Everyone today has an opinion about Harish Rana and his parents.

His photograph is everywhere. Mouth agape. A tracheostomy tube in his throat. Eyes that look as lifeless as life permits. Another image shows his parents, their faces suspended somewhere between relief and guilt.

Between these images runs a flood of judgement. Some insist that if they had been given time, they could have brought him back from his vegetative state. Many empathize with the parents. Many others accuse them of not giving their son one last chance.

What most people do not understand is this: the suffering was never his alone.

For thirteen years, an entire family has lived inside that coma.

Here, let me walk you through those thirteen years they lived and suffered.

It takes a different, almost godly patience to care for someone in a coma. Because doctors themselves are not certain about how the brain is functioning, and because our films have conditioned us to believe that a person simply wakes up from a coma and asks, “Where am I?”, families can never fully rest.

Feeding him, cleaning him, bathing him, and ensuring that he is turned from side to side every few hours to prevent bedsores, exhausting as it is, is only one part of the caregiving process. The other, heavier part is talking to the patient endlessly. What if he can hear and needs to be reassured that he is not alone? What if these conversations somehow rewire his neurons, touch a dormant nerve, and miraculously stir him awake?

No one rests.

Talking to someone in a coma is not easy. There is no response, and with every conversation you begin, you are painfully aware of the silence that follows. Sometimes one ends up having entire conversations in their head, imagining what he might say or how he might respond.

And when all the memories have been revisited too many times and there are no new topics left to talk about, the caregivers begin to narrate the ordinary rhythms of life. They talk about the small happenings of the day, about the lives of the people he once loved and cared for. Almost after every few sentences, they remind him that he is missed.

Because what if he can hear and begins to think that life is perfectly normal without him? What if his zeal to come back weakens because everything sounds too happy?

Then there are friends and extended family members who flock to the hospital and the house in the first few years. Everyone tries hard. Everyone reminds him of the days when they laughed together and shared stories. But it is not easy to keep up this effort forever. While life stands still in that room, nothing stops outside those gates.

With time, friends who still think about him begin to visit less.

But no one can be blamed for leaving, for not continuing to play this strange and exhausting game.

Those who remain are the one who is in a coma, and the parents and family who never had the option of walking away.

In the first few years, the family tries everything anyone suggests. A maulvi in a distant village in Jharkhand might cure him. A doctor in Kolkata might bring him back to life. A tarot reader in South Africa who claims expertise in past life regression might have an answer.

Name it, and the family runs to it. Desperate for a solution, any solution, they travel from villages in Jharkhand to suburbs of Kolkata to Gurgaon in search of a miracle.

This continues for years.

Then slowly everyone fails. Everyone grows quiet. The only sound left in the house is the grinder making food paste for the patient’s feeding tube.

Hours turn into days. Days turn into weeks. Weeks turn into years.

So years later, when the Supreme Court allowed passive euthanasia in Harish’s case, it was not relief for Harish alone. For lack of a better word, it was relief for the family as well.

The last thirteen years were lived in hours and days, sometimes even minutes. What they endured in those years is impossible to fathom for anyone who has not spent even a day inside that house.

So anyone calling the family out for “not giving their son one last chance” should pause.

Step back. Say a quiet prayer for the family, and for Harish.

Nothing else we say or do will mean anything to them.

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