THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: ‘May the lord give strength to the grieving parents’. The final prayers were being chanted in the drawing room of ‘Irfante veedu’, where lay the frail, lifeless body of a 12-year-old boy, wrapped in a white cloth. For a moment, Shahjahan, his father who had till then composed himself fell silent. He didn’t repeat the prayer. He just broke down and so did his wife Shajini . He just let everything out, may be for the first time in seven years.When Irfan slipped into coma with slim chances of recovery in 2011, at some point these parents had prepared themselves to realize that they should care for their lone son, whether he came back or not. “That was the only thing we could have done. We never cried because we were scared we would fall ill and nobody would take care of him,” Shahjahan said.They had stopped going out since 2011. The last film they watched in a theatre was in 2010 with Irfan when they would set out in Shahjahan’s motorcycle and the father reluctantly giving in to his son’s wish that he sat at the front close to the fuel tank of the vehicle.Shajini would try everything to bring her son back. They would constantly play an electric harmonium, one of Irfan’s favourite toys, repeating a tune he would once ask her to play again and again. There was an old radio cum CD player which played out the rhymes he had learnt from the play school. Shajini would fix her eyes on his face half covered with a surgical mask to spot a faint glint of recognition. When the visitors brought toys, they would open it for him and would ride the musical train or switch on the dancing monkey.Every evening they would put him in a wheel chair and bring him to the drawing room. When a Vijay movie was being played, he would be silent or else he would show signs of discomfort and his mother would know her son didn’t want that.They stopped celebrating his birthdays after 2013, but, whenever there was a religious occasion or a family function, they would buy him a pair of new dress. They took him to hospital for reviews preening himself up in the best colourful dress. When Shajini was carrying and went for check-up, Shahjahan sat by the side of Irfan. “There was not a moment all these years when he would be without his father or mother,” said Shahjahan.When they had a baby daughter two months ago, they named her Inayya; meaning love and compassion. The mother and the kids would sleep in the same room; Shajini ever ready to respond to a sound; be it from her son who had fallen silent for a long time or from her baby who would wake up in the middle of the night. Sometimes they placed the baby close to Irfan, when the baby cried, they saw his eyes pan towards her. It made the parents happy; the brother turning towards his little sister.Padma, who had been one of his acupressure trainers for the past six years, says Shajini is a ‘half doctor’. “When he coughed, she would adeptly suck the phlegm with a machine. She fed him like a professional, injecting the mashed liquid through the tube. The dressing around the tube in his abdomen had to be constantly changed and Shajini never needed help for that,” said Padma.

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