Voices in the Waiting Room

Five doctors. One hospital. A cacophony orchestrated by forced silence, ruptured memories and the quiet fight to belong.

When Dr Silva receives a bangle, it threatens to unravel the life she has so carefully constructed. Around her, four colleagues carry burdens of their own.

There is Dr Ankit, who fled a broken system in India and is now struggling to find a sense of home in a country that sees him as a stranger; Dr Pooja, poised on the outside but aching beneath the surface; Dr Shashi, brilliant yet adrift in the ubiquity of human connections; and Dr Jindal, a pillar of the diaspora, undone by a grief too vast to articulate.

In the antiseptic corridors of a hospital in the United States, these voices intersect and intertwine, bound together by the universal need to be seen, understood and remembered.

Voices in the Waiting Room is a powerful, multi-perspective debut by Mayank Gupta about identity, displacement and the fragile bonds that tether us to one another. As each voice rises, falters and finally finds its place, Gupta crafts a chorus that is both intimate and resonant.

Mayank Gupta is a writer who observes life from the edges, diving into the messy spaces where our thoughts splinter and our identities get wobbly. His stories explore the often ignored shadows of human experience, capturing those moments that lie just beneath the surface.

As a triple board-certified psychiatrist, Mayank’s fiction is deeply influenced by his years of practice in places such as Mumbai, London and New York, where he’s witnessed the complexities of identityand the human psyche. Rather than providing neat conclusions or redemption, his work invites readers to embrace uncertainty, to feel the dissonance of life and to navigate the intricate landscapes of consciousness. In Mayank’s stories, you won’t find tidy endings—just the raw beauty of what is left when we peel back the layers of our façades.