The building was four storeys of unpainted concrete with laundry lines strung between windows and a generator humming on the ground floor. The stairwell smelled of kerosene and rain. Someone on the second floor was awake — a television, low, a soap opera at three AM.
Room 12. She knocked quietly. The door opened to the width of a security chain and an eye looked at her — brown, sharp, young.
"Raju Waghmare?" she said.
"Who are you?"
"My name is Priya Vashisht. I am a doctor at Kalyani Medical Centre. I need to talk to you right now about your assessment tomorrow."
A long silence. "It's three in the morning."
"I know. Please open the door."
He did. The room was small — shared with two people currently asleep on mats on the far side. A hotplate. A shelf with a padlocked box, a phone charging, a folder of papers. The accumulated documentation of proving you existed in a system that made it difficult.
Raju Waghmare was exactly as his photograph had been — lean, dark-eyed, the small scar on his jaw. He had the intelligent kind of fear, the fear of someone who had learned that unexpected things in the middle of the night were usually bad.
"Sit down," she said. "I'll be quick."
She told him. Not everything — not the full scale of it, not the one hundred and nine. She told him what was going to happen to him tomorrow. The assessment, the sedation, the heart. She spoke quietly, without drama, with the clinical directness she used when she had to give a patient information that was going to change everything. You heard emotional urgency and your mind reached for reasons to dismiss it. You heard a doctor saying something terrible in a quiet, precise voice and some part of you understood that this was the register of truth.
He listened without interrupting. His hands, she noticed, were completely still on his knees.
When she finished, he said: "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because my name is on your death certificate and it hasn't happened yet. And because I am a doctor and this is not what doctors are for."
"Why should I believe you?"
She opened her bag and took out the printout — his own file, his health records, the compatibility score, the pre-written death certificate with her signature. He read every word.
His hands were not still anymore.
"My cousin," he said. Very quiet. "Jayesh. He was in this programme. He died eight months ago. They said it was a heart attack." He looked up. "He was twenty-six. He ran five kilometres every morning."
"I'm sorry," she said.
"How many?" he said.
She was quiet for a moment. "I don't know yet."
