Two Lives - Vikram Seth
In the extract below, Shanti Uncle is a Dentist by profession and Aunty Henny is his wife.
. . . For days, Aunty Henny had asked Shanti Uncle to let her go. He begged her to fight on for his sake. The doctors too had prescribed a dose of morphine to help relieve her pain, but Uncle said to me, ‘That would be killing her. I cannot do it. My problem is that I am her husband but I have too much medical knowledge. I know what the morphine will do. Her speech will become slurred; she will go into a coma. I will lose her. But she is in so much pain.’
His distress was so painful to see. He halved the tablet, then he decided not to give it at all, then he said it was she who wouldn’t take it. Once he said she had kept it under her tongue and had spat it out the next day.
He kept associating the five-milligram tablet of morphine sulphate with Euthanasia. Though Dr. Murphy tried time and again to explain that it was a false connection, Uncle would not listen. He said that he had seen a television programme where a doctor, a renowned specialist, having put on a patient’s favourite music and injected her with a large dose of morphine, had held her hand until he had felt an impulse of pressure from her, expressing her thanks.
‘I don’t think that is necessarily wrong, Uncle,’ I said, ‘but this is not that.’
‘We’ll wait till the specialist comes,’ said Uncle. ‘See, she doesn’t want it. See, she’s not in pain. Are you, Henny?’ Aunty Henny shook her head, knowing that this was what he wanted to hear.
Dr Murphy said, ‘Henny, you can’t fool me.’ . . .
