Zane walked into the office holding Sanjana’s hand, who shuffled in with a bit of a limp. They were a young couple in their 40s, but they helped each other settle into their chairs like 80-year-olds do—slowly, gingerly, tenderly. As I directed my gaze towards Sanjana to ask about her problem, she shook her head sideways, pointing her thumb at her husband. “Don’t look at me; he’s the patient,” she said, articulately lifting the veil of perception we subconsciously carry within us.

I asked him what the issue was. “I had an aneurysm that ruptured in June 2020,” he said, a little saliva drooling from the corner of his mouth. His speech was slightly slurred and garbled, with the intonation of someone who’s been intoxicated. “They did an operation for me in Singapore to treat it, but now we’ve moved back to Mumbai and I need someone to fix back the skull, which they had removed at the time of the operation because of brain swelling,” he explained, taking off his monkey cap to show me the defect over the right side of his head, which caved in like a saucer. “They tried to place it back nine months after surgery, but it got infected twice and they had to discard it,” Sanjana chipped in, pointing to the scarred areas on his scalp that now looked like a battlefield after the war was over.