Room 460 was a twin-bed arrangement sliced into two neat halves by a wooden partition. On one half of the room was Father’s bed. The room was functionally furnished with a second cot (provided for the patient's attendant), a bedside table and an almirah that held Father’s voluminous medical history in bags of files. A patient recuperating from a knee surgery occupied the other half of Room 460. The man’s bejewelled wife waited on him devotedly, tending to his every whim and fancy, her fat arms encased in glass bangles of every conceivable shade, tinkling in the background. 

Things might have been relatively peaceful in Room 460 had it not been for a bone of contention: the television set. Operated Knee had the TV in his half of the room, a flagrant violation of hospital rules. But we had no complaint with that, caught as we were in the middle of a real-life soap opera, to want to indulge in fantasies of the screen variety. But the blasted TV was on, set at a particularly offensive decibel level, at all times of day and night. Father was having enough trouble sleeping.

After a long and arduous battle with insomnia, he would finally drift off, just when Operated Knee, and all the extended family that descended on him at uncomfortably frequent intervals, settled down to drool over the wild gyrations of the movie industry’s hottest siren. And Father would predictably come awake like a light switch being flicked on, demanding that he be fed breakfast at the unearthly hour of three in the morning. It took three nurses and all their reserves of patience and guile to calm Father down. 

To add to the mayhem were the daily arrivals of several branches of Operated Knee’s rather large and loving family tree, many of whom seemed to have rediscovered and retraced their paths to him. They would arrive in multiples of three, waddling, and laden with plastic bags bursting with food enough to feed the hospital. Then they would follow an elaborate clunking and tinkling as stainless steel containers of assorted shapes and sizes revealed their contents. Ladles were sloshed inside spice-rich gravies as they gurgled their way into mountains of rice. The aroma of fried fish and curry would waft over to our side of the room, carried on the fan-circulated breeze. A loud chomping would ensue, punctuated by hearty sighs of contentment, and loud belches. 

I could stand it no longer one morning and stormed out toward the nurses station with my practiced protestations. Within minutes the Head Nurse strode into the room, reminding the patient’s family of visiting hours (and visiting numbers), and with a flourish turned down the offending volume on the television set. Instantly incensed, the bejewelled wife declared that we were welcome to move out if we couldn't "adjust." Obviously, they had connections in high places that gave them the confidence to flaunt rules and expect others to make the adjustment. The same evening, an officious-looking administrative executive knocked on our door. Clucking and sucking in his breath at all the right places during my narrative of woe, he offered to move us to a single room in the next hour, his well-trained smile in place through it all. "At no extra cost," we were politely placated.