"I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that."
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
The world sees him as a cold, calculated, ruthless, heartless, arrogant man. He is loathed and respected, feared and awed because of the stature he has acquired owing to his success, in the short amount of time of barely six years.
However, he was not always this man.
Once he was an obedient son, a sweet older brother, a loving husband and a doting father. He was a true blue Punjabi who wore his heart on the sleeve and never shied away from baring his emotions. The people he loved knew him as the warmest, kindest, most caring and sweet person who though shy would always be there for them in their hour of need.
He loved with all his heart and gave every relationship his 100 percent.
Life was perfect and beautiful for him, until it was not.
He believed he lived in a world that was perfect. His world was perfect – something right out of a dream, until he realized the nightmare it could turn into and did.
Gone was the illusion and with it every dream that he had. He woke up to the cruel, ugly reality that burned his world to ashes, while all he could do was stand and watch as it crumbled to dust.
He had assumed the worst was over when it was done, oh how mistaken he was. For it was only the beginning.
The carnage had barely scratched the surface.
People who deceived him did not just kill the love that he had or his capacity to feel any emotion thereafter, by ripping his heart out, they ransacked every hope he had, every dream he dared dream, every bit of happiness he ever felt and turned his world inside out.
He could have lived with a broken heart and the ruins of a failed marriage. He could have even let every trauma he ever felt slide had it not been for the worst – had he not been deprived of his own flesh and blood.
The mockery and jibes he faced from the world at large were nothing to the tears that he and his kin shed once they lost Aditya.
Every humiliation, every insult was tolerable to him but losing his son was not.
The blow was the one that changed him.
Now he is this man – one who is rude to a fault, careless and insensitive to the world that is every bit suave and stylish. Gone is the sweet, shy, content, mild-mannered Raman, who wore glasses, had a paunch whose his hair was greased back.
The mask he wore has everyone fooled so well even those who have known him all his life now do not recognize him as well as they should.
Mihir, his shadow, failed to see through him. He could not pick up the simple fact that he never meant for Mihir to marry Trisha – all he wanted was for Mihir to speak up for himself, take a stand for the girl he loves without the debt he felt he owed to him.
Despite the things they took from him, he is thankful to his mentor and ex-wife for the one thing that they did give him.
The lessons that forged him, his new identity; he learned from them.
The ability to wear a mask – one that deceives even those around you, the harsh lesson that the world only bends for those who have the power to make it happen were learned by him because of their doings.
Thanks to them, he is a wiser man, a guarded man – a well-hidden man.
He had assumed he had learned enough to now know it all, had perceived now that he has been burned once he wont ever make the same mistake again.
He will not ever go wrong in judging people again.
Oh, how wrong was he – how very foolish to believe he had learned all there is to it, when nothing could have been truer? But how was he supposed to know this before? How could he have learned life never stops teaching you - he was yet to meet her till then after all, their paths had not yet crossed, as they now have.
He has heard the idiom – never judge a book by its cover, so many times, - a lesson which applies to him as well, strange how the lesson never fails to teach him something new every time that he comes to reflect upon it as well.
He has been married twice – and both his wives – an ex and a present, are as different as chalk and cheese.
Strange how though, they both have taught him the same lesson – one he first learned from Shagun and now with Ishita – is unlearning and relearning at the same time – appearances can be and are deceiving.
