Stars | completed

47. One For All & All For One

M A N I K

In life, we meet all kinds of friends. There are some whom you hang out with just for the sake of company, some you painfully endure because you need something from them, some who are acquaintances, some whom you sit with for a coffee because you bond with them on certain good topics, some who grow apart with time and some become your bestfriends. But at some point in life, you also befriend people who gradually become your ride-or-die, your platonic soulmates, those people in the world you could trust more than your own life.

Most people meet few such friends around whom your life could easily revolve. I was lucky enough to have six of them.

But... life doesn't always go as planned. Fate has its twisted ways to get to you. Five years back, I lost all six of my friends, with nothing and nobody to blame except circumstances.

And then, or over the years, I did wish to see them and be with them once more, but if I'm being truly honest, I didn't hold out much hope for that day to come.

I didn't consider myself to be lucky enough for a second chance.

And then here I was. The bulb overhead flickered every few seconds, making me uneasy while I tapped my foot on the polished floors impatiently puffing out some air from my lips and shutting my eyes for only a brief second. I didn't feel the urge to fall asleep. Sometimes, if you're too tired mentally and physically to even sleep, when you shut your eyes, you see lights dancing around in a black abyss. And in that short few seconds that I shut my eyes, I didn't see darkness either. It was almost as if I saw the entire universe with closed eyes, mostly because in that instant, I felt like I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders singlehandedly.

Almost immediately pulling myself up from the chair I was sitting on, I leaned on the wall beside the window, staring outside, realising how I had lost track of time driving between two hospitals.

I switched on my phone only to check if I had any missed calls from Cabir, who was also on his way here but much to my disappointment, there was nothing new.

In order to kill time, I did what I usually do best– I stared at the faint stars playing hopscotch with the dense clouds in the lapis coloured sky that painted a perfect twilight as the first rays of sunlight filled in.

It was crazy how the sky repeated the same algorithm everyday, and yet, the sunrise I had watched yesterday somehow seemed so different from today's.

"Mr. Malhotra?"

The doctor's heavy voice broke my small reverie. "Yes?" I turned to him, taking a deep breath, the anguish vanishing from my eyes.

"You can go inside now." He held the door of the room behind him open for me.

I stared at it reluctantly, before giving him a small nod to let him leave. I had hoped Cabir would be here for this moment and he'd be the one to walk ahead of me.

But he wasn't here, so I walked inside.

I'd taken only a few steps inside but could already feel the weight of the silence pushing me down.

The ECG machine beeped a few feet away and I took in the sight of the room ahead of me, the plain walls and prominent scent of a syringe that I had grown to hate after seeing too many die in similar hospital rooms.

My eyes wandered everywhere consciously before they stood fix at the man on the bed lying in a white tee shirt and black joggers, both of which had marks of burns and tear holes where the fire had managed to penetrate. A white bandaid went from across his forehead to the back of his head, covering it in a circle and I couldn't help but notice his right arm was also bruised with a second degree burn, a white gelatinous cream applied over it.