The Lost 25 Years and an Incomplete Prayer
Ghostwriter: Amita Sharma
A small endeavour on the occasion of World Mental Health Day, October 10, to spread awareness and dispel the stigma surrounding psychiatric illness.
This story is based on a true clinical case from the experience of Dr. Rashid Gauri. Names and certain personal details have been altered to protect the family’s identity and dignity.
In a forgotten corner of the room stood an old steel trunk, undisturbed for decades.
The thick layer of dust settled upon it bore silent witness to the relentless passage of time—a time that had trapped an entire family within the confines of a suffocating past.
Inside that trunk lay half-finished notebooks from the third year of an engineering degree, an unused drafting board, and weathered textbooks that had once been meant to lay the foundation for a bright and promising future.
Sitting beside the wooden window of that very room was Adil.
At 45, premature lines had etched themselves deeply into his face. His eyes held a hollow, distant gaze, looking past every person in the room towards an unseen presence lingering in thin air.
“Amma, they are here again. They are standing right outside the window. Tell them to leave. Tell them not to talk to me today.”
Adil would plead in a trembling voice, caught somewhere between sheer terror and weary resignation.
From the kitchen, his ageing mother would emerge, balancing a cup of tea in her trembling hand. Her hair had turned completely white, and her back was bent under the searing weight of years spent enduring her son’s illness.
Close behind her walked his father, whose tired eyes had long run dry of the tears he had once shed for a gifted young man’s stolen dreams.
Adil had never been an ordinary mind.
When he secured admission to an engineering college, the entire neighbourhood held him up as an example of brilliance. But around the time of his third-year examinations, the nights began to grow heavy.
Phantom voices started calling out to him—sometimes reprimanding him, sometimes issuing strange and frightening commands.
At first, everyone assumed it was the strain of rigorous examinations.
But soon, the community and society stamped their own verdict upon his condition.
“He is possessed.”
“A shadow of a jinn has fallen upon him.”
And thus began an agonising journey that plunged 25 precious years of Adil’s life into darkness.
The sound of sirens, the heavy burden of amulets, and endless visits to faith healers and exorcists became part of their daily existence.
In a home where bookshelves should have multiplied, they were instead covered with slips of paper bearing prayers meant to ward off evil spirits.
Whenever his father gathered the courage to quietly consult a medical doctor, the prescribed psychiatric medicines remained untouched, locked away in a drawer.
“If I take these pills, the jinn will get angry,” Adil would scream.
And the neighbourhood echoed the same belief:
“This is a spiritual affliction. Pills and syrups cannot drive away a spirit.”
Days turned into months, months into years, and years into decades.
Then came the years when marriage was supposed to happen—and quietly passed away.
Prospective alliances knocked on the door, but Adil’s detached and frightened gaze, coupled with the voices echoing in his mind, turned every proposal away at the threshold.
At 45, Adil remained as helpless and dependent on his elderly parents as a child.
Whenever his father caught sight of his own white beard and Adil’s ageing face in the mirror, a knot of dread tightened in his chest.
What will happen to him when we are gone?
Who will look after him when these voices return?
When every glimmer of hope had almost worn out, an acquaintance offered one final piece of advice:
“Take him to NIMHANS in Bengaluru. Just once.”
Desperate, and with nothing left to lose, the elderly parents took their 45-year-old son to Bengaluru.
There, they met Dr. Rashid Gauri and his dedicated medical team.
Dr. Gauri and his team did not dismiss the family’s faith, nor did they mock their deeply held cultural beliefs.
Instead, they listened to Adil and his parents with patience, empathy and respect.
What followed was a structured course of psychoeducation and counselling, explained in simple, relatable terms.
The medical team explained that the brain is an organ of the human body, just like the heart, lungs or liver. Just as any other organ can become unwell, changes in brain functioning and neurotransmission can also lead to genuine medical conditions that require appropriate treatment.
The voices Adil believed were coming from the wind outside were, in fact, symptoms arising from disturbances in the functioning of his brain—symptoms that could be treated with modern psychiatric care.
With careful reassurance, Adil was started on appropriate psychiatric medication.
Initially, there was hesitation and fear.
But the medical team’s continued counselling gave the family strength and confidence.
Then came what the family perceived as a miracle.
But in truth, it was a quiet victory of medical science.
Within just three weeks, a remarkable shift began to take place.
The intrusive voices that had dominated Adil’s mind for 25 years began to recede into silence.
The terror he had felt outside his window began to dissolve.
Following two or three follow-up consultations, the frightening voices had subsided dramatically.
And then, for the first time in a quarter of a century, Adil looked at his elderly mother and offered her a calm, natural and lucid smile.
For his parents, it was an unforgettable moment.
Yet beneath that immense relief lay a sharp and lingering ache.
When Adil stepped fully back into the ordinary world of reality, he began to realise what had been lost.
His youth.
His education.
The possibility of a career.
Marriage.
Companionship.
Twenty-five years of the most vibrant and productive chapters of his life had been consumed by fear, misinformation and superstition.
A quarter century had simply vanished—years that could never be brought back.
Too often, in the name of faith, we overlook the truth standing right before our eyes.
Faith in the divine can offer inner strength, hope and solace.
But divine grace can also work through human action, compassion, sound judgment and science.
If this entire universe is an expression of the divine, then science, medicine and modern healthcare are also part of that creation.
Ancient traditions have spoken of divine blessings and boons.
Perhaps the life-saving medicines available to us today can be seen as some of those very blessings—and doctors as the human beings entrusted with the knowledge and responsibility to heal.
To hold half-hearted faith is to worship the Creator while rejecting the very remedies and gifts that may have been placed within our reach to ease human suffering.
If we truly honour the divine, we must not see doctors and scientific medicine as the opposite of faith.
We can hold faith in our hearts while still walking towards science.
Had Adil’s family recognised the truth 25 years earlier, his golden years might not have been lost to the shadows.
Today, Adil is doing well.
But his journey leaves society with a question that is much larger than one family:
How many more lives are we willing to lose to stigma before we recognise that mental illness deserves the same compassion, diagnosis and treatment as any other illness?
Healing an illness does not require abandoning one’s faith.
Sometimes, it simply requires having the courage to walk through the door of science.
And perhaps that is where the incomplete prayer finally finds its meaning.
