Taken As Reward (The war of politics and love BOOK 2 )

30. Kabil

Maybe that is why, she does have sympathy on her face for me. Divya asked me to go inside the bedroom. I nodded and stood up.

I did not want to sit, I felt like my body was melting, I followed her into a tiny room with only one person's bed in the corner and a cupboard on the other side, with overflowing clothes. There was a bag of Divya and Maa in one corner since they must have living here.

"You should sleep, the sooner you are drifted off the easier it will get to forget." She said sweetly, as she shut the door for me.

I sat down on the small bed, as I couldn't care less if I am being weak, or I am portraying myself as troublesome. If I am being too vulnerable in other's eyes.

Only I know that the thumping in my chest hasn't stopped since, I curled myself in the bed, hugging myself tightly, closing my eyes,

As tears started to slide through my eyes, slipping to my temple to my hair, the banging was drilling into my head. I tried to shun my mind with that overwhelming emotion.

I know it was wrong of me to take Vandigana's name. When I knew that it triggers him. And I did it anyway,
But the outcome of my mistake shouldn't have left me dreading inside a room. On the mercy of a wooden door.

I don't know how long I was still like this in the bed, with my eyes close, when I felt a slow caressing of a hand on my head.

My eyes opened slowly when I saw his mother standing, and her hand was caressing my head. I closed my eyes, and let her hand feel on my head. This was the first time after year someone did it.

I couldn't hold myself and started crying, she sat down by my head and took my face in her lap, as she kept stirring my hair.

She rubbed my back with her hair, urging me to let out my cry. I couldn't hold on and just bawled in her lap.

These tears were not for what happened this evening. These tears were for all that have happened to me for a whole year. The pain and sorrow that had been kept on my chest for a year. In her warm embrace lap, I broke out completely.

I don't know for how long, but had her hold on me, and did not once stop. Until I finally started to sob, "Did he tell you why he acts like this?" She said when she heard my sobs dying down.

I closed my eyes and shook my head. She sigh, "I knew he won't," she said as she pushed her fingers in my hair and started making circular motions.

It felt surreal and magical, such an easy effort but it was calming my nerves, "He had always been a troublesome child, always causing problems with his friends since childhood. But then, he fell in love with some girl in Vandigana, he loved her so much that he was ready to quit all his habits for her. He started to study and pay attention to his work, he worked hard at his part-time jobs to provide her with the things she needed because she came from a poor family. He quit singing for that girl because he had to go to the politician friend and start working under him to get her out of that hell hole along with himself. We were never fond of his actions but that girl saved him from being a rogue. He even went to work, stayed in this small room with three more men from a hotel he use to work at, and proved himself to that politician and rose himself to a position where he could save her and take her here, but the day he went to bring her. She was getting married, that same day. And before he could do anything, the Muslim community, that girl was Muslim too, their Muslim community attacked him personally and kept him hostage and tortured him to the point where he lost his sanity. Being exposed to so much abuse and cruelty at that young at heart age. He got sick with this mental illness of losing his sanity every time someone says Vandigana." Each word left me, frozen.