Amit's family believes he understands them. "The doctors don't agree but he blinks his eyes after we complete a sentence. He loosens his knees when we urge him -- didn't you just see him do that?" asks his mother.
Three months ago, Amit started blinking his eyes. Sometimes, tears roll down his cheeks. He raises his arms till his shoulders occasionally, his mother says.
On the day his volleyball mates came to meet him, when the kids from his building came to his bed, there had been a sparkle in his eyes. Dheeraj Singh is sure about that. Sitting in the conference room of the software company he works in, he says he remembers the look in his brother's eye that day.
That was a good day -- a bright spot in a cruel year.
"The doctors neither say yes or no -- what should we do, we don't know," says Amit's father.
A senior section officer with the railways, Dinesh Singh is a broken man. As he tends to his son, wiping the drool from his mouth, cleaning his eyes, caressing his head and kissing his cheeks and forehead, he cannot stop the tears that overwhelm him repeatedly.
He dabs some ayurvedic oil onto a cotton swab, takes it to Amit's nose and to the mouth of tube through which he gets his 2.2 litres of food every day. Somebody had vouched for the oil's healing qualities -- "we try anything that people recommend which is possible."
Image: Tears overwhelm Dinesh Singh repeatedly. 'What should we do, we don't know,' he says. Photograph: Reuben N V
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