DEAR AHMED,

     I have chosen you in particular to be the recipient of this letter for a reason which may appear to you commonplace, yet since yesterday my every thought has been centred on it. I chose you in particular because when I saw him yesterday dying on the high white bed I remembered how you used to use the word ‘die’ to express anything extreme. Many is the time I’ve heard you use such expressions as ‘I almost died laughing’,  ‘I was dead tired’, ‘Death itself couldn’t quench my love’, and so on. While it is true that we all use such words, you use them more than anybody. Thus it was that I remembered you as I saw him sinking down in the bed and clutching at the coverlet with his long, emaciated fingers, giving a convulsive shiver and then staring out at me with dead eyes.

     But why have I not begun at the beginning? You know, no doubt, that I am now in my second month at the hospital. I have been suffering from a stomach ulcer, but no sooner had the surgeon plugged up the hole in my stomach than a new one appeared in my head, about which the surgeon could do nothing. Believe me, Ahmed, that an ‘ulcer’ on the brain is a lot more stubborn than one in the stomach. My room leads on to the main corridor of the Internal Diseases Wing, while the window overlooks the small hospital garden. Thus, propped up by a pillow, I can observe both the continuous flow of patients passing the door as well as the birds which fly past the window incessantly. Amidst this  hubbub of people who come here to die in the serene shadow of the scalpel and whom I see, having arrived on their own two feet, leaving after days or hours on the death trolley, wrapped round in a covering of white; in this hubbub I find myself quite unable to make good those holes that have begun to open up in my head, quite incapable of stopping the flow of questions that mercilessly demand an answer of me.

     I shall be leaving the hospital in a few days, for they have patched up my insides as best they can. I am now able to walk leaning on the arm of an old and ugly nurse and on my own powers of resistance. The hospital, however, has done little more than transfer the ulcer from my stomach to my head, for in this place, as the ugly old woman remarked, medicine may be able to plug up a hole in the stomach but it can never find the answers required to plug up holes in one’s thinking. The day she said this the old woman gave a toothless laugh as she quietly led me off to the scales.

     What, though, is such talk to do with us? What I want to talk to you about is death. Death that takes place in front of you, not about that death of which one merely hears. The difference between the two types of death is immeasurable and cannot be appreciated by someone who has not been a witness to a human being clutching at the coverlet of his bed with all the strength of his trembling fingers in order to resist that terrible slipping into extinction, as though the coverlet can pull him back from that colossus who, little by little, wrests from his eyes this life about which we know scarcely anything.

     As the doctors waited around him, I examined the card that hung at the foot of his bed. I had slipped out of my room and was standing there , unseen by the doctors, who were engaged in  a hopeless attempt to save the dying man. I read: ‘Name: Mohamed Ali Akbar. Age: 25. Nationality: Omani.’ I turned the card over and this time read: ‘Leukaemia.’ Again I stared into the thin brown face, the wide frightened eyes and the lips that trembled like a ripple of purple water. As his eyes turned and came to rest on my face it seemed that he was appealing to me for help. Why? Because I used to give him a casual greeting every morning? Or was it that he saw in my face some understanding of the terror he was undergoing? He went on staring at me and then—quite simply—he died.

     It was only then that the doctor discovered me and dragged me off angrily to my room. But he would never be able to banish from my mind the scene that is ever-present there. As I got on to my bed I heard the voice of the male nurse in the corridor alongside my door saying in a matter-of-fact voice:

     ‘Bed number 12 has died!’

     I said to myself: ‘Mohamed Ali Akbar has lost his name, he is Bed number 12.’ What do I mean now when I talk of a human being whose name was Mohamed Ali Akbar? What does it matter to him whether he still retains his name or whether it has been replaced by a number? Then I remembered how he wouldn’t allow anyone to omit any part of his name. Every morning the nurse would ask him, ‘And how are you, Mohamed Ali?’ and he would not reply, for he regarded his name as being Mohamed Ali Akbar— just like that, all in one—and that this Mohamed Ali to whom the nurse was speaking was some other person.