The Unresolved Dilemma

10.

I had made up mind by then, i needed to find the characters. I had to finish the story. It was less curiosity and more of an obsession. I hurriedly check out the email of the shop. I send out th email describing the situation

To: Akshikaceo141@gmail.com
Subject: Wanted to meet for a personal matter.

Good morning Sir, hope you are in pink of your health. This Email is been sent out to you in accordance of a situation I am facing. It may sound weird to you at first but try to understand the situation . I recently got hold of a diary written by Rihan Srivastava . This name might ring some bells to you. The diary describes all sorts of events and about relations through school till college. But as I read the diary, it seems to be incomplete after a major event that took place in your life. I was thinking you being best friend of Rihan according to the diary might be able to complete the story . I would be very grateful to you if I could meet you in person and talk about on this issue. I need you to know that this diary means a lot to me and I need it to be complete. I would be obliged if you give a little time out of your busy schedule and might share what actually happened.
Thanking you

And sent...............

I was constantly checking my mail for reply. It was for millionth time I took a look at my mail . There was no reply. I went to my bedroom ,lie down for a while still thinking how can I reach them or contact them? I lied there and the next time I knew it was 4.30pm in the evening. I had fallen asleep thinking about the issue. I hurriedly sprinted towards my Macbook and checked if there was any reply . But there was none. Now it was time to try something different but first I needed to get a bath. I was already starting to smell like rotten fish and my hairs were entangled. I went inside, took a nice hot shower, made a kadak masala chai and sat down to search for Rihan Srivastava on Facebook. I entered the name in the search bar, my heart already started pacing up, the buffering icon started to do it's work. It was buffering and buffering ,still buffering. On the other hand, it was pacing my heart up, I had started to perspire. I looked at my internet connection and noticed that I haven't connected to the internet . I sighed in a relief and laughed on myself.

The page was loaded and it showed almost a million profiles. I started checking each one of them. After 2hours of stalking profiles, I finally found a profile that pointed towards him. The profile was of an computer engineer who was working for a security systems making company. The profile was also followed by 'Akshika'. Finally I found the profile. It was Eureka moment for me. I sent a friend request to the profile and 'boom' it was accepted in just 5 minutes. I sent a message from the messenger to the Rihan Srivastava.

Me: Hi
Profile user : Hello sir ,how may I help you?

Me: Are you Rihan Srivastava?
Profile user: Yes I am. What can I do for you ?

Me : You studied in Ahmedabad right. Son of a district judge. Topper of your college.

Rihan (as it was confirmed!): How do you know all this? Are you here to blackmail me? I got contacts everywhere . Tell me what you want. Why are you doing this all?

Me: No no don't get me wrong. I don't want to blackmail or harm you. I found a diary that was addressed to Rihan Srivastava and it contained all the above information . Do you know anything about that?

Rihan: Ohh so you found my diary. Yes the diary is written by me. 🥺

Me: Can you tell why the diary is incomplete? Why after maintaining the diary for so long you kept it incomplete ? Why did you throw away the diary?

Rihan: Slow down mister. Take a breath. See I can't give answers to all these things. I could just say that there was an incident that happen to affect all this.

Rihan
Offline

Already there was so much confusion regarding the diary . The last msg of the writer of diary made it all worse. I hoped I had never talk to him. The feeling to find out what actually happened felt like a active volcano which may erupt anytime.

Me: Can I meet you and talk about this? You should understand that I need to know the end. How all this happened and how does it all end. Can we please meet?

Still offline .

I sat there and checked the emails that I received from my work. I started completing my work and I forgot about the issue for a while. I was engrossed in my work. I was on backlog. I had lots of pending work because I wasted my time on the diary. It was 11 o clock in my wall clock. I had finished with my food and was all set to complete the remaining work. Suddenly a notification popped. I opened the mail. My eyes were on the screen and I just slipped a beat. It was reply from the Akshika. It read:

Thanks for reaching out to me. I would like to assist you in your purchase. Also what you wrote about the diary thing, I think that doesn't concern me because I have no such friend. Thanks for reaching us out. Please rate the service. Thank you.

That's it. That was the whole Email. The Email for which I waited so long,so desperately was nothing at all. The wait was worthless. The desperation had no meaning now. I felt useless at this hour. I wasted whole day thinking how would I proceed after the Email. I already had the conversation rehearsed in my head a million times. How could this happen now? It felt like I was building a house of glass with hope and desperation and someone just threw a truckload of stones on it. It all crashed into pieces and I could see my reflection in that tiny pieces laughing at me. I couldn't handle the situation . I took out a cigar pack  from the table . Ready the cigar and lit it up. This was my very bad and old habit. Whenever I would be stuck in a problem, I would lit up a cigar and smoked up the problem. It worked everytime. I was just hoping it works this time as well. I wanted it to work so badly. I just sat there in smoke thinking about how to solve all this. The two links that lit a hope have been washed off . Rihan has not replied even if he had seen the message on facebook while the Akshika came out to be someone else . I had came to an impasse. My last hope was the smoke of the cigar that was about to get over. This time I badly wanted it to last a little longer. A little slower to be burnt down.