The Psalm at My Daughter's Sickbed
I hadn't prayed since childhood, but the old words knew the way.
Febrile seizure.
Two words I learned at 3:41 in the morning, standing in a paediatric corridor in mismatched socks because I had left my shoes somewhere between the car park and the emergency desk and could not remember doing it.
My daughter Meera was six. The fever had climbed all evening the way water climbs into a boat with a slow leak, quietly, politely, and then all at once. One minute she was watching cartoons with glassy eyes and refusing soup. The next her small body went rigid on the sofa, her eyes rolled back, and my wife screamed my name in a voice I had never heard her use in eleven years of marriage.
The doctors were calm. Doctors are always calm, which is either the most comforting thing in the world or the most enraging, depending on which side of the curtain you are standing on. They said febrile seizures look terrifying and are usually harmless. They said usually... I heard only that word.
Usually is a trapdoor with a rusted hinge, and I spent the whole night standing on it.
They kept her for observation. My wife stayed by the bed, holding Meera's hand through the rail. I was sent to fill out forms, and afterwards I could not make myself go back into the room, because in the room there was a pulse monitor and a child the size of a comma, and I did not trust my face.
I stood in the corridor instead. It was dim, lit by one tube light that flickered near the nurses' station. It smelled of disinfectant and someone's abandoned coffee, and somewhere down the hall a machine beeped with the patience of a thing that has never loved anyone.
That is where the psalm found me.
I should explain something. I had not prayed since I was maybe twelve. Not out of anger, nothing dramatic. Faith had simply left me the way baby teeth leave, painlessly, one by one, until one day I ran my tongue along the space where belief used to be and found smooth gum. But my grandmother had taught me the words when I was small. Every night at her house in Nagpur, before the mosquito coil burned down, she would make me repeat after her: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. She said it in her strange convent-school English, and I said it back, and neither of us worried about what it meant. It was just the sound the day made when it was ending.
In that corridor, at 3:41 in the morning, my mouth started saying the words without asking me first.
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
I stopped, embarrassed, and looked around. A cleaner was pushing a mop three doors down. He did not look up. I started again, quieter.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved. He that keepeth thee will not slumber.
An hour earlier I had typed prayers for a sick child into my phone with shaking thumbs, the way you type anything at 2 a.m. that you would deny typing in daylight. The internet offered me formatted graphics with clip-art doves and fonts that looked like wedding invitations. None of it stuck to me. But the psalm was not something I found that night.
It was something that had been waiting inside me for thirty years, folded small like a letter in a coat pocket, and fear reached in and unfolded it.
I did not believe in God that night. I believed in my grandmother believing, and I borrowed her belief like a coat that still smelled of her.
Here is what nobody tells you about the old words: they know the way even when you do not. My own sentences had abandoned me hours before. When the doctor asked if I had questions, I had said, "Is she... will she... the thing where," and then given up and nodded at nothing. But the psalm walked out of my mouth in complete lines, sure of its footing, like a person who had made this trip many times and knew exactly where the corridor turned.
I said it four times... Maybe five.
Then I wiped my face on my sleeve and went back into the room.
Meera was asleep, an IV line taped to a hand so small the tape went nearly all the way around. My wife had fallen asleep sitting up, her cheek against the bed rail, printing a mark she would carry to breakfast. I sat in the plastic chair and did the thing you do, which is watch a chest rise and fall and count the rises like a miser counting coins.
Somewhere around dawn, Meera opened her eyes.
"Papa," she said, "you were saying a poem."
I told her she had been dreaming. She shook her head with the terrible certainty of a six-year-old. "You said it in the hallway. The one about the hills. Say it again."
The walls of a paediatric ward are thin, apparently, and children hear more than the machines do.
So I said it again, out loud this time, to an audience of one, feeling ridiculous and then, somewhere around the second verse, not feeling ridiculous at all. He that keepeth thee will not slumber. Meera listened the way she listens to thunderstorms, with her whole face. When I finished she said, "Again," the way she used to say it about the caterpillar book, and I understood that to her it was not a prayer at all. It was a poem. Hills and rhythm and a promise, said by her father in the dark.
Maybe that is all it ever was for me too. Maybe that is not a smaller thing. I have stopped being sure the two were ever different.
She came home two days later with a dinosaur sticker on her shirt and no memory of the seizure. Children are mercifully built. The fear stayed with me, of course. It took up residence, and it still knocks some nights when she coughs twice in a row. But something else stayed too, something with better manners.
A month afterwards, I did a thing I had not done since college. I wrote. Not a prayer, I would not know what address to put on one anymore, but a poem about that corridor: the flickering tube light, the cleaner and his mop, my grandmother's voice arriving thirty years late and exactly on time. It was the first honest thing I had written in decades, and it taught me that writing about family is really writing about everything else wearing a familiar face. I read it to my wife at the kitchen table. She cried, and then pointed out two weak line breaks, because she is both a good wife and a good editor.
I even entered it into a monthly poetry contest, less for the prize than to make that night mean something outside the walls of our house. It did not win. A stranger wrote to say it made her call her mother, which felt like winning something older than contests. Since then I have been reading poems about hope that do not lie, the ones that admit how dark the corridor was before they mention the hills.
These days, bedtime at our house has a new liturgy. The caterpillar book has been retired with full honors. Meera asks for the hill poem instead, and I sit on the edge of her bed and say my grandmother's psalm to my daughter while the nightlight hums its one note. I still do not know who keeps us. I know the words go out of me like they are going somewhere, and I know that when I reach the last line, from this time forth, and even for evermore, there is a small voice in the dark that says, "Again."
And I begin again. That part, at least, I have complete faith in.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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