Suvir Saran: Between Trust and Fear

LAST WEEK, I walked into a hospital still sticky with dried blood along my hairline and collar, the fabric of my shirt stiff where it had soaked through and begun to crust. A few hours earlier, I had been in Delhi with someone I had known and trusted for nearly two years. We had first met in Mumbai. Trust had built gradually, the way it usually does— not through dramatic declarations, but through repeated encounters, easy conversations and the quiet habit of believing another person means you no harm. Then, in minutes, it broke.

At the hospital, everything moved in a clinical rhythm—the buzz of fluorescent lights, the rustle of paper sheets, the snap of gloves. A doctor leaned over me and asked for permission to shave my head.

“Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

“Then why ask?”

We smiled anyway. What else was there to do?

By the time they were finished, my scalp carried nearly two dozen staples and stitches. There were others scattered across my body. I caught my reflection in a metal cabinet and barely recognised the person looking back. Even now, my hand rises absent-mindedly toward hair that is no longer there. I found myself mourning it—not because it was hair, but because it was familiar. Violence does not merely injure the body. It interrupts identity. It rearranges the map by which you locate yourself.

When I returned home from the hospital, the room felt wrong the moment I entered it. Blood on the sheets. Blood on the pillows. Blood on the floor. Blood on the blinds. Blood on the windowpanes. Blood on the bookshelves. Blood on clothes, corners, creases and cotton. The room felt less like a bedroom and more like a landscape abandoned by certainty itself. And yet that was not the moment that frightened me most.

The moment arrived when I realised my phone was gone. First disbelief. Then panic. Then something deeper. I knew every password to my life lived inside that small rectangle of glass and metal—banking, contacts, conversations, photographs, notes, reminders, the invisible architecture of modern existence.

I could survive injury. I could survive stitches. I could survive fear. What I did not know how to survive was losing access to my life. Years ago, I stopped keeping a diary. My phone became memory. A dear friend once remarked that I seemed exactly the sort of person who would keep one. She was right. Until I wasn’t.

We mistake convenience for permanence. We assume connection is continuous. We assume what holds us today will hold us tomorrow. Until one day it doesn’t.

There will always be people searching for simple explanations when something terrible happens. We find comfort in causes because they create the illusion of control. If every misfortune can be explained, perhaps every misfortune can be prevented. Life is rarely so tidy. Not everything painful happens because we were careless. At the same time, surviving something difficult asks something of us. Not retreat. Not isolation. Not fear masquerading as wisdom. Awareness. Preparation. Humility. The willingness to recognise that trust is essential and that trust requires safeguards. Without trust there are no friendships, no families, no communities, no love. Without caution there is unnecessary risk. The challenge is learning to live between those truths.

I will begin again the old-fashioned way— through memory, through people, through persistence. The staples will come out. The hair will grow back. The passwords will be reset.

But the lesson I hope to keep is this: Safety is not the absence of risk. It is the courage to remain open-eyed without becoming closed-hearted. We are all more vulnerable than we imagine. We are all more resilient than we know. And life, stubborn and magnificent, asks us to remember both.