# Birthday Wish A phone call came at half past five in the morning. My eyes snapped open in the dark. The phone was ringing from somewhere downstairs—that old-fashioned ring that sounds like a small alarm, urgent and accusatory in the silence of the house. I stumbled down, switching on lights as I went. In the kitchen, the phone was blinking on the wall like a tiny angry eye. "Hello?" My voice came out rough, unpracticed. "Is this the residence of Dr. Ashish Banerjee?" "Speaking." I was already alert now. No good news arrives at five-thirty in the morning. "Sir, I'm calling from Metro Hospital. Your wife, Malini—she was admitted through the emergency ward about two hours ago. She's had a fall. She's stable now, but we need you to—" I don't remember the rest of the conversation. I remember standing in my pajamas in the cold kitchen, the receiver growing heavy in my hand. I remember the word "fall" and the word "stable" refusing to sit together in my mind. She had gone out for her morning walk, I realized. She had been doing that for the past year or so—up at five, out by half past, back by six-thirty. A routine she guarded jealously, like some women guard their jewelry. "The mind needs it," she'd say. "The body needs it." I dressed in a trance and took a taxi. The city was just waking up—early workers, street vendors, the soft clatter of shutters being raised. Normal morning sounds that seemed obscene. Malini was in the ICU observation ward. Her left leg was in a cast, and she had a bandage across her forehead. She looked smaller in the hospital gown, diminished, as though the cotton fabric had the power to reduce her. When she saw me, she tried to smile. That nearly finished me. "The autorickshaw came too fast," she said. Her voice was slurred slightly. Painkillers. "I was crossing. It wasn't—the boy driving, he was very scared. He cried." I sat beside her and held her hand, the one without the IV needle. "Rest now," I said. "Don't talk." "Ashish." She gripped my hand with surprising strength. "I had such a good walk. I'd just finished, I was coming back, and I was thinking—" "Hush." "—I was thinking that today is my birthday." I felt the words hit me like a physical thing. Today. Today was her birthday. Our birthday, in a way, since for the past fifteen years I had been asked to celebrate hers, which had gradually become something I did, automatically, like brushing my teeth. "I know, love," I said. "I know." But I didn't, not really. I had forgotten it. I was going to remember it after I got home from the clinic. I was going to call her and suggest a restaurant. Maybe that new Italian place she'd been talking about. That was my plan. "I'm sorry," she whispered, and her eyes—drugged and dim—filled with tears. "I'm sorry I've spoiled—" "Don't be absurd." But she had. She had spoiled something. Not the day itself—the day could be rearranged, postponed. But something else. Some invisible, necessary arrangement had been disrupted. The way the day was supposed to unfold. The way I was supposed to remember, at five-thirty in the evening, to buy flowers. The way she was supposed to find them, that small expression of surprise and pleasure crossing her face. The doctor came and talked to me in that particular way doctors have—kind but distant, as if describing something they'd read in a textbook rather than something happening to my wife. Fracture of the tibia. Mild concussion. Possible contusion. Observation for twenty-four hours. Likely to make a good recovery. I nodded and asked the right questions. Then I sat beside her as she slept, her hand still in mine, feeling the faint pulse in her wrist like a small, persistent argument. At seven in the morning, I called my clinic and told them I wouldn't be coming in. At eight, I called a florist from the hospital phone and had flowers sent to her room—roses, the kind she liked, the deep red ones that were slightly too expensive. At nine, I called the Italian restaurant and made a reservation for the following week, though I didn't mention it to her, sleeping there with the IV in her arm and the bandage on her forehead. When she woke at noon, I was still sitting there. "What time is it?" she asked drowsily. "Almost twelve." "You're still here? Your clinic—" "Never mind the clinic." She looked at the window, where the sun was now fully up, bleaching the day into flatness. "It's still my birthday," she said quietly. "Yes." "I was thinking—" She shifted slightly, winced. "I was thinking I wouldn't get to do anything. Isn't that funny? I spent the whole year waiting for this one day, and now I won't get to do anything." "You'll rest," I said. "That's what you'll do." "I wanted you to take the day off. I was going to ask you, next week, when you were less busy, if you'd take a day off and we could go somewhere. Somewhere nice. Just for the day." I said nothing. "But it doesn't matter now," she continued, more to herself than to me. "Some things you plan for and they don't happen the way you planned. And then you think—why did I plan it that way? Why did I want it to be that way?" The nurse came and gave her more painkillers. Her eyes grew heavy. "Your present," I said suddenly, "is still coming. Not today. But it's coming." She looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite read. "I don't want a present," she said. "I never want presents. I only want—" She paused, searching for words. The drugs were making her honest in a way that seemed to pain her. "I only want you to remember that I exist. Even when I'm not making you remember. Even when nothing is happening. Even when it's just an ordinary day." "I do," I lied. "You don't," she said gently. "But that's all right. You're here now." That afternoon, I brought her tea from the hospital canteen. In the evening, I bought her a magazine from the shop downstairs. Around seven o'clock, I stepped out to take a call from my partner at the clinic, and when I came back, I found her looking out the window at the city lights beginning to come on, like small wishes being lit one by one. "Happy birthday," I said, standing in the doorway. She didn't turn around. "Thank you," she said after a moment. "I think it might be."