Chapter 9: Parth Remembers

## Chapter 9: Parth Remembers

The call came at 2 AM.

Ruhani was still at the desk, editing footage, her eyes gritty from the laptop's glare. The burner phone buzzed, and Tanvi's name flashed on the screen.

"I found Parth," Tanvi said without preamble. "He's in Hyderabad. His mother took him there after he woke up from the coma. He's willing to talk."

"How willing?"

"He wants to go on record. On camera. He says he remembers who attacked him. And it wasn't Ananya."

Ruhani's exhaustion vanished. "When?"

"He can do a video call tomorrow. But Ruhani; he's fragile. The coma damaged his motor functions. He has tremors, slurred speech. He gets confused sometimes. But his memory of that night is clear. He's been telling everyone who'll listen, but no one believes the boyfriend of a woman convicted of stabbing him."

"I believe him."

"Then be gentle. He's been through enough."

— The video call happened at 11 AM the next day, with Ruhani sitting on the charpoy, laptop propped on a stack of books she'd borrowed from a pavement seller on Itwari Road.

Parth Mane appeared on screen and Ruhani's first thought was: this man has aged twenty years in fourteen months.

He was thirty-two, according to Hemant's files. He looked fifty. His face was gaunt, the cheekbones protruding like cliff edges. His left hand trembled visibly; a constant, low-frequency vibration that he tried to control by pressing it against his thigh. His speech came slowly, each word extracted with visible effort, the consonants soft where they should have been hard.

But his eyes were sharp. Terribly, painfully sharp. The eyes of a man who'd seen something he couldn't unsee.

"Thank you for talking to me," Ruhani said.

"Thank you for asking." His mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "Everyone else just wants me to shut up."

"Tell me about that night. The night you were attacked."

Parth's good hand, the right one — gripped the arm of his chair.

"Ananya and I had been fighting. Not about us, about the hospital. She'd found something. Files. Patient records that didn't match. Patients who were listed as having certain conditions but whose symptoms didn't align. Medications being prescribed at doses that didn't make sense."

"What did she do?"

"She confronted Chaudhary. Privately, in his office. She told me about it that evening. She said he'd been... calm. Too calm. He'd told her she was 'overworked' and 'seeing patterns that weren't there.' He suggested she take a leave of absence."

"And she refused?"

"Ananya doesn't take leaves of absence. Ananya works. That's who she is." His voice softened. "Was. I don't know who she is now."

"What happened the night you were attacked?"

Parth was quiet for a moment. His left hand trembled against his thigh.

"I went to bed early. Around ten. Ananya was still up; she was going through files she'd printed from the hospital. I remember thinking she looked scared. She never looked scared."

He paused. Breathed.

"I woke up because of the pain. In my stomach. I'd been stabbed: three times, the doctors told me later, but I only remember the first one. The sensation of... intrusion. Something entering your body that shouldn't be there. Cold, at first, then hot. Like someone had poured chai inside my abdomen."

Ruhani kept her face neutral. Her hands were gripping the edges of the laptop.

"I opened my eyes. The room was dark; the light had been off when I went to sleep. But there was a figure. Standing over me. Holding something."

"Ananya?"

"No." His voice was firm. Absolute. "It wasn't Ananya. I know her body. I know her shape, her height, her silhouette. This person was taller. Broader. Male."

"Could you see his face?"

"No. It was too dark. But I saw his hands. He was wearing gloves — latex gloves, the kind doctors use. And on his wrist..." Parth closed his eyes, concentrating. "A watch. A silver watch with a large face. It caught the light from the window."

"Do you know anyone who wears a watch like that?"

"I didn't then. I do now." Parth opened his eyes. "Six months after I woke up from the coma, Tanvi showed me a photograph. A group photo of the NCH medical staff. And in the photo, standing next to Chaudhary, there was a junior doctor. Prashant Kadam. Wearing a silver watch with a large face."

Ruhani's breath caught.

"Prashant Kadam is Chaudhary's protégé," Parth continued. "He follows him around like a shadow. Does whatever he's told. And he's about the right height and build. taller than Ananya, broader."

"Did you tell the police?"

"I told everyone. The police said my testimony was unreliable because of the brain damage from the coma. The water ran between her fingers, cold and insistent. The doctors said trauma could create false memories. My own mother told me to stop talking because I was 'making things worse.'"

His voice cracked. The tremor in his left hand worsened.

"They put Ananya in that ward because of what they said she did to me. She's been drugged and imprisoned for fourteen months because they needed someone to blame, and she was already a threat to them. Two problems solved with one frame job."

He looked directly at the camera.

"I loved her. I still love her. And I let them destroy her because I was in a coma and couldn't speak. But I'm speaking now. And I'm telling you, and everyone watching. Ananya Deshmukh did not stab me. She is innocent. And the people who did this to her are still walking free."

---

Ruhani sat with the recording for a long time after the call ended.

Parth's testimony was devastating. But it was also fragile; a man with documented brain damage, whose ex-girlfriend was convicted of attacking him, claiming he remembered details from a dark room during a violent assault. A defense lawyer would have a field day.

She needed corroboration. Something physical. Something that didn't depend on a traumatized man's memory.

She called Hemant.

"The night Parth was attacked. 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. Is there anything in the police file? CCTV? Forensics?"

"The case file is sealed. But I have my own notes." She heard him opening a drawer; the unmistakable scrape of metal on metal. "The knife used in the attack was from Ananya's kitchen. Her fingerprints were on it."

"Of course they were. It was her knife."

"Exactly. But here's what wasn't in the official report: the CSI team found a second set of prints on the knife handle. Partial, smudged, but present. They were identified as belonging to a 'person unknown' and the finding was buried in an appendix that nobody reads."

"Can we get those prints matched?"

"If we had a comparison set. Kadam's prints would be on file somewhere: every doctor registers with the medical council, and many hospitals keep biometric records."

"Can you get them?"

A pause. "I can try. It'll take time."

"We don't have time. Thursday."

"I know. I'll try."

---

That evening, Yash found her on the rooftop.

He'd come up with chai, he always came with chai, as if the act of bringing tea absolved him of the need for an excuse to visit; and found her sitting on the low parapet wall, legs dangling over the edge, staring at the Nagpur skyline.

The city looked almost beautiful from up here. Orange and gold lights stretching to the horizon, punctuated by the dark masses of trees and the occasional green spire of a mosque. The air smelled like exhaust and night-blooming jasmine and the distant, ghostly sweetness of a bread factory.

"That's a long way down," Yash said, setting the chai on the parapet beside her.

"Four storeys. I'd survive with broken legs."

"That's... not the reassurance you think it is."

She took the chai. Their fingers didn't touch this time. She'd been careful about that. Careful about the distance between them, about the way his presence made the constant knot in her chest loosen, about the danger of needing someone when the people you needed had a habit of getting hurt.

"Parth's testimony is powerful but not enough on its own," she said. "I need more before Thursday."

"What do you need?"

"Physical evidence linking Prashant Kadam to the attack on Parth. Fingerprint records from the hospital's biometric system. Or failing that, I need to get inside Ward 7 and document everything firsthand."

Yash was quiet for a moment. He sat down beside her: not close, not touching, but near enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from him in the cooling evening air.

"When you say 'get inside,' you mean as a patient."

"Tanvi has a plan."

"Tanvi's plan gets you locked in a ward full of people who want you dead."

"Tanvi's plan gets me close enough to Ananya to record her testimony. To see the conditions. To document the medication regime. If I can show the world what Ward 7 actually looks like from the inside, it's over. Chaudhary can't survive that."

"And if they catch you?"

"They won't."

"Ruhani." He said her name like a full sentence. Like a paragraph. Like it contained everything he wanted to say and couldn't.

She looked at him. In the dim light from the street below, his face was all shadow and suggestion — the line of his jaw, the curve of his mouth, the dark intensity of his eyes.

"I lost my aai to a hospital that didn't care," he said. "I lost my grandmother to the same thing. I'm not losing you to one."

"You can't lose something you don't have."

"Can't I?"

The question hung between them. Ruhani took a sip of chai to avoid answering it. The chai was perfect; strong, sweet, with a hint of elaichi that lingered on the tongue.

"If you're going in," Yash said, "I'm your backup."

"That's not—"

"I'm not asking. I'm telling. If something goes wrong, if you don't come out. I need to be close enough to help."

"Help how? Storm the hospital?"

"If that's what it takes." He said it without drama. Without bravado. Like a man stating a simple fact about the weather.

She wanted to argue. To push him away. To protect him from the consequences of caring about someone who was running toward danger with both arms open.

But she was tired. So tired. And the rooftop was quiet, and the chai was warm, and his presence beside her was the only solid thing in a world that had been tilting off its axis for weeks.

"Okay," she said. "You're my backup."

He nodded. Took a sip of his own chai.

They sat in silence, watching the city breathe. Somewhere below, a dog barked. A temple bell rang: once, twice, a third time. An auto-rickshaw's horn cut through the night, sharp and insistent, the universal sound of Indian impatience.

"Yash?"

"Yeah?"

"The vangi bhaat was better last night. Tonight the brinjal was slightly overcooked."

He looked at her. She looked at him.

And then they both laughed, the real kind, the kind that shook your shoulders and made your eyes water: and for thirty seconds, the world was just two people on a rooftop, drinking chai, laughing about brinjal, pretending that everything was going to be okay.