Strings Of Love

Chapter 7

"Tu kyu aayi bakery? Bimar thi toh ghar pe rehne ka tha!" Mary scolded Shehnaaz when the girl sneezed for the nth time.

"Aunty bas zara sa zukam hai." Shehnaaz replied in a stuffy nose tone.

"Jo hum sab ko ho jayega yadi tu ghar nahi gayi toh." Mary replied, suggesting to her to go home.

"Thik hai." She pouted, scrunching her nose to inhale every time. She walked back towards the counter to keep the tray and removed her apron cum uniform she wore over her T-shirt.

"Yeh le Cetirizine. Kha ke so jana." Mary handed her a couple of tablets and got back to work.

Exhausted and cold, Shehnaaz returned home and followed her boss's instructions to feel better, covering herself under layers of sheets after taking the tablet. But sleep was yet to take over so she grabbed her phone to scroll through some social media feed to pass her time.

She hated staying home like this, all by herself and no one to talk to but she was the one to be blamed for getting drenched and falling ill. If she would have avoided going out last night, she would have been perfectly fine today but then she wouldn't have come across Sidharth.

Ah, that guy was another story running in a loop at the back of her head. Imagine bumping into a handsome man who's a gentleman enough to drop a stranger home safely and he's got a sense of humour too. Who was he? God? She just couldn't get their encounters out of her mind, they were really funny episodes about how the same two people kept bumping into one another.

She opened the explorer section on her social media and looked for Sidharth. Sidharth what? She didn't know his last name and there were hundreds of guys with the same username. As much as she could think of, a rich and reputed businessman always had a fancy last name. Oberoi, Kapoor, Mittal, Bajaj, Birla, Patel, Jindal, Agrawal, Lal, etc. But he wasn't there in any of the profiles they displayed on her screen. As if a cold wasn't enough, she was beginning with a headache after getting her head into the matter.

"Haaye rabba! Sach me kisi Sidharth se mili bhi thi ya sab kuch ek sapna tha?" She wondered, throwing her phone away and letting sleep takeover when the medicine started working on her.

It surely wasn't love at first sight, what happens at first sight is usually a strong attraction. If one acts on that attraction and seeks opportunities for conversation, they might find that the attraction eventually increases and people probably fall in love. One's mind can unconsciously arrange the entire sequence of memory such that the initial attraction seems to be love from the first moment. Shehnaaz knew she wasn't in love, she just adored the fact that she enjoyed Sidharth's company even though she hardly knew anything about him and that is why she wanted to get in touch with him.

"Bindu, shaam ko D-Mart ja rahe hai na?" She called her friend early in the evening.

"Mai chali jaungi tu rehne de, aunty ne bataya tujhe zukam hai." Bindu replied.

"Arey abhi thik hu mai, ghar pe bore lagta hai yaar. Chalna, chalte hai." She insisted.

"Thik hai, mai Vicky ke sath aati hu." Bindu hung up with that.

Shehnaaz changed her clothes and waited for her friends to arrive, scrolling down her social media again when an idea popped up. She switched to Google and searched for 'Bussinessman Sidharth from Mumbai', the first thing google let her know was the correct spelling of businessman and then about the CEO of Mobitechtron, Sidharth Shukla.

There was a picture of him with a elderly man who looked like him, so she began to read the article to know more. It said that the man was Ashok Shukla, his late father who had built this company and now his son was having a hard time handling it. The further she read, the more the article said that the guy was a potential industrialist who had dated a couple of models. There were pictures of him with beautiful girls, walking in and out of luxurious restaurants where the article said that one of them was also his fiance.