After The Rain

Chapter Thirty - Lean On Me

Tell me,
if a person falls apart
alone in the dark,
does it make a sound?
And if it does make a sound,
is it as loud and devastating
as a decaying broken heart
when it is finally found?
Or is the sound
a soft strangulation hidden
that we miss all the time
behind words like "I'm fine"?

- Nikita Gill (Your Heart is the Sea).

~

It was hard to believe that everything was so perfect just yesterday. Less than 24 hours, that's all it took for everything to go to hell.

Khushi knew that something was seriously wrong the moment Arnav jumped into her bedroom through the window. After he left, she went out to meet the police officers who informed her that they will be stationed around her house. She tried asking them what the matter was, but all they could say was that they were acting on orders. It then took about fifteen minutes for her family to come home-fifteen minutes that she spent in a long agonising thought process that conjured up all sorts of horrible things. Everything she thought, however, paled in comparison to the truth that Jiji told her.

Turns out her accident was not an accident after all. It was orchestrated by Shyam, and it was not even meant for her.

Khushi had felt sick at this revelation. Sure, she had grown to see Shyam as nothing more than a pile of dung, but to think that he could be capable of something like murder? That was not something that could ever have crossed her mind. It didn't help that Khushi instantly realised why he may have wanted to ki-harm Anjali-ji. Nobody said it, but Khushi knew it had to do with her. Given the current circumstances, it didn't take a genius to figure out that much.

The sick feeling that brewed through her body intensified, and Khushi retired to her room, leaving her family to their panicked musings.

Shyam had done all of this because of her. She was convinced of it. He had spent three years with Anjali-ji without any qualms. If he had chosen this moment to try and get rid of his wife, Khushi could find no other reason than his obsession with her. Perhaps-a voice muttered in Khushi's head, overwhelmed by disgust-he thought that if Anjali-ji wouldn't be here, then she would... Unable to finish the thought, Khushi dropped on her bed, her head in her hands.

It was an eternity later that she emerged from her painful thoughts and that was when she heard Jiji's relieved shout, something to do with Akash-ji and Anjali-ji. She hurriedly returned to the hall. Payal had just cut the call, her face whiter than it had been when she first arrived home that afternoon. A sense of foreboding weighed on Khushi.

"Is Anjali-ji...?" she began to ask but stopped short of voicing out the words.

"What?" Payal blinked, seeming to have forgotten that there were people around her. She shook her head. "No, God no, she's fine. They found her." Amma and Buaji fell back on the couch, looking relieved but Khushi approached her sister.

"What happened?" Khushi asked in a whisper.

Payal's lips thinned. She looked like she was holding back tears. "She is fine," she said. "Akash-ji said they were able to find her before, well before anything went wrong. But she was injured. They took her to the hospital." She lifted her eyes to Khushi and swallowed down her own anxiety at the look on Khushi's face.

"Khushi, she's going to be alright," she tried for a reassuring tone.

"Can we go to the hospital?" Khushi asked, her mind instantly wheeling to Arnav. She remembered him from this afternoon. His panicked face, his obvious distress... She didn't want to think about how he must be feeling.