Her voice didn't tremble, but it carried something hollow. Not emptiness exactly-but something that had once been full and was now just... echo. We sat across from each other in a room that smelled faintly of phenyl and rust, the walls off-white and peeling near the corners.
Hitisha Sharma, or Saraswati, didn't blink much. She stared as if trying to read between my words, not just what I said, but what I meant. And I could already feel-within the first few minutes-that she was not an ordinary patient.
Her thoughts flowed in tangled rivers, sometimes lucid, sometimes trailing into strange silence. But there was a rhythm. If you listened closely enough, you could almost hear it-the heartbeat of something profound behind her schizophrenia.
"You carry a notebook," she said suddenly.
"Yes," I replied. "I'm researching female psychology. I'd like to understand you better. If that's okay."
"You mean you'd like to put me under a microscope," she said, one eyebrow rising slightly. "Like a butterfly with a pin through its wing."
I didn't know how to respond.
"No," I finally said. "I want to listen."
That seemed to soften her. Just a little.
She turned her gaze away from me and looked at the wall beside her, where a faint scratch pattern formed a crooked circle. She'd made it herself, I would learn later-scratching the wall with her fingernails during nights when her mind was too loud to sleep.
"My mother used to braid my hair every morning," she said. "Before she was killed."
My breath caught. The shift in tone was sudden, sharp.
"I'm sorry," I said softly.
She looked at me again, but this time her expression was unreadable.
"They think I'm mad," she said. "But I'm just trying to find the door."
"What door?"
She gave a ghost of a smile.
"The one that leads out of here. The one that doesn't exist."
I didn't write anything down. Not yet. Something about that moment felt too intimate to reduce to notes. I just let it be, the silence curling around her words like breath on glass.
Over the next few days, I visited her room every morning at 10 a.m. We developed a pattern-not quite friendship, but not clinical detachment either. She would talk; I would listen. Sometimes she'd ask me questions about life outside, about trains and books and what color the sky was that morning.
Her mood changed like the weather. One morning, she'd be curled into herself, mumbling poetry. The next, she'd be laughing like a child, asking me if I'd ever seen angels walk.
"I talk to them," she told me one day, her fingers tracing invisible symbols on the floor. "They tell me things. Sometimes they lie. But sometimes... they tell me the truth."
I'd nod, not to encourage delusion, but because I didn't want to interrupt the flow. Every thread of her story mattered.
I began to notice things-how she rocked slightly when anxious, how she refused to eat unless the tray came from a specific nurse, how she hated the fluorescent light overhead and insisted it buzzed with secrets.
And then there were her drawings.
She had a small pile of papers tucked under her mattress-each filled with swirling ink patterns, symbols, and faces. One face appeared repeatedly: a woman with wide, weeping eyes and a flame instead of a mouth.
"That's me," she whispered one afternoon, showing me the picture. "On the inside."
Despite the clinical diagnosis-schizophrenia, acute with psychotic features-there was something painfully aware about her. As if two versions of herself were constantly watching each other: the fractured self and the witness.
One day, as I sat cross-legged beside her cot, I asked, "Do you ever feel lonely?"
She looked at me, long and hard.
"I feel everything, all at once. That's worse than being lonely."
I swallowed the lump in my throat. I was starting to understand-not as a student, but as a human being-that pain like hers wasn't linear. It didn't move in straight lines. It spiraled, crashed, reformed.
The janitor, who still remembered me every morning, once said, "You shouldn't spend so much time with that girl. She's got a darkness in her. She'll pull you in."
But I didn't feel fear.
I felt drawn.
Each conversation with her peeled away something inside me-layers of detachment, the cold academic lens. I began to feel. And I wasn't sure that was good for me... or her.
Still, I returned. Every day.
One afternoon, as sunlight filtered through the barred window in dusty shafts, she suddenly looked at me and said, "You remind me of someone I once knew. A boy who gave me a rose when I was nine. He said it would never wilt."
"What happened to him?"
She smiled faintly. "He forgot me. Like everyone does."
I wanted to say something-to reassure her-but I didn't. I just sat there, letting the moment exist.
That night, I lay in my hotel bed unable to sleep. I thought about her voice. Her hands. Her stories. And that face she kept drawing-the flame-mouthed woman. I wondered if it was a cry for help, or a map to something deeper.
I was beginning to realize I wasn't just writing a research paper anymore.
I was being rewritten.