My brother's best friend

Chapter 25

The mirrors in the room have been covered for the past three days, and though he knows that perhaps he should check his appearance he can't force himself to meet his own eyes. As he is thinking that perhaps it might have been the right thing to do, if only so that Rohan doesn't glare at him, he curls and uncurls the fingers of his right hand. He'd lied to Rohan, to his nanu, to anyone who had asked, and told them that he'd had an accident. That the cuts on his knuckles had come from banging out his old bike at a nearby tree. Nobody needs to know that as soon as he'd looked at his face in the last uncovered mirror he hadn't been able to stand the jerk that stared back at him and had taken a page out of someone else's book and punched the glass.

It's not simple to say,

He'd banned anyone from coming to his room since then, and avoided having to see what he was turning into when he was forced out of the solace of the room. There was nobody to check on him, anyway, since nanu was out on a buisness trip and Rohan has settled on avoiding him at all costs, so avoidance had suddenly become a lot easier. He leans against the counter in his bathroom for a second longer, breathes a slow exhale and ghosts his fingers over the center of his chest before he tells himself to man up. "Uth, Sameer", the voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like the brat Somani grunts at him,"Uth aur apna kaam kar"

That most days I don't recognize me

So that's exactly what he does. Puts himself together, wills the excess of himself that keeps bursting at the seams, and gets out of the bathroom. Methodically, he picks up his watch and his wallet and makes his way to the stairs. Even Ramdhari is mournfully silent as he goes, as if he knows that something is wrong with him wishes him a quiet good luck that makes him close his eyes and wish for a stupid request for having breakfast, and the familiar "Sameer bhaiya", and gets into his car. He avoids his eyes in the rearview mirror and revs out of his home's garage.

After all, tournament trophies don't award themselves.

Don't watch the clock. Do what it does.

Keep going.

Unbeknownst to him, Naina Aggarwal was leaning on her bedside, clutching the furry mess she called her "Guglupuchu". Though Swati failed to understand her suddenly revived obsession with the toy they had won back in Mount Abu, and Preeti had finally shifted from distrust to straightway disregard, Naina couldn't bring herself to become conscious of her current situation.

Life after that is... pandemonium, to put it bluntly. There are concerns and people and all sorts of confusion Naina can barely keep up with. Through everything, Preeti proves to be a rock. After the day, which is later on dubbed D-Day for Destruction Day, Naina hadn't been able to think straight, rather think at all. There she was, eager to share her insecurities about Sunaina with Sameer, bursting with love and joy- love for him and joy for their love. Her love. She thought bitterly. She's feeling the strain of it, every day, and had been wishing for some sort of respite from it all.

She's barely slept since the whole ordeal started and she knows her shaking is more than just nervousness, but she trudges on every day. What else can she do anyway? Sometimes she weeps at her fate, sometimes she curses at Sameer, but majority of the times, she nothing but laughs at herself. "Sameer tujhse pyaar kaise kar sakta hai? Aisa hai kya tujhmein jo unn baaki ladkiyo mein nahi hai" Her own reflection had said that the other day. How can her inner-self be anything but truthful?

Sometimes pain is just suffering

And all of a sudden Naina feels her chest wrench in pain and loss, tears start pouring out because the only person she's ever loved doesn't truly love her back. And it hurts her more than anything in the world. Yeah, maybe, Naina was naïve into thinking this could work but it had felt so right that she couldn't stop. So when she heard those words come out of Sameer, she did the first thing that popped up in her mind. Which was to drown her sorrow by locking herself away and weep in the emptiness of bathrooms and corners, until she couldn't feel this great emptiness within her.