“Ok, listen to me. Before you decide to do anything. Just listen once. Then, you can decide for yourself. I promise.”
“Go on. I have all the time.”
My legs are starting to shake and I can feel my heart wanting to thump out of my chest. The adrenaline coursing through my veins, yelling to either jump at this man or just turn back and run like I was never here. I should be composed.
Calm down.
“Don’t you need a witness?”
“I don’t need any empathy, Doctor.”
Still not used to that word.
“It’s pretty hypocritical of the universe to send someone now to help me. What was it doing edging me this whole time? It’s had enough fun I guess.”
He might be true. But not now…
“Maybe it sent me at the right time because it wants me to help you with something. Think of me as an aid rather an obstacle. I still haven’t done anything to stop you yet. But I do want to hear you out because that’s one sort of treatment everyone deserves, from a doctor atleast.” Why am I using that word?
He doesn’t speak. It’s working? Is he turning towards me to utter his last words? Wait, IT’S WORKING.
“Get down from the edge slowly and we’ll talk about it. I will help you in any whichever way I can with all the power I have.”
Patient No. 089 made a quite an appearance on the day of our induction as his fits of rage were reverberated through the walls of our conference room when our supervising resident was trying to compare the cafeteria’s lunch menu to a botched liposuction. He continued, “…and if in any case your attitude towards your supervisors is not up to the mark, you will be feeding patient 089 in his room with the help of a wooden stick. Trust me, you’ll need that.” Later, as I was closing the door of the conference room, I peered into the sliver of opening in the room to see spilled saline bag on the bedside table, and a rolling sonorous sound followed by, “I DON’T NEED HYDRATION!!!”
But he listened to reason this time, probably because I was the first person to offer a ‘madman’ a chance to speak. He got down, and he immediately collapsed.
Wiping his face with his palm, he sat up against the elevated ledge of the rooftop, which was the perfect pedestal height for suiciders. He spoke up, “I have to go back there, where the explosion happened, where she, my wife, died. Take me to Tanmen Noodle Shop.”
“You want to go back to where we found you? It’s completely barricaded now, and as a doct- medical practitioner, I cannot recommend you revisit your place of trauma while you are still healing. It only has been a couple of weeks and your physical injuries only just healed. If anything, you are lucky to make it out along with the few others.”
“This is why I am called the ‘special patient’, Doc”
Don’t call me that.
I asked, “What do you expect to find there?”
He takes a deep breath and looks straight into my eyes which tempted me to divert my gaze, but he says, “My wife.”
“It’s an 30 minute drive even at two-thirty at night. We better talk about something or the questions will crawl out of my ears.” I blurted through my teeth as I took a left turn on an unnamed road surrounded by woods.
“I am not crazy, Doctor”
Why does he keep saying that?
“I really think my wife is still there. I don’t think she left yet.”
“Like her spirit?”
“I can’t explain it. I needed someone to trust me. None of them were ready to help.”
“I think they all lost it when you tried to assault a nurse by ripping off your saline needle and threatening her with it.”
“I wasn’t threatening her, she kept insisting that I was dehydrated and needed electrolytes when I asked her, I wanted to have soup.” he asserted.
I looked at him, puzzled. “That’s some temper you have.”
His feet dragged to the footboard. “I wish she were here to calm me. We had this deal when we got married that whenever I would go into fits of rage and couldn’t control myself and put on deaf ears, she had a code word. She would look at me straight, not stutter and say, ‘ARE. YOU. HUNGRY?’ And I would understand, and whether I was or wasn’t, I should say yes. Then, we’d break the conversation and she’d make me something. That was her way of telling me that you are not angry, just deprived of something.”
I kept listening. I didn’t nod or make any noise. As someone who has dealt with people telling their personal stuff all my life, I know that he was deprived of company. He had no one to talk to ever since. A professor once taught me that the most infectious disease on the planet that leaves no one, including our favourite animals, is loneliness. It doesn’t discriminate against anyone. Unfortunately, as doct-as people who are versed in medicine, we are not completely equipped to cure it. And, I think no one is.
“The night when it exploded…”-he cut my thought train
“Yeah?”
“It was my birthday. She wanted to make me this Japanese noodle soup that we both enjoy. It’s from Tanmen Noodle Shop. We’d always go there to eat late-night, and she would enjoy it, but she’d say that they use too much MSG or salt, or they use old stock or meat or noodles. Always argued that she could do it much better. She made it for me that day. I complained that the taste isn’t the same and that she could never make it exactly like them. She wasn’t ready to back down. We drove there, sat down and…..”
“Yeah, I know.”
He started whimpering….
“I- I held her hand. I remember holding her hand in mine. When I opened my eyes….tha- that’s all there was left.”
I feel bad. I was not in a position to offer comfort, condolences or motivation. As a docto- learning medical resident, I should not be personally involved in any patient’s trauma, and I felt I was getting there slowly. The best thing I can do is drive there as fast as I can. We reached. It was a 35-minute drive, and neither of us spoke after he finished his story. I parked my car far away from the site, not to provide any unnecessary evidence.
It was a brightly moonlit day. There weren’t any working streetlights, but anyone could spot us under the glowing blue moon. The shop was next to an abandoned petrol pump. If it weren’t abandoned, Patient 089 wouldn’t have been here twice, and I wouldn’t have had to bring him. It was a desolate area. We chose our steps carefully. The shop had a clear sign in the centre of where it exploded, relative to which, all the debris, rubble and black stains on the wall had arranged themselves. I could smell burnt wood and charcoal in the air. A yellow shining tape was stitched around the shop, warning us not to do anything stupid. But we went on. He was ahead of me and didn’t seem to care about his steps anymore. A slight jog suddenly turned into a full-on sprint. I wanted to yell, but didn’t.
He expertly ducked under the tape as he went, and I was more nimble with it. I wanted to warn him about the wooden pierings, rubble, and nails on the ground, but he didn’t even try to dodge them. He ran into the shop to say his last goodbye.
“It’s all collapsed under there,” I told him in an assertive yet whispering tone, fearing that someone might be around listening via the cold winds. I followed him through the broken ceiling bars, half collapsed yet still firm to their high roots. Attempting to move them, I ducked, nudged, and pushed them to my best capabilities before entering a vacant space that seemed to be undisturbed by the chaos surrounding it.
“This is where we used to sit”, he pointed.
In front of his forefinger, lay a wooden counter that once seemed to be connected to the walls that are no longer giving it support, yet a chunk of it still holds onto the ground, covered in charcoal from all sides, consumed by it almost. Yet, there lay a bowl of what seemed to be steaming light-coloured broth covered by chopped spring onions, both the whites and the greens, garnished with trimmed Enocchi mushrooms, sitting on top of curly ramen noodles, which were accompanied by seared pieces of thinly sliced pork belly. All the ingredients on top were lively, glistening, and looked crisp, like they were just assembled. Everything surrounding the bowl was burnt to a two-centimetre edge, where it was completely untouched.
089 thought for a second and moved forward. He started to think about his steps again. He inched forward one by one and reached the bowl. He put his face right up against the steam and took a deep inhale.
I noticed that there was no wind around us anymore. The steam was flowing straight upwards. He picked up the bowl, and I thought he didn’t notice the chopsticks beside him. But without even attempting to cool it down, he took a small slurp of the broth.
“Is it hers?” I asked him with the utmost sincerity.
Before I could get any confirmation, he slowly started choking on his tears as he picked up the chopsticks beside him and started eating like a ravenous beast. First, he took a bite of noodles and slurped expressively. A piece of the pork belly went in, then the mushrooms and a sip of the broth again. I could only see the left side of his face from where I was standing. As he was trying to withhold his tears, he was eating voraciously. He did not move from his place; his posture did not change. He was determined to finish the bowl. Once it reached completion, he lifted the bowl up to his mouth and poured the broth directly into his throat. And as he finished his meal, he collapsed onto the ground and sobbed with the bowl in his hands.
“I’m sorry……I’m sorry…..I’m sorry I said….. that…….that you weren’t enough……….I shouldn’t have told you that. I’m sorry.” He kept on sobbing.
I walked up to him, bent to the ground without my knees falling to the floor, and rubbed my hand on his back. He kept on sobbing, and I took the bowl from his hands, and as soon as I did that, he held me closely, and continued to mourn.
I decided not to tell anyone about that day. Besides, who would believe a doctor who was on a 36-hour shift that he listened to a borderline madman to drive him across town to a restricted area, to find a magical bowl of ‘Noodle soup’ prepared by his dead wife? I don’t want to occupy the room next to Patient 089.
I have started calling myself a doctor now. In fact, I was charged with looking over Patient 089 the next day, and everyone was astonished to find that a doctor with little to no experience was able to make progress with the most difficult patient in the hospital in a few days. A couple of 089’s ex-doctors even came and asked me basic medical questions, not to test me. But to make sure they were right about their own assessments of him. All of this led me to believe that the core of medicine isn’t even about understanding ailments, it’s about treatment, and people, and ultimately finding the best way of offering that. And sometimes, it’s as simple as asking and answering a question. A question I often ask my patients before treating them. ARE. YOU. HUNGRY?
1 thought on “Fork & Fiction: Tanmen Noodle Shop”
A perfect marriage of the real and the surreal!!!