Beyond the Vows: One Man’s 24/7 Mission to Defy Mortality and Redefine Love 

Beyond the Vows: One Man’s 24/7 Mission to Defy Mortality and Redefine Love 

When Kabir Mohan traded his career for caregiving, he didn’t just keep his wife alive—he gave their entire family a reason to keep living 

The photograph from the Andaman Islands captures something extraordinary, though you’d never know it by looking. There’s Kabir Mohan, one arm steadying his wife Chhanda as she rises from her wheelchair, the other wrapped around their daughter. Their son angles his phone just right, trying to frame four people and one impossible story into a single image. 

What the camera doesn’t show is the medical timeline ticking quietly in the background. Chhanda had exactly three days between dialysis sessions. The family had exactly one window for happiness. 

“Everything in our lives is measured now,” Kabir says quietly, sitting in their Delhi home weeks later. “But that doesn’t mean we stop living. It means I find a reason for them not to give up.” 

This is not a love story in the conventional sense. There are no candlelit dinners here, no spontaneous getaways, none of the trappings that February 14th has come to represent. Instead, this is a story about what happens after the wedding cake has been eaten and the guests have gone home—when the vow “in sickness and in health” transforms from beautiful poetry into a grueling, beautiful, daily reality. 

The Unfolding 

Chhanda’s health didn’t collapse all at once. It unraveled slowly, thread by thread, over nearly two decades. 

The first thread pulled loose in 2002. She was seven months pregnant with their daughter when her father died during bypass surgery. The grief arrived like a tidal wave and never fully receded. Postpartum depression settled into something darker, more persistent—a trauma she couldn’t process, couldn’t name, couldn’t escape. 

Then came their daughter’s diagnosis. Autism spectrum disorder. The word landed in their lives like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples outward that would touch everything. 

“That’s when her blood pressure became impossible to control,” Kabir remembers. “The doctors would adjust medications, and for a while it would seem better, but something underneath was always wrong.” 

They moved from Kolkata to Delhi, chasing better therapies for their daughter at the Action for Autism centre. Kabir ran a successful travel agency—he’d grown up in Africa, built a business from scratch, understood how to navigate unfamiliar terrain. But this new landscape—of medical reports and therapy sessions and medications with impossible names—was different. 

Their son was born, and for a brief moment, things felt manageable again. But Chhanda’s hypertension worsened despite multiple medications. The blood pressure that had raged uncontrolled for years had been quietly destroying something irreplaceable. 

By 2015, her kidneys had sustained irreversible damage. 

What the Blood Tests Don’t Say 

Dr. Yasir Rizvi, Director of Nephrology at Dharamshila Narayana Hospital in Delhi, has treated Chhanda for years. He explains what was happening inside her body while the family tried to hold itself together outside. 

“The kidneys filter waste through tiny blood vessels—think of them as microscopic sieves. When blood pressure stays dangerously high for extended periods, those vessels thicken and narrow. They become stiff, less flexible. The kidney can’t filter toxins effectively anymore. The damage is cumulative, and it’s permanent.” 

By the time Chhanda started dialysis in 2015, her body had already endured years of this invisible destruction. But dialysis itself carries risks—particularly for someone whose cardiovascular system is already compromised. 

“Dialysis removes excess fluid from the body,” Dr. Rizvi explains. “But if too much fluid is removed too quickly, blood pressure can drop suddenly. That reduces blood flow to the heart. In someone with underlying vulnerability, that can trigger a heart attack. Additionally, dialysis shifts electrolyte balances—sodium, potassium, calcium. Those shifts can cause irregular heartbeats, even sudden cardiac arrest.” 

During one session, the unthinkable happened. Chhanda’s heart stopped. 

She survived. But the message was clear: her body was walking an increasingly narrow tightrope, and the safety net had holes. 

The Calculation 

Somewhere in those hospital corridors, while machines beeped and doctors spoke in careful, measured tones, Kabir made a decision. It wasn’t dramatic—no single moment of revelation, no cinematic epiphany. Just a quiet recognition that the life they’d built was no longer sustainable. 

He closed his travel agency. Every rupee of savings was pulled out, examined, and redistributed with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. Mutual funds. Insurance policies. Emergency provisions. Inflation calculations. Medical projections. 

“I did the math,” Kabir says simply. “I arrived at a figure and invested accordingly. There was a lot of careful planning, a lot of risk management.” 

What he doesn’t say—what he might never say—is that this kind of calculation requires something most of us never have to confront: the cold arithmetic of a loved one’s remaining time. How many years? How many sessions? How many hospital visits? How much will it cost to keep her alive, and how do I make that money last as long as she does? 

He became, in essence, the CFO of a family fighting for survival. But his role expanded far beyond finances. 

The Rhythm of Keeping Someone Alive 

Kabir’s days now follow a rhythm that would exhaust most people within a week. 

Chhanda requires dialysis three times weekly—12 sessions each month. Kabir has not missed a single session in over a decade. Not one. He holds her hand through each one, watching the monitors, tracking the numbers, serving as her anchor through the strange, disorienting experience of having your blood cycled through a machine. 

He has memorized every parameter, every lab value, every trend line in her medical history. When doctors discuss treatment adjustments, he understands exactly what they’re saying—not because he has medical training, but because he has made himself a student of her body. 

At home, the vigilance continues. He monitors her fluid intake obsessively—too little and she risks dehydration, too much and fluid can accumulate around her heart. Protein must be carefully calibrated. Salt is nearly eliminated. He watches for swelling in her feet, a sign that fluid is building up where it shouldn’t. 

“I always feed her myself,” he says. “Portion control isn’t just a concept—it’s survival. One mistake, one miscalculation, and she could be in the hospital for weeks.” 

He bathes her. He cleans her. He manages the kitchen inventory and cooks when their helper is unavailable. Between these tasks, he carves out moments for their daughter, who needs attention as reliably as Chhanda needs dialysis. 

“I’ve read everything I can about autism,” Kabir says. “I know that when she feels ignored, she becomes anxious. Upset. That anxiety has nowhere to go. So I make sure she knows she’s seen.” 

Their daughter sings beautifully, he tells me. It’s one of the few things that still calms her completely. 

The Son Who Grew Up Quietly 

Ask Kabir about regrets, and he hesitates. Not about Chhanda—that path was chosen, and he would choose it again. But their son, now studying to become a psychologist, grew up differently. 

“He got the short shrift,” Kabir admits. “I can’t pretend otherwise. His sister needed therapies. His mother needed constant care. I did what I could—I helped with school, with exams, with the moments that mattered most. But he learned early to take care of himself.” 

What Kabir doesn’t say is that his son also learned something else: how to love unconditionally, how to sacrifice without resentment, how to find purpose in caring for others. Those lessons don’t appear on any transcript. They can’t be graded or quantified. But they shape a person in ways that outlast any degree. 

Perhaps that’s why the young man chose psychology—to understand the minds that shaped his childhood, to make sense of a family held together by threads of devotion and desperation. 

The Miniature Vacations 

Four days in the Andamans. A carefully chosen window between dialysis sessions. A destination with medical facilities nearby. Wheelchair accessibility. Quiet enough for their daughter’s sensory needs. 

This is what vacations look like now. 

“I measure everything,” Kabir says. “Every trip, every outing, every moment of joy has to be calculated against medical reality. But that doesn’t make the joy less real. It makes it more precious.” 

They’ve learned to find happiness in small doses—afternoon outings near Delhi, brief escapes that don’t strain Chhanda’s endurance or their daughter’s tolerance for stimulation. Each one is a small victory against the gravity of their circumstances. 

“People think caregiving means giving up on life,” Kabir reflects. “It doesn’t. It means redefining what life looks like. It means finding the beautiful in the possible.” 

What Medicine Can’t Measure 

Dr. Rizvi has watched countless families navigate kidney disease over his career. He’s seen marriages fracture under the strain, seen children grow distant, seen patients deteriorate despite perfect medical adherence. But he’s also seen something different in the Mohan family. 

“This story proves that proper caregiving can do what therapies alone cannot,” he says quietly. “Patients with chronic kidney disease on dialysis typically survive five to ten years on average. Some live longer—twenty, even thirty years—with optimal care, strict treatment adherence, and healthy lifestyle modifications. But Chhanda has additional complications: a heart attack history, mobility limitations. By any statistical measure, she should be declining faster than she is.” 

Instead, she remains stable. Not cured—stability is the best they can hope for—but stable enough to travel, to celebrate anniversaries, to appear in photographs that look almost ordinary. 

“Kabir has absorbed every anxiety his wife and daughter carry,” Dr. Rizvi continues. “That calmness—that absolute, unwavering presence—has held them together in ways medicine cannot measure. You can’t prescribe that. You can’t bill for it. But it matters more than any medication in their regimen.” 

The Unwinding 

How does one man sustain this, day after day, year after year? 

“I listen to music,” Kabir says. “I watch funny YouTube videos at the end of the day. I don’t try to predict what’s coming tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day—a beautiful one.” 

The answer seems almost too simple. But perhaps simplicity is the point. When your life is consumed by complexity—medical schedules, insurance paperwork, therapy appointments, dietary restrictions, the endless calculations of keeping someone alive—you learn to find release in small, uncomplicated pleasures. A song. A silly video. A photograph that captures one perfect moment before the next dialysis session. 

“I have to keep her alive,” Kabir says. “Only then will we all feel alive.” 

He doesn’t say it bitterly, or heroically, or with any expectation of recognition. He says it like a statement of fact, like gravity or sunrise—something that simply is. 

The Broader Picture 

Chronic kidney disease affects an estimated 10% of the global population. In India, where healthcare infrastructure struggles to keep pace with demand, the burden falls disproportionately on families. Dialysis centers are concentrated in urban areas. Transportation is expensive. Lost wages compound medical costs. The emotional toll is never quantified. 

Kabir’s story is remarkable not because he faces these challenges, but because he has navigated them with such unwavering dedication. He represents what’s possible when one person commits completely—but also highlights what’s missing when families face these battles alone. 

“We need better support systems for caregivers,” Dr. Rizvi notes. “Psychological support, respite care, financial counseling. The patient isn’t the only one suffering. The family suffers too. And when the caregiver collapses, everyone collapses.” 

Kabir has not collapsed. Not yet. But the weight he carries would break most people, and he carries it without complaint, without recognition, without any of the support systems that might lighten the load. 

What Love Actually Looks Like 

On February 14th, the world celebrates love with roses and chocolates and carefully curated social media posts. Kabir will likely spend the day much like any other—monitoring fluids, preparing meals, holding Chhanda’s hand through another dialysis session. Their 25th wedding anniversary passed recently, marked quietly, the way everything in their lives is marked now. 

But perhaps this is what love actually looks like. Not the fantasy, but the reality. Not the wedding vow recited before witnesses, but the vow lived out when no one is watching. Not the grand gesture, but the ten thousand small gestures that accumulate into a life. 

“I love Chhanda,” Kabir says simply. “And I love the family we created. That’s not complicated. That’s just true.” 

The photograph from the Andamans sits on a shelf in their home. Four people, one wheelchair, one impossible story. Anyone looking at it would see a family on vacation, smiling for the camera. They wouldn’t see the dialysis schedule, the autism triggers, the careful calculations that made those four days possible. 

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe love’s greatest victory is not in overcoming tragedy, but in making tragedy invisible—in creating moments so ordinary, so full of simple happiness, that no one looking from the outside would ever guess what it took to get there. 

Kabir holds his wife’s hand. Their daughter leans against his shoulder. Their son frames the shot. And for one frozen moment, they are not patients, not caregivers, not survivors of anything. They are just a family, on vacation, happy. 

That is what he has given them. That is what love, in its truest form, can do.