Chapter 4—The Hit and the Quiet of Waiting
Life after the wedding was a constellation of small domestic coronations. They learned to negotiate light—where to hang pictures, how to divide chores. Rahul discovered that Ananya loved her dal slightly sour; Ananya learned that Rahul folded his shirts with a strange, precise intensity. Their days carried on with the steady intimacy they had built: metro rides with a hand tucked into the other's, arguments about whether to buy a new pressure cooker, and laughter over Mango's dramatic theft of a dinner roll.
Ananya's sister Priya was twenty-two, a veterinary student with a stubborn, luminous grin and a habit of calling at inconvenient hours. She lived in a rented room near the university but loved to spend weekends with her mother and sister, weaving through their life with the blunt optimism of younger siblings. Priya adored Rahul—she called him "Rau" with a lisp that made him break into a grin—and she and Rahul shared an easy joke about Rahul's sketches that often left Ananya smiling from the doorway.
On a humid evening in late autumn, a trivial errand turned into a full stop. Priya was returning from the college library, her shoulder bag heavy with textbooks, when a frayed rivalry in the lane outside their building—men shouting about borrowed money—escalated. It was not the kind of violence that belonged in films; it was the petty, raw anger of lives pressed until they frayed. Priya, caught between two arguing men, tried to cross the lane. One of the men, quick with a swing of anger, pushed her aside—intended or not—and she stumbled, knuckles scraping the concrete.
Rahul, who had just stepped out to get milk, registered the scene in the slow-motion way that panic sometimes frames ordinary life. He pushed through the small crowd, voice high and exact, asking people to move. One of the men, perhaps drunk or perhaps only flayed by his own reasons, lunged out, and where the arm met Rahul's temple, the world turned into light and a hollow knock.
He went down. The world narrowed into a sound that was not sound—someone's shoes squeaking, Ananya's scream ripping open, the metallic clank of a milk bottle hitting the pavement. Priya was on the ground, stunned and shaking, and Rahul lay with one hand fisted in his shirt, blood warm and quick beneath his palm.
They reached the hospital in a blur. Ananya's hands shook so hard she could not hold the payment card; she signed forms with a script that shook but remained legible. Rahul's head had a dark map of blood; the doctor's voice became a series of efficient gates. They took scans. They stitched. The surgeon, a woman who spoke in cool, certain syllables, looked at Ananya and said, "He's stable now, but there's swelling. We have to observe. He might go into a coma because of the trauma."
The world rearranged itself around that sentence. Time fractured. Ananya's voice found edges of a prayer she had not known she knew. Priya sat with her forehead on the plastic chair and sobbed like someone releasing a bellows.
"Why didn't you let me—" Priya began, and Ananya gripped her sister's hand until the knuckles whitened. There were a thousand reasons in that question—the foolish courage of siblings, the dangerous older-world reflexes, and the knife of the unexpected. None of it mattered now except that Rahul, who had stood between a younger woman and harm, had taken that violence into his own body.
The first night in ICU moved like a slow, impossible tide. Venous tubes like thin, modern ligatures ran from Rahul's arm; his breath came and went via machinery that recorded each small wave. Ananya sat by his bed with a folded shawl, her forehead resting on that familiar chest ridge where she had once relaxed into sleep. The thing about hospital light is that it tends to reveal rather than flatter: pores, small scars, and the pallor that grief can lend to a face.
Days drifted. Friends arrived in shifts; Rahul's mother, salt-faced and hands trembling with old worry, fed Ananya quietly between phone calls. Priya read aloud from old, silly books—her voice different in the hum of machines—pages of comic relief threaded between facts and dates. Vandana refused to leave; she bathed Rahul's head with cool water under the physician's permission and pressed scented cloths to his forehead with a ministrating tenderness that was almost sacramental.
At night, Ananya would press her hand against Rahul's palm, saying aloud things she wanted him to hear: the small events of the day, the petty office emails, Mango's latest theft, and a promise to visit the new chaat stall they'd been meaning to try. She recited the mundane like prayer: "We bought onions, but I forgot green chilies." These tiny, ridiculous facts anchored him to the life he had saved them to live. Sometimes she would talk about their wedding again—the sari that had slipped, the jokes, the haldi paste drying like a golden bruise. Her voice would fray at the edges and then steady with a fierce, stubborn cadence: "Fight. Come back. We have to fight. Mango will miss you."
Doctors spoke in clinical cadences that felt sometimes like a foreign language and sometimes like a blunt instrument. "He's showing reflexes," one said; another offered a guarded hope. The neurosurgeon recommended time: "The brain needs rest. We can only watch." Watching was a work they had not been hired for.
Family folded around them. Rahul's friends took turns staying overnight so Ananya could go home to sleep. Colleagues brought daal and rice that tasted like comfort and something less definable—solidarity. There were times when the hospital room felt like an altar of ordinary love: friends lighting small lamps, coworkers whispering silly, impossible memories about Rahul dropping a plate at a family lunch, and Priya whispering promises as if the words could be made into medicine.
Weeks slotted themselves into a rhythm only grief knows—small temporal units marked by blood tests and CT scans and one miraculous morning when Rahul's fingers twitched against Ananya's. It was maddeningly small: a twitch like a sign, like a punctuation mark in a long sentence. She watched him with a devotion that became its own economy. Her days emptied into that vigil; she learned to sleep in forty-minute intervals and to count breaths as if they were currency.
If anything kept her upright, it was memory. She remembered how he used to fold his hand into the shape of a cup when he was thinking, how he once tried to toast bread and set off a small alarm in the flat, and how he always knocked twice before entering a room. She pinned these small things to her mind like talismans against the dark.
One evening, after a day when the scans said nothing and the machines sang a steady mechanical rhythm, Rahul's eyelids fluttered. A breath deepened. Ananya, who had been composing a message to everyone who mattered, found she could not send it because something in her wanted to be present when he woke up. Around them, the machines hummed, and the city rolled on beyond the window—indifferent and tenacious in equal measure.
The chapter ends with a long, long night: a woman at a hospital bedside, whispering the small petitions of a life she had built—promises to buy the wrong kind of chili again, to let Mango sleep on the bed tonight, and to fold his shirts in his odd way whenever he woke. She pressed her ear to the quiet of the machines and listened for a breath that would mean homecoming.