Page 84 - Till the Last Breath . . .

Arman frantically pored through the research reports in front of him one

more time. They were wasting time. People were losing to the disease
without even a shred of hope. But he knew that it would take him and his
team years, if not decades, to ascertain and prove that the stem cell

approach could work. The girl he thought he had saved, the girl who
thought she had been saved, would be long dead by then. He saw her file

lying across the table and flipped through it. Pihu Malhotra. 19. Medical
Student. The words floated in his head, refusing to settle down in an

undiscoverable corner. Why was he so hell-bent on trying the treatment
before it was time? Was it desperation? Was it the guilt from having

someone believe that he had cured them? He didn’t know. With her file in
his hand, he left his office and headed for the third floor. In the lift, he read
through her file twice, nervously flipping through the pages, wondering if

she had lost herself in the disease. He wondered if she, like the many
patients he had seen dying, had let the disease define her.

‘I was diagnosed three years back.’
‘I first noticed it when I was driving.’

‘Is there a cure?’
These were often the first responses Arman heard from his patients who

had lost to the disease way before it eventually consumed them. From the
little he knew of her, she was different.
He entered the room and saw Dushyant lying on his bed, his eyes rolled

over, sleeping under the effect of the powerful sedatives. Such a burden, he
thought. On the other side of the curtain, he saw Pihu reading a book. Her

mom was reading a book too.
‘Hi. I am back,’ he said and smiled. Arman knew exactly when to put his

charm on. He was quite the guy to date back in medical school. Since he
had grown up around medical books and people from medicine, expecting

him to excel in medical school was like expecting a fish to swim. With
plenty of time on his hands and with big wads of cash from his father’s
hospitals, he was the perfect guy to be with. But the girls who dated him

back in those days admitted that his charm didn’t lie in his wealth or his big
brain. It was in his disarming smile and his perfect behaviour. Even as a