CHAPTER 17: THE FORGOTTEN YEARS
CHAPTER 17: THE FORGOTTEN YEARS
Arjun's Point of View
Grief is a strange thing. It wraps around people differently. Some cry. Some scream. Some go numb.
Pia didn't do any of that.
For four days after she opened her eyes in the hospital, she cried. And when I say cried, I mean a scream from the soul—ripping through the sterile walls of the hospital, vibrating in the core of anyone who heard her. Her mother held her. My mother wept silently. And I… I stayed by her side, watching her world fall apart.
It wasn't just the loss of our child. It was everything that came with it—the hopes, the dreams, the tiny socks she had bought, the lullabies she had already started humming.
But then… one morning… she just… stopped.
No tears. No questions. No signs of pain.
She was smiling.
"Good morning," she said to me as I brought her breakfast.
"Morning," I replied slowly, unsure.
She looked at me with a softness in her eyes that didn't match the days before. "You didn't tell me we were staying here. It's such a nice hotel. Is this a surprise for our honeymoon?"
I nearly dropped the tray.
"What?"
She giggled. "Arjun, don't be so dramatic. It's only been a month since we got married. Can't a husband surprise his wife?"
My world froze.
She didn't remember.
Not the accident.
Not the baby.
Not even the last three years.
For a moment, I thought maybe this was how her mind was coping. Denial. A temporary mechanism.
But when my mother came in and asked gently, "Pia beta, how are you feeling?" Pia beamed, "Much better, aunty. You don't have to keep calling me beta just because I married your son!"
My mother's eyes widened. She excused herself with a nervous smile and walked out of the room.
We were wrong.
This wasn't coping.
This was something else entirely.
---
We got Pia discharged a few days later. She was energetic. Playful. Loving. But it wasn't the Pia I knew.
It was Pia from three years ago.
She wore the same kind of dresses she used to wear when we had just gotten married. She asked about her internship, even though she had long since left it. She cooked my favorite meals with a sense of newness, of discovery—as if she was still trying to learn about me.
At first, I played along.
I couldn't tell her the truth. Not yet. How do you break someone's heart twice?
But soon, it started showing. The gaps in her memory. The little questions.
"When are we going on our honeymoon?"
"Why is there no wedding album?"
"Why do I feel like I've lived here forever?"
She looked at me one night and asked, "Why don't we have a baby yet?"
I didn't answer.
I couldn't.
I turned to my father that night.
Aryaveer Mehra. A brilliant doctor. A calm man. A pillar of strength. But even he looked shaken.
He ran neurological exams. MRI, CT scans, memory tests.
He didn't speak for a while.
Then he called me to his study.
I followed him in, heart pounding.
He shut the door behind us.
"Papa?"
He didn't look at me at first. Just stared at the screen, the brain scans glowing faintly in the dim light.
"Her hippocampus…" he murmured. "There's damage here. And here. Temporal lobe shows inconsistencies. This… this isn't just trauma."
I stepped forward. "What do you mean?"
He ran a hand through his hair. I had never seen him so rattled. Not even during the most critical surgeries.
"Arjun… it's not memory loss. It's selective regression. Her mind has erased everything after a certain point. As if those years were… overwritten."
"Can it be reversed?" My voice cracked.
He didn't answer.
"Papa?" I repeated, louder this time.
He slowly turned to face me.
And then he just… shook his head.
No words.
Just silence.
That silence said more than anything else ever could.