NEET paper leak suicide: ‘His guitar still waits,’ says dad as family learns to heal

The books are gone. The biology notes, mock test papers and dog-eared textbooks that had once taken over Kahaan Patel’s room now sit inside a cupboard, packed away one-and-a-half months after his death. But the guitar remains where he left it. His father, Advocate Prashant Patel, has discovered that grief follows no logic. Some things it asks you to put away. Others, it refuses to let you touch. Like the guitar.“I was going to buy him a car when he turned 18”, the 45-year-old says of his son, who took his own life at 17, unable to cope with the pressure of a re-test following a paper leak and cancellation of the NEET exam. “I had even planned a guitar stand in the trunk so he could carry it everywhere,” says Prashant. After the NEET results, he had promised himself, there would also be a c