Isha's POV

Night had swallowed the house whole. I must have fallen asleep thinking about Shivamji - his name kept drifting through my mind like a small, stubborn refrain - and I don't even remember when sleep finally took me. But at some point before five, I woke up suddenly. The world inside my chest felt wrong, like a bird frantically beating against the ribs of my body. I couldn't tell whether it was fear or something worse, only that a tightness had settled over me and would not loosen.

I pushed the blanket away, the room cooler than I expected. The familiar shadows looked unfamiliar, as if the walls themselves were closing in. There was no sensible reason for me to be awake like this; nothing good was waiting in the dark. Still, something pulled me from bed with a weight I couldn't name, an almost physical ache that forced my feet across the floor.

Dadi.

The name rose in my head like a bell. I didn't want to believe it, but the thought that she might be- that she could leave me - surged through me with the force of a wave. My hands were trembling as I opened the door. The hallway light blinked on in a lazy way, throwing a thin strip of yellow across the tiles. Every step toward her room felt longer than the last, like walking through syrup.

When I pushed the door open, the sight took my breath away in the worst possible way: she wasn't asleep in her usual way, nor was she simply resting. She lay with her face turned to the side, cheeks pale, and her small chest hardly moving. For a terrifying second my mind refused to accept it - this couldn't be happening. Dadi had always been the calm center of our little chaos: slow, steady, indomitable in her own quiet way. The idea of her slipping away from us seemed absurd, as if someone had misplaced an anchor.

"Dadi?" I don't know why my voice came out thin and high. I must have sounded like a child. "Dadi, what happened? Wake up, dadi. Please-" Tears came hot and immediate. My throat closed as if someone had tied a rope there, and I could feel myself losing the plot of sense and sequence.

She didn't answer.

For a moment the house itself seemed to hold its breath with me. The clock on the wall ticked, mechanical and deadpan, while I felt the air squeezing tighter around my lungs. The room - the familiar floral bedsheet, the small folded shawl on her chair, the calendar on the wall - all the ordinary, everyday things were suddenly part of a cruel theater set. It was as if the room was shrinking, the walls leaning in, and every sound was being absorbed by an invisible, choking hush.

I reached for her hand. It was colder than it should have been. I put my palm against her wrist, searching for the steady sign that had always comforted me: the faint, sure pulse. Nothing. Panic flared, hot and stupid and immediate. I grabbed my phone with hands that wouldn't stop shaking and dialed Uncle before I even thought it through.

"Uncle!" My voice came out a sob. "Dadi - she can't breathe. Please, please tell me to do something. Help, Uncle!"

There was the sound of him picking up on the other end, bleary and worried: "Yes, beta? What happened? Is she-"

"She won't wake up properly. Her chest - she's not breathing right. Come quickly, please. Call a doctor. Someone. Please, Uncle-"

"Shh, calm down. I'm coming. I'm calling a doctor now."

He sounded as if he was trying to be calm for my sake, but his words were thin with urgency. I clung to the phone like a rope. My ear heard his responses but my mind had already slipped into a private panic. The house that had always cradled us now felt like a trap - every shuttered room and silent corridor conspiring to make the minutes lengthen like stretched taffy.

I kept checking Dadi, over and over, as if repetition alone could wake her. I saw, with a strange, clinical clarity, the way her breath hitched and then slowed, how her eyelids fluttered without opening. Each tiny, silent movement made my insides twist. I wanted to scream, to shake her awake, to drag her back from wherever she had drifted. But all I could manage was to hold her hand and whisper things that sounded small and meaningless in the face of what might be happening.

"Please, dadi. Wake up. Please don't go. Not now. Not like this." My voice broke on the last word. I pressed my forehead to her palm, as if that would send warmth, as if closeness could rewrite the rules that were unfolding.

Uncle arrived in a flurry of dust and breathless apologies for being late, and with him came a strange, hollow hope. He looked at Dadi, took her pulse, murmured something, and then pulled out his phone. The room filled with practical movements - the kind that try to stitch sense back into chaos. He called the family doctor and then, like an automaton, began to help coordinate: someone to get the car ready, someone to fetch the oxygen cylinder. Each action was an attempt to push the dread back into a corner.

They moved around us, their faces set with the resolute calm that people adopt when panic is not an option. But my body still trembled like a brittle leaf. There was that terrifying impatience - that frantic, guilty thought that at any second everything could change and I'd be left with the memory of her lying so still.

The minutes crawled. The doctor arrived, his face a practiced calm, and the room filled with the soft beeps of the oxygen machine being set up, the rustle of hands checking vitals, murmured medical words that were both terrifying and strangely comforting. Someone wrapped Dadi in a shawl, lifting her gently onto a stretcher. She looked so small and frail, and with each movement, my chest constricted as if someone were compressing my heart.

I wanted to go with them. I wanted to be beside her, to hold her hand and not let go. But there were a dozen small tasks - a call to the hospital, to the neighbor who always helped in emergencies, finding warm clothes - that kept pulling me back from that instinct. Each small responsibility felt like a test: could I keep myself functioning while everything inside me broke?

In the car, the world outside the windows blurred into streaks of streetlights and sleep-shadowed lanes. Dadi lay still, tubes and oxygen making her look unreal, as if she were paused in a fragile scene I couldn't step into properly. I gripped the edge of the stretcher until my knuckles went white. Everything seemed too loud: the wheeze of the oxygen mask, the soft shuffle of shoes, my own breath rasping like a ragged thing.

At the hospital, time dissolved into a barrage of fluorescent lights and sterile smells. Doctors spoke in clipped phrases and then disappeared behind curtained doors. Nurses moved with brisk, efficient kindness. I waited in a chair that seemed to swallow me, hands clasped so tightly that my palms hurt. The waiting was the worst kind of torture - full of possibility and dread in equal measure. I tried to pray, tried to breathe with a steadiness I did not feel. I told myself to remember every small detail about her: the smell of her hair, the way she folded her hands when she ate, the soft croon she made when she hummed old songs. I repeated these like a litany, an attempt to hold on to something permanent.

When the doctor finally came out, his face was kind but tired. He explained things with a measured tone - something about respiratory distress, possible complications, tests they would run. He said words like "stabilize" and "monitor," and for a sliver of a moment, hope and fear tangled together. They said they'd do everything they could. They said she was in capable hands.

Hearing those words should have steadied me, and in some strange way it did. Maybe it was the presence of structure amid the chaos - an order being made of the panic. Or maybe it was simply human nature to cling to any rope thrown into the storm. My breath slowed, ever so slightly, as I sat there in the antiseptic light and tried to let the professionals take what I could not hold together.

Hours later, the night lost its blackness and began to pale at the edges. The waiting room was littered with other people carrying their own private catastrophes. A nurse finally told me I could see Dadi. My legs moved as if through molasses when I walked to the recovery room.

She was awake, but different. Her eyes were glassy, small flecks of confusion clouding them. Her chest still rose and fell with the effort of a traveler climbing a steep hill. She turned her face when she saw me, and a tiny, bewildered smile crossed her lips. Relief flooded me so violently that I felt dizzy. I wanted to laugh and sob and kneel at her feet all at once.

"Dadi," I whispered, and the sound broke somewhere between gratitude and complaint. "You're here. Don't even think about leaving me."

She reached for my hand with a trembling finger. "Isha," she breathed, her voice thin but steady, and the name slid into the room like balm. In that word there was recognition, warmth, and something steadier still: home.

In the days that followed, things returned to a new kind of normal. We sat by her bedside, reliving the small memories like talismans against fear. We learned how fragile and precious the ordinary was. Each ordinary day - waking up, making tea, hearing her soft humming - became a quiet victory.

What shook me most was the knowledge that life could change in an instant. The night had taught me to hold time differently: not to take the trivial for granted, not to let the little loving moments slip. Shivamji's name still played in my mind sometimes, a gentle refrain, but it had been rearranged now in order of importance. Dadi had slipped to the center, as she always should have been.

I still wake sometimes in the small hours, startled by the memory of those stretched moments, my heart lurching as if to check that everything is still where it ought to be. And every time, I cross the floor and stand at Dadi's door, grateful for the sound of her breathing, the steady rise and fall that tells me, in the most honest way, that she is still here.

♡♡✿⁠ ⁠♡♡

Okay okay here me out ik it's a bit disappointing that I write a whole part about Isha and her dadi but in someone's life this grandmother held so many memories and love for those people I wrote this part and maybe the next two part will be on this topic if u don't like this parts then u can skip in 10 or maybe 11 ep

isode anyway happy reading

Take care

Muah💋

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