After The Rain

Chapter Thirty-Three - The End And The Beginning

There is power in ending.
It takes you to the beginnings
of what is meant for you.

- Heba Nazar.

~

Aside from love, Arnav always thought that misery was the most dangerous of emotions.

A strange paralysis always accompanied that feeling of being miserable - the statis where he simultaneously cannot feel anything and can feel too much. That was how he felt at his parents' funeral, and when he saw Khushi lying motionless on that stretcher. And that was how he felt when he entered that room to find his sister's broken body on the floor, bruised, cut and bleeding.

Arnav scrutinised the staircase, remembering the day he had stormed this very building and had rushed upstairs to find Anjali, his heart pumping wildly in his chest as dread and despair held him in a vice grip. When he saw Anjali, however, misery had its appearance. It had leeched off the adrenaline from his body and for the entirety of the trip to the hospital, he had slipped into the wretched state called helplessness, paralysed as he wallowed in self-pity - about how, despite his best attempts, he had failed as a brother, about how much his sister's state reminded him of the shattered look he saw in his mother's eyes seconds before she took her own life. He had wondered then how long it would take Anjali to follow in her footsteps and had felt as if he could do nothing to prevent that. Misery froze him in place, convincing him that his past was to repeat itself after all, no matter what he did. He might as well just sit back and watch it all unfold.

Misery was sinister like that. It convinces you to focus on the problem, never the potential solution.

He had years of training to thank for his eventual recovery. As a man who preferred to have as much of an iron-grip on his life as possible, he was not one who wallowed for too long. No matter how bad things were, he always found a way out of the mess.

In this case, the way out was obvious, and he acted instantly. He had Shyam arrested. But that did little to soothe him. Shyam would be out of his life, out of his sister's life, out of his fiancée's life, but his absence was no longer the thing that satisfied Arnav.

He took his eyes off the staircase and glanced at his watch. As if on cue, he heard the sound of tires screeching to a halt. A minute later, they arrived.

Shyam looked better than the last time Arnav saw him, which was when he had been knocked unconscious by the sedative that he had planned on using on Anjali. His left eye was bandaged, still recovering from his surgery from three weeks ago. Arnav tried to find some satisfaction over the fact that Shyam's vision in that eye will never be the same, and that that injury was inflicted on him by his sister, but he only felt a glimmer of pleasure. Even that injury was mild compared to what Shyam had done to his family. It wasn't enough. Nothing would ever be enough.

He watched as Shyam, handcuffed and visibly confused, walked into the building, flanked by four police officers, two on each side of him. When his eyes fell on Arnav, however, he gave an almost imperceptible start. Then, he started to laugh. He had stopped moving, so the officers dragged him to the chair opposite Arnav and adjusted his handcuffs so that he was now tied to the chair. His shoulders were still shaking in mirth.

He regarded Arnav with a twisted grin on his grotesque face.

"Well, isn't this a nice surprise! Thought of paying a visit to your dear brother-in-law before he is cantered off to jail, have you Saale-Sahab?"

Arnav gave Shyam a small shrug of his shoulders. "I thought we had a lot to catch up on."

"Oh, that we do, for sure, for sure," Shyam agreed amiably. "I wanted to ask, for example, what did you think about this place? Wasn't it perfect for my final strike?"