Sherlie D'Costa's second suicide attempt

Sherlie D'Costa's second suicide attempt is a decisive turning point in the novel's treatment of obsession, grief, and responsibility. The attempt brings her suicidal crisis into the open, forces Shivam Goyal to confront how long he and others have minimized her fixation, and prompts his determination to seek a future with Aparna Mahadevan as a means of making clear that he is no longer available to Sherlie.

Crisis and Immediate Circumstances

The event is disclosed through a telephone call that interrupts Shivam's birthday celebration with Satyam Goyal. Alex D Costa calls and pleads with Shivam to save his daughter, transforming a scene of celebration into an emergency. Shivam has to return from Delhi to Mumbai after Alex reports that Sherlie has again tried to slit her wrists during another episode of hysteria. The wording of the situation establishes recurrence: this is not an isolated gesture but a second attempt in a pattern that has already become life-threatening.

At the hospital, Shivam sees Sherlie lying sedated on a bed. The physical stillness of the scene contrasts with the violence implied by the injury and with the emotional turmoil surrounding it. When he senses movement, he rushes to her side and asks whether she can hear him. Sherlie, still asleep, calls out that she baked something for him, a confused return to an intimate image of devotion rather than an acknowledgment of the danger she has created. Shivam recoils and collapses onto the sofa beside her bed, exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed.

Belated Recognition of the Obsession

The attempt makes Shivam reinterpret an earlier memory. He recalls the birthday when he was fourteen, the year his grandfather died, and the Goyal family custom of not holding celebrations for a year after a death in the family. Because Shivam could not celebrate at home, Alex arranged a cake at his own house, where Sherlie was present. Shivam now understands that her intense attachment was already visible then, when she was thirteen, but that the family dismissed it as a teenage rant. The second attempt therefore exposes not only Sherlie's crisis but also the adults' failure to recognize its seriousness before it developed into a repeated threat to her life.

This retrospective recognition is central to the event's force. Shivam asks where they went wrong and how they allowed Sherlie's obsession to grow to such a degree. His response is not presented as simple blame directed at Sherlie; instead, the crisis reveals a network of delayed recognition, inadequate boundaries, and emotional misreading. The hospital scene becomes a belated act of witnessing, in which the danger that had previously been treated as youthful excess can no longer be ignored.

Shivam's Decision and the Boundary of Love

After the nurse checks on Sherlie, Shivam decides that he cannot allow the unhealthy obsession to continue. He concludes that he must put a stop to it before it worsens and turns toward Aparna. His plan is to ask whether she is willing to become engaged immediately. If she agrees, he imagines that he, Aparna, and the others can tell Sherlie together that he is not hers to obsess over, that he has found love again, and that he intends to move on.

The decision is both practical and emotionally complicated. Shivam wants to establish a clear boundary with Sherlie, but he also recognizes that the legitimacy of his plan depends on Aparna's feelings. He cannot simply use her as an instrument in managing Sherlie's crisis; he must first know whether Aparna is willing to share that future. The attempt thus redirects his emotional movement from avoidance toward explicit commitment, while preserving the uncertainty of whether Aparna will consent.

That uncertainty is immediately sharpened when Shivam goes to the office and looks for Aparna. He sees her speaking on the phone near the balcony and approaches secretly, only to notice Shija Meity beside her with an expression of concern. Before he can surprise Aparna, he stops behind tinted glass, unable to see what has caused her distress. The scene places two forms of crisis beside each other: Sherlie's visible medical emergency and Aparna's unexplained emotional trouble. Shivam's desire for a clean solution collides with the fact that Aparna's inner state remains unknown to him.

Wider Pattern of Loss and Misjudgment

Sherlie's attempt occurs within a family and social world already marked by unresolved trauma. Shivam continues to grieve Mohini Bhattacharya, whose death in a freak accident two years earlier has left him vulnerable to involuntary memories. Mohini's laughter, evening walks, and distinctive jhumkas return to him when he notices similar earrings on Aparna, and the recollection produces tears and renewed turmoil. Shivam's grief has therefore already shown the pattern of the past intruding upon the present; Sherlie's crisis reveals a parallel form of fixation in which an earlier attachment refuses to release its object.

The event also echoes the Goyal family's other wound. Menka Goyal, Girish Goyal's wife, remains comatose after a short circuit in one of the family's new projects at Gurgaon. When Alex later mentions Menka in a business meeting and points toward the idea of couples bound by family business, the remark produces an abrupt silence because Menka's condition and Mohini's death have damaged the relationship between Girish and Shivam. Across these cases, personal suffering repeatedly enters family, business, and romantic decisions, making it difficult for the characters to separate care from obligation or memory from present action.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The immediate consequence is Shivam's resolve to seek Aparna and ask for engagement, but the attempt does not produce a simple resolution. Instead, it intensifies the novel's pattern of miscommunication. Shivam approaches Aparna with a plan formed while she is absent and while he is still reacting to Sherlie's emergency; he does not yet know what Aparna is experiencing, and his intended explanation may become entangled with her own fears and assumptions.

The crisis also establishes the limits of private rescue. Alex summons Shivam as though Shivam alone can save Sherlie, while Shivam imagines that a public declaration of his love for Aparna can end her obsession. Yet the narrative shows that neither family celebration, indulgent reassurance, nor romantic availability has resolved Sherlie's distress. Her second attempt forces the characters to recognize that devotion cannot substitute for boundaries and that treating suicidal behavior as emotional excess allows danger to deepen.

As a structural turning point, the event converts an unstable relationship into an urgent moral problem. Shivam's earlier grief over Mohini is inward and involuntary; Sherlie's fixation is directed outward and repeatedly places her life in peril. By linking these conditions through memory, bodily crisis, and delayed recognition, the novel makes the hospital encounter the moment when Shivam finally decides that compassion must include refusal. His proposed engagement with Aparna is consequently not merely a romantic advance. It is his attempt to acknowledge that love has changed, to protect Aparna from continued ambiguity, and to stop allowing Sherlie's crisis to define all three of their lives.