From the corner of my eye, he shook his hand with the lawyer and nodded at the officers as they carried the four culprits back to their car, their faces burning at my back with hatred, their intentions speaking the truth they could do to me or what they had already done.
Seven years.
They would come back to me after seven years. What would I do then? Go back to Arnav to help me? Plead him to listen to me whilst he would be too busy to handle his own family and children? Or let the past repeat itself, try to act bold and mark each day as the seven years come nearer or leave the city and act as if I wasn't the girl I held on to. Isn't what dad suggested to that I should leave my identity and go somewhere else because people had started inspecting?
A warm hand grabbed mine and my face was pushed into a hard chest. "Don't look at them and torment yourself."
"Seven years," I repeated, my family at the back, waiting for me to come and join them. "He will come back after seven years. He will—" I took a deep breath. "I cannot. I—"
His hands engulfed my face. "I will not let anyone hurt you. Trust me, he will never come back to you." How do I trust anyone when it was me at the stake? How do I trust when I was shattered on the other end? Time wasn't healing the wounds. Every night, I think of the ways they could have enjoyed themselves. Every night, I relive the emotional pain again and again. "Even though, I had suspected this punishment."
"Arnav, it is too less," I cried at the back of my throat. "I don't want to live my life being scared."
"You will not. I promise to you everything will be okay. Trust me for a while." But I was scared of trusting you, scared to see the bloodlust in your eyes, scared of what your anger could do. If you didn't forgive your dad, I had no idea what grudge you held against them. "Your paintings."
I perked my ears. "What about them?"
"They are painful."
Shrugging his hands, I smirked at the sad reality. "You only said I don't expose myself. I guess I learned at last."
Black deep horror flashed across his face. "I never meant through this way, never this." But his eyes endeavour to speak more.
Say I am changed.
Say you didn't know this sad and gloomy Sanjana.
Say you were used to the mischievous and outspoken girl.
Say you lied about loving me.
"I should go."
"No, you are coming with me." What? "I asked your parents. They allowed." He didn't let me question, opened the back door and nodded to slide in but I wanted answers. Where were we going? How could my parents answer things for me when I had no idea what I was supposed to do anymore? How could he do things without asking me? Why everyone made decisions for me? "Sanjana—"
"I am going nowhere with you. You didn't tell me anything."
"It is a surprise. I need a break from those court sessions." Fingers slipped inside mine, tugging it gently. "Allow me to take you."
"But where?"
"I want you to meet someone." His lips curled in a small smile, the harsh winds of the winter clashing at my body. "Please come with me. Your bags are in the car. Sammy packed it."
"Where are we going?"
"Somewhere." He checked his watch. "You will be surprised. Your dad is calling you." Nodding his head at the back, he withdrew to talk to his driver whilst I walked back to see dad and the conversations from the last night surfaced back.
You cannot be with him.
I am glad for his help but he is not of our society.
His world is not yours, Sanjana.
How accurate yet heartbreaking his words had been, how disappointing it was to accept those words and realise foolish dreams I had kept before, and now, those dreams were nothing but a mere stupid thing I used to hold to my heart. Some things never make to reality, never breathe a sigh.
And trying to be with him was one of the things.
We couldn't be together.
I clutched my hand tightly around the paintbrush, the wood breaking in pieces.
[ A R N A V ' S P O V ]
"Holy fucking shit."
When you know someone from a long period of time, you pick some of their habits such as what they like and how they utter out their sentences and make sense of them. And one of the things I knew about Sanjana had been her aversion of abusive language, she wouldn't whisper those words in a normal conversation because according to her, it was impolite.
I could say it was impolite with her awestruck look.
Parting her a glance, I shook my head and waited for her to grab her passport and visa from my hands.
"I didn't have a passport. I never applied for one."
"Actually, you did," I reminded her. "One day I had called you for some work and you gave some details. That was for your passport. Things you forget in your paintings." Grabbing her bag from the driver, I nodded at him to leave and let me handle this girl for next few days, let me ask permission for something far greater than anything I have done in my entire life. "Shall we, Sanjana?"
"We are going to Paris," She gushed, an instant grin wrapping her face as she jumped up and down. "We are going to Paris." However, the smile dimmed down. "But how? I don't have money."
Rolling my eyes, I caught her hand, rubbed my thumb on her palm to calm the stupid nerves she was having, to make her see everything would be okay as long as she was here and money thing was the last thing she had to worry.
"Just enjoy this trip." And let me get away from my father who kept on irritating me to get married and leave you. I cannot leave you."You deserve this after everything."
"But—"
"We will be late for check-in. Come on. Let's not miss this chance." Curling her hand around my upper arm, I helped her to come inside the airport after all the checking and the way she grinned at the people running around, the commination of the airport, it didn't take long to understand it was her first time in the airport.
Things she had been denied too.
I am adopted.
I don't know where I actually belong.
"Why do you have an American passport?" She asked out of curiosity.
"Because I was born there." I glanced at the black colored passport and clenched it a little tighter. "That's why my father never had a problem in sending me to America."
"When did you go to America?"
"Seventeen." Because he was too scared of what I might expose if I stayed here, what I might say to everyone if I got too angry, what I might do to him if I get the pain again.
"But you said your sister died when you were eighteen and—"
"I never came for her funeral." I side-glanced at her fallen face. "I couldn't do it." Swallowing the cloaking emotions, I caught her hand and tugged it to the check-in boards. "We have a trip."
You needed to meet someone.
"Arnav!" The excitement in his voice never died down, the same old apron remained stuck to his body as usual. As he came near for a hug, an instant grin wrapped my face and I was engulfed in bone-crushing arms. "fils, comment vas-tu?" (Son, how are you?)
"Je vais bien, Rafe. Pourquoi es-tu couvert de farine?" (I'm fine, Rafe. Why are you covered with flour?)
Breaking his hug, he titled his head at the back and the peals of laughter flooded in his bachelor pad, the warming brown walls tearing some of the jet-lag. "Aliments. Mon estomac affamé." (Food. My hungry stomach.) He glanced at my back and cocked his head to the side. "Oh mon. Qui est cette jolie fille, mon fils?" (Oh my. Who is this pretty lady, my son?)
Sanjana.
And she appeared confused.
"Sorry." Switching back to the same old language, I continued, "Rafael, she doesn't know French. So, switch back. And she is Sanjana, my—" And the sentence remained hanging. What should I say her? My friend? My girlfriend? My lover?
"Friend," She completed my confusion with an uncomfortable smile. "Hey."
"Hello to you too." Rafael lips twisted in a naughty smile, and before he could speak further, I hit the back of his head. "Ow. Bad nephew." He stuck his tongue, enveloped Sanjana in a hug and she freaked out. Fuck. Quickly, I caught him by the shoulders and broke his arms on her. "What?" He whined.
"For a forty-year-old man, you have no shame." I ran my hand on her arm to ask if she was okay, if my uncle didn't scare her out of her wits, and with a slight nod, she numbed down the worries of my heart. "Stay away from her a bit." I tried to tell him to understand my position, to see why I couldn't force her. "Are we clear?"
"You break my heart." Winking, he untied the strings of his apron. "As you said, your rooms are ready upstairs. I will prepare lunch." He paused, grinning. "Stay away from each other. If you do anything, make sure I don't hear it."
And when you thought your family cannot embarrass you more.
Before he could speak something more, I took Sanjana by the hand, flight to the upstairs and opened the door of one of the rooms. Smiling hesitantly, she trudged in, her steps seemed nervous, her body seemed tense, her actions seemed feeble.
"Relax," I tried to calm her nerves. "He was joking."
"It is not that." She bit her lower lip and sat down on the bed. "I have never been outside Delhi and you brought me to Paris. It's overwhelming." Crunching down on the floor, I bored my eyes into the similar orbs of her eyes. Light brown. At this moment, they were light brown. "Who is he?"
Licking my lower lip, I smiled. "We all need a father figure, don't we? He is my father's younger brother, and someone, I consider as my father."
"Your father," She repeated. "Can I ask you something? I know I shouldn't ask now with both of us tired and all, and that you need to sleep from the flight. That reminded me, why flights suck? Like my ears are still ringing and the food was yuck and all I had to do was look at clouds. You know trains journeys are osum. You can move, you can see trees and cities and—"
"Sanjana," I smiled at her rambling, at how she was catching hold of the girl I had thought we both had lost, at how she was still here alive after all the fight from the world for her own dignity. "Your question."
"Sorry." She bit her lower lip cheekily. "Don't smile and show your dimples." She slapped my shoulder. "Yes, my question. Why you hate your dad?"
And the smile slipped off.
Did she deserve to know?
But I was going to ask her to marry me and that meant something in all the aspects of the world and I could never expose the reason for my father's hatred to her. She would leave me, feel disgusted to the family I belonged and losing her was the last thing on my mind.
"Just something." I curled the strand of her hair behind her ear. "Rest. My father and I are fucked up."
"Don't you trust me?"
"I do but I also care about you, and this care is stopping me. If I tell the hatred, I tell things I don't want to revisit."
Before she could ask further, I stood up and ran out of the room, removing all her stupid questions that could endanger us, finish us and that was the bargain I wasn't ready to have yet.
He had taken everything from me, I couldn't let him take Sanjana too.
Not her.
Hearing the giggling and laughter from the kitchen, I cocked my head to the side and walked down the stairs to march to the metal grey kitchen and stuck to the door at the strange view in front of me.
Sanjana and Rafe were cooking.
They were laughing as Sanjana beat the spoon in the bowl, flour stuck to her cheek, her lips curled in a naughty grin. My body refused to move as a sudden clenching erupted. She wasn't this happy with me, she wouldn't smile with me, she wouldn't laugh with me. She had developed a certain level of the wall between us and I couldn't break it, no matter how hard I try, how tough it becomes.
Was I doing something wrong?
"Arnav," Rafe called, breaking my reverie. "You didn't tell me your girl cooks here." She wasn't my girl yet, and if Sanjana noticed the slight use, she ignored it and the smile came off her face. "She told me things I never knew about."
Managing a tight smile, I said, "That's Sanjana for you." Ignoring the tightness of my heart, I licked my lower lip. "When did you wake up?"
"An hour ago," She answered. "I was getting bored. Your uncle offered for cooking."
"Nah." He waggled his finger. "Call me Rafe. I hate being called uncle. It sounds too old."
"You are old." And stay away from Sanjana. She wasn't your type."You are forty."
"Thirty," He shot. "I stopped aging when I reached thirty. Isn't it, senorita?"
"Senorita?" I curled my hand in a fist. He was testing my patience here.
"She is so beautiful. One cannot help." Stop toying with me, Uncle."Do you want a bite?" He nudged the plate of pizza to my side. "Sanjana made the dough. It's yummy." He licked his fingers, wriggling his eyebrows. "You will make your man very happy."
"My man?" She repeated.
"Mon fils va être ton homme." (My son will be your man.)
We both grinned, and at last, he got why was I in Paris at the first place. I desired to show Sanjana to him, to know if he approved of my choice rather than some biological father I had, see if I could ask her to marry me, here in this place, with no one to object, with no one to say no.
"What did he say?"
"Just gibberish." I tore the piece of pizza, took a bite and almost moaned at the dripping cheese on my tongue. From the corner of my eye, Sanjana smiled. She knew the love I stored for cheese, especially the melted cheese on my tongue. "Do you want to go out?"
"Rubbish," Rafe exclaimed, cleaning his hands from the cloth napkin. "Spend time with your uncle. You have come here after years."
And that's what we did the whole night, holed up in his penthouse, talking, eating and laughing at his various anecdotes or the humiliation I bored as he recited the long forgotten stories of my childhood when everything was good, when I still had a father, mother and a twin, when he used to stay with us for months rather than never turning his back on the country he grew up in, when I had a hope for future.
From his slight nod and expression, I could gather he was fond of Sanjana and didn't disapprove of my choice. I had no idea why it mattered if he liked him, why he behaved more as my father than the strange uncle who refused to come back to me, who forfeited his shares of the company to my name and made me the sole owner and refused to give it to my step-sisters. No matter how dad made the company, sacrifices were made by my mother and sister.
It only belonged to me.
Only I was allowed to be tainted by it.
As the night slipped on and the talks grew more upfront and casual, Sanjana got up from her seat and slipped back to her room even after sleeping for the whole afternoon.
"She is good," Rafe commented after we both were alone, his beer bottle rested on his thigh. "She sleeps a lot."
"Yeah, she does," I tried to avoid the reality behind it. "Want to sit in the backyard?"
Without the reply, he stood up from the halls and walked to the backyard, to the three pair stairs and sat down on one of them. The bewitching night and the buildings of the Paris flowing around us, the noises beneath the road clashing in our conversations as I settled down next to him and took a sip of my drink.
"What's between you and her?" He asked, his serious tone indulging in the conversation.
"Something. We both love each other." Even though she never said to me.
Do you know why I forced her? She loves you. That was her punishment for loving you.
I shook his words quickly. I never knew her love for me could give her this grave thing, this disgusting thing.
"She is nothing like your mother," He chuckled. "Sanjana is too—"
"Feisty, outspoken, daring?" I offered the words I could come up with.
"I was going to say caring and loving, but those words also work. She scolded me in the kitchen for not washing my hands. You will have a hard time keeping her out of there." As if I wasn't aware. "She loves painting, isn't she?"
"How you know?"
"I asked her." He wriggled his eyebrows. "I need to know my nephew's wife who will carry on the legacy of ours. Yes, she might have slipped on she slapped you." I rolled my eyes. "Does she know about your behavior in America?"
"Tell her what? I was a manwhore? Not a chance." And she would leave me that moment. "I changed girls."
"You bedded girls. There is a difference," He said with amusement.
"And it stopped as soon as I joined the business."
A hand clapped on my back. "You stole from him. Thank god, you did it. Your dad is hopeless." And yet you knew nothing about what he had done and what kind of monster he was. "Tell her your manwhore past. She deserves to know."
"She will leave."
"If she loves you, she will understand." He paused. "Show me the ring. I know you have it."
How well he knew me.
Fisting my hand in the jeans pocket, I fished out the black box and popped it open to reveal a ring with a single diamond, too sleek for her finger, too delicate for her soft hand, too elegant for her taste.
"It is simple."
"Sanjana is simple," I clarified. "You think she loves me?"
"If she remembers your taste in food, handle your arrogant behavior, knows how control freak you get and is still here, then yes, she does." My hand tightened around the box. "I have never seen you this obsessed with a girl before."
Because I never met a girl like her before.
"When I am with her, nothing else matters. My business is just business, not my life, not something I breath and cherish. When I am with her, other people are just people and she is the only that matters." I glanced at the clinking diamond. "Mom showed me girls. She likes Sanjana but her family background is not something she approves of slightly."
"And what?" He asked softly.
"They are not Sanjana, you know? I met some of them when she wasn't talking to me and all I could think was." I laughed lightly. "Why aren't you scolding me? Why aren't you shutting me down? Why are you just agreeing with me? Challenge me. Shut me up. Make me."
"Make you what?"
"See how my life was unworthy before you." Don't cry, stupid Arnav. "I had missed her like hell those months." And what I got in return wasn't what I expected. "With her, life doesn't seem like a routine anymore. I just know she is the one for me. I can never get a girl like Sanjana. I don't want a girl who is not Sanjana."
He slung his arm around my shoulders, knocked his forehead with mine and nodded. "I never thought I will see you in love."
"Am I in love?"
"Sickly in love. She makes you breathless, do you know that? You kept on looking at her. Your children are going to complain a lot about your romance." He chuckled, clicking his bottle with mine. "Keep her happy and have a wonderful family. Teach them the meaning of family. Oberoi's are cursed to not have a proper happy family." That's why he changed his name, for him, Oberoi carried a curse of constant despair and pain in their lives, crushed under the lights of the media and the empire.
"I will." My children would never go through what I did in my childhood. I would give them the love they deserved, show what it meant to be a family because I never had one. "Kabir Oberoi," I repeated. "Why you hate your real name so much?"
"What's to love? You removed your father's name from your name." He taunted. "Rafael is cool." Winking, he placed his bottle on the side and unstrapped his watch. "Give this to your son." He placed it on my palm. "Tell him your uncle gave him, tell him he is a lucky son to have you as a father."
"Nah." I knocked my shoulder with his. "He will know you as someone else, someone he can look up to. When I was alone in America, you flew all the way and stayed with me all those years. When I lost my sister, you held me as I cried in a strange graveyard."
"Don't make me emotional now." He sniffed, cleaned the invisible tears. "What will he know me as?"
"His grandfather." I stared down at the watch, resting on my palm. "I will make him a better man than me." I took a sharp breath.
"And what's the first thing you are going to teach him?"
"It's obvious, isn't it?"
"Protect his sisters."
Protect his twin if he gets one because I failed mine, I wouldn't let him fail his.
The knock heckled the reading. Closing it lightly, I mumbled the person to come in and frowned at the timings. After our talk, Rafe had gone to his bed and I was left to attend my readings.
The door parted to reveal a stiff girl, biting her lower lip and glancing around the room in nervousness.
"Sanjana, is everything okay?" I was about to move from the bed but she waved her hand and dismissed my actions.
"I—I couldn't sleep," She stammered, shivering slightly. "The room is too big and strange. I am trying sleeping from hours but I am not able to sleep. I don't know why. I tried to call my parents but they must be asleep. I don't know what to do. This country is strange."
This was her first trip.
She was overwhelmed as she said before.
"Sleep with me?" I offered, cautious to not overstep my boundaries. "I can talk you to sleep."
She cocked her head to the side, her nightwear doing things it shouldn't do. It wasn't the first time I was seeing half of her legs naked, seeing the green tank top but sometimes, your body didn't listen to you.
Hugging her arms, she laid on my bed and covered her body with the blanket. Her back faced me, her body remained tense. Dropping the book to the side, I slid lower on the bed and faced her hair.
"Talk," She mumbled.
"Did you know I once vomited on a birthday boy?"
"What?" A bit of humor became alive in her voice, and to my surprise, she twisted her body to see me.
"House Party. First year of college. I drank too much and vomited on the boy. Of course, I was thrown out and officially banned from any party for the next six months. That boy actually cried."
"How was your college?" She asked.
And I talked about my college life, let the secrets peal out in the open air in the small world of ours, conveyed how different and yet captivating that life had been and skipped the part where I had been too reckless with my life, too disappointing to my own self and lost who I had been.
In the ribbons of my talk, her eyes dropped, her soft breathing filled the air and I was left staring at her until my eyes dropped on their occasion, until I felt her moving on top of my chest and I said nothing, just tightened my arm around her waist.
I would ask her soon.
And I hoped she said yes.
______________________________
How was it?
Good or bad?
Don't forget to comment and vote.
Thank you!