Between November 2024 and June 2026, I lost four members of my family. Two brothers, a sister, a brother-in-law. The eldest was ninety-two. The youngest was seventy-eight. I had been each one’s physician, in one way or another, for most of my adult life.

Om, Ashok, and Pushpa’s departures are told elsewhere in this book, in “The Three Departures.” What follows here is the fourth.

Narsingdasji — my Jijaji — married my elder sister Asha when I was barely three. I have no memory of a time before him. He lived his life in Bhopal, in the old Ramnivas building in Kayasthpura, then at a cast-iron factory on Chhola Road, where the family survived the Union Carbide disaster, and finally in Shail Shikhar, the house he built in the 1990s and lived in for the last forty-five years of his life.

He was a pucca Bhopali — his language, his taste, his food, all of it exact. He measured his words the way other men measure ingredients. He dressed the same way: shirt tucked in, shoes polished, belt precisely placed, face clean-shaven, every day of his life, into his nineties. He made his own morning tea, and Asha’s, and took real pride in it. He fixed things. Two years ago, in his late eighties, he came to Sevagram and repaired our washbasin plumbing with a dexterity that would have embarrassed a professional plumber. He had no patience for looseness — in thought, in speech, in food, in dress.

A decade before he died, he wrote down how he wanted to be treated after death. No religious ceremony. No rituals. He asked, in his own hand, that his body be given to the anatomy department at MGIMS, for students to learn from. By the time he was old enough for the question to matter, medical schools no longer needed cadavers the way they once had, and the family persuaded him toward a simple funeral instead. He agreed, on the condition that it stay simple: no garlands, no shawls over the body, no circling the bier, nothing thrown at the cremation ground. Peace, and nothing more.

He got exactly that. He died on 14 June 2026, at Aalok’s home in Indore, at ninety-two — at home, not in a hospital, not in an ICU, with no interventions. My elder brother JP’s seventy-fifth birthday party was underway in Wardha when the news reached us. We left the celebration and drove through the night to Indore. The funeral was over within three days, as plain as he had asked it to be. Later, Asha travelled to Haridwar with Anand, Archana, and her husband Suresh, to release his ashes into the Ganga. A simple ceremony, for a man who had asked for nothing else.

With Om, and with Ashok, and with Pushpa, I had been the one making calls to hospitals, reading reports, deciding what to try and what to stop. With Narsingdasji, there was nothing for me to decide. He had decided everything himself, years before, in a notebook, in his own measured hand. I arrived only in time to keep the promise the family had already made him.

Four deaths in eighteen months. I was a physician for none of them, in the end — not really. I was a brother, and a brother-in-law, standing where I had been asked to stand, in a house grown quieter each time.