Chapter 11: Inside

## Chapter 11: Inside

The admission process was easier than it should have been.

Ruhani arrived at Nagpur Central Hospital at 10:07 AM, wearing a salwar kameez she'd bought from a roadside stall in Mahal for two hundred rupees. Faded, slightly torn at the hem, the kind of clothes a woman in crisis might wear. She'd not washed her hair in two days. The bruise on her cheek, though fading, still lent her face a battered quality that required no acting.

Tanvi met her at the outpatient entrance. She was in full doctor mode; white coat, stethoscope, clipboard, the practiced confidence of someone who belonged. She didn't acknowledge Ruhani with anything more than a professional glance.

"Patient's name?" the intake nurse asked.

"Meera Jadhav," Tanvi said, reading from the referral she'd prepared. "Twenty-seven years old. Presenting with acute depressive episode with psychotic features. History of self-harm. Referred by Dr. Bhosle at Yavatmal District Hospital."

The referral was a masterpiece of bureaucratic fiction. Dr. Bhosle existed, he was a real psychiatrist at Yavatmal District Hospital, but he hadn't written this referral. Tanvi had forged his signature using a prescription she'd found in the hospital's archive. It was a crime. A serious one. If caught, she'd lose her medical license and possibly face prison.

She'd done it without hesitation.

The intake nurse, a tired woman named Sushma who processed twenty admissions a day and cared about none of them — glanced at the referral, typed something into her computer, and handed Ruhani a hospital gown.

"Change in there," she said, pointing to a curtained cubicle. "Remove all personal items. Jewelry, phone, everything. Put them in this bag. They'll be stored in the admin office."

Ruhani had brought nothing personal. No phone, no ID, no wallet. Just the clothes on her back and the sharp, terrified clarity of a woman walking into a cage.

She changed into the hospital gown, thin cotton, the colour of old dishwater, smelling of industrial detergent and someone else's sweat; and emerged feeling stripped. Not just of her clothes, but of her identity. Of everything that made her Ruhani Malhotra and not just another patient in a system that devoured people whole.

"Follow me," a ward boy said. He was young, nineteen, maybe twenty; with acne scars and the dead eyes of someone who'd stopped caring about anything a long time ago.

She followed him through corridors that smelled of phenyl and despair. Past the general ward, where patients lay in beds so close together that their hands could touch. Past the dietary department, which was a generous name for a room with industrial-sized pots and a menu board that hadn't been updated since 2019. Past the nurses' station, where three nurses sat behind a counter watching something on a phone, their laughter incongruously bright in the grey surroundings.

And then through a set of double doors, heavy, metal, with small reinforced glass windows — into a ward that felt different.

Quieter. Dimmer. The air thicker, sweeter, with that chemical undertone she'd come to associate with sedation.

General Psychiatric Ward B. Her home for the next forty-eight hours.

---

The bed was in a room with five others. All occupied. None of the occupants looked at her.

The woman in the next bed was maybe fifty. She lay on her side, facing the wall, her body curled into a question mark. She was muttering something: a continuous, low-frequency stream of words that resolved, when Ruhani listened closely, into a prayer. The Hanuman Chalisa, over and over, the same forty verses on an infinite loop.

Across the room, a girl who couldn't have been older than seventeen sat cross-legged on her bed, braiding and unbraiding her hair. She had the look of someone who'd been institutionalized long enough that the institution had become her world; the walls, the routine, the slow dissolution of self that came from being told, day after day, that your mind was broken.

The other beds held bodies that barely moved. Sedated. Managed. Silenced.

A nurse came by at noon with medication. Two pills in a small paper cup.

"Take these," she said.

"What are they?" Ruhani asked.

"Your medication."

"Yes, but what medication? What's the name? The dosage?"

The nurse looked at her the way you look at a fly that won't stop buzzing. "Doctor's orders. Take them."

Ruhani took the cup. She put the pills in her mouth, took a sip of water, and performed the oldest trick in the psychiatric ward playbook: she tucked the pills under her tongue and swallowed the water.

When the nurse moved on, she spat the pills into her palm and slipped them into the pillowcase.

She'd examine them later. For now, she needed to orient herself.

---

The ward had a routine, and the routine was relentless.

6 AM: Wake-up. Not by choice; by fluorescent lights snapping on and a ward boy banging a steel tumbler against the door frame.

6:30 AM: Medication round.

7 AM: Breakfast. Two slices of bread and a glass of milk that tasted like it had been diluted with equal parts water and regret.

8 AM: "Activity hour." This consisted of sitting in a common room with a television that played the same news channel on loop. The irony, watching news about Ward 7 while sitting in a ward adjacent to it — was lost on no one.

10 AM: Doctor's rounds. A perfunctory walk-through by a junior doctor (not Tanvi: she'd deliberately recused herself from Ward B to avoid suspicion) who asked the same three questions of every patient: "How are you feeling? Did you sleep well? Any side effects?"

12 PM: Lunch. Rice, dal, and a vegetable that was theoretically bhindi but had been cooked into a state of existential despair.

2 PM: Rest period. Doors locked. Lights dimmed. Patients expected to sleep.

4 PM: "Recreation." Another hour in the common room. Some patients played carrom. Most stared at walls.

6 PM: Dinner. Chapati and sabzi. The chapati was as flexible as a ceramic tile.

8 PM: Medication round.

9 PM: Lights out.

Every hour, accounted for. Every moment, controlled. The routine was a cage unto itself: a structure designed not to heal but to contain. To reduce complex, suffering human beings into manageable units that slept when told, ate when told, and swallowed their pills without asking what they were.

Ruhani observed everything. Catalogued everything. The number of staff (seven during the day, three at night). The security cameras (four visible, all in the corridors, none in the patient rooms). The connecting corridor on the second floor that Tanvi had mentioned, she'd seen the door during her walk-through, a grey metal door marked "STAFF ONLY," located between Ward B and what the signage indicated was Ward 7.

The door was locked. A keypad entry system.

She needed the code.

---

She found it by accident. Or rather, by the universal human tendency to cut corners.

During the afternoon rest period, while most patients slept and the ward boy dozed in his chair, Ruhani slipped out of bed and walked to the bathroom at the end of the corridor. The bathroom was shared, six stalls, three working: and offered a clear sightline to the staff-only door.

She waited.

At 2:17 PM, a cleaning woman, middle-aged, wearing a blue saree and rubber slippers — approached the door. She balanced a bucket and mop in one hand and typed the code with the other, not bothering to shield the keypad.

7-3-5-2.

The door opened. The cleaning woman went through. The door clicked shut behind her.

Ruhani committed the code to memory: 7-3-5-2. And then returned to bed, heart pounding, face neutral.

Tonight. Between 2 and 4 AM, when the cameras in the connecting corridor were dead and the night staff was at its thinnest.

She lay on the thin mattress, staring at the ceiling, listening to the Hanuman Chalisa woman's endless prayer, and counted the hours.

---

At 1:47 AM, Ruhani opened her eyes.

The ward was dark. Not completely, a dim emergency light at the far end cast a feeble orange glow; but dark enough. The Hanuman Chalisa woman had finally fallen silent. The teenager across the room was a motionless lump under her blanket.

Ruhani swung her legs off the bed. The floor was cold. smooth concrete that had been mopped with phenyl so recently she could still smell it. She padded barefoot to the door.

The night nurse was at the station, sixty feet down the corridor. Ruhani could see her silhouette, slumped in a chair, head tilted back. Asleep.

She moved. Not running — walking. Steady and deliberate, keeping to the shadow side of the corridor where the emergency lights didn't reach. Her hospital gown whispered against her legs with each step.

The staff-only door materialized out of the dimness. The keypad glowed faintly green.

She typed: 7-3-5-2.

A click. The door swung inward.

Beyond it: a narrow corridor, lit only by the exit signs at either end. No cameras. No staff. Just empty space and the smell of disinfectant and something else; something organic, something that smelled like unwashed bodies and fear.

Ward 7.

Ruhani stepped through and pulled the door shut behind her.

The corridor was perhaps thirty metres long. Doors on both sides, patient rooms, she assumed; each with a small reinforced glass window. She peered through the first one.

A room with six beds. All occupied. The patients lay motionless, their bodies arranged with the unnatural stillness of heavy sedation. IV drips hung from stands beside two of the beds. The light was minimal: a single nightlight casting everything in blue. The evening air was layered with the smell of incense from the neighbour’s puja and the distant, greasy warmth of street food being fried. She moved to the next door. Same scene. Six beds, six motionless bodies, the quiet hiss of medical equipment.

The third room was different. Only two beds. One was empty. The other held a woman.

Ruhani pressed her face to the glass.

The woman was thin, desperately thin, the way people get when the body starts consuming itself. Her hair was dark and matted. Her arms, lying on top of the blanket, were tracked with needle marks; old ones and new ones, a timeline of chemical assault.

On the wall above her bed, a chart read: PATIENT: DESHMUKH, A. ROOM 7C. RESTRICTED ACCESS.

Ananya.

Ruhani tried the door. Locked.

She looked at the keypad beside it. Different from the corridor door. this one required a card, not a code. A card she didn't have.

Think. Think.

She could break the window. But that would make noise. She could try to find a card — but where? The nurse's station would have one, but the nurse's station was staffed.

She was about to turn back when a hand touched her shoulder.

Ruhani spun, her heart slamming against her ribs.

A face in the darkness. Young. Female. Wide eyes, sharp cheekbones, a scar across the left eyebrow.

"You're not staff," the woman whispered. "Who are you?"

Ruhani's mind raced. A patient? A nurse? Someone who'd report her?

"I'm a journalist," she said, because at this point, the truth was the only weapon she had. "I'm here to help."

The woman's eyes widened. Then narrowed. Then something shifted: a calculation, a decision.

"You're Ruhani. The YouTube one."

"Yes."

The woman looked down the corridor. Back at Ruhani. Down the corridor again.

"My name is Manasi," she said. "I've been in Ward 7 for eight months. And I can get you into that room."