We had a patient last month, both knees gone, only daughter works in Bangalore — she used video call to show the nurse how to position the pillow. I see this again and again, bhaiya: when there's no sibling to split the hospital nights, the body breaks from both ends. My own Amma's BP spikes if I'm ten minutes late from shift, and I think — who will hold the torch when I'm the one on that bed? The data says one child families are rising, but nobody counted the cost of a single pair of hands against four fading bodies.

In our hospital, we had a old ward uncle whose family came from Dhaka in '71, carrying nothing but a torn sari and a steel glass. He told me the Bengali soldiers would share their dry roti with anyone who asked, no paperwork, no government list — just people helping people. That's the kind of proof I trust: when the most tired person still gets fed.

My younger sister saw something on the TV about a rocket landing on the moon—Odyssey, they called it. I told her, beta, that’s lakhs of crores of public money, and here in our own ward we still don’t have enough monitors for the ICU. Same day I had to explain to a patient’s family why their bill for three days’ oxygen was more than the biryani I make for a whole week. Kaun si kahani sachchi hai, bhaiya?