It was raining in Noida. The kind of grey, relentless rain that washes the dust off the glass buildings but turns the traffic into a sludge of honking metal.
Inside Dr. Farah's cabin, the air was still.
Kabir, Meera, and Aarav sat in a semi-circle. They weren't sitting in the patient chairs; they had pulled them closer, forming a small, jagged island of humanity. They weren't here for prescriptions today. They were here because they had realized that their sickness wasn't in their bodies.
"Science is useful," Dr. Farah said, leaning back against her desk, abandoning her doctor's coat for a shawl. "It can tell you that your cortisol is high. It can tell you that your dopamine receptors are fried from scrolling. It can tell you that grief looks like brain damage on an MRI. But science is helpless here."
She looked at them.
"Science cannot tell you how to forgive yourself for not picking up a phone call. Science cannot calculate the weight of a silence you created."