Lekaki
The alarm didn't wake Shivam; the shift in his internal clock did. It was 4:30 AM.
The apartment around him was pitch black, silent, and cold. He didn't turn on the overhead lights, preferring the sharp, sterile beam of his phone screen as he checked his emails. Three notifications from the intensive care unit. Two patient updates. A text from his chief of surgery.
By 5:15 AM, Shivam was standing in the hospital locker room, pulling on a pair of faded blue scrubs. Even in the harsh fluorescent lighting, it was easy to see why people were drawn to him. He was striking-tall, with sharp, symmetrical features and a calm, commanding presence. But it was his eyes that truly defined him; they were wise and intensely perceptive, carrying the quiet gravity of someone who understood the fragile line between life and death.
He tied his mask behind his head, stepped up to the metal sink, and began the ritual.
Scrub. Scrub. Scrub.
Water blasted against his forearms. He scraped under his fingernails with a plastic pick. In the operating room, there was no room for error, no room for microscopic dirt, and absolutely no room for hesitation.
"Morning, Dr. Shivam," the scrub nurse muttered, her voice muffled by her mask as he walked into OR 3. "Patient is a sixty-two-year-old male. Triple bypass."
"Let's begin," Shivam said, his voice dropping into that calm, authoritative register that everyone in the room relied on.
For the next six hours, Shivam's world shrunk down to a five-inch opening in a human chest. The air conditioning hummed aggressively to keep the room at a steady 16°C, but a bead of sweat still formed on his brow. The rhythmic beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor was the metronome of his life. His fingers moved with terrifying precision-sewing arteries thinner than a strand of hair.
Yet, for all his clinical perfection, Shivam's kindness was legendary in the wards. When the surgery was over and the patient was stable, he didn't just disappear to his office. He