Menka Goyal's accident and coma

Menka Goyal’s accident and coma is the defining domestic catastrophe behind the Goyal family’s prolonged mourning and estrangement. A short circuit at one of the family’s new projects in Gurgaon leaves Menka unconscious, transforming an ordinary business venture into an enduring medical and emotional crisis. Her continuing absence becomes a presence in the family’s life: it shapes Shivam Goyal’s grief, Girish Goyal’s guardedness, and the pressure placed on every later attempt to restore family intimacy.

Causes and Immediate Consequences

The accident is described as a freak, unexpected incident during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shivam explains that a short circuit at one of the Goyal Group’s projects in Gurgaon left his mother in a coma. The event is therefore connected to the family’s business world, but its consequences are entirely personal: Menka Goyal is no longer able to participate in family life, while Girish Goyal and Shivam must live with uncertainty rather than a completed bereavement.

The damage becomes even more devastating because Mohini Bhattacharya dies in another accident within the same six-month period. Shivam later tells Aparna Mahadevan that losing his mother to coma and losing Mohini together overwhelmed both him and Girish. The two losses do not resolve into separate episodes of mourning; they accumulate into a single wound, making Menka’s suspended condition inseparable from Shivam’s first love and death.

The Family Under Strain

In the aftermath, work becomes the principal refuge for both Shivam and Girish. Instead of consoling one another or speaking openly about their pain, they plunge into business, compete over tasks, and turn ordinary disagreements into repeated arguments. Shivam describes their conflict as a pattern of opposing and cutting down each other’s ideas without recognizing that both men are drowning in grief. Menka’s coma thus changes the father-son relationship even though she never speaks in the recalled scenes: her condition removes a central emotional bond and leaves the two survivors unable to approach one another directly.

The estrangement is visible during a Goyal Group meeting when Alex D Costa makes a pointed remark about couples whose shared business strengthens their marriages. He then apologizes after recalling that Menka, Girish’s wife, has been comatose because of the short-circuit accident. The room falls silent; Girish avoids eye contact, clenches his jaw, and forces the meeting back toward investment matters. His attempt to continue reviewing the Maheshwari Hospitality Group’s interests shows how business functions as both responsibility and emotional concealment.

Medical Hope and Continuing Care

Menka’s condition remains unresolved rather than improving. When Rati Goyal asks Shivam about her, he answers that there has been no improvement and that the family is placing its hopes in Dr. Henry Oliver’s planned visit to Delhi. The reference to an internationally acclaimed neurologist gives the family a concrete future to wait for, but it also emphasizes the uncertainty governing their present. Treatment is imagined through appointments, travel, and professional expertise, while the family remains suspended between hope and exhaustion.

Shivam’s decision to travel to Delhi is partly connected to the effort to obtain medical attention for his mother and partly to another family obligation involving Satyam Goyal and bureaucratic work. His responsibilities repeatedly pull him between professional demands and family crisis. Even after returning from Delhi, he is called urgently to the hospital because Sherlie D Costa has attempted suicide again. Menka’s coma therefore belongs to a wider landscape of bodily and psychological emergencies in which Shivam is repeatedly made responsible for protecting others while his own grief remains largely unspoken.

Reconciliation and Narrative Significance

The possibility of healing begins indirectly through work. Aparna Mahadevan’s team presents an ambitious proposal, and the success of the Kyrah maternity-wear campaign reminds Shivam and Girish of an older, more collaborative version of themselves. Shivam tells Aparna that her team’s passion brought out the person he used to be and that Girish noticed the change. Their shared investment in a later workshop becomes important not merely as a commercial project but as a means of protecting the fragile sanity that the family has begun to recover.

Menka’s accident consequently operates as more than background tragedy. It is the origin of the Goyal men’s emotional avoidance, the pressure behind their reliance on work, and the silent measure against which later family progress is judged. The coma leaves Menka physically absent but structurally central: every attempt at renewed trust, every plan involving risk, and every hope for medical intervention takes place under the shadow of the event. The story presents the accident as an external disaster whose deepest damage appears in delayed forms—in silence, rivalry, overwork, and the inability of a father and son to comfort each other until another relationship helps them begin to speak again.