If you asked Shubman how he reached Mumbai, he would not be able to recount a single moment of his journey. All he remembered was the fearful look in his sister's eyes as she put a jacket on him and handed him his backpack, the cacophony of noises that seemed to come from a place far, far away, and the eventual dread that sat like lead in his stomach.

He felt like a machine on autopilot, watching life happen to other people. He walked in a haze, surrounded by people going about their lives, while his was concurrently locked in his throat and on a hospital bed somewhere, thousands of miles away (that sobered him up quickly for a moment, but he quickly shoved the thought in the back of his mind, intent on taking it out for further inspection when his life didn't hang in the balance).