Chapter 13: The Discharge

## Chapter 13: The Discharge

Tanvi came for her at 9 AM.

She arrived with a clipboard and the brisk efficiency of a doctor on rounds, flanked by the same dead-eyed ward boy who'd escorted Ruhani in. She checked the patient chart at the foot of the bed, made a note, and said, loudly enough for the ward nurse to hear. "Patient Meera Jadhav is showing significant improvement. I'm recommending discharge with outpatient follow-up." The ward nurse, who had approximately zero interest in the discharge of a patient who'd been there for less than forty-eight hours, signed the form without reading it.

Ruhani changed back into her street clothes, the two-hundred-rupee salwar kameez, wrinkled and smelling of the hospital, and walked out of Nagpur Central Hospital at 9:37 AM. She didn't run. Didn't hurry. Just walked through the corridors, past the nurses' station, past the outpatient lobby with its plastic chairs and its perpetual queue, through the main entrance and into the Nagpur morning.

the warm sun hit her face like an act of mercy. The sun’s weight settled on her bare arms like a physical thing. She stood on the hospital steps and breathed. Deep, shaking breaths. The warm air was thick with exhaust and street food and the specific dusty warmth of a Vidarbha October, and it was the sweetest thing she'd ever tasted.

You're out. You made it.

A hand touched her elbow. Yash, materializing from behind a parked ambulance, his Bullet idling at the curb.

"You look like you've been in a hospital," he said.

"Hilarious."

He handed her a helmet. She put it on, climbed onto the back of the bike, and pressed her face against his shoulder blade. The denim jacket smelled like diesel and soap and the faint sweetness of the paan he'd been chewing while he waited.

"Home?" he asked.

"Home."

He gunned the engine. The Bullet roared. And they were gone.

---

Back in the apartment in Mahal, Ruhani sat on the charpoy and let herself shake. The surface was rough under her palms, textured with grit. The tremors had been building since she'd left the hospital, small at first, just a quiver in her rough hands, but growing until her whole body vibrated with the aftershock of what she'd seen. What she'd done.

Yash sat beside her without speaking. He didn't touch her. Didn't try to calm her or offer platitudes. Just sat, his weight on the soft mattress tilting her slightly toward him, and waited.

After ten minutes, the shaking stopped.

"I need to tell you what I saw," she said.

And she did. Everything. Ward 7's locked doors and unlabeled IVs. Ananya Deshmukh, barely alive, drugged into a chemical coma. Manasi Shinde, nineteen years old, eight months imprisoned, her father's three acres stolen. The medication charts with doses that would kill a horse. The bruises on patients' wrists from "restraint procedures."

Yash listened. His face didn't change; not because he wasn't affected, but because he was the kind of man who processed things internally, who let the anger settle deep before deciding what to do with it.

When she finished, he was calm for a long time.

"How do we get them out?" he said finally.

Not should we get them out. Not is it possible. How.

"I don't know yet. But I have three days until they move Ananya. After that, she's gone."

"Then we have three days."

He said it the way he said everything — simply, directly, as if the enormity of the task was irrelevant and the only thing that mattered was the doing.

"Yash."

"Yeah?"

"Why are you still here?"

He looked at her. Not with the intensity of someone about to make a declaration; with the calm of someone stating something obvious.

"Because you need me. And because this matters. And because—" He paused. Picked at a thread on the charpoy's mattress. "And because you eat vangi bhaat like it's the only good thing in the world, and I want to keep making it for someone who appreciates it that much."

She laughed. A wet, shaky sound that was half laugh and half sob.

"That's a terrible reason."

"It's the best reason I've got."

---

She spent the rest of the day working.

First: the audio recordings from Manasi's device. She transferred them to her laptop using a USB cable she'd borrowed from a mobile repair shop down the street. The recordings were low quality, muffled, heavy with background noise; but the words were discernible.

Manasi's voice, describing her admission. The forged consent. The property transfer. Eight months of medication she didn't need.

The nurses, talking in the corridor:

"Joshi auntie keeps crying at night. Disturbs the whole ward."

"Tell Prashant to up her dose. We need her quiet by Thursday — the inspection team is coming."

"What inspection team?"

"The one Sneha madam arranged. They'll walk through, sign the papers, say everything is fine. The usual."

An inspection team. Arranged by Sneha. Coming to rubber-stamp the ward. The corruption went all the way down to the oversight mechanisms.

And then: the recording that made Ruhani's blood freeze:

Chaudhary's voice, on the phone, captured through the supply closet wall:

"The journalist is becoming a problem. The usual channels aren't working: she's too visible now. Too many people watching."

A pause. The other side of the conversation, inaudible.

"I understand. But we need to be careful. If something happens to her now, it'll only prove her right."

Another pause.

"Yes. The sister; the doctor, Tanvi. She's been visiting Ananya regularly. I've had her watched. She's clean — no contact with the journalist that we can prove. But she's emotional. Desperate. If we move Ananya on Thursday as planned, Tanvi might do something rash."

A longer pause. Then:

"Agreed. We move the timeline up. Transfer Ananya tomorrow night. And Tanvi, suspend her. Pending investigation. Remove her access to the hospital."

Ruhani stopped the recording.

Tomorrow night. Not Thursday.

They'd moved the timeline up.

She grabbed her phone and called Tanvi. The phone rang four times before going to voicemail.

She tried again. Voicemail.

A text:

Tanvi. Call me. They're moving Ananya TOMORROW NIGHT, not Thursday. Chaudhary is suspending you. Get out of the hospital NOW.

She waited. One minute. Two. Three.

No reply.

---

At 6:14 PM, Ruhani's phone rang. Hemant.

"Tanvi's been suspended," he said, without preamble. "She was escorted out of the hospital by security twenty minutes ago. Her access badge was confiscated. She's... she's not in good shape."

"Where is she?"

"At my apartment. She came here. She didn't have anywhere else to go."

"Is she safe?"

"For now. But Ruhani, the suspension is the least of it. They've filed a formal complaint with the Medical Council. Fraud: the fake referral she used to admit you. If it goes through, she'll lose her license."

Ruhani pressed her palm against her forehead. Tanvi had risked everything, her career, her freedom, her safety — to help. And now the machine was grinding her down.

"There's more," Hemant said. "They're moving Ananya tomorrow night. I just heard from a contact inside the hospital. A private ambulance has been booked. Destination: unknown. Not Chhindwara. They've abandoned that pretense."

"Unknown? What does that mean?"

"It means they're not even bothering to create a paper trail anymore. They're just... making her disappear."

The word landed like a brick.

"Hemant. We need to stop this."

"How? I'm a suspended cop's husband hiding a suspended doctor in my apartment. You're a wanted journalist living in a borrowed room. We have no legal standing, no institutional support, and no—"

"We have twenty-five million people watching. We have the NHRC on notice. We have the entire country talking about Ward 7."

"And yet the hospital is still open. Chaudhary is still free. And they're about to disappear a witness right under everyone's nose."

Silence. Ruhani gripped the phone so hard her knuckles went white.

"Then we don't let them," she said. "We go in tomorrow night. Before the ambulance arrives. We get Ananya out."

"That's—"

"Crazy? Yes. Illegal? Probably. Dangerous? Definitely. But tell me another option."

Hemant was quiet. She could hear Tanvi in the background; a low, constant sound that might have been crying.

"I have one thing," he said. "The fingerprints. I got Kadam's prints. Lifted them from a chai glass at the hospital canteen. I had a friend at the forensic lab run a comparison against the partial prints from the knife that was used on Parth."

"And?"

"Match. Eighty-seven percent probability. Prashant Kadam's prints were on the knife that stabbed Parth Mane."

Ruhani exhaled. "That's it. That's the physical evidence linking Kadam to the attack. Combined with Parth's testimony—"

"It's enough for an arrest warrant. Under normal circumstances. But circumstances haven't been normal in this city for a long time."

"Release it. Send it to every news channel. Put it on Twitter. Make it impossible to ignore."

"If I do that, they'll know it came from me. My career is over."

"Your career has been over since you started recording. You just haven't admitted it yet."

Another stillness. Then, softly: "You're right. Give me an hour."

He hung up.

Ruhani put the phone down. Looked at Yash, who'd been sitting in the corner, listening.

"Tomorrow night," she said. 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. The road smelled of hot tar and exhaust and the sweet rot of overripe fruit from the vendor cart. "We're going to break someone out of a psychiatric hospital."

Yash nodded. No surprise. No hesitation.

"I'll gas up the Bullet," he said.