When Novels Healed My Hospital Wait

When Novels Healed My Hospital Wait

The antiseptic sting of hospital air clung to my throat as fluorescent lights hummed above vinyl chairs. Outside the ICU doors, minutes bled into hours while machines beeped a dissonant symphony behind thick walls. My knuckles whitened around the phone – that useless slab of glass – until I remembered the crimson icon tucked between productivity apps. Urdu Novels Collection. Last refuge of the soul-weary.

Fingers trembling, I tapped it open. No fancy animations, just stark elegance: rows of digital spines glowing against deep indigo. My thumb hovered over Parveen Shakir’s section – her verses once saved me during college heartbreaks. Scrolling felt like running fingers through a silk sari’s edge. Then offline access struck me: this marvel worked without Wi-Fi in this signal-dead zone. I downloaded "Khushboo" as a nurse called another family’s name.

Suddenly, the vinyl chair vanished. Shakir’s couplets bloomed: "Tum mere paas hotey ho goya / Jab koi doosra nahin hota" (You’re with me, it seems / When no one else remains). The app’s sepia theme mirrored old parchment, fonts adjustable till words danced like calligraphy. But damn the auto-brightness glitch! Screen blazing suddenly in dim ward – I fumbled like a thief caught reading diaries. Mortified, I dove into settings. Discovered scheduled dark mode: sunset-to-sunrise ambers. Genius buried in menus.

Outside, rain lashed the parking lot. Inside, Shakir’s metaphors became lifelines: grief crystallizing into dew on rose petals. The app’s library organization – by era, theme, even poetic meter – felt like wandering Lahore’s Mughal-era book bazaars. Yet fury spiked when highlighting a stanza caused accidental page-turns. Three swipes to recover! I nearly hurled the phone until discovering palm-rejection settings. Why hide such essentials?

Midnight approached. A wailing gurney rushed past. I hunched lower, screen light etching shadows on my face. The text-to-speech feature – robotic but rhythmic – let me close burning eyes while Urdu vowels washed over me. For twenty minutes, I wasn’t a terrified nephew in surgical limbo. I was a traveler hearing village elders recite Rumi by firelight. Then reality: battery at 8%. Panic! But the app’s minimalist design consumed less power than social media black holes. Grateful tears pricked as percentage stabilized.

Dawn crept through blinds when green lights finally blinked above ICU doors. Shakir’s final verse lingered: "Zindagi yun bhi guzar hi jaati / Kisi ke saath, kisi ke baad" (Life passes anyway / With someone, after someone). I shut the app, its crimson icon now a blood-pulse on my homescreen. Not perfect – clunky annotations, occasional translation hiccups – yet profoundly human. That night, it didn’t just display texts. It resurrected grandmother’s voice reading bedtime tales, made sterile walls breathe with ancestral ghosts.

Keywords:Urdu Novels Collection,news,hospital waiting,poetry escape,offline reading