Under the Pillow

 

He woke up one morning with a searing pain in his head. He struggled to sit up in bed. He felt a lot of pain, as if he was sleeping on a bed of nails. He rubbed his eyes and looked around bewildered.

‘Where am I?’ he thought. He remembered neither the room nor how he got there.

He struggled to his feet and limped to the door. Very gently he opened the door a little and peeped outside. He saw a man and a woman sitting at the dining table having breakfast. He quietly shut the door and limped back to his bed.

‘Where am I? Who are these people?’ he thought. He held his head in his hands and thought hard. But the harder he thought the more intense the pain in his head became. He felt as if someone was striking his head with a hammer.

‘I must search the room for clues,’ he thought. He opened the bedside drawers to search for clues. He found a wallet and in it a driving license.

‘Aditya Mehra,’ he read. ‘Strange, why can’t I recollect my name?’

He looked for more clues but couldn’t find any. Suddenly the end of an envelope jotting out from underneath the pillow caught his attention. He pulled out the envelope. ‘To Aditya Mehra’, it read.

 He opened the envelope and in it found a letter and some photographs. He kept the photographs aside and started reading the letter. His eyes welled up with tears. This was a letter he had written to himself. Tears rolled down as he read the letter. The letter described his horrific accident and his miraculous survival albeit at the cost of his memory. His brain had been damaged in a way that every morning it was a clean slate for him. He saw the photographs of his mom, dad and of them together. He realised the man and woman at the dining table were his parents.

He went out of the room.

“Mom? Dad?” he enquired. “Are you guys my parents?”

“We sure are,” replied his mom with a smile on her face. “Come on, quickly brush your teeth and come for breakfast.”

“Yeah,” he replied. “Give me 10 minutes.”

As soon as he went into the room, his mom broke down. Her fake smile was replaced with incessant sobbing. Her husband held her in a warm embrace and tried to console her.

“One reckless person thought it was fun to jump the red light and it ruined my boy’s life forever,” she said and sobbed.

“It’ll be alright honey,” he said.

“I just want my boy to be fine,” she said. “I can’t see him suffer every day, dependent on a letter he writes to himself every night. Dependent on a letter to identify himself, to identify his parents.”

She wept; he couldn’t control his tears either. But he quickly wiped them, one of them had to be strong, or at least pretend to be strong.