Of all the time spent at a hospital, I think the dreariest is the bit spent at the admission and insurance counters. On this occasion at the admission counter, I was again being asked for the details of my identification documents and my mother’s. But unlike on other occasions, I was fully prepared. All my IDs were saved in the photo gallery of my phone. But not very methodically, I realized. I had saved them over a period of time. Whenever I had used an ID, I had taken a photo, but not of all of them together, because I hate looking at IDs and can only have them one at a time, not more.

They lay scattered all over. Trying to focus through my face shield, I spotted my Aadhaar card photo on top of a heap of pictures of me — taken by my daughter through Snapchat filters. They were silly, they were grotesque, they were hideous. I was featured with a cat’s face that knocked my chin in and extended my jowls even more, a bunny face and, mostly, as a baby. The baby pictures made me look monstrous. One picture showed me as a bald man. Another with two giant front teeth. When they had been taken I had been annoyed with my daughter for filling my phone up with rubbish.

Now they felt different. They were oddly comforting. Instead of mailing the Aadhaar card, I began to scroll down through my pictures, lingering over each of them. Between my Aadhaar and PAN card I found another stash, of random screenshots of Shashi Kapoor, whose beauty never fails to move me. I began to linger over them too.

What was I doing? I was at the hospital finishing the admission process for my mother, the gentleman at the counter was glaring at me and asking me for the details every second minute, and others at the counter were also looking at me accusingly, and I was failing to drag myself away from Shashi Kapoor and also from the pictures of a silly, lovely evening that were stacked below. My activities took less time in reality, and are taking more time to be written down, but what I was passing through seemed like an eternity. I was troubled by my own behaviour, although I had made sure that there were no other patients’ families queuing up behind me. It was so silly, but I was paralyzed by joy. I was looking at another world, one which I had almost forgotten, having been snatched away by death, disease, virtual life and endless gloom. That other world was less perfect when I lived in it, but the photographs made it perfect. They were the very antidote to the hospital now. Did Wordsworth feel like me, lying on the couch, focusing his inward eye on the daffodils? Emotions recollected in tranquillity, or in a hospital?

The admission process could not wait any more and I began to fill in a series of forms, when there was a commotion on my right. I looked up and saw a miracle. Really.

Santa Claus had appeared and was wishing me ‘Merry Christmas’. He was standing at the head of a mini procession of revellers in Christmas colours and at least two angels, in white gowns and white wings, although walking on earth. Each of them offered me and everyone at the counters and all the visitors in the lobby a candy each.

The gentleman at the counter told me that they were all hospital staff, Christians, mostly from the Northeast and the South. They had not been able to go home for an entire year, not even for Christmas. This is what they had organized to make themselves, and others, feel good.

Santa Claus and the merrymakers moved towards the hospital entrance and seemed to vanish as they had materialized.

I felt blessed.