A staircase is an inanimate object. It cannot think, feel, and act. Well, that is the worldly wisdom. But perhaps all such wisdom is not true at all times.
We have an elevator, and the staircase goes all around it from the ground floor to the top floor. The side walls of the staircase are painted in the upper part and have tiles in the lower part. Near the landing, there are one foot wide tiles from the floor to the roof, probably to make it look good. The visitors have a pastime of chewing paan, which contains a special leaf, calcium hydroxide, betel nut, tobacco, and some flavor. The process of chewing this paan results in collection of saliva in the mouth which is colored red due to the juices coming out of the concoction. The juice is not to be swallowed, but to be spat out. They believe that the road, pavements, ground, and staircases and corridors of the hospital are at par as spitting places. They are aesthetic people, and they always spit on the walls or in the corners, rather than in the middle of the corridor or staircase. A servant cleans the muck every morning, as advised by the Boss. That has kept the place clean. Otherwise people feel the corridors and staircases are the right places to spit when they see the red spit of others who have been there before them, and contribute to it.
We used to be asked to write short autobiographies of things like school blackboard or bench when we were in school. It used to be an exercise in composition, where we had to imagine ourselves to be those things and write about their lives as if they were our own. I could write a good autobiography of the hospital staircase, what with my experience of last 36 years.
“Sir, look what has happened” the OT servant called my attention to the staircase. The tile in the upper part of the wall near the landing had fallen off and broken into a number of pieces. There was some red fluid under it. I thought it was blood.
“Did it fall on someone’s head?” I asked. “That seems to be blood.”
“No, Sir” he said. “It is the spit of a person who had chewed paan. “It is something quite weird.”
“A new tile fitted not more trhan 8 months ago coming off like that is indeed weird” I said. “It cannot have been hit by something, because it is above the level of our heads.”
“No, Sir. That is not weird. That keep happening everywhere in the newly repaired and renovated building of the hospital. What is weird is that when the man was spitting there, there was an angry roar-like noise and the tile came off and fell almost on his head. His friend pulled him away just in time, or his head would have been bashed in.”
“That sounds dangerous” I said, “bit what do you mean calling it weird?”
“Sir, the angry sound came from the wall, much before the tile fell off. I think the staircase got angry at people spitting in it, and dropped a tile to punish that man.”
This sounded weird all right. I could not believe it as an intellectual, a doctor. I would have passed it as his imagination and superstition, but he was an intelligent fellow and usually did not make such statements. And then I recalled a small story like this one that I had read in ‘Peanut’ comics by Schulz, where the school wall had dropped a brick on Lucy as punishment. Was our hospital building following the school in ‘Peanut’ comics?
