By Jessica Faleiro

During a routine consultation, the cardiac interventionist frowns at my father’s ECG reading. He’s immediately admitted into the ICU, where he’s restricted to seeing visitors for only thirty minutes, twice a day. The ICU security guard, Raj, allows me into the ward after visiting hours, when he realises that my father is in for a long haul. It occurs to me that he’s seen as many dead people wheeled out as live ones wheeled in. After days of tests, we’re told that an operation is unavoidable. My father makes me lean in close as he whispers the location of his black notebook, the one full of magic numbers and secret codes. I’m to keep his lawyer informed. After signing permission forms for my father’s pacemaker insertion, I don’t tell my mother the probability of a person his age going into cardiac arrest on the table. His friends are impressed by how calm and stoic he is.

Three hours into what is supposed to be a forty-five minute procedure, I hug my mother tightly. When they finally wheel him out, the assistant gives us a thumbs up sign and stops the gurney briefly by us before wheeling him back to the ICU. My father lifts his arm weakly from under the thin, cotton sheet, reaches for me for the first time in his eighty-four years and his lips quiver. I stand there, looking into his tearful eyes and not letting go of his hand.

Jessica Faleiro’s fiction, poetry, essays and travel pieces have been published in Asia Literary Review, Forbes, Indian Quarterly, IndiaCurrents, Coldnoon, Joao Roque Literary Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Muse India and the Times of India and in various anthologies. Her novels include Afterlife: Ghost stories from Goa (Rupa, 2012) and The Delicate Balance of Little Lives (2018). In 2023, she was published in the anthology The Greatest Goan Stories Ever Told (Aleph). She has an MA in Creative Writing from Kingston University UK.

Afterlife: Ghost Stories From Goa can be purchased on Amazon.

Photo credit, Igor, downloaded from Unsplash.com