A bend in the road - Vol 1

14. Wrong turn

Guilt.

It was a strange thing.

It ate him from inside. There was an alive restlessness in his heart that wouldn't just subside.

It was all very new, taking responsibility of his wrong choices.

He was eight maybe when one fine day, his father who had visited them only once in a fortnight had come to take them to a house very huge.

There was a boy aged 10 in the house by the time Dev and in infant Vikram who was months old were taken.

Dev saw his parents fight a lot earlier but it subsided once they were taken to this new home with this boy.

The boy lost his mother recently, he got to know and Dev tried to befriend the empty looking boy.

"Maan" the boy introduced himself that day before he went to his room.

Dev later found out Maan was his step brother.

He had tried for a long time to befriend him, and sometimes unknowingly had found himself trying to copy Maan.

While Dev himself was the sweetheart child of the house, using his charm and dimpled smile on everyone including the servants that gave him the best sweetmeats when around, he understood very soon that Maan commanded an air of respect unbeknown to himself.

He didn't say it much often, and almost never to Maan's face but he had respected his brother.

It somehow pinched him just a little that Vikram, being the youngest has got it easy to become close to Maan without even trying, while Dev had always felt a misfit in their equation.

True, it was Maan who had come to his rescue although with less number of words offered to him, whenever he screwed up. Maan picked up the mess that he made usually and he had kept his brother in loop on whatever he used to do.

Except one day he let the greed take over him and messed up real big.

Dev had never felt this lonely in his entire life as he was driving back home that night.

He had seen a girl come from shadows out of nowhere and stopped just in time before his car could strike her.

He had seen her frightened form before she sprinted away. But it was enough to notice the small bump the girl was showing.

Somehow it was all that was needed to find a dull ache in his heart.

Geet.

He was reminded of the girl whom he had wronged on so many levels. He was not blind to the sort of conservative family she was bought in. He wondered what fate had befallen her. Was she married off to someone else in secret? Did something bad happen to her?

With the thoughts that ate at him, he took one wrong turn in that cold night and had ended up running into a huge tree by the roadside, his whole body jerked with the collision, his unconscious form falling on the steering as hot blood trickled down from the side of his head.