Into The Unknown

Chapter 09

It should be striking to me that unexpected things will be thrown at me like curveballs for which I should be ready after I witnessed open gunfire but I was not ready or maybe I was stupid enough to not pre-prepare myself for those unexpected curveballs and that’s why that specific sentence from Zain about my parents dying in a plane crash of Arbmtys left me shocked and doubtful, doubtful of my judgment of laying my trust on Zain.

Let him explain. He did nothing to break your trust yet, my subconscious snarled, rooting for my previous judgment. My subconscious is me, I hate to admit if I was wrong so my subconscious is protecting my ego.

“I’ll give you five minutes to explain”, I cut straight to the point to save time and satisfy my inquisitiveness.

Zain took a long deep sighing breath and it was so long that I internally cursed my patience.

“Mariah found out”, he did the cliffhanger thing, which I hate the most.

If the waterfall would not be serving as a perfect aesthetic and captivating background sound to this tense situation, I must’ve hissed and called an army of snakes to make it thriller. Waterfall did its work, it expanded my patience and my capacity of holding back my impulse to jab the sighing egg-shaped face of Zain.

“4 minutes left”, I remind him to speed it up.

His expressions started wearing off hinting at his regret over his decision of spilling out about my parents. That’s life, you can’t take back the words once you spill them, life is sad.

It kind of shatters my amour proper knowing that he knows something concerned with me which I didn’t know. It implies that I didn’t dig enough to know the truth about my parents' death and he or his sister did dig enough. From one side it’s sweet of them and from the other side, it makes me look careless slash ignorant slash unfilially.

“Mariah loves you like you are the twin she never had. You told her once that your parents died in the crash while returning from Kolkata, that was the same flight our grandfather was in. Because our grandfather was in that flight, dad left no scraps in investing if it was really the unintended crash or sabotage. After you told her that your parents were on the same flight, she sneaked into dad's study and took out the files that were buried in for the past 7 years. According to the reports, there were 478 passengers, she went through every name and none of the name in the passenger list were of Sachdev”, he finishes his storytelling bringing me back to square one of Zed's story of 3 extra passengers in the crash of 2007.

Zain sighed and snatched away the beer tin from my grip and started gulping the liquor down his burning throat. He’s fulfilling his hollow quench that recently got spilled by his act of sympathy.

If my parents were on the plane to Arbmtys in 2007, then why did they lie and why did their bodies were transferred to the Kolkata crash scene? Or maybe the bodies were not of theirs. All this time I thought that the half-burned bodies I set off the fire to their way to God were of my parents but they were of someone else, maybe.

If they were here on Arbmtys in 2007 then the same thing must’ve happened, the crash was their cover story and they were shot. No, maybe they sprinted into greens like us and maybe they are hiding somewhere here. No, it’s been 14 years, that’s way too long.

The A380, which had flown from Kolkata, skidded off the runway in rain and broke in two after landing, the headlines of The Times of India that I’ve engraved in my mind, the headlines that made me believe that my parents’ death is real when I was in denial to accept it. Till now, I believed that because of the unsuccessful landing, my parents flew up to heaven, if heaven exists but it’s fake, everything is fake. I thought people were plastic but never knew that stories could be polythene.