Thikaana

Seventy Five

"Aaja, araam se" he said as he stood up and gave his hand to her.

He was now properly, really looking at her. and his heart broke. She was not the Sana, not even close to the Sana he met and had known all these months. Everything about her, every little thing was so different. From her sticky thin hair, to her small, pale, lifeless, sunken cheeks and face, to her cracked and white lips, her frail body. She was suddenly so weak, so thin, he was sure that she barely ate these days and how would she? She was so alone, so broken, so scared. Her eyes, they were the scariest. They didn't look like those sparkling shiny, happy eyes he fell in love with.

These eyes, they were sunken deep inside her ace, swollen, red, and so hollow, so lifeless. They screamed of everything she had been through all these days, all by herself. There were such dark bags under her eyes. she scared him. He felt like her body would break if he even applied a little pressure. She was in a light yellow shalwar kameez and he could see how lose it was on her.

"Si..dharth..aap ye kyun" she managed to whisper as she looked up at his face.

"Shhh. Bas. You don't worry about any of that okay? Mai kuch ghalat nahi honay doonga Sana. Main hoon na yahan tere saath, tujhe ab aur darne ki zaroorat nahi hai un logo se. Okay my love?" he explained to her softly.

What he didn't know was, that she was no longer scared of them. She had been giving it back to them all these days with a fierceness nobody would have expected from her. It was just that she was tired now. She had been fighting so much and so insanely, that it was now draining her emotionally.

Being away from him for so many days, and thinking that he would never take her back, it had been eating her up inside and now that he actually came and was right here, in front of her eyes, she still couldn't believe it and now she just wanted to give in and get away from this place and these people.

But Sidharth? He was a different wreckage altogether. He had been a mess all these days thinking that despite his choice, despite his attempts to keep her with him, she chose Punjab and just left. For Sidharth, her leaving and coming here meant her getting married to that man. And so he was scared, devastated, absolutely broken.

Despite hearing her voice on the messages, knowing that she too was equally broken, he was still scared. His past had done that to him. Thinking and believing something to be your life and reality, and then it suddenly being snatched from your hands, finding out that you are going to have a child, and then that being snatched from your hands before even knowing about it, it isn't something easy to deal with or come out of.

Traumas like these leave dark, irreversible marks on one's whole personality. Sidharth had the same. That is why, after meeting Sana, after finding out she was engaged, he tried to pull back as much as he could. He didn't want to go down that path again. Experiences and traumas like these alter you forever. Fears like these, they don't leave. A person becomes conditioned to believe and act in a certain way after seeing life in a specific way.

This fear of her leaving, of her being forced back to Punjab, of her being forcefully married off to Akshay, he had been harboring these fears inside him since the day he met her. It had been eating him up since day one. So when things actually started happening, when it slowly started to look like a reality, it felt like every single fear was slowly coming to life. He became desperate to hold on to her. in his desperation, he gave her that choice.

When she still left, it shook his entire ground. He didn't know how to act, what to think, what to do. Everything, every past trauma, every fear, it all came true. It all came back to life. So he was absolutely deranged with fear. Fear of losing her for good, fear of her marrying him, fear of her not being able to take the pressure and fear of everything just slipping away right from his hands. Even if he wanted to speak to her, the constant fear playing in his mind would stop him.