"Dolly, do you know about the angmo in bed number 33? The one who's always mumbling to himself? Something about desert, burning bird and some angmo called katharine?"
"Oh, that one lah. All day long, don't know talk what. Must be the morphine. Don't care about him lah." Dolly goes back to filing his polished nails.
"But he is a count you know. And a desert explorer too. And his angmo - so romantic, so poetic." Blushing with her knuckles under the chin, Hana stares dreamingly out at the garden under the sweltering afternoon sun.
"Oh, Hana, Hana. Silly, silly, silly. Open your eyes. He is a walking, no, not walking, a laying corpse you know. What do you see in him. All black coal ready to be turned into diamonds? Haha"
Yet, nothing seems to shake Hana out of her desert-like mirage, no matter how hard Dolly shakes his head in exasperation. Money turns the world on its head - not romance, silly girl. Dolly mumbles to herself.
Our English Patient has his head twisted at an awkward angle to glance out the window. The wind, bringing with it the tropical heat, brushes his burnt skin like feathers. He can smell the ointment on his body, and his own excrement too. Damn! What's keeping Hana. Well, what to do. He reaches out a claw-like hand at the tattered notebook on the small bedside table, wrenching out several pages of The Histories by Herodotus. The medium he once had with Katharine.
Katharine. So much in a name, far-reaching as the desert, resounding in the high Himayalan mountains, etched in his withered soul.
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