.
A pothole is only a pothole until someone you know does not come home. A fake medicine is a regulatory statistic until it is handed to someone you love. A badly designed road is just an inconvenience until an ambulance needs those twelve minutes. A weak institution remains some newspaper debate until suddenly your family is inside it looking for somebody, anybody, who knows what to do. And then all the things we thought were boring become the most important things in the world.
Perhaps this is also what society was originally supposed to solve. Not the grand, philosophical version of society. Not speeches about nation building or progress or civilisation. Just the basic acknowledgement that each of us is frighteningly fragile on our own.
There will be days when you cannot be the strongest person in the room. There will be days when you do not know what to do. There will be days when your body fails you, when your money is not enough, when you are too old, too young, too frightened, too tired, too broken or simply too unlucky.
And on those days, somebody else carries a little more weight. That probably is society at its most primitive form.
The child cannot take care of itself, so adults do. The old eventually need somebody to walk slightly slower with them. The sick need people who are healthy. The frightened need somebody who is calm. The person who knows needs to help the person who does not. Somebody falls, somebody else stops by to help them. And we have forgotten this in our bones.
It is embarrassingly simple when you strip everything else away. And yet somehow, we have made social dependence feel shameful. We have made being busy aspirational. We have started treating the time spent caring for someone as time stolen from productive life, rather than perhaps one of the reasons productive life exists at all.
This has been uncomfortable for me to admit because I have spent much of my adult life worshipping agency. I have shunted out friends and family and loved ones. I have gone incognito not for weeks, but for years. All sacrificed at the altar of pursuit. It was simple: Do more. Build more. Fix it yourself. Find an answer. Move faster. Don’t wait for permission.
And I still believe and will continue to believe in most of that.
But sitting helplessly beside someone you love also teaches you that there are moments where agency has a border. Maybe you can find another doctor. Maybe you can ask another question. Maybe you can pay another bill. Maybe you can call another person.
And after all of that, there is sometimes nothing left to do other than sit. Just that.
Sit and hope.
Sit and pray, even if you are not entirely sure who you are praying to.
Sit and accept that the person in front of you has a body that belongs entirely to them, following rules that no amount of your urgency is obliged to obey. There is something strangely humbling about that helplessness. For all the control we spend our lives trying to accumulate, some of the most important moments of our lives arrive with almost none.
And then, after weeks of this, something we had become almost scared to expect has started happening. She has started getting better.
Not dramatically. There is no cinematic moment that happened here when everybody suddenly understood that the danger had passed. It is much smaller than that. A number changed. Then another. And now it’s half a dozen signals that are all green. Now it’s doctors giving you cleaner answers and timelines without a break in eye contact. A response from her body today that was stronger than the previous day. Something that required support yesterday required slightly less support today.
The tone of conversations with the doctors has changed by a few words. Questions that were once about the next few hours slowly became questions about the next few days. The greens on the screens have started staying green for longer.
We were almost afraid to celebrate it. When hope has disappointed you a few times, you start holding it very carefully. But gradually, the impossible possibility started becoming less impossible.
At 78, after her body had gone through what looked to us like an astonishing amount, she started coming back. The doctors will have clinical explanations. There will be scans, numbers, medicines, interventions and a hundred decisions that contributed to it.
For us, there is probably a simpler word.
A miracle.
Not because medicine did not do its job. But because families are allowed to use a slightly less scientific language for gratitude. And this, unexpectedly, changed the lesson of the last three weeks for me.
Because mortality is usually discussed as a warning.
You will die. People you love will die. Time is short. Use it carefully.
All of that is true.
But watching somebody come back from a place where we had quietly begun wondering whether she would come back from at all, has made me think there is another side to that warning.
I am here. You are also still here. There is still time. There is still time to make money.
There is still time to build companies. To become great at something. To chase something that looks irrational to everyone else. To make mistakes, recover from them and make a few new ones all over again. To learn, and unlearn.
There is still time to want more from life. But there is also time to decide what enough looks like. There is time to sit with your parents while the conversations are still boring and repetitive and wonderfully ordinary. There is time to ask them questions about parts of their lives that existed before you did. There is time to call the friend you keep assuming will always be around. There is time to apologise without first constructing a courtroom in your head about who was more wrong.
There is time to be less transactional. There is time to walk slower with someone who cannot walk as fast as you anymore. There is time to put the phone away. There is time to spend an afternoon producing absolutely nothing measurable. There is time to notice the people who make your life work and tell them that you noticed.
There is time to care about the road, the hospital, the school, the medicines and the strangers around us before their failures become our personal emergencies.
And there is still time to make our ambitions serve our lives, rather than make our lives serve our ambitions. I don’t think the last three weeks have made me less ambitious.
If anything, I want to build more. Earn more. Know more. Experience more. Have the ability to do more. But I perhaps have a slightly better definition of what all that capacity is meant to do.
Money should mean that when someone I love needs help, the first question can be “what does she need?” and not “what can we afford?”
Success should mean I have more control over my time when someone needs some of it. Knowledge should make me useful when everybody else is confused. Relationships should mean that when somebody’s world becomes very small, there are people willing to enter that small world with them and sit there for a while.
And perhaps wealth, in its most meaningful form, is just accumulated capacity to be there when life asks something of you. For three weeks we thought we were perhaps watching someone slowly leave us.
Instead, we have now had the privilege of watching her fight her way back.
And at 78, without intending to, she has managed to teach me something I should probably have figured out much earlier.
There is still time.
Not an infinite amount. Not enough to postpone everything that matters to some imaginary future version of ourselves where life has finally become convenient.
But there is still time.
Enough to call. Enough to sit. Enough to build. Enough to repair. Enough to care. Enough to change what we are running towards.
And perhaps, every once in a while, enough to stop running altogether and remember why we started.