Page 100 of Mrs. Pandey
They told me I was lucky. Lucky to be alive. Lucky to have survived. Lucky that the bullets hadn’t torn deeper, that the infection hadn’t spread beyond the cracked ribs and shredded muscle.
But I didn’t feel lucky. Not even for a moment.
When I first opened my eyes in the sterile white walls of the Army Research and Referral Hospital in Delhi, the world felt too silent. The sheets were stiff with antiseptic. The air smelled of phenyl, of medicine, of a controlled environment where chaos had been locked outside. It was the exact opposite of the pit I had lived in for months beyond the LOC.
And yet I flinched at every sudden sound. When a door slamming, when Boots strikes the polished floor. A fluorescent tube flickering overhead. Every one of them felt like trigger, a whip cracking against the scars inside me.
The doctors worked tirelessly on my body. They reconstructed my shoulder, realigned my ribs, stitched my wounds with threads finer than hair. It took weeks before I could sit upright without collapsing into the bedframe like a sack of broken bones.Six months before I could walk the hospital corridors, dragging my IV pole like a reluctant shadow.
But no one had the cure for the nightmares.
Every night, I returned back into the cell, back into the stench of gasoline water, the screaming voices, the shadowy figures pressing boots into my ribs. I woke drenched in sweat, gasping, my heart racing as if the guards were still outside my door. Nurses rushed in, their faces kind, but to me, every silhouette in the dark was an enemy.
I had forgotten what laughter sounded like, even my own.
It was during one of those nights, when sleep refused to come and the silence had turned unbearable, that I met her.
Dr. Riddhima Kashyap.
She didn’t enter like the others. There were no clattering trays, no brisk footsteps, no clinical authority that reminded me of the precision with which I’d once followed orders. She came in quietly, carrying no stethoscope, no clipboard, just a small notebook in her hand and her eyes that had already seen too many broken men trying to become whole again.
“You don’t have to talk,” she said the first night when she sat next to my bed. “Not until you want to.”
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t because my throat was a desert of unsaid words, and trust was a currency I no longer traded.
So she sat in the chair beside my bed silently and breathed the same air as me, but not intruding. I noticed sometimes shewould write something in her notebook, sometimes she would simply sit, as though keeping watch over a soldier who no longer knew how to stand guard over himself.
Days blurred into weeks with her. She returned, always at the same hour, between the long shadows of evening and the false calm of midnight. I began to wait for her without admitting it to myself.
It started with questions.
“Did you eat?”
“Did you sleep?”
“Do you want the window open?”
I gave her nods, shakes of my head. And then, one evening, the words came out, brittle and unwilling, but real.
“It was a nightmare.”
She looked at me, not with pity, but with understanding. “Of course. That’s your mind replaying the trauma, hoping to finish what was never finished. You survived the torture, but your brain hasn’t caught up yet.”
Her voice was calm, steady, like the low murmur of a river that refused to dry up. She never forced me to share. She simply waited, patient, steady, until I began to pour pieces of myself onto the cold air between us.
I told her about the cell. About the screams. About the photographs they used to show me. About how they whisperedlies into my ears, planting doubts that had taken root inside my soul like weeds.
She listened, didn’t interrupt, didn’t correct, didn’t flinch at the ugliness. Only when I fell silent did she speak.
“What they did wasn’t just cruelty,” she said. “It was a strategy. They broke your body to weaken your mind, and then they attacked your mind to make sure your body never rose again. That’s psychological warfare. But you’re still here, Prashant. That means they failed.”
Failed. The word felt foreign on my tongue. Had they really failed? Or was I still carrying their victory inside me?
It was in one of those sessions that I mentioned Ira.
It slipped out without planning, a name I had held too close to my chest for too long.
“She’s always more,” I whispered, staring at the IV drip instead of her face.
