The prince displayed no such wit on his first trip though, as he was checked in wearing his bloodied cricket whites, his right eye shut and his nose swollen to the size of a cucumber. Halfway through his hasty trip from Ranakpour, blood had started oozing again from his injured eye, a slow but sure drip in every direction. Dried blood in his hair, neck and shoulders had taken over the Ranakpour emblem on the chest of his shirt. The rudimentary band-aid across his head had to be changed every hour as it would get soaking wet. He would drift in and out of consciousness, barely noticing the various modes of transport he was in. A car, a plane, a wheelchair. Had he also been on a train? ‘Meera,’ he would call out, not bothering about who was around him. Thankfully, Ranjit Singh had convinced his family members to stay back home as he assured them that Abhimanyu would be rushed to the best hospital in India. Ranjit, accompanied by Meera, reached the hospital where Penaru joined them to help with the paperwork, while Abhimanyu was whisked away for an emergency surgery. ‘Careful with the trousers,’ he muttered as they were prepping to get him in the operating theater. Meera assured him that everything was fine. She stuck her hand into the pockets of his trousers to check, as they were going to be cut open with scissors before the surgery, and found a note. A page ripped out of his black diary that had a neatly written address on it – that of old man Madhao from Ahmedabad airport who had asked for help. Abhimanyu had intended to announce that his team’s proceeds from the match would go to the man in need; a protocol he had established to raise issues for the countryfolk. Meera placed it next to his other belongings.

The surgery wasn’t conclusive by any means, but the doctors were able to remove a bone fragment lodged in Abhimanyu’s eye socket. The good news was that his retina was intact. The bad news was that they couldn’t do much until the optic canal decompressed. All the first surgery achieved was allowing Abhimanyu’s injury to bleed out freely. Meera saw more blood soaked bandages in the first hour after the surgery than she had used during the day and a half it had taken Ranjit Singh and her to get Abhimanyu to Bombay. As the painkillers wore off in the middle of the night, through the agony that followed surgery, all Abhimanyu could think of was how in the world he would break the news to Meera that he won’t be able to marry her. It was as though the lingering misery of this thought was robbing him of the ability to cope with his debilitating injury – that feeling of swollen brain tissue pressing up against his skull; a paralyzing pain he would feel for the rest of his life in the most unpredictable moments. At times, he was sure his head was going to burst. A cocktail of painkillers would become his staple diet – five colourful tablets after breakfast, two after lunch and seven at dinner. Over the years, the monstrous throb in his head became a way for Abhimanyu to predict the weather. A throb every six seconds meant a cold front was coming. A throb that lasted more than an hour meant that the humidity was well above 80 per cent. And yet, at that moment in the hospital bed, the thought of confessing to Meera was a thousand times more agonizing than the clockwork-like tremble in his mangled right eye.