Shattered Beauty

8: Tears

After the performance was over and she got changed, she was about to go out.

"You were good!"-Ahan spoke, standing behind her.

She got startled and turned around.-"You were watching?"

"From up there"-he pointed.

"Don't lie...it was bad."-she said as she covered the stairs.

"It was beautiful..."-Ahan said as he followed her.

"Where are you going?"-Ahan's mother called.

"I will bring her to the hostel...its already this late."

She thought for a moment...its late...it is..."Jaydeep can take her back...Jaydeep, go with her"-she said to a man sitting in the dining table.

"Me?"

"Yes you, go!"

Both the men went in different directions, both, unwillingly.

Jaydeep and Arsi walked down the lanes.

"Who are you?"

"How ironic that you don't know me when its me who had been searching for you for last two years."

"HUh?"

"I am Jaydeep, Ahandeep's cousin. You know him really well, I must say."

Arsi, not understanding his implications, remained silent.

"You must be thinking that he is one of us, right? But I bet you will stop talking to him when you will get to know what blood he actually carries..."

"Is it blue?"

He looked at her and laughed.

"How come you don't understand anything?"

But she did...he was trying to disrespect Ahan...she felt herself lucky that Jaydeep hadn't caught her sarcastic tone.

"Well...you will know everything after you get married to my uncle."

"Marriage?"

"Didn't my dear brother told you? Or did he thought that your delicate ear won't be able to handle it?"

She kept silent but her thoughts were running from here to there.

"That's the reason why we have paid your father's debts and why you are being kept as a maid here...you need to get accustomed to our house without raising any suspicions...or else why do you think you were sent to clean my uncle's room on the first day?"-he looked at her expressions...baffled and confused with a large bit of horror...Jaydeep took sometime to enjoy his hard work.

"My mother and father know about this?"

"Obviously they do...it was I who had taken the pleasure to inform them. They were happy you know..."

"No they wouldn't..."-but she doubted herself.

"They did..."

No doubt at all...Her parents have sold her again.

"Get in."

And then Jaydeep, with a big smile left her drowning in her sorrow as she laid on her bad, awake, all night.

The sunshine fell on her face as dawn broke. She got up, freshened and went to attend the class...but after some time, the sun got obscured by dark clouds and heavy rain.

(In the Malhotra house)

"How is it that she was unknown to everything?"

"What?"

"Well...I told her why she was brought...oh sorry...bought here in the first place."

"You didn't!"-Ahan said but by Jay's expression, he knew that he wasn't lying. He was about to go out of his room when Jay stopped him.-"Are you going to that hostel?"

"What if I am?"

"To meet your lover or your mother?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You didn't knew that your prostitute mother had a new position? Oh! right...if you knew then how could you have talked with her so normally the day you had bought that girl..."

Ahan ran out of the house to the hostel. He stood in the hostel gate as he saw Arsi with some other girls were trying to go back to the hostel from their classrooms by avoiding the rain as much as they could.

He looked at her for sometime...but looked away her eyes fell on him. 

Arsi was about to run to him when the warden stopped her...She gave Arsi her umbrella and told her to go back.

Then she went to the gate and stood in front of Ahan-"Go back...if you have something to tell her, it can wait till evening!"-she said as she turned around...

With their body drenched in rain, faces soaked with water, they turned their back to each other...maybe they had hidden it from each other but they couldn't hide it from themselves that among the rainwater that fell on their face, there was an infiltrator that carries the name- tears, one of sorrow and another of anger...