As Long As I Live

First Session

Praying for the people of Nepal and Chile who have both been caught in Natural Disasters!

May peace be with all of us!

******
To say that she was nervous would have been a huge understatement, he knew. But what she didn't know, and he would do everything within his power to make sure that she wouldn't know, was exactly how nervous he was. For all he knew, it could be a monumental disaster, a catastrophe, but he had to try.

There simply was no other way!

He watched her get ready in a simple peach coloured suit and a matching hijab. No jewellery and no make up. The simple Mayra he knew and loved. She needed no adornment to enhance her beauty for he believed that it was just too perfect to be enhanced! He had been mesmerised by her since the beginning of their marriage, though he had adamantly refused to acknowledge any feelings for her except disgust and hatred, he knew -quite hypocritically - that even then he couldn't stop himself from developing a huge infatuation with her.

And with the months and years that followed, he believed that with her forced retreat into her shell, courtesy of his insane anger issues, he would grow out of such childish feelings and desires. And then life handed him the biggest reality check ever - his paralysis.

He knew that some people could at least speak or express in their states of paralysis, and there were others who slipped into comas along with their paralysis and could not feel a thing. He would have preferred either of those. Neither could he stop himself from seeing, hearing and feeling things, nor was he able to communicate anything despite his senses working absolutely fine. One could not be trapped more torturously than that.

In those hours, days and weeks of complete loss of his own body, Aamir realised that his infatuation with Mayra had turned into fascination and adoration, while his hatred and disgust were slowly being wiped away. When that had converted to love, he didn't know.

Only when a man is knocked down from his high and mighty pedestal into the grips of loneliness and despair, when his own faculties fail him, when utter uselessness makes it very easy to differentiate between those who truly love you and those who appear to do so, that's when a man learns the hardest lesson of life. The lesson of his own self-worth, the price of his pride and questioning the need for an ever-present ego.

That was a lesson Aamir had learnt dearly and it had come at a very high price. Almost at Mayra's life.

"Stop fidgeting!" Farhan admonished his son at the breakfast table who was shaking his legs so hard that the entire table had started to shake and the cutlery was rattling. "You'll make her even more nervous!"

Aamir glanced at the end of the table where Mayra was seated trying bravely to swallow some food past the lump in her throat that just wouldn't go away. Her gaze was fixed at her plate and she knew that everybody else's gazes were fixed upon her yet she refused to meet their stares head on. She wasn't prepared for any confrontations. God Almighty knew how she barely managed to pull herself out of bed for this 'session'.

Her bed.

It had been harder than she had ever imagined. Returning to the room that had been a prison for her for two years had been hell in itself. When she tried to close her eyes, she would have nightmares of Aamir throwing a glassful of water in her face to wake her up for another beating. When she would arise, she would have a moment of panic upon realising that she was in his bed and that he would definitely punish her for that. But by the time she would wake, his side of the bed would be empty and he would be showering, getting ready for office. When she would sit outside in her balcony trying to relax in the silence, her heart would be fearful that he would come back home angry from an bad day at the office and seek his coffee-making, awful-looking, miserable little punching bag.