‘The fire that cooks your food and the fire that burns your house down are the same fire. The only difference is whether somebody's watching it.’

Three years sober, Vikram walks into the borrowed clinic in Vijay Nagar wanting to turn the worst thing that ever happened to him into the thing that finally helps someone else. For a while, it works. His own history lets him reach a drowning young man named Rustom in a way no textbook could teach. It lets him stay steady at the doorway when a young woman named Naina's whole nervous system convinces her she's back on the bus that nearly killed her. It even, unexpectedly, teaches him something about sitting beside a woman named Meher's unshakeable faith in her own visions without needing to win an argument about God in order to help her.

And then, at two in the morning, the same instinct that made him good at this work walks him alone into somebody else's crisis with no one watching — and very nearly costs him everything he had rebuilt.

The Fourth Chair is a novel about what lived experience can actually do for the people we try to help, and what it can cost the people who carry it — about the razor's edge between a helper who has been there and a helper who needs to be needed, about faith, doubt, and the shrugging middle ground between them, and about the unglamorous, unfinished, absolutely necessary work of building enough structure around a good instinct to keep it from turning on everyone it was meant to save.
A sequel and companion to It Takes Three to Counsel: Stories of Barefoot Counsellors, grounded in real research on peer support, trauma, and the psychology of belief.