"I knew it would rain today."
She exclaimed. Goading him for her untimely, unchecked, and baseless weather forecast that somehow has come to life. She watched the rain droplets pouring down the window sill like a scientist watching his invention fly heights of recognition on the world platform. Her grin was getting wider with each droplet crawling down the glass, along her eyes twinkled watching them like a proud mother.
"Do you see those clouds? They look pulchritudinous amidst the rain." She gushed watching the sky, wiping the glass clean of the dew.
She talked as if she had lived a thousand lives, her lips formed tales of a million days she had spent watching around her yet finding something new every second she lingered her eyes at a place. She will see things from such a different perspective that he often questions everything he knows. She would describe things using alien words that he would look up, like pulchritudinous.
It meant beautiful, not that Uttara Rai Chauhan would be satisfied using a millennial word to describe her love for these huge cotton balls floating in the dull blue sea.
If only he was brave enough to speak his thoughts out loud against her lovely clouds. If someday he told her what she didn't wish to hear, he would witness her heartbreak in half and he would never be able to witness her broken pieces that he may never be able to hold up and piece back again.
Not when he was never able to piece back himself. He was inclined towards her to help him do it.
She was the brave one in them. Not him. Yet she was the child carrying the curiosity, grins, wonder, and excitement around. She gives a new meaning to the phrase 'Curiosity killed the cat', being her irrational yet charming self who could hypnotize death with her bright smiles and grins.
The same one through which she won him over, and still pulls him towards her feeling things he had never felt, things he would never feel if not for her.
Like a magnet attracting another, he walked towards her as she stood with her nose pressed against the glass, watching the thunderstorm and lightning, illuminating her in a white light that caused a spark in his heart. Laughing, she pointed out many things, gushing about things he couldn't concentrate on. Not when she stood near him.
She acted like a little girl sometimes, and it was one of his favorite things about her. Each time she saw lightning, her eyes widened and she smiled, she would glance at him and pass her joy to him.
He stepped closer and wrapped his arms around her from behind, she leaned back and held his hands, locking them around her as if confirming his destination, Ending his search on her.
At this moment, he felt as if he was where he always meant to be.
"I love you." She whispered, swooning at his gesture.
He steeled hearing them, calming his insides in seconds, and pressing his nose against her nape to pepper soft kisses on her collarbone and clutching her to him. He could feel her take a sigh, their reflection sparked with the hope that bloomed in her eyes at those words, diminishing at his lack of reply.
His heart turned erratic at her dropped smile and he gritted his teeth as refurbished the smile back in seconds.
He was the reason for her ache.
Or his memories that haunted his present actions.
"I love you so much, my son. Please come with your Mumma!" Avantika held an 8-year-old Vidyut in her hold against his wish. "Do you not love your Mumma? Say you love me."
"You are not my Mumma." He thrashed against her but he could never push her fingers away from his arm, they were curled like a snake, sucking any blood in his veins. "Leave me!"
"I am your mother, Vidyut."
He flinched at the loud declaration mumbling broken words. "No...Mumma...leave...me...No"
"I love you, don't you see it?" Her voice softened witnessing him crying, yet she never loosened her hold on him.
"No...No...Mom." He shook his head vigorously, crying for help but no one could enter the bedroom. It was locked and none will be able to hear his pleas. "Mom...I want...my mom."
"She is not your Mom." She yelled losing her calm, shaking the kid to gain his attention, as if physically shrugging the thoughts out of his brain. "I gave birth to you. I am your mother, not her. Do you understand, Vidyut? You are my son. Mine."
"Mom!" He screamed loudly, crying, and begging to be scooped in those familiar arms of his mother, his own mother. "MOM!"
"Who are you calling for? I am right here. I am your mother." She tried pulling him to her but he kicked and bit on her arm, breaking her hold.
Running towards the door, he banged loudly, screaming for his mother who had sat all night yesterday, holding him as he cried to his sleep.
His mother.
"Mom, open this door. I am here. Take me away. Mom!"
Loud footsteps came running towards him, or was it the door? His brain was frenzy to distinguish sounds around him.
A palm landed on his face, harshly throwing him to the ground as the door was pushed open with a loud bang.
"Vidyut!"
He watched through his blurred vision, familiar palms cupping his face and pulling him towards the warmth, continuous tears rolling down his cheeks that stung because of the recent impact.
"Mom!" His whimper met a quivering voice. Her soft palms took him in her soothing embrace like always.
"I am here, my baby. I am here to protect you." She cooed softly.
"I love him. I love my son. He is mine."
He pressed his face against his mother, wanting to unhear those words.
"Shut up, Avantika. How dare you touch him?" Rashi roared while Harshvardhan kept her at bay from reaching them.
"Stay away from our son," Harshvardhan growled at his sister who looked nowhere sane.
"Mom." He whimpered again, not wanting to see her.
His mother latched him to her, shushing him and repeating the words so that he could all other voices around him. "Shush, my baby. I am here. Your mother is here. No one will take you away. You are my son."
"No!" Avantika screamed against all odds. "He is mine. I am his mother. I love him. I love my son."
"No...no." He shivered in her hold. "No...love...no...love."
"Vidyut." Her soft voice ended his nightmares.
"I will never say those words back." He confessed, letting a lone tear seep in her shirt, and stepping away from her "I cannot say those words back to you, Tara. I will never."
"Vidyut" She watched him with fear settling in her eyes. "I...I don't want to hear them back, I swear I do not."
"You say that now, but there will be a day when you will yearn to hear them back and I will never be able to fulfill that, Tara." He shook his head and took another step back as if distance would stop the pain laced with that word. The same syllables that he heard all those sleepless nights in the past. Those helpless cries and yells for help from a little boy lingered in his head who still stayed trapped with a woman claiming his existence. "I told you, I am not capable of paying them back. Ever"
"I will...never force you." She hesitated, watching his eyes that closed his memories and pushed them away, not wanting her to witness his vulnerability again but he did not miss her quivering lips. "Don't...please don't...Vidyut, please."
"I can't lose you." He confessed holding her eyes, blinking to let his vulnerability flash for seconds to assure something in her. "I don't want to lose you, ever."
Uttara bit her wobbling lips and nodded. She ran towards him, throwing her arms around his torso, and snuggling in his chest. "You won't. You will never. I promise."
She kept repeating the assurance to him until he felt his walls lowering again. She was a part of him, just like he was hers.
The walls had to surround them, not him alone.
leave you." She glanced at him, cupping his face, and tilting his face downwards. "Even if you want me to leave you, I will never step away."
"You will." He ascertained, shaking his head in distrust.
"Vidyut..."
"You will. The moment you know who I am, you will walk away from me." He confided his fears.
"I won't."
"I know you will." He tried parting away.
She yanked him back with force enough to earn a bewildered look from him. "You cannot make judgments on your own, Vidyut Chauhan. Be it heaven or hell, I am going to follow you till the very end. I am going nowhere. Ever. Do you understand?"
"You won't?"
She shook her head with certainty. "Even if you confess to be a blood-sucking vampire or a shape-shifting werewolf in the human form, I will stay right here. I am never freeing you from me, neither I will let you walk away from me. There is no way out of this, Vidyut. We are stuck together, till the end of this universe."
He blinked at her dramatics.
"Say something." She shook his frame lightly. "Try me."
"Do you promise?" The child in him questioned her, waiting for the answers he wished to hear on a repeat.
"Nothing will push me away from you. I aim to stay." She stated in finality. "I promise."
He breathed in her scent, closing his eyes shut to gain strength.
"Tara, I...am..." He stammered.
"Wait." She cut him off and pulled him back inside the room, making him sit on the couch, she settled near him and took hold of his palms, her thumb rubbing soothing circles on his knuckles. "You know you can tell me anything, right?"
He nodded, pushing his head back and scrounging his eyes shut before letting out the words he was harboring all his life. "I am not a Chauhan."
She watched him, hinting at him to say it all.
If he had known her profession, he would have expected some reactions but he was well-versed in her power to keep her reactions in check.
"I am not Rashi and Harshvardhan Chauhan's biological son. I am an imposter who is living as a Chauhan all his life, like a fraud I am living under a duplicate identity."
She licked her lips as if contemplating her next words. "Is that lady from the party...your mother?"
He snorted with a mirthless chuckle. "Yes, I am her mistake. Avantika Chauhan's illegitimate son."
She swallowed inaudibly.
"She got impregnated before marriage. She tried many ways to abort me yet had to keep me in her womb to save herself from any future complications. Mom was expecting Rakshit at the same time, their due dates were close, almost aligned so Dad covered her information under Mom's records. The day Mom was due, she went into early labor because of stress. Mom gave birth to Rakshit at the same time, she pushed me out of her." He let out in disgust, palms fisted as he continued. "She had decided to dump me as soon as she was out of the labor room so none would ever get to know about her secret but Dad took me away before she could even hold me. He sneaked me inside Mom's ward and laid me beside Rakshit. Mom accepted me like her own and fed me before her own child. They announced to the world about having twins and cleared her hospital records. Dad registered my birth as their son and marked Avantika Chauhan's case as an accident. The staff was bribed for keeping their lips shut and soon were dispersed away from Mumbai. He made the world believe that I was their son, a Chauhan. Anirudh Chauhan's sibling and Rakshit's twin."
"How did you get to know the truth?" She asked hesitantly.
He didn't meet her eyes. "I was 8 when I first met her again. She was married off in a year after my birth and was shipped to the US along with her husband. Mom and Dad never let her step back but my grandparents were attached to their daughter. They had already lost their one daughter, Jahnvi Aunty, in a fatal car accident so they didn't wish to push the other one away too. They somehow convinced mom to let her come back and she did. She came back with her husband for dinner and was supposed to leave soon after but she demanded to talk to Mom and Dad." He scoffed in disdain. "Her purpose for coming back was not reconciling with her family but me. She wanted to take me with her because she was unable to conceive again. 7 years of marriage but she couldn't conceive again. Doctors have refused to give them any hope so to have an heir of their own, Mr. and Mrs. Sahay came back to Mumbai to take in her mistake."
She hugged his arm, squeezing his forearm and caressing his fists to loosen the hold. "It was her punishment for thinking of abandoning a child. She deserved it."
"It could be." He shrugged. "Or it could be because she was heartless. She tried manipulating everyone - Paa, GM, Dad, and Mom in order to take me with her."
"But mom never let her," Uttara added. "Mom would never let anyone harm you."
"She did." He smiled at the reference to Rashi, his mother. "She didn't budge. She fiercely warned Mrs. Sahay to not even look in my direction but it was late. I had heard everything they talked about in that study. I couldn't process and take in the news. I collapsed outside the door."
She gasped, horrified.
"Mom heard me fall and rushed out to gather me in her arms. I remember her panic and fear. She had threatened everyone if anything happened to me. She didn't leave my side the entire night and in the pretense of showing her own care, Avantika Sahay stayed back too. The moment I gained consciousness, she cornered me in my room and tried coercing me into accepting her as my mother. I kept crying. I begged her to let me go to my parents but she was heartless. My pleas didn't affect her. Somehow I had broken through her hold and screamed for Mom."
He blinked his eyes shut remembering the slap, the intensity and pain printed in his brain.
"She had slapped me." He worded. "She kept saying how she loved me and I was her son. I remember Dad breaking the door and Mom hugging me for her life. They kicked her out of the house and filed a restraining order against her. She tried using the legal ways but there were no proofs for her to prove that I was her son. She demanded a DNA test but Dad manipulated it too, making her lose the case and leave the country as good riddance."
"But she came back."
"She did." He sighed tiredly. "She came back after 18 years and I fear what she wishes to take now."
â â â â
It was a shame. A prominent shame that crawled up her skin with each passing second. The shame of being a coward, being a weakling that was capable of slashing her wrists in the name of freedom.
Shame of being a nuisance and a liability.
Then, what followed was fear. Fear of facing all those people who had known the Shreya she actually was. A strong-willed girl who made a space for herself in an elite school, the girl who stood up against the bullies in her university, and the girl who climbed the ladder of success with her dare-devil reporting. She had never known fear until that one moment when control was snatched right from her palms and she was thrust into a typhoon of mishappenings.
Shame and fear were not alone, they were closely followed by disgust. Disgust on her lack of decision-making.
Shreya had left the orphanage in the late afternoon feeling hopeful, her morale was rejuvenated sitting alone and in the company of Dhwani. She had hailed a taxi and made him drive towards the old garden in their locality. A place she had enjoyed the warmth and pleasant memories of her childhood with her best friend, the boy Rakshit Chauhan. So much different than the man he had become.
They used to hang around in the area, chasing street dogs, playing with other children, and sitting under the tree for hours.
The few hours of drive through her memory lane had come to a halt when her phone had chimed.
An alien number had shared with her a bunch of images, all taking mere seconds to download because of the high-speed 5G internet, and equally fast her breath was knocked out of her lungs.
Those were the pictures from her years in Delhi. The days when she had decided to rebel against her love and had tried exploring the physical attention. She had dated multiple men in that period and tried different levels of intimacy with them, finding her likes, dislikes, interests, and limits.
Never think that all that could come biting back to her.
Her phone weighed with several pictures of her in different scenarios, some showcasing explicit moments from her date nights and some snippets of her walking down the roads of Delhi, all with that one man she had met before the doom followed her shadow.
Darsh Khanna.
The man who wiped out her hard-earned money and brought her at the mercy of loan sharks. The man was a conman who scammed her, setting her start-up, savings, equity, and stability ablaze in a mere 6 months.
The same man had filmed their private moments, snippets of which lay in her lap with her shivering fingers and cloaked throat.
"A week is all you get, Shreya Thapar before I strip you naked in front of the so-called media you work for. Give me my money, or get ready to hang yourself to death."
He had known.
She had realized at those moments how horrifically she was trapped in this hole with no way to climb back.
That was the second when she had fell weak when her fingers got hold of the sharp glass piece lying at some distance and slashed down her wrists. She had sat against the tree watching her blood ooze out of the cut she had self-inflicted until the loud tyres made her throw the piece somewhere far.
Afraid someone would catch her with it.
She covered her hand, hiding the stupidity, and sat back, feeling the blood dropping each second along with the drop in her body temperature.
But she couldn't hold the effect on her senses, they were turning fuzzy each second that Rakshit tried holding her. She had sprouted just anything to him until she remembered nothing.
After a supposed time-skip, she opened her eyes the next day, in a luxury hotel room that smelled nothing like hospital disinfectant, rather it was soothing, calming the urge to dig a hole and jump in her grave.
She had never seen her brother look this distorted. He kept pushing her for reasons, answers to the questions she could never give him, never to him. She intricately weaved a tale of anxiety playing with her emotions. Something she had repeated for Rakshit who looked far from being convinced, yet he had dropped further questions to respect their truce.
But she knew him, the Rakshit Chauhan she knew would perform his own research to find out her reason. The truth.
The past records from the psychologist in Delhi who she had consulted for a mere 2 sessions after the ruckus created by her previous boyfriend, supported her claim to the psychologist as well, saving her from police investigation.
Today, after a whole of 3 days, she was getting discharged. Something she preferred would have happened quickly seeing how this hospital visit cost her 4 days of the week given to her.
She was yet to arrange almost 1.8 crores to repay her installment.
With this one paid, she will be left with one more and finally earn her freedom from those abusive loan sharks.
She owed them a total of 10 crores that she had repaid after selling her entire belongings. Her car, apartment, jewelry, and liquidating all her investments.
Her start-up and website patent were already sold by Darsh who played her a fool and cashed her shares with his, taking all the money and running away, leaving a huge debt on her head to repay.
He introduced distrust to her, something she felt was hard to harbor. She may not have trusted everyone but she believed there was good in every heart, be it small but it existed.
And how brutally was she proven wrong?
"You are a damn good actor, aren't you?"
She flinched at those words. Breaking her staring contest with the walls and empty spaces, she whipped her head towards him. "What...what do you mean?"
"I do not say what I don't mean," Rakshit spoke with an underlying challenge that echoed louder than those mere words he uttered. "Talking in circles and manipulating words is your job, isn't it right, Miss PR head?"
She watched him take a seat on the couch opposite her bed, elbow resting on the armrest and legs wide.
He hummed questioningly. "Why, you got nothing to speak to me today?"
"W...why are you behaving like t...this?" The stammer made her wince, but nothing made her brain super aware if not his predatory gaze on her.
"I am trying to figure out a few things." He piped, not averting his gaze from her.
"What?" She asked timidly.
"You" He answered and tilted his head to the side before adding "And, your reasons. It has been days to it, don't you think I deserve an explanation?"
"You said...you will not ask me what happened that day."
The reminder of his words from her made him crack a smirk. "I did. But I never said I wouldn't talk about a little something that was dropped on my number that morning."
"What? What is it?"
"Won't you like to see it?" He chimed with a mock and fetched his phone, typing, sliding, and tapping. Her phone chimed from the bedside table. "Check it. You will be revisiting your memories."
Had intuitions ever been correct?
Because this very moment she had one, she felt like she knew what was in her phone. His eyes were red and burning with accusations while his jaw was set, clenching and chewing each word he said coming out measured.
He knew, she concluded.
"Rakshit, I...I can explain." She tried.
He chuckled with a scoff. "Isn't that what I have been wanting to hear?"
She clutched her eyes shut with disgust crawling all over her. This all was because she trusted the wrong people because she was too easy to fool.
"I..." she shook her head as if the right words had left her brain. "He is Darsh..."
"Stop. I don't care about it." He raised his palm and walked to her bed forwarding papers to her. "What I want today, is for you to sign them."
She blinked in confusion. "What is this?"
"Our contract termination papers." He pushed them to her palm, followed by a pen from his upper pocket.
"You are ending...this engagement?" She gaped, swallowing, and looking between the papers that burned her palm and his face that remained stoic with a hint of condescending smirk.
"Arrangement." He corrected her bitingly. "I am freeing you from this arrangement. After today, you will no longer work for Chauhans. As for our fake engagement, we will be announcing separation 7 months from today, I will convince my family why you left. You will leave Mumbai and go wherever you want but you will leave right after you get discharged from here."
She shook her head fervently. "But I..." she cleared her throat. "You cannot end this. We agreed that I would help you clean your image and stay here. Why should I go? I...I have nowhere to go."
"That's why." He stepped back from her. "You have fooled a lot of people with your brilliant acting, your job is done. Now, I want you to leave."
"Rakshit, please...don't."
"I have signed the papers." He announced, his grey eyes were icy prickles poking her skin. "Sign them and I shall give you what I owe you."
"I don't need anything." She snapped, breathing through her nose as several thoughts made it back to her head. "I thought you wanted a...chance. You said you would not let me leave this time...there were so many things you said...so why this?"
"Don't waste your energy, Shreya." He took a once-over on her. "Save all the energy you need. You will require it. Now sign these. I have many things to amend from here."
"Rakshit, please." She was begging, the tears blurred her eyes while she tried holding his gaze which never settled on hers. "I will tell you everything. I promise. Just don't push me away."
"I you are already far from me, Shreya." He concluded averting his gaze towards his watch. "Can you hurry?"
She swallowed the ball of words and emotions that choked her. She straightened the papers she had clutched in her palm, his sign mocking back at her from the lower half of the page. She looked up at him. "Rakhsit, I don't want to do this."
"I want to." He gritted. "The contract stated its end the moment any party decides to break it. In this case, I do."
She ducked her head and let the droplets of tears fall on her lap, palms, and some on the paper. With shaky hands, she uncapped the pen and scribbled what seemed the only anchor for her.
The papers were snatched from her palm and retrieving footsteps could be heard.
"Shreya." He called and she snapped her head to see him tap on his phone again, with a self-admonishing smile. "Before you leave, check your account. I have wired you 6 crore rupees. Clear your debts."
Do I hear heartbreaks?