Redemption - Part II

Out of these two patients under my care, there was a young Indian man named Sam who was assigned to me. I presume he had had a more Indian name like Shyam which perhaps got changed along the way so that the western world could refer to him with more ease. Or maybe he had been Sam all his life, there was no way to know. Some people have the worst of luck throughout their lives and this man was a living example of that.  

Sam was born and brought up in the USA itself. When he was six years old, he lost his parents and his little brother in a fire. He had been out camping with the school boy scouts team when the incident occurred. His parents and his little brother had gone to sleep comfortably in their beds unaware of the fate that would befall them that night. The fire started from one of the incense sticks his mother used for her daily ‘puja’, the Hindi word for the rituals performed towards God by Hindus. A streak of wind sneaked in from somewhere and toppled the little stick towards a nearby curtain which started smoking and eventually a fire broke out on the ground floor. By the time the Guptas (their surname was Gupta) were aware it was too late. Forensics confirmed death of all three members by asphyxiation from smoke inhalation. Sam was picked up from the camp in the dark hours of the next morning by a police officer who explained to him what had happened as best as he could.

Child Services came into the scene and Sam went through several homes on account of his ever increasing erratic and troubling behavior. Finally he was put in an orphanage where he picked fights every other day, ran away several times and even had an accident. This was another turning moment in his life. He had stolen the dean’s car and crashed it on the interstate. The accident left him paralyzed waist down. All other motor functions were normal waist up but it didn’t matter, it was as if the life had gone out of him after the accident, leaving an empty shell of skin, muscle and bone behind. Sam had been unhappy his entire life, and life never seemed to hold back on giving more reasons to be so.

The only activity Sam now did was scream out at times and then start to sob. He screamed that he had visions of the future. He would scream and then start talking in illegible sentences, words all disordered, making wild gestures and then as suddenly as he had started, he would stop, start to sob and then eventually quieten down. From what was gathered, the vision similar every time - he could see his mother, father and his little brother, but they were not in the house or anyplace he remembered being with them. The part with his family always seemed constant but the place he saw them kept on changing- sometimes it was in the clouds, sometimes at the local fair or sometimes at their own old backyard. He also screamed about another misshapen hazy figure in his visions, standing at a distance. Mr. Conrad took deep interest in trying to learn about the man’s visions. He always had a research intern around Sam, taking notes of his behavior and what he talked about. The other nurses claimed that the research wing had even secretly done experiments to decipher what was going on in his mind. Of course, they didn’t have proof to back up their story. But these erratic visions kept repeating themselves over and over every day; that is, until the day I came in to work. All the other nurses had the same story to tell- Sam had been the empty human shell going through the cycles of everyday mental hospital life with his erratic visions and screaming until the day I had arrived. 

Read Redemption - Part III