Gehna didn’t even mention it to the ob-gyn when the doctor showed up a few minutes later. Ajay began quizzing the doctor about painkillers—when, which, how much—but had to step out of the room when the nursing staff asked Gehna to change out of her street clothes. He winked at her on his way out. She noticed how strong he looked, how capable, and was glad that she could always count on him to be in her corner. She also noticed how blue the lapis pattern printed on her white hospital shift was as she slipped into it. The nurse—Daisy, the name tag on her chest said—got Gehna to lie down and wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around her upper arm. She pumped the bulb and looked at the reading. She frowned.

‘Doctor,’ said Daisy.

The ob-gyn broke off her discussion with Nina Rai and came over. She looked at the reading, then took the bulb from the nurse, adjusted the cuff, and repeated the process herself. She stared at the reading.

‘Gehna,’ she said. ‘Have you felt any contractions yet?’

Gehna shook her head. ‘Nopes.’

‘Okay. We’re going to check your liver and kidney function. It’s nothing to worry about, just a precautionary test.’

The thing about a private clinic versus a big hospital is that everything moves quicker. In the hour it took for the results from Gehna’s blood test to come in, Ajay read the news and Nina Rai fielded phone calls from people who wanted to know what was going on. Eram rocked back and forth on his heels with his hands shoved deep into his pockets. At one point he asked if Gehna would like a sandwich. She said no and shut her eyes against the light. She could feel a slight headache coming on.

The ob-gyn strode into the room accompanied by Daisy and two male orderlies who immediately set about unlocking the wheels underneath Gehna’s bed. Ajay Rai half stood, as if pulled to his feet by invisible wires, still clutching on to the newspaper in his hands.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

The doctor, in the preternaturally calm voice of someone delivering shitty news without wanting it to sound like shitty news, said that Gehna’s BP was through the roof. Her platelet count was low and there were signs of liver impairment. She was pre-eclamptic. The only way to prevent full-blown eclampsia was to induce labour immediately. The ob-gyn said that they had, obviously, seen this sort of thing many times, how pre-eclampsia could flare up in a matter of hours with no prior warning. She would have answers to all their questions later, but right now there was no time.

As she was being wheeled out of the room, Gehna opened her eyes briefly before shutting them again. Her headache was worse. And seeing the worry reflected on the faces of her mum, her dad, and her Rat was scaring her badly, so she preferred not to.

In the OT, they gave her oxytocin to induce labour and hooked her up to a bag of magnesium sulphate to lower her blood pressure. Then the ob-gyn started yelling garbled instructions. Gehna couldn’t understand why the two nurses were suddenly holding down her arms, one on either side of the gurney. She tried to say something but couldn’t because her tongue felt too big in her mouth.