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The official cover of Behind His White Coat by Dipjyoti Sharma—a moving novel about a mother’s sacrifice, a son’s dream, and the journey behind every successful doctor.

The Gates of AIIMS

May in Delhi is a specific kind of cruelty. It comes with full sunlight and a blue sky and the promise of summer, and then delivers a heat that is not merely uncomfortable but physically oppressive, pressing down from above and radiating up from the pavement simultaneously, trapping you between two sources of warmth that have no intention of relenting.

By seven in the morning on the Sunday of the AIIMS entrance examination, the temperature was already thirty-three degrees. By nine, when the examination was scheduled to begin, it would be thirty-seven.

Arjun had been awake since three-thirty.

He had not planned to be awake since three-thirty. He had gone to bed at eleven-thirty — specifically early, following Ramesh Chand’s instruction: no studying on the night before, no last-minute review, sleep fully, arrive rested. The examination tests what you know, not what you can memorize in the final twelve hours.

He had closed the notebook at eleven-thirty. He had lain down. He had closed his eyes.

His mind had declined to sleep.

Not from panic. Not from a specific fear — though fear was present, it was a familiar companion by now, domesticated by months of daily preparation. What kept him awake was the body’s refusal to comply with a decision the mind had made. He was lying perfectly still with his eyes closed, and his mind was running through reaction mechanisms and physics derivations and embryology diagrams not because he was revising but because his mind had decided that this was what the night was for, regardless of what he had decided.

At three-thirty he gave up on the project of sleep.

He sat up carefully, trying not to wake Meera, and moved to the window. He looked out at the dark grey wall. Then he made tea on the stove in the corridor, quietly, and sat cross-legged on the floor of the room with the cup warming his hands.

He thought about the examination. He thought about Rampur Khas. About the night in the library with the blue book. About the kerosene lamp and the notebooks and Meera’s small precise handwriting. About the night at the river temple. About the bus. About the first meal of rice and salt. About the months since — the studying, the shop, the fever, the sessions with Ramesh Chand.

He thought about Meera asleep behind him.

He thought: whatever happens in that examination room, I am already somewhere I was not supposed to reach. I am already in Delhi. I am already in this preparation. The reach toward this is already an act that the village did not expect of me, and something has already changed because of the reaching.

The thought did not eliminate the fear. But it changed its size slightly. Made it smaller relative to other things.

When Meera woke at five-thirty — the alarm going off with its usual violence and being silenced immediately — he was still sitting on the floor. She looked at him.

“How long have you been up?”

“A while.”

She did not lecture him about sleep. She got up and started the stove.

She made tea. She made two rotis and a small dish of pickle, which she had bought at the corner shop the previous week specifically for this morning because she knew he needed something of home in his stomach on this day. He ate without tasting it and she watched him eat and did not say this.

~ ~ ~

She had packed the cloth bag the previous evening with the systematic care she brought to important tasks. The pencil case with three sharpened pencils and two pens. The admit card in a plastic sleeve. A small bottle of water. A piece of jaggery — she had read in one of his preparation books that it provided steadier energy over several hours than glucose. A clean handkerchief.

He went through the bag one more time. Admit card. Pencils. Water. Jaggery. Handkerchief. All present.

He dressed. White shirt, pressed the night before. His better trousers. Clean shoes. She looked at him when he was ready and adjusted his collar, one quick efficient movement, the way she did everything.

They left the room at seven.

~ ~ ~

The street outside the examination center was a particular kind of chaos — purposeful, not disorderly. Students everywhere, in clusters and alone, in varying states of preparation and anxiety readable in posture and face. Boys with textbooks still open in the morning wind, reading in the final minutes. Girls with earphones, listening to recorded notes. Pairs of students testing each other with rapid-fire questions.

Parents standing at a remove. Some had been there since six, waiting, looking at the building as if they could assess it. Mothers with small food packets pressing them on children who sometimes took them and sometimes shook their heads.

Arjun looked at all of this. He looked at the students — so many of them, from so many schools, with so many advantages. He had read the statistics. Approximately three hundred thousand students applied for AIIMS MBBS in any given year. Approximately a hundred seats available. The odds were numbers he had not permitted himself to dwell on. But they were present, always, as context.

“There are so many of them,”

he said.

“Yes.”

“Most have had more preparation time than I have. Better schools.”

“That is probably true for most of them.”

“That worries you.”

“It is a fact. Facts need to be acknowledged.”

“And after you have acknowledged it?”

She looked at him.

“After you have acknowledged it, you remember that the examination does not know which school you came from. It only knows the answers on the paper. And your answers are as correct as anyone’s answers.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No. But I know the preparation we have been doing for eight months, and I know what Ramesh sir has said about your mock scores, and I know what I have seen when you work. So I have better information than you think I have.”

He looked at her.

“You believe I will pass.”

“I believe you have given this every single thing you have. That is the only thing that is in your control. The rest is the examination’s business.”

A pause.

“And yes. I believe you will pass.”

He almost smiled. He did not, quite, because the morning was too tense for smiling. But almost.

She opened the cloth bag and brought out the piece of jaggery. She put it in his hand.

“Here?”

“Yes, here. Eat it.”

He ate the jaggery. It was sweet and slightly gritty and tasted faintly of molasses.

She watched him eat it with the expression of someone who has arranged things carefully and is watching them proceed as arranged.

~ ~ ~

The gate opened at eight.

Students separated from families. The separation happened quickly with the particular compression of feeling that occurs when people are anxious and there is nothing more to say. Brief embraces. Last instructions. The students moving toward the gate, the families staying behind.

Arjun picked up the cloth bag. He turned toward the gate.

“Arjun.”

He turned back.

Meera was standing on the pavement in the morning heat. A small woman in a cotton kameez, her hair tied simply, her face calm. Not performing calm — genuinely calm, the calm of someone who has done everything within their power and is at peace with having done it.

“I will be at the chai stall on the corner. Come out and find me when it’s done.”

“You’re going to wait here for three hours?”

“I have a book.”

He looked at her. The morning sun was behind her. She squinted slightly against it.

He thought: I am walking toward an examination that will determine the next forty years of my life. And she is going to sit at a chai stall in the May heat and read a book and wait for me.

He thought: I do not deserve this. And then he thought: I will earn it.

“Go,”

she said, with the small decisive note that meant she had seen what he was thinking and it needed to stop now.

He went through the gate.

~ ~ ~

Row seven, seat three.

He placed the cloth bag under his chair. The admit card on the desk’s corner. The pencil case in front of him. His hands flat on the desk.

He breathed. Ramesh Chand had been very specific about the first sixty seconds: do not open the paper immediately. Sit. Breathe. Let the mind settle from the journey and the nerves and the morning’s accumulated tension into the particular stillness required for this work. Sixty seconds. Then begin.

He breathed for sixty seconds.

The examination room was hot despite the fans running. Eighty students around him in various postures of readiness. The clock on the wall moved toward nine.

The invigilator said: You may begin.

Arjun opened the paper.

~ ~ ~

Sixty questions. Three sections: physics, chemistry, biology. Three hours. Each wrong answer carried a one-third negative mark.

He read the first physics question. It was harder than any of his mock examinations — not unfair, but harder by the specific margin that separates the very good students from the exceptional ones. The questions that have an extra step, an extra inference, a place where the easy approach leads slightly away from the right answer and you need the second look to catch it.

He read it again. He saw it. He answered it.

Second question: also harder. He marked it with a dot and moved on — the Ramesh Chand method. Never spend more than ninety seconds on a problem in the first pass. Mark the uncertain ones and return.

Chemistry was more settled for him. He had spent the last two months going deep into organic chemistry specifically, working the one hundred and twelve reaction mechanisms until they were automatic. The chemistry questions were in his wheelhouse. He moved through them with more confidence, checking behind himself, not rushing.

Biology: home.

Biology was where he had always been strongest, where his genuine love for the material showed up as a kind of ease that was not carelessness but comfort. The questions about cellular biology, about genetics, about human physiology, about the specific details of neurology that he had studied with particular intensity — he knew these not as memorized facts but as things that had made sense to him in a deep way, connected in his mind to the image of the brain in the blue book and the question of how such a thing could be operated on by human hands.

He answered the biology section with the focused pleasure of someone working on problems they genuinely like.

He returned to his dotted questions. Three in physics, one in chemistry. He worked through them methodically, not rushing, not panicking at the clock. He had seven minutes when he finished the last.

He did not fill in anything he was genuinely uncertain about. Ramesh Chand, with the specificity of someone who had analyzed past AIIMS results for fifteen years, had been absolute on this: the negative marking killed more candidates than any other factor. Students who guessed when uncertain consistently scored lower than students who left genuinely uncertain answers blank.

He left four blanks.

The invigilator said: Time.

He put down his pencil.

He sat for a moment in the instant cessation of the room’s collective energy — the instant when eighty people released the breath they had been holding for three hours. He did not know if he had passed. There was no way to know. The calculation was complex, the cut-off unknown. He knew he had done what he had prepared to do. He knew he had been careful. He knew the biology section had been the best he had ever performed on any formal assessment.

He gathered his things. He walked out.

~ ~ ~

She was at the chai stall, exactly as she had promised.

She was sitting on a plastic chair with her book open on her lap. She had not, from her expression, been reading for some time. She was looking at the gate of the examination center. She had been watching the gate for the last twenty minutes, waiting.

She saw him.

She closed the book. She set it on the table beside the chai.

He walked toward her through the May heat. His shirt was damp. His face was blank in the way his face went blank when he was processing something large.

He sat down on the stool across from her. The chai-wala, who had seen examinations empty out for many years from this particular stall, poured a glass of chai without being asked and placed it on the table.

Arjun wrapped both hands around the glass. Meera waited.

“I think it went well,”

he said.

“Good.”

“I don’t know. The cut-off—”

“Tell me what happened. In the paper.”

He told her. Section by section. The harder-than-expected physics questions, the first question that had required the second look, the confident chemistry run, the biology section that had felt almost like a conversation with the material. The four blanks. The three re-checked answers.

She listened. She asked two specific questions — about the physics question that had required the second look, about one of the organic chemistry mechanisms.

“The second look — you caught it?”

“Yes.”

“That is the examination working as it should. That is exactly the quality it is testing.”

He looked at her.

“You think I passed.”

“I think you performed to your preparation. Whether that is enough depends on how everyone else performed.”

“That is not an answer.”

“I think you passed. I cannot promise you that. But that is what I believe.”

He drank his chai. She sat across from him in the May heat, her book closed and forgotten.

“Now we wait,”

she said.

~ ~ ~

Six weeks of ordinary time with the specific weight of waiting underneath it.

Meera went to the shop. Arjun studied — not for the examination that was done but for what came next, because stopping made no sense either way. The weeks were long in the specific way of weeks when something important is pending. The days went at normal speed. The evenings were slow. The nights were slower.

Arjun’s appetite reduced. Meera noted this and adjusted the meals — less rice, more dal, things easier to eat when the stomach is tight with waiting. He did not notice she had done this.

Two weeks in, Ramesh Chand called the mock scores sufficient. That was the word he used. Arjun asked what that meant in terms of probability and Ramesh Chand said: it means you have a reasonable chance and reasonable is the best I will say about any examination before the results are in.

On the morning the results were posted, Ramesh Chand sent word through Dilip at seven: list is up at the regional office, come now.

Arjun and Meera went together. They took the bus. They did not speak on the bus. They held hands, which they rarely did in public, but this morning neither of them thought about it as a decision.

The regional office was a government building on a busy road. Outside it, a crowd had assembled — the specific crowd of results day, which is equal parts hope and dread assembled in human form. Families. Students. The occasional coach. People who had come to watch their investment in the form of a child’s years of studying pay off or not.

Arjun moved to the front of the crowd. Meera stayed just behind him, her hand still in his.

The list was several pages, hand-typed, pinned at eye level. Rank order. Names and roll numbers.

He started reading from the top.

Rank 1: someone from Bengaluru. Rank 2: someone from a Delhi school. He scanned quickly, not reading carefully but scanning for the shape of his own name, the specific arrangement of letters he had been writing his whole life.

Rank 15. Rank 30. Rank 40. Rank 43. Rank 44.

Rank 47.

ARJUN KUMAR. Roll Number 187634.

He read it once. The letters were clear and sharp. His name, his roll number, rank 47.

He read it twice. Three times.

His name. Each time.

He stood very still for a moment. Around him the crowd pushed and scanned and someone said a name and someone else gasped and someone was crying already and the noise of it all continued as noise does regardless of what the individual is feeling inside it.

He turned to Meera. She was looking at him. She had read his face before he spoke. He showed her the list. He pointed to rank 47. She looked.

She read it once. She looked up at him. She read it again.

Her face changed. Not immediately — it changed the way light changes on a landscape when a cloud moves: first the quality of the light shifts, then the colors, then everything. Her face changed from its usual composure into something beneath the composure, something that had been underneath for eight months in a room with a bent fan and a wooden platform and a borrowed stove and a tin alarm clock and ten-hour shifts and cracked feet and a hidden fever and a morning alarm at five-thirty.

She began to cry.

Not quietly. Not the contained tears of a woman managing herself in public. She cried the way people cry when they have been strong for a very long time and the thing they were being strong for has finally arrived and the strength is no longer needed and the body releases everything that was being held in its service.

She cried in the middle of the crowd at the results notice board of the regional examination office on a Tuesday morning in July.

Arjun put his arms around her. She pressed her face into his shoulder and cried. People looked. Some looked away. Some did not. The crowd continued its noise around them.

He held her and she cried and he did not speak because there was nothing to say, because everything that needed to be said was already known between them, had been known for eight months, and this was simply the moment when it was finally permitted to be felt.

He cried too. He did not try not to.

The results board on the wall said rank 47.

Outside, the July sun was hitting the pavement hard. It did not matter.