Chapter 29 of 30

KHAMOSH CHEEKHEIN

Chapter 29: The Missing

1,680 words | 7 min read

## Chapter 29: The Missing

The eleven missing patients haunted Ruhani like ghosts she couldn't bury.

The CBI had traced eight of them to a transit point. A private guest house in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, owned by a company that was itself owned by another company that was owned by a trust registered in Dubai. The paper trail was a masterwork of obfuscation, each layer designed to absorb investigation the way sandbags absorb floodwater.

From Raipur, the trail went cold.

Saxena's team had found records of bus tickets purchased in bulk. Passport-sized photographs of patients, taken without consent, filed in a folder labeled "RELOCATION BATCH 3." A manifest listing eleven names, eleven "diagnoses," and eleven destinations; all in Nepal, all at facilities that, when investigated through diplomatic channels, turned out to be either nonexistent or abandoned.

The patients had entered the system as people. They'd exited as paperwork.

Ruhani couldn't let it go.

She'd moved on to other investigations; the Pune nursing homes, a story about migrant workers in Gujarat, a series on child labour in Rajasthan's mica mines. Good work. Important work. Work that kept Kavya and Sahil and Meera busy and the office rent paid and the YouTube channel growing.

But at night, in the apartment in Mahal, when the electricity cut out and the ceiling fan died and the darkness pressed in, she'd lie on the charpoy and think about eleven people whose names she knew and whose faces she'd never seen.

Savita Kulkarni. The psychiatric technician. The woman who'd known too much.

Girish Patole. The retired bank employee. Admitted for depression after his wife's death.

Leela Gaikwad. Postpartum psychosis, or not. Her baby had been two months old when she was admitted.

And eight others. Names in a spreadsheet. Entries in a manifest. People who'd been alive, and then transported, and then... nothing.

The breakthrough came from Nepal.

A human rights organization in Kathmandu, the Forum for the Protection of Vulnerable Persons — had been investigating reports of Indian nationals being held in private facilities near the Indian border. They'd found three such facilities in the Terai region, operating without government registration, housing patients who'd been "transferred" from Indian hospitals.

The Forum's director, a Nepali lawyer named Sujata Thapa, contacted Ruhani through her YouTube channel's email, which, by this point, received approximately four thousand messages per day and was managed primarily by Kavya, who had the patience of a saint and the organizational skills of a general.

Kavya flagged the email. Ruhani read it. Called Sujata. And within forty-eight hours, was on a flight to Kathmandu.

The facility was in Birgunj, a border town in the Parsa district; the kind of place that existed in the overlap between India and Nepal, where the cultures blurred and the border was more suggestion than barrier. The "hospital" was a converted warehouse on the outskirts of town, surrounded by a concrete wall topped with broken glass.

Sujata had arranged for a team, two lawyers, a doctor, and a representative from the Nepal Human Rights Commission. They arrived with legal authority to inspect the facility, and the facility's manager, a thin man with a pencil moustache and the nervous energy of someone who'd been expecting this visit; let them in without resistance.

Inside: thirty-two patients. Indian nationals, all of them. Admitted under diagnoses that, when reviewed by the accompanying doctor, were found to be fabricated or grossly exaggerated. Housed in rooms that were barely habitable. Concrete floors, no ventilation, shared buckets for toilets. Medicated with a cocktail of sedatives that the doctor described as "veterinary-grade."

Of the thirty-two patients, four were from Ward 7.

Savita Kulkarni was one of them.

Ruhani found her in a room at the back of the facility. A small space with a single window, barred, looking out onto the concrete wall. A cot with a stained mattress. A bucket. A plastic cup.

Savita was sitting on the cot, her back against the wall, her hands folded in her lap. She was fifty-three, according to her file, but she looked seventy. Her hair was entirely white. It had been dark when she'd last been seen in Nagpur, according to photos. Her face was gaunt, the skin stretched tight over the bones like canvas over a frame. Her eyes, when she looked up at Ruhani, were the eyes of someone who'd spent so long in the dark that light itself had become a foreign substance.

"Who are you?" she asked. Her voice was rusty. Marathi, with the specific cadence of someone from Nagpur's working class; the soft consonants, the elongated vowels.

"My name is Ruhani. I'm a journalist from Nagpur."

Something flickered in Savita's eyes. A spark, deep and buried, like an ember under ash.

"Nagpur." She said the word like a prayer. "I'm from Nagpur."

"I know. I've been looking for you."

"Looking?" The concept seemed foreign. As if the idea of someone actively searching for her was so far outside her experience that it required translation.

"You were in Ward 7. Nagpur Central Hospital. You were transferred here; illegally. By people who wanted you to disappear."

Savita's hands tightened in her lap.

"Ward 7," she whispered. "I worked there. I was a technician. I saw what they were doing to the patients — the medication, the transfers, the property documents. I told Dr. Chaudhary I would report it." A pause. "He said I wouldn't."

"He admitted you."

"He said I was 'exhibiting signs of paranoid delusion.' That I was a danger to myself and others. He put me in Ward 7, in the same ward where I'd worked for six years. My colleagues, the nurses, the ward boys: they saw me in a hospital gown instead of an uniform, and they looked away. Every single one of them looked away."

Her voice cracked. Not with tears: with something harder. The crystallized fury of a woman who'd been betrayed by the people she'd trusted.

"How long have you been here?" Ruhani asked.

"I don't know. There are no calendars. No newspapers. No television. The days... merge."

"It's been nineteen months."

Savita closed her eyes. When she opened them, a single tear tracked down her cheek. Not the tear of sadness, but the physical response of a body overwhelmed.

"Nineteen months," she said. "In this room. With this bucket. Nineteen months."

The other three Ward 7 patients were in similar condition. Girish Patole was barely responsive, the medication had accelerated whatever genuine cognitive decline he'd been experiencing, and the doctor assessed him as having advanced dementia that was at least partially iatrogenic. Leela Gaikwad was physically present but psychologically absent, she didn't speak, didn't make eye contact, didn't respond to her name. Her baby; who would have been twenty-one months old now, was unaccounted for.

The fourth was a man named Deepak Raut, a farmer from Yavatmal, who'd been in Ward 7 for six months before the transfer. He was the most functional of the four; he could speak, could walk, could understand what was happening. When Ruhani told him he was going home, he stood up from his cot and walked to the door and stood there, as if he couldn't quite believe that the door would open.

It opened.

He walked through it.

And then he walked through the facility's entrance, and through the gate in the concrete wall, and onto the dusty street outside, and he stood in the sunlight, the pale, warm sunlight of a Terai afternoon — and he lifted his face to the sky and he breathed.

Just breathed.

The remaining seven Ward 7 patients were not at the Birgunj facility. Sujata's team had identified two other facilities, one near Biratnagar, one near Janakpur, and Ruhani would visit them in the coming days.

But first, she had to make a call.

She stepped outside the facility, into the dusty street, and called Hemant. The road smelled of hot tar and exhaust and the sweet rot of overripe fruit from the vendor cart. "I found four of them," she said. "Savita, Girish, Leela, and Deepak. They're alive. They're in bad shape, but they're alive."

Silence on the line. Then a sound: Hemant, clearing his throat.

"The other seven?"

"Two more facilities. I'm going tomorrow and the day after."

"Do you need help?"

"I need the Indian embassy to coordinate repatriation. These are Indian citizens held illegally on foreign soil. The government needs to bring them home."

"I'll call Saxena. The CBI has liaison channels with Nepal."

"And Hemant?"

"Yeah?"

"Savita wants to testify. She wants to tell the court what happened to her. All of it. The admission, the transfer, the nineteen months."

"The appeal hearing is in two months."

"Perfect timing."

The repatriation took three weeks. Bureaucracy, Indian and Nepali, competing and overlapping like two rivers meeting: ground slowly even when the cause was urgent. There were forms to be filed, diplomatic notes to be exchanged, medical assessments to be conducted, legal authorities to be established.

But eventually, the four patients were flown home. A small Indian Air Force transport, arranged by the Ministry of External Affairs after a personal intervention by the Chief Justice, who, upon learning that Indian citizens had been found imprisoned in Nepal as a result of a case under his court's cognizance, had made a phone call that Ruhani would have given anything to have recorded.

Savita Kulkarni landed at Nagpur airport on a Thursday afternoon. She was met by her son: a young man named Akash, twenty-four, who'd spent nineteen months believing his mother was in a government facility receiving treatment. He'd tried to visit. He'd been told the facility was "in a restricted area." He'd filed police complaints. They'd disappeared.

When he saw his mother, thin, white-haired, walking with a nurse's support — he fell to his knees on the airport tarmac.

"Aai," he said. Just that. Aai. Mother.

Savita reached down and touched his head. The way mothers touch their children; with a gentleness that contains the entirety of human tenderness.

"I'm home," she said.

And she was.