Chapter — Wake, and Two Names
When Rahul opened his eyes, the world was made of hospital light and the slow, businesslike beeping of machines. His first thought was nonsense: he was late for the metro, he hadn't finished the sketch for the balcony cornice, Mango would be on the sill—petty, domestic things that had been his map for years. His second thought was physical and blunt: the inside of his head felt like a soaked cloth. Every attempt to lift his arms returned a listless, leaden refusal.
He tried to speak. The sound that came out of him was a hoarse, gravelly thing that belonged to another man. A nurse—young, competent, with a badge that said "Simran"—was there in half a second, palms flat on his wrist as if checking for a pulse he already knew existed.
"Sir? You're awake," she said. Her voice was measured, the way people use when the fragile thing in front of them might break again. The room swam. The fluorescent ceiling tiles looked like the underside of a train platform, and for a dizzy second Rahul thought of the metro, of rain, of how Ananya had first laughed to keep from falling apart.
"What—" he tried.
"You've been in a coma," Simran said, and the words fell like someone dropping a heavy book. "Six years. We… we need to call your wife."
Rahul's mouth felt empty. Six. The number collided with him and did not fit. He tried to remember the strike, the shove, the concrete. There was a flash—the lane, Priya stumbling, him stepping forward—and then a blankness that should have swallowed years. The nurses' faces blurred and sharpened; a clipboard appeared like a prop. Rahul's tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.
"Why do I feel so weak?" he asked, voice smaller now, like a child asking why the sun was not in the sky.
Simran answered with a professionalism that softened at the edges. "Because your body slept for a long time. Muscles atrophy. You've lost weight. You'll need time, therapy—" she paused. "We're monitoring you for brain swelling and infection. For now, rest. Try to conserve strength."
They moved around him with a quiet choreography: stethoscopes, soft instructions, a curtain drawn back to keep the glare away. Rahul watched his limbs as if they were strangers who'd taken a train he did not board. He felt an ache for Mango's warm weight, for the city's noise that had been the hush between his life breaths. He tried to anchor himself in one thing: a name. Ananya. He could not feel the word in his mouth, but the memory of her laugh—tough, brave, always carrying a little shelter—arrived like scent.
The nurses went to call her. Simran's hand on the phone was a small, brittle bridge between what he remembered and what the world had become. For a long minute nothing happened. Rahul tried to sit up and the room tilted, a slow, sleepy tilt that made his stomach protest. He lay back, breath shallow, the world reduced to the sound of his heartbeat and the distant murmur of people who seemed to be conducting a thing he was not ready for.
When the door opened and a woman stepped in, the air changed. Rahul saw her before he could name her: smaller, yes, but larger now in a way he had not expected—lined around the eyes by time and sorrow, steadier in the set of her mouth. Her hair had a streak of silver near the temple that had not been there in his memory. She clutched a small hand to her side.
"Ananya," the word found him like a lifeline.
Ananya's breath hitched when she saw him. There were six years in the way she blinked—a compression of nights and legal forms and hospital corridors and the small ironies of motherhood. She was not the same girl who had joked on a rainy Tuesday; she carried a reserve of armor made of late-night work, of taunts from relatives who had not understood mercy, of the constant balancing of wages and medicines and lullabies. But when she moved closer, when she knelt so their faces were nearly level, something old and gentle unspooled.
"Rahul," she said, voice careful. Her free hand—callused at the fingers from grocery bags and the small brawls of midday—trembled as it reached for his. He watched the lines in her face and felt his chest crack with a dozen small regrets: guilt for the things he could not remember, shame for the space six years had created, and a ridiculous, fierce tenderness that had the absurdity of a man who loved someone for the way they removed tea stains.
Ananya's daughter—his daughter?—looked at him with large, solemn eyes. She was small, maybe six, a neat braid down her back and a strip of hospital-issue paper on her wrist like the world's first document. She held tightly to Ananya's sari with one hand and clutched a stuffed parrot in the other. The child's name—Mira—was a syllable that landed somewhere tender and new. Rahul's mouth wanted to form the sound; his tongue could not yet follow the command.
"Are you… okay?" Ananya asked, voice thin but steady. There was the practiced softness of someone who had learned to keep herself together when the rest of the world wanted pieces back. Her eyes were rimmed with tired compassion. "You were… we didn't know for a while. The doctors said—" She stopped, and a familiar grit came in her face. "You saved Priya. You—" She swallowed. Rahul watched the memory of that moment rise in her like a tide and recede. He glimpsed, for a second, the harshness of the years she had navigated.
The nurses left them to a hush that was not silence but an audience of machines. Rahul tried to lift his hand. It was heavy, but it moved—an infinitesimal victory. Mira's small fingers brushed his knuckles like a benediction. The warmth of that touch traveled farther than medical devices; it soothed like a child's song. He found he could feel gratitude without the weight of speech.
Ananya sat beside him—reserved, a little formal at first, as if she were learning a new etiquette of intimacy—and then she exhaled and let herself be human. "You were brave," she said. "You pushed someone away. You took the blow. The doctors said your quick reflex saved Priya's life. Afterwards—" Her mouth worked. "Afterwards, nothing made sense. There were legal things. There were nights I did not sleep. There were mornings when people said—" She pictured it with the flatness of someone who had catalogued insults to protect against them. "They said I should have left you. They said I wasted my youth waiting. They blamed me for your state."
Rahul's eyes filled with a slow, unfamiliar shame. Those years he could not remember had shaped the woman in front of him into someone he had no right to take for granted. She had become both a storm and a shelter. He saw, in the way she held Mira dutifully on her lap, the steady ministrations of a mother who worked shifts—she had been juggling a publishing job and night classes and hospital visits, a life threaded with the grind of survival. The hospital smell made everything too real, but his brain—slow, tired—could excavate details anyway: the chipped ring she still wore, the small ink smudge on her wrist from a thousand lists.
"Why didn't you tell me?" He asked, voice rasping. Not accusing—mere childlike bewilderment. "About—about Mira."
Ananya gave a small, rueful smile. "Because you were sleeping, Rahul. Because it felt like stealing to speak of joy when you didn't get to count the days. Because people watch how you grieve and decide how to speak. I waited until I could bring her here myself. Six years of visiting every day—same time, sometimes twice—watching you breathe, reading to you, bringing your mother's dal when she feared the hospital food. It was the only place I could be certain you were held."
Mira—Mira—timidly, as if approaching a sleeping animal—extended her hand. "Hi," she said in a small voice that had the clarity and bluntness of a child who had learned that a handshake is sometimes the only way to measure a man. "Papa."
Rahul's throat closed. The syllable arrived like a key. "Mira," he managed, and the name landed between them like an offering. He tried to say other things—what is it like to be gone for six years?—but the question evaporated before it could be formed. The nurses returned then with a soft authority, murmuring about nutrition, physiotherapy, speech therapists. The world arrived again with schedule and necessity.
That night, Ananya did not leave. She slept in a chair that had been designed to be cruelly awkward for visitors and made it into a cradle for vigilance. Rahul watched her sleep: the way her mouth relaxed, the small crease between her brows that even rest could not iron away. He thought of all the nights she must have sat in fluorescent light, reading to him from chapter books and old magazines, sounding out syllables she hoped would find him in his dreams. He wanted to apologize for the stolen years, for the emptiness of recollection. He wanted to ask questions—about the world, about their life, about the child he now loved like a miraculous satellite—but words were thin as tissue.
In the weeks that followed, rehabilitation became a calendar of small triumphs: a first unaided step in the hospital corridor, a halting, guttural attempt at his own name, a laugh that surprised him as it broke into sound. Ananya navigated the bureaucracy with the same practical tenderness she had shown at his bedside—filing forms, calling insurance, insisting to doctors that he be involved as much as possible. Mira made a habit of drawing pictures for him—rainy metros with two people standing close—and bringing them like talismans. Rahul kept them on the little bedside table and watched their childish scrawl become the resilience of his mornings.
People in their neighborhood—a mixture of softened relatives and some who had been cruel—came and went. The taunts that had once cut at Ananya had less purchase now; her face had acquired the calm of someone who had been tested and had found, finally, what she would keep. She told Rahul things with the economy of a woman who had learned to be concise: she had worked nights at a call-center for a while, taken up freelance editing, balanced medicine costs with a thrift that made him ashamed and grateful in equal measure. She had learned the arithmetic of motherhood and grief; she had become, in small, fierce ways, their household's ledger and heart.
Rahul, waking into a life rewritten, learned to move gently through a space that had continued without him. He made mistakes—he forgot anniversaries that hadn't happened for him, he misremembered small jokes Mira loved—but he learned, each day, to make reparation not through speeches but by showing up: by relearning the tilt of Ananya's head when she listened, by making Mira a drawing for school, by asking Ananya for her lists and then following them.
On the morning when he took an unsteady walk through the colony with the support of a cane and Ananya's hand in his, people watched them like a small miracle. Mira skipped ahead, half hopeful, half proud, and Ananya walked between the two of them like a conductor. The neighbors who had once whispered now nodded with a new kind of respect. The world had not been fair, but it had been honest in its consequences. Rahul's body might have betrayed him, but the life that had been held in the years of his sleep—Ananya, Mira, their small rituals—was a testament to a love that had learned how to bear things.
That evening, as rain began again—softly, with a steady patience—Rahul rested his head on Ananya's shoulder in a way that felt like a beginning. He whispered, not quite able to hold all the words: "Thank you for not leaving."
Ananya smiled, the kind of smile that had been forged through nights of nursing and days spent balancing ledgers. "You saved us," she said. "Now we will save you."
Mira tucked her small, rainy parrot under Rahul's hand as if sealing the bargain. Outside, the city breathed. Inside, a family that had been tempered by fire gathered like something both fragile and sure. They had been bound—by vows, by habit, by a violent night—and now, after six years of quiet endurance, they would have the slow, patient work of living together again.