Divulging Remorse ✔

Chapter 27

She was prepping for dinner, chopping up vegetables for a quick veggie and chicken stir fry. No one was home yet, except her father who always stayed back, she didn't know why and since there were a lot of other questions she wanted to ask as well, she always stopped because she thought, they were better off unanswered; every single time. 

All she knew was, her father had stopped working because her grandfather had asked him. A very strange thing for her Baba to do as the money game was the only thing he was good at. It was sort of a gamble, not literally, but when he injected his money somewhere for the best possible returns, he had forgotten how to lose. 

Though Hufaiz had told her that someone had deceived Baba in business, she didn't actually believe him. Maybe, it had become a habit even for her to always see her father win, more like, suck in money just as a frog sucks in a bee. Her father who had no time in the past due to work had now turned stingy and cranky even though he had loads of time to give to his family. All of them tried to not get into an argument with him over a petty issue or just simply, they avoided crossing tracks with him. 

Riya thought sometimes that there had to be some knot in this whole situation, she knew she was missing on something, but she never dug up to find out what. She didn't want any more things that wore herself down.

She also didn't know whether she still held a grudge against him for marrying her off to Moutasim because it didn't matter now, that's what it is, nothing matters for too long. Her "Central Station" of grudge was gone and so was his family. 

Moutasim's family had moved to Norway, ten days right after the incident. Ammar had found a job there and he had been planning to move for months, but when Moutasim's traumatic news came in, Kashmala wasn't in a stable condition to be left back. He took along his parents and Faarima, to put everything back and start fresh. They had said all of this over the phone, after packing their bags and moving continents away. They weren't to be blamed though, the trauma was too big to care about anything else and people already had big mouths to say things at the worse time to top it off. 

She remembered how Moutasim, his death, and his family had become a talk of the town, it already was due to his "reputation", but it had gotten off limits when his sudden death was on news for twenty-four/seven. The mutual social circles her family and her aunt's belonged to, haunted for months. 

Now, no one even remembered who he was or how his family was doing. Her aunt gave her dad a random call every few months, but other than that, it was silence. It had always been that way, even when Moutasim was there, though not always but for years there was a transparent bitterness after the court case. 

Sometimes, she felt, for a seven hundred and thirty days of life span, things had changed so much like how they do over twenty years. At other times, she thought everything was just like it always had been and it was her who had been shown some reality check. It was overwhelming and confusing all at once.

Like, they were still in the same apartment, meant to be moving in a villa two years ago. It could most probably be because of the financial restraint, but she also knew well that her father received a handsome income from their family business which her Agha Jaan, uncle, and cousins ran.  She never asked, just overheard her parents once. 

Their home had felt empty when Hufaiz moved to London to pursue his degree in music and his mind was pretty much well planned to settle there and start a career with his boy band. Their mother was still on job as a professor, a little less social now as of her dementia; it was creeping in very slowly, dot by dot, something none of them wanted to digest, including herself. 

Arshiya had taken up university when she finished with the Quran Institute. They had offered her to be a full-time teacher in the evening session to which she had heartily accepted. Riya barely saw her on weekdays because Arshiya would leave early in the morning for university and returned in the afternoons to go back to the institute in the evening when she'd be at work, only for them both to return home tired as hell and hit the bed after some dinner, all in their own timings.