I Prayed for the First Time in Ten Years
Outside an operation theatre, my atheism asked for a quick word.
My negotiation with God opened at 2:15 in the morning with the words, and I quote myself exactly, "Okay. Listen."
Ten years of confident atheism, of winning arguments at dinner tables, of explaining to patient aunties that I respected their beliefs but did not share them, and when the moment came, that was my liturgy. Okay. Listen. The tone you use with a customer service desk when the flight has been cancelled and you have decided to stay calm in a way that is audibly not calm.
The flight in question was my father. Triple bypass, emergency, the kind where the cardiologist stops using soft words and starts using short ones. They took him in at midnight. The operation theatre at that hospital sits at the end of a long corridor with lights that someone had dimmed for the night shift, and outside it there is a row of steel benches bolted to the wall, and on those benches the human race conducts its rawest business.
My mother had her prayer beads out before they finished the paperwork. Her thumb moved over them all night with the steadiness of a metronome, and I remember being jealous of her hands. They had somewhere to go. Mine opened and closed around a phone that had no one useful in it.
I did the things an unbeliever does in a crisis. I read the statistics twice. Bypass surgery has excellent outcomes, said the internet, and I stood in that dim corridor doing maths with my father's life, adding his diabetes, subtracting his age, carrying the fear. The numbers were good. The numbers were genuinely good. And at some point around 2 a.m. I discovered the terrible secret of numbers, which is that they do not care whether you hold them or not.
You cannot grip a percentage. It has no handle on it.
At 2:15, without any decision being taken at any level of management, I found myself at the far end of the corridor, past the sleeping relatives of other patients, facing a window that faced nothing, and I heard myself say it.
Okay. Listen.
And then, because apparently ten years of silence had not improved my material, I offered God a deal like a man selling a scooter.
If my father comes out of this, I will call my brother.
I should explain the scooter I was selling. My brother and I had not spoken in four years. The original wound was money, which is what we said, and pride, which is what it was. Two stubborn men, one inheritance-shaped misunderstanding, and forty-eight months of silence that had calcified into furniture. Both of us waiting to be apologised to. Our father had asked us, separately and often, to fix it, and we had both told him, separately and often, that it was complicated. It was not complicated... It was just heavy, and neither of us would bend our knees to lift it.
So that was my opening bid, praying in a crisis for the first time in a decade: my father's heart in exchange for one phone call I should have made anyway. Even in the moment I could hear how cheap it was. I remember thinking, you are bargaining with a God you do not believe in, using a currency you already owed.
And I remember the answer my own head gave back, which was, then why is your face wet.
I did not find God outside that operation theatre. I found the part of me that would trade anything I had, and it needed someone, anyone, to trade with.
The surgery took five hours. The surgeon came out at dawn still wearing his cap, and he said the three or four sentences that surgeons say, and inside them, like a coin inside a cake, was the word "successful." My mother's thumb stopped on its bead. I went to the end of the corridor, past the window that faced nothing, and I did not say thank you to anyone, because by 7 a.m. my atheism had reported back to work and was already drafting explanations. Statistics, remember. Excellent outcomes. The numbers held, that is all.
But a deal is a deal, even a deal with nobody.
I called my brother from the hospital car park, standing between two ambulances. He picked up on the second ring, which told me the aunties had already informed the entire subcontinent. There was a silence... and then I heard him crying before I heard him speak, and the four years came off like a scab that had been ready for longer than either of us knew. He said, "How is he?" I said, "He is out, he is okay." He said, "I am coming, I am leaving now," and hung up before I could say the sentence I had rehearsed, which was fine, because the sentence was terrible.
He drove nine hours.
When our father woke up properly the next evening, both his sons were in the room, standing on opposite sides of the bed but in the same room, and the old man looked from one of us to the other, did the arithmetic, and started to laugh, which you should not do with a fresh sternotomy. The nurse scolded all three of us.
Here is the part I did not see coming. A week later, during his recovery walks, my father told me what happened to him on the trolley. My father, the man who has done his morning rituals every day for fifty years without missing one, told me that when they wheeled him in, his mind went completely blank. "I tried to say my prayers," he said, shuffling down the ward corridor in his hospital slippers, holding my arm. "Nothing came... Fifty years of prayers and the cupboard was empty. You know what came instead?" A film song. An old Rafi song his own father used to sing while shaving. He said he went under the anaesthesia with a film song playing in his head, and he was not ashamed, because, and I am quoting my father now, "it went to the same address."
So there it is. On the same night, in the same building, the believer lost his prayers and the atheist found some. Neither of us converted. We just swapped coats for a few hours in the cold, and gave them back in the morning.
I have tried to write about that night several times since. The first attempts were arguments, essays about foxholes and hypocrisy, and they were dead on arrival. The thing only came alive when I stopped defending myself and wrote it as what it was, a story about family, and about the phone call, which is to say about forgiveness, which I have learned is a door that looks locked because nobody has touched the handle in years. Eventually one draft turned into a poem, and my brother, of all people, dared me to enter it into a monthly poetry contest. It placed nowhere. He has a screenshot of it framed in his hallway anyway, which is the most our family has ever said out loud about any of this.
My father walks five kilometres a day now and takes his statins with theatrical sighing. My brother calls on Sundays. My mother still prays for all of us, on the beads, with the metronome thumb.
And me... I am still an atheist, I think, on paper, at dinner tables. But some nights when the house is quiet I catch myself humming an old Rafi song I never chose to learn, and I let it run all the way to the end.
Whatever address it goes to, I no longer mark it return to sender.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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