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Balaji steps out of his room and is immediately greeted by the turmeric-stained hands of his mother holding a stainless steel tumbler in front of him, wisps of steam dancing on top of the bubbly brown liquid. He looks to his right. There’s his dad sitting on a dining chair, holding up a newspaper, consistently oblivious to his presence (and absence), unlike his mother. Balaji takes the tumbler from her hands, holding the edges with two fingertips and sits on the doorstep. He sits here at this time every day to sip his morning coffee and stare at the pretty girl with the long hair; the girl who dries her hair with a white towel methodically every morning, standing near the stoop of her house opposite to Balaji’s. He often imagined what she smelled like; jasmine and soap probably. However, today, she isn’t there standing at the stoop and the door of her house remains firmly shut. Balaji knows that she probably went to school earlier than usual or she took a shower at a different time but something about it throws him off and he shuffles back inside his home hurriedly to avoid the anomaly.

Balaji takes long strides to the gate of the school as his ID card sways against his shirt, the tag twisting up before dramatically spinning out, releasing itself. Somewhere on the way between his house’s rusted gate that creaks every time it moves and the big and quiet polished metal gates of K.S Senior Secondary School, he has managed to stuff his lunchboxes deep into his backpack, unbutton the top of his shirt, and loosen his shirt’s tight tuck.

As he approaches these gates, he watches students like him descending from the several yellow school buses that line the narrow street outside his school. A bustling crowd of grey uniforms trudges on, some of them daring to sport their red and black earphones, risking their smartphones getting snatched by an eager teacher or two. Balaji instinctively grabs his smartphone that’s in his pocket, before placing himself in one of the beelines marching towards the dusty pink buildings. He hears the bass of a song making its way from a girl’s earphones right in front of him. Cold by Maroon 5. She wears a tight ponytail. Balaji’s eyes roam, landing on a keychain hooked onto one of the zips on her bag. It's a glass of whiskey. He unwillingly smiles, almost struggles to hold in a snigger, before his face settles into the same expression of mild boredom he always wore here, one that befits the walk into his unfortunate abode for the next seven hours.

He runs his fingers once through his carefully gelled hair before stepping into his classroom. His eyes perform a cursory scan of the faces he is almost too familiar with, faces that are peering down at notebooks or standing around a table discussing last night’s cricket match or chattering about a TV show episode, faces nodding off into a power nap. He slides into an empty seat in the second last row, flinging his school bag off his shoulder and onto the ground next to his feet, greeting his friend with a thwack on the shoulder, his friend who is gushing about Suresh Raina’s incredible cover drive last night - before Usha Ma’am can traipse into the room and threaten everybody into straight postures and silence.

When Usha ma’am does traipse in, there is something different about her. Her confident gait is replaced by something more urgent, less composed. She shuffles in, her kohl-lined eyes scanning the room for a few seconds before they meet Balaji’s. “Can I speak with you outside the classroom, Balaji?” She says loudly, sternly - not that she seems to know any other way to say things - and Balaji feels a thick mound of saliva in his mouth.

The class falls quiet, Satvik’s remark about Dwayne Bravo’s yorker left hanging in the air. Balaji feels thirty one pairs of eyes on him as he awkwardly steps over the bags piled on the ground and comes to a stop in front of Usha ma’am. Without saying a word, she turns around to walk outside of the classroom, and Balaji follows. He hears the murmurs emerging from his classroom even as he stands outside in the mostly empty corridor.

“Balaji-” Usha ma’am begins, and pauses briefly. She seems to shift her weight from one foot to another.

“I am sorry. I have some…difficult news. Your dad has had a heart attack. He's receiving medical care right now. I just got a call from your mom. She is with him at the hospital.” She enunciates nearly every word.

Balaji feels the mound of saliva grow bigger, to the size of a golf ball, in his mouth. He takes a large gulp. “Ma’am.” he mumbles, but he isn’t sure what he wants to say. The two of them stand there silently. Usha Ma’am’s gaze turns piercing, her eyebrows inching closer to her hairline. A few seconds later, she places a hand on his arm and he feels almost embarrassed by the touch.

“Balaji, stay strong.” She gulps. “I know you can. There’s a cab driver waiting downstairs near the principal’s office. He will take you to the hospital now.”

Balaji nods, trailing Usha Ma’am as she walks towards the staircase. She abruptly pauses before stepping down onto the first stair, clicks her tongue. “Wait here Balaji, I’ll get your bag.” Balaji stares into the dingy grey corridor, at the floor covered by scuff marks left by the hundreds of canvas shoes before Usha Ma’am emerges from the classroom at the end of the corridor. The sight of her holding a school bag almost looks wrong, a little funny.

Soon, he is in the backseat of a white Maruti Swift, the school bag now resting on his lap. He peers out the window, the scorching Chennai sun is comfortingly unforgiving, as his mind wanders to his classroom. He wonders whether Usha ma’am has begun her spiel, started the day’s Math class, whether he is on her mind as she scribbles equations on the chalkboard. He wonders what Satvik and the rest of his classmates are making of his sudden absence, if they care enough to ponder hard about it.

When Balaji steps out in front of the large glass doors of the hospital, a stage seemingly held up by the ramps for wheelchairs that sprawl out on either side, he suddenly feels a tug at his stomach, a tug that screams at him to throw his bag on one of the ramps, turn away, run. He ignores it, waddles up the stairs and through the doors, and spots his mom almost immediately. She is off to the side, sitting in a black metal chair next to a row of receptionists, in the same yellow saree he saw her thirty minutes earlier, the same golden bangles adorning her wrists. In fact, the only visible difference, he notes as she looks up, is her bloodshot eyes and the dark circles that seem to ring them. The sight of her is reassuring and disconcerting all at once.

He can see the tears well up in her eyes as soon as she spots him. She gets up, makes her way steadily towards him, and holds his arms. “Balu” she silently cries, looking into his eyes, the right first and then the left. “What do we do now, Balu? Will he be okay, Balu?” The tears spill out unhesitatingly, her mouth contorting to a shape Balaji has never seen before.

Out of the corner of his eye, Balaji can see a few people staring. He puts his arms around his mom, and it occurs to him that they have never hugged, at least as far as he can remember. He has never felt her frail shoulders and bony back, her coarse hair against his neck.

She takes him, by the arm, into a few turns and a corridor or two, finally halting at a white hall containing another corridor and a long line of rooms. Her touch, prominent on his skin, makes him feel uncomfortably real. There is a man in brown uniform cutting wide grey paper, the size of a stretcher, over and over again, at one end of the massive hall. They are greeted by a nurse who looks at both him and his mom as she speaks, saying something about a coronary intervention and a thrombosis, the alien terms rolling off of her tongue expertly. Balaji stares at her mouth, straining to catch a word or two he can make sense of. “Ma’am”, the nurse slows down, makes an effort to speak more sombrely, looking only at his mother now, “It is a serious complication. We are trying our best now to dissolve the clot.”

After the nurse swiftly walks back and into a pair of swinging doors at the end of the corridor, Balaji sits down next to his mom, whose face is buried in her hands. They are occupying a pair of white leather cushioned seats. Balaji doesn’t comfort her. He stares at the sights around him, pointedly avoiding the man in the brown uniform cutting the paper. Almost every wooden door Balaji can see around him is adorned with a yellow “WARNING” sign and a big triangle below it. Restricted area, a sign sneers at him. X-ray radiation, another sign shouts at him. Balaji looks away, down at his feet tapping to a nondescript rhythm and then looks at his mom’s, her chipped red nail polish contrasting the dull blue of her chappals. He looks up. There is a stray blue wheelchair that sits in the corner. He studies the oxygen cylinders that are lined up next to it, and the rest of the hall blurs around one particular cylinder's valve, its bottle, its outlet.

His eyes drag themselves to the pair of doors that the nurse walked into. His stomach turns so hard and so suddenly that he wants to puke. There’s a lady shrieking inside of him, telling him to run inside, grab his dad, shake him by the shoulders, wake him up. He clutches his ID card, as his mind wanders. He imagines the classroom Usha ma’am walks around in now, waving her chalk around in circles as she rambles off about a theorem. He must look so out of place here, he thinks, with his grey uniform and his school bag.

When the nurse comes out of the room again, she is accompanied by a doctor, their feet squeaking against the marble floor. Balaji doesn’t want to tell his mom of the sight of the two, doesn't want to lift her from the protection of her palms. When they come to a stop in front of them, neither Balaji nor his mom stand up. Their words seem repetitive, annoying, listless, to Balaji.

“Mr. Hari’s condition worsened, and he passed away a few minutes ago. We know this is very hard to hear. I am so sorry for your loss."

"We did everything we could, but his heart was just too severely affected. We are here to support you."

“We can answer any questions you have. If there’s someone you need to contact, please tell us."

Balaji closes his eyes. He can feel someone’s, the nurse's probably, cold hands on his. He hears his mom’s melodic wails blend into a gnarly scream that rises, gushing with all of the sweet hot blood that swishes inside of him, from the pit of his stomach and out of his mouth.

The wails and screams multiply and turn from melodic to blaring, over the course of the next few days. Balaji is surrounded by a crowd. Unfamiliar arms of uncles and aunties and cousins and friends crush him. Pairs of eyes, each one more intense than the one before, bore into his soul. Except Satvik’s and Usha ma’am’s. Their stares seem milder and more forgiving to him than the rest. He watches as his father’s body, so unusually calm, is decorated with jasmine flowers, his mother’s yellow hands placing them with a disregard for precision.

A week passes, then a month. The strangers trickle out of his house slowly as the ghost of his father watches, sitting stubbornly on that dining chair in the living room that Balaji ensures to avoid. On a particularly sunny morning, Balaji sits on the stone step outside of his house, blowing at the hot liquid in his tumbler. He glances at the house opposite to him and sees the girl. She rubs her wet hair between her hands with a thin towel. Again, he wonders what she smells like. All of a sudden, the smell of jasmine fills his nose, blocking his airways and choking him as he abandons the tumbler of coffee on the step, runs inside and retches in the kitchen sink. His dad’s guffaws echo from the living room, louder and harsher than his mother’s coos of concern, as a clear stream of bile exits Balaji’s mouth.