The old man.....

Today he touched 100. 

He looks like a little boy, but at the same time he's an old man.  His flesh is wasting away. Bones once covered and concealed by well rounded muscles now stick out offensively.  Once, a man on the move is now confined to the bed.  He lies helplessly on his stained sheets. Impervious to the bites of the bedbugs and mosquitoes. He is nearly blind. Cataract has taken over the retinas. Yesterday someone called. A relative. Wanted to know, how he was doing. He couldn't get the name. But at this stage of life, names, faces do not matter. His memory was also fading. He has an old mobile phone by his side. That's his only contact to the outside world. His relatives call. Now and then. He does not remember their names anymore. Keeps confusing one with the other. Rarely they come to visit him. They have all contributed and kept a servant to attend to his needs-which are now limited to eating, peeing and shitting. He shits more than he eats.  One of the signs of  him being alive.  One night, he heard a woman's voice in the next room. Then he heard her moaning heavily. The servant perhaps had got a whore for the night. Or maybe he imagined, he was not sure.   He  gets irritated, when the phone rings. He does not want to talk. The effort, tires him out. He does not know anything about his disease. He only knows that its time to die. There was a time he was scared of death. He didn't learn to swim for fear of drowning. He didn't fly kites for fear of falling off the roof.  He is tired of shitting on the bed, tired of the bloody servant, trying to force food into him.

The phone began to ring. Then it went on and on…………