The night sky wore a dirty mud-like hue to it. I lay sprawled on my stomach on the bed, arms and legs flailed, like a four legged insect who had been gently squashed against the wall.
The rain God had been as hesitant as a pimpled face teenager in his first season of love who is not sure when to reveal his feelings to the girl who sat in the first row in class. A solitary mosquito buzzed around my left ear for a while and then quietly settled on the back of my neck, sucking my blood. I let it stay there, not caring anymore, so that the mosquito slowly had its fill and then, too heavy to fly away, just kept sitting there, quite oblivious of the droplets of sweat that surrounded it. The fever was in its third day now. It was no longer regular but arrived in bursts - high in the morning, low during the afternoon and evening, and then rising again as night approached. I could feel a fresh wave of shiver run across my wasted body as the fever was on the rise again.
During my last trip to the washroom, I had noticed the first signs of a rash on the side of my neck, a pale pink patch, like a dash of strawberry juice on a brick of butterscotch. The doc had warned me against this a long time ago - "Watch out for rashes, and don't scratch them. As if it mattered, i thought as i reached back lazily and dug my long and now dirty nails into it. I had lost track of time, not sure which day it was, not sure if it was still June or July, the thin streak of light that peeped in from the crack under the door acting as the sole guide which told me if it was a day or a night.
The bowl of cornflakes with mashed bananas laid untouched and cold by the bedside on the table. Even the slow tick tock of the wall clock had stopped bothering me. I laid there, slowly waiting for the end to come, taking solace from the fact that it would be painless, just a shadow that will come and cover my eyes, and stay there forever.
They said that just before one dies, his whole life gets replayed in his head - images, snapshots - like a slideshow which isn't of uniform speed - speeding through the happy slides and almost halting to a stop on the painful ones. They were wrong. No slideshows got played, no images formed. Maybe, the wise men who said that hadn't taken into account the fact that the death of a cancer patient was different from other deaths.
I died sometime during the night (or it might have been morning, I am not sure). The maid discovered me the next morning, put her hands on her mouth to suppress a shriek and fled away, and a couple of hours later, members of a local NGO arranged for my body to be removed and then consigned to the electric crematorium a couple of kilometres away, while a group of ants slowly but steadily carried the carcass of a dead mosquito, its belly still full of cancer infected blood across the floor, and soon disappeared into a small hole on the floor by the side of the western wall. I died an anonymous death, no obituaries came out in the newspapers the next day - while the ants in my room had a grand meal - cornflakes and mashed potatoes dried in milk, and a lick at a dead mosquito every now and then.
