Page 78 of A Thousand Painted Hours

The hospital was an assault—patients tucked into every nook and cranny, beds in the corridors, four or six crowded into rooms meant for two. Weeping visitors, stalwart nurses, physicians hurrying through thecrowds. I managed to track down an information desk, and the harried volunteer looked up Betty’s name, and directed me to the basement.

“The basement!”

“Safer,” she said curtly.

At last I found her, in a room with two others and a bed recently vacated by the look of it. She was asleep as I approached, her face battered, one eye swollen closed even this many days after the event. A bandage circled her head, which gave me pause. A head injury? Her body was covered with a blanket, but one leg was thick with plaster. Gingerly, I took her hand. It was cold, and I covered it with both of mine. She didn’t stir.

“She won’t know you,” the woman in the next bed said. “She’s drugged right to the gills, she is.”

“Do you know what her injuries are?”

“Broken this, broken that,” she said. “Same as us all.”

I nodded acknowledgment. Holding her hand, I said quietly, “I’m here, Betty. Your sister tracked you down, and we all know where you are now, so you are not alone. You just get well now, all right?” I stroked her dry fingers, wishing I’d thought to bring a book to read aloud to her. Looking around the room, I didn’t see any, and then, tucked behind a curtain, I saw the spine of one. “I’ll be right back.”

It was an old book, with faded gold letters on a blue cloth spine.Oroonoko, by Aphra Behn. “Does this belong to anyone?”

The other two patients simply shook their heads.

I found a chair and sat between Betty and her roommate, then opened the book and began to read. I could not help but remember reading to the injured soldiers near the end of the last war, H.G. Wells andGulliver’s Travels.

For a moment, I was washed with acute despair, the ghosts of those soldiers lying beneath the bodies of these humans, also grievously injured by the cold tools of war.

What was the point to any of it, a war to end wars, and then another war to gulp it down, on and on and on forever?

My despair only lasted a moment, for wasn’t I still whole myself, and wouldn’t I want to be read to if it were me in the bed, suffering? I picked up the book and continued to read.

October 26, 1940

London

[In Urdu]

Dear Tanveer,

It’s 2:00 a.m. Bombs have been falling in rounds all day, here and then farther away, then close enough to rock the house and rattle the windows. One small beauty is this circle of lamplight and my hand on the paper, writing to you. I am buoyed by the knowledge of you reading this, far away, but real. Alive. If I think of your face, reading the words I’ve written, I can take a breath.

A bomb just shook the walls, and I heard shrapnel rattle against the window. It is nerve-racking. I hate being above ground, and wish to run to a shelter, but Mother cannot even manage the stairs. Here we will stay.

Betty is in the hospital, and I suspect she will not be well enough to return to us, though where she will go is a mystery, as her sisters were displaced the first night of the blitzkrieg. I do not know if I can manage another invalid on my own, either. Perhaps I might find an able-bodied refugee. We have a little space.

But that is a task for another day. Tonight (this morning) I am weary in every bone in my entire body, and I cannot imagine there is a soul in this city who does not feel the same.

Reading helps quite a lot. When I visited Betty, I found a copy ofOroonoko, by Aphra Behn. It’s an old novel, and there are predictable colonialisms about the “natives” and their innocence, but in ways, it’s also critical of those same systems. I believe you would enjoy it, although there is a female narrator. I admit I grew so engrossed in my reading that I brought the novel home with me. When I am able to leave Mother with Peter for a few hours again, I shall take it back and read to her some more.

I’m sorry to hear that Channan still struggles. Please give her a kiss from my heart and tell her that I think of her every day and wish I could send my strength to her. It must be difficult to live in a body so riddled with injury, and she is a woman of great courage to have carried her pain so valiantly. I treasure my paintings of her.

Mother is also in poor health, and growing more so. Recently, she seems to forget where she is, orwhenshe is, and mentally wanders through her life, dropping into a timeline that pleases her and stays there for a time. I have been with her girlhood self at a tea where she met my father, and rather too vividly in the arms of her husband in America. I care for her as well as I am able, but I see her fading by the day.

How could it be otherwise in this madness of endless raids? It infuriates me!

In truth, Tanveer, I find it difficult to maintain a sense of optimism of any kind. How can London survive this onslaught? There will be nothing left by the end. The papers speak of the enemy’s losses, but I know they don’t report the full truth. I see the damage of a bomb nearby or on a notable landmark, and oftenthe papers mention nothing about it. It only feeds my sense of certainty that London will fall, just as the rest of Europe has—and then what future will we face?

Forgive my pouring this darkness out to you. There is no other. I must keep a brave face for Mother, and Nina suffers terrors of her own. I barely see anyone else. Peter weaves in and out, here long enough to bathe and sleep, then back to work.

Tell me a story, if you please. Give me a fable I can cling to. I keep thinking of the last war, of the telegrams that arrived, over and over. Of your suffering. Of my brother’s. Remind me there is also good in the world, and that we will know it again.

Your friend,