Manan FF: The Sketch Artist

Twenty Third

Present

Manik felt a loud sound in his head as if someone has been hammering beside him for a while. He tried opening his eyelids with great difficulty but found sun rays directly piercing through his sight making him shut his eyes the very same time.

The next he heard a faint noise of someone talking. After a grunt and shake of his head, he opened his eyes, adjusting them to the light to interpret the situation and found himself in a car's backseat with seatbelt and handcuffs on but the car was void of any other human apart from him.

The windows were tinted giving him no view of outside except almost everything appeared yellow and green, and in an attempt to ascertain his whereabouts, he tried unlocking the door before which Siddharth entered the car through driver's seat while talking on phone.

'Yes Sir, I can hear you now. The signal in this area is troublesome. About the situation, it's serious. The Sweat box officials were injured and were taken to the hospital with the two officials who were tailing us and as for Mr Malhotra, he is with me but is in pretty serious condition, perhaps facing breathing issues.'

'No sir, I checked the car but couldn't detect the problem.'

'Yes, please do.'

He said before hanging up the call. Keeping the phone on the front seat, he looked back and sighed in relief.

'Thank god, you woke up.'

'Okay, so you've two options, either run away if you've somewhere to be or pretend dead.'

'What?' Manik replied perplexed.

'We don't have much time here. Look we made a plan so that you don't get the death sentence which can be explained to you later. Right now a vehicle will be here in less than three minutes and you'll be shifted to a hospital which is five minutes away. Now if you've a place to run away, punch me and take the car and if you don't, just pretend dead.'

'I don't have anywhere to go and I can't just pretend dead. I'm not even that bad injured.'

'You fucking can and you'll fucking do.' Siddharth lashed out while he roughly brushed his hair back from his forehead.

'And you think the doctors in the hospital won't know I'm pretending' Manik uttered irritated by the nonsense he was hearing which increased his headache tenfolds.

'The nearest hospital is Care for All'

He looked at him with with raised brows and no sooner realisation dawned upon him.

'That's where I did my residency.' Manik muttered while blinking his eyes.

'Exactly, you might be knowing Dr. Abhimanyu very well then.'

At that moment Manik knew god has gifted him with a miracle and the only option he has is to make use of this rather than dying of a death sentence and he never wanted to die cowardly anyway.

They heard the loud blaring of ambulance siren and Manik pushed his head back in a way it swayed almost lifelessly, turning his breathing ragged.

Flashback

Nandini's POV:

'If I'm agreeing for this, things go my way.' Siddharth said while we're all seated in the living room after the whole back and forth shouting and drama, to which all of us nodded.

'First and foremost, we are just delaying things, he has to come up and confess the truth, whoever committed the crime after the situation turns sober. He might get some jail time after that. So, consider this a grace period.'