The Living Dead

“Doctor, my son is not dead. I am not blind — I can see him there in front of me alive. How can you say he is dead?”

“Mr Malhotra, I understand it is difficult for you. Ritesh… is brain dead. His brain swelled after the accident and has become completely and permanently damaged. Legally and truthfully, Ritesh is dead.”

“No, we are not going to pull the plug on him! I know my son. He is fighting as we speak.”

“I’m sorry Mr Malhotra. Why don’t we take a break and talk later?”

The waiting room was deathly quiet, the only sounds being faint drips from the kitchenette. I paced back and forth, unable to sit still, while my father slouched in the corner, arms crossed, staring mutinously into space.

“Stupid doctor… absolutely no idea,” my father muttered, his face twitching unnervingly. “Lazy, ignorant… Ritesh is fine. Just needs time.”

He abruptly stood up and left the room, slamming the door with a resounding crash.

I remained silent, the CT scan the doctor had just shown us burnt into my mind. My brother’s brain. Where there should have been an intricate web of white lines, only an empty black chasm was left in the center of his skull. I shook the image out of my mind and stared out the window at the hospital car-park and gardens below. Tiny ant-like specks moved about busily. Real people, living their day-to-day human lives, while ours were thrown into turmoil. No doubt my father would be down there now, rebelliously puffing smoke towards one of the no smoking signs.

Only a week ago Ritesh had been teasing and taunting me.

“You suck Harish!”

He goaded me to chase him, as he took off on his new carbon-fiber bike on our usual track. I had never been able to catch up to my older brother in the past. Unfortunately though, this time I was able to. Pedaling as fast as I could, I blazed down the familiar hill and saw him lying at the bottom, his helmet split down the middle, the bike nowhere to be seen. Blood was streaked all over the pavement. Gravel and scratches peppered every inch of his face. Yet at that moment, he still looked like my brother.

He scarcely looked like my brother now. After coming back from surgery, most of his face was covered by bandages and dressings. An alien plastic tube exited the top of his head, and another penetrated his mouth, connecting it to the ventilator. Every inch of his body was adorned with invasive dots and dressings. What little I could see of his face and skin was swollen and puffy. He didn’t look anything like my brother anymore, let alone anything human. However, his familiar tattoo was still there — the small, black dragon on his arm. It was the only sign that the creature in the bed was still my brother.

When my father returned, I took him back to Ritesh’s bedside. We watched Ritesh’s chest move up and down in sync with loud hums from the ventilator. The display next to him gave sharp, reassuring beeps with Ritesh’s every heartbeat.

“Look at him,” my father whispered softly. “He’s still breathing. He’s still warm. His heart is still beating. How can he be dead?”

“I know, it’s really weird isn’t it?” a thick Irish accent said behind us.

We turned to look at Elise, the tall ICU nurse, smiling sadly at us.

“You can still see him, breathing on life support, heart still beating. It’s really weird, isn’t it?”

“How can you say he is dead then?”

Elise nodded, appearing all too familiar with this question.

“There are two ways that someone can die. Most people die when their heart stops. I guess everyone knows that. But… the other way someone can die is when the damage to their brain is… complete. Their heart may be beating, their lungs may be artificially breathing. But… for Ritesh, everything in his brain that actually makes him Ritesh — his personality, who he is, his memories, his beliefs, his ability to talk, walk, run… to think. And his ability to breathe for himself, control his heart, to move, to cough, blink…” She shook her head. “Everything that makes Ritesh ‘Ritesh’ has permanently left his body.”

My father stared at her silently, tears glistening at his eyes.

“It’s just a… shell left,” Elise continued. “His body. Kept artificially existing.”

My father and I shared a look, then turned back to Ritesh. Together we sat, feeling the warm rush of blood coursing through the veins of my dead brother’s hand.