The books are gone. The biology notes, mock test papers and dog-eared textbooks that had once taken over Kahaan Patel’s room now sit inside a cupboard, packed away one-and-a-half months after his death. But the guitar remains where he left it. His father, Advocate Prashant Patel, has discovered that grief follows no logic. Some things it asks you to put away. Others, it refuses to let you touch. Like the guitar.
“I was going to buy him a car when he turned 18”, the 45-year-old says of his son, who took his own life at 17, unable to cope with the pressure of a re-test following a paper leak and cancellation of the NEET exam. “I had even planned a guitar stand in the trunk so he could carry it everywhere,” says Prashant. After the NEET results, he had promised himself, there would also be a customised stethoscope engraved with Kahaan’s name.
Before medicine became his singular ambition, Kahaan was simply a curious child. He built Lego models, dismantled toy aeroplanes to understand how they worked and loved trekking with his family. Later came football, the ukulele and heavy metal music. He wanted an electric guitar, but postponed buying one because the entrance examinations were too close. There would be time later, he believed. By Class XI, Kahaan had changed schools to prepare for the NEET exams better. For the next two years, life revolved around a single examination. Holidays disappeared. Hobbies became rewards for a future yet to arrive. Everything was organised around one dream.
When he finally walked out of the examination hall on May 3, that future finally seemed within reach. His friend Dhruvi says Kahaan was confident of scoring around 650 out of 720 marks and securing a seat in a government medical college. For the first time in months, he allowed himself a holiday with friends at a farmhouse near Surat. When news of the NEET paper leak broke, Kahaan returned but was far less certain and anxious, worried if he could get top notch scores yet again. That performance anxiety pushed him over the edge. Naina Shahri, a counselling psychologist who has spent over a year working on a suicide crisis helpline and now provides trauma-informed support to students affected by the NEET exams, says overwhelming stress often changes the way people experience possibility itself. “When someone has invested years into one goal and suddenly experiences something that feels deeply unfair or beyond their control, it can create profound helplessness. Instead of believing the system has failed them, they begin believing they themselves have failed,” she says. This summarises what could have been Kahaan’s last straw.
The questions that never stop
In the weeks after Kahaan’s death, grief settled into details. Prashant found himself replaying conversations that had once seemed ordinary. He wondered if he should have called his son more often during the weeks leading up to the re-examination instead of worrying that he might disturb his revision. He thought about a family holiday the previous year that Kahaan had later joked had cost him valuable study time. Every memory became evidence in an impossible trial where he was both witness and accused.
“The grief of losing a child can be unbearable,” says Shahri. “Parents often revisit conversations again and again, wondering if something could have changed. They search for signs they may have missed. But grief doesn’t move in a straight line. It returns to the same questions because the mind is trying to make sense of something that feels impossible to understand,” she adds.
Psychologists describe this as one of the most common responses to traumatic loss. The brain keeps reconstructing the past, hoping to find a version of events in which the ending is different. It is less about finding answers than about trying to regain a sense of control after an event that shattered it. For Prashant, speaking about his son has become part of a survival strategy. “I want to remember him,” he says. “I want to talk about him,” he says. Silence to him is far more frightening.
Dealing with grief
Grief did not arrive the same way for everyone in the family. Veena, Kahaan’s mother, withdrew into herself. Friends describe her as trying to stay strong for their younger son, Rihaan. Yet even in the middle of her own grief, she began asking whether there were places where she could volunteer with children struggling under academic pressure.
For psychologists, that instinct reflects something important. “People often think healing means forgetting or moving on,” says Dr Mimansa Singh Tanwar, clinical psychologist and head of the School Mental Health Programme at Fortis Adayu. “It doesn’t. Over time, many bereaved parents begin looking for ways to create meaning. For one parent, it may be advocacy. For another, it may be supporting other children or simply finding ways to keep their child’s memory alive.” The hardest part, she says, is allowing grief to exist without trying to rush it away.
Families often tell bereaved parents that they need to be strong or that time will heal everything. Those reassurances, however well intentioned, can leave people feeling even more alone. “What they need most is space to express what they are experiencing. To have someone simply listen without judgement, without trying to fix it or explain it,” adds Tanwar.
There is another grief that often goes unseen. Rihaan, Kahaan’s 13-year-old brother, has heard adults tell him, in different ways, “Don’t do what your brother did.” Asked whether he liked hearing those words, he quietly said no, according to Prashant. Children who lose siblings are frequently overlooked, psychologists say, because so much attention is focused on grieving parents. Yet they are grieving too while also navigating the fear and expectations that others may now place upon them.
For Dhruvi, trauma processing is going over Kahaan’s voice notes, old messages and photographs. Dhruvi had been bullied at school and slipped away to a staircase to cry alone. Kahaan followed her, let her cry on his shoulder and eventually walked her back to class. “Since then he became a friend I could trust,” she says. A month after Kahaan’s death, she couldn’t deal with the vacuum, called a friend and stayed on the phone until morning.
Divya, a psychotherapist who works with people navigating grief and loss, says moments like these underline why connection matters after suicide. “Grief can become incredibly isolating,” she says. “Naming emotions, talking about them and allowing someone else to sit with that pain reduces the intensity of what they’re experiencing. It doesn’t erase grief, but it helps make it survivable.” She also challenges one of the oldest assumptions about bereavement — that healing requires letting go. Many people continue speaking to loved ones who have died, listening to their voice notes, celebrating birthdays or holding onto photographs. Rather than preventing healing, these continuing bonds often become part of it. “We don’t ask people to stop loving someone simply because they’ve died,” Divya says. “The relationship changes, but it doesn’t disappear.”
Learning to carry absence
The guitar remains. It is still difficult for Prashant to imagine giving it to someone else. Trauma, psychologists say, is not something people simply recover from. It reshapes life. “Healing is not about returning to the person you were before loss. It is about slowly building a life around an absence that will always remain,” says Tanwar.
For Prashant, it means speaking publicly about his son because silence feels more dangerous than remembrance. For Veena, it is searching for ways to help other children facing pressures like the ones Kahaan carried. For Dhruvi, it is choosing, again and again, to stay alive while carrying memories that still hurt to revisit.
(From left to right) Prashant with his sons in happier days; Kahaan's room and guitar are still in place. (Source: Express Photo) 
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