It hurts me so much to know that despite the amount of efforts I put in, only very few people like to comment willingly.
But who cares about the writer as long as you get to read the next chapter of the book, right?
*Enjoy.*
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A U T H O R ' S P O V
A lot of people love the sky. They think of it as something more than a storage of gases and clouds and vacuum like science makes it to be.
The dreamers look at it as if it is a portal to another world, as if by getting lost in its enchanting colours for hours, they would actually fall through it someday and see something more than the promised planets and stars on the other side, something more than they could imagine, full of colours that a human eye couldn't even begin to comprehend.
To be honest, on some days, it is just what the scientists make it to be- all air and blue and clouds. Plain, dull and boring. But on the other days, it dresses in prepossessing colours, and becomes a spectacular sight, a special treat for the dreamer's eyes.
That particular evening, the sky was a little bit of both.
It started with a melodious pink with hints of blue, almost resembling stripes of cotton candy. It stood vibrantly, as if releasing beauty and peace from its every corner. But more than that, it emitted love. And the love was quite evident when Manik had delicately held Nandini's face and kissed her, with the setting sun on one side, and the rising moon on another.
It quickly turned into lavender, and then dark purple. The stars were more prominently visible now, playing their own game of hop-skip-jump, disappearing and reappearing behind the cloud cover according to their own convenience, shining like glimpses of naughtiness behind a toddler's happy eyes. Dark purple. It stood for mischief.
But before you could enough of that colour, it changed again. This time it was blue. But not the ocean colour, one that makes us think of all things pretty. This blue was dark. Persian. Laced with clouds that covered the stars. It didn't stand for calm and tranquility like it usually does. It stood for chaos in persistency.
When the first droplets of rain touched the ground, the sky was an ash grey. It indicated how nothing is truly in our hands, and how change is quick to happen. The wind was rustling passionately and the unexpected shower soon turned into something much more when thunder roared in the night sky and flashes of blinding lightning were seen. It was a thunderstorm.
The sky turned pitch black only when the thunderstorm was at its peak. It was wild and it was terrifying in a way that scared everyone who dared to watch it. People in the town packed early and shut the windows of their houses extra tight that night, because if nature had a way to regain control and spread destruction, this was it. The most powerful thunderstorm that the people had seen in the past atleast twenty years.
I think everybody has some wild in them, the knack of adventure, to do something reckless with no regrets. But anyone who would see a young girl standing in the middle of the road, at the centre of a brewing thunderstorm wouldn't call her wild, they'd call her stupid.
Maybe that was what she was. Stupid. But that didn't stop her from standing there and drenching in the rain, her brown eyes fixed at the Augustine Hospital that stood opposite her with an unfathomable emotion in her eyes.
She stared at it as if it was her sweet dream that was snatched away and turned into a nightmare. Maybe that was true. Maybe not. Truth being told, she didn't exactly know what she felt anymore.
Her memories were tumbling inside her brain like pieces of a puzzle she didn't know how to solve, some just more distinct than the others. There was no timeline. She didn't remember if she loved first and then the world hurt her or did she hurt first and then got saved by love.
All she knew was that she had loved. And she hadn't loved in pieces like most people of her age did. She had loved hard, in an irreversible way, giving all her heart, all of her pieces, the broken ones and the mended, to that one man who had promised to keep her safe until his last breath. She had loved too much. And maybe that was her flaw. The only mistake she had made was probably to love too much, because this- the unbearable pain she was experiencing had to be punishment for it.
Besides that, what she also knew was that she had been hurt. By a lot of people who thought it was okay to think of her as a second option.
She often found herself wondering why. She loved them so much, but she was never the one they chose. It was always somebody else. She couldn't point that somebody else's name yet, but she had the face well on the top of her mind.
As the night became damper and colder, she clung her hands close to her arms, trying to provide herself with the little warmth it could.
To retire and go back to a safer place for spending the night was not an option. At all. She had work to do. She had places to be. She had a love to avenge. And above all, she had chaos to create.
It was easy. For her to be able to create chaos, it would be pretty damn easy. You know what they say: to defeat a monster, you have to first become a monster. To create chaos, you have to be chaotic.
Her thoughts. Her memories. Her emotions. Her appearance. Everything you could think of was a mess. And yet, 'mess' would be too subtle a word to describe what she was at the moment. Chaos, though, was closer.
Ask yourself, what is chaos?
There are too many answers. Too many descriptions. But ask me, and I'd point my finger at that girl who once loved too much, who's emotions were never in order, who felt too much, sometimes even expected too much, the one who's been broken and lied to and maybe even betrayed but that never stopped her from hoping or loving again. A hundred times, she's rebuilt herself from the pieces of her broken old self. That girl is chaos.
But this girl, walking in the middle of the storm like she was the one who created it in the first place? She was way past chaos. She was fire.
Unfortunately, she wasn't the kind of fire from which you seek comfort in her warmth. Not anymore.
She had become the kind of fire that grows recklessly. It would burn you into ashes in front of her own eyes, and she wouldn't care.
Maybe because when she was burning, nobody bothered to care too.
Giving one last glance to the hospital that for some reason meant too much and too little at the same time to her, she walked in the opposite direction from where she had come.
She walked as if she owned the street below and the thunder overhead.
That was the plan- to walk, until blinding headlights of a car were flashing at her.
She paused, and the car slowed by her, the window of the passenger seat being rolled down.
"Hey!" It was girl, no older than herself, with short brown hair and eyes that had a sparkle in them, in a way, reminding her of her old self.
At least that is what she remembered the man she loved telling her- that she was the prettiest when she was happy because there was a shine in her eyes when she smiled. And now, she knew for a fact, that shine was lost forever. And she had no intentions in wanting to make it return.
"Where to?" The girl in the car asked.
She hesitated to reply. But the rains were still heavy and even if she walked all night, she might not reach her destination. It was an hour's drive, which give or take a few, was a five hour walk.
Leaning in, she answered, "The hospital below the creek."
The girl in the car looked surprised. "That is just where I'm heading. You're in luck. Hop in."
And then, the passenger door was open. She hesitated again. But then, what was the worst that could happen? She could die, right? Death didn't seem so scary anymore.
Grabbing the door, she sat in. She was soaking in water, but the girl didn't seem to mind. The heater was switched on, and the engine of the black Volvo roared again.
Keeping the good of her jacket still intact on her face, she squeezed some water off it, asking, "Are you always so trusting? To strangers who's face you haven't even seen? Giving them lifts after midnight?"
"Honestly," the girl who had so generously decided to give her a lift answered, "No. But you looked like you could use a lift. And plus, I can still barely see your face. God, wonder what's wrong with the street lights."
It was a short circuit. She knew because she had stood patiently and watched all the streets lights go off one-by-one just an hour ago.
The girl behind the wheel decided to speak up again. "What were you doing, anyway? Planning to walk it to the hospital?"
Staring out of the window and the now speeding buildings, she shrugged. "Yes."
"Doesn't the storm scare you?" Another question asked.
She gulped, loudly. "No."
She herself wondered why such a powerful storm didn't scare her.
Maybe because ever since she was a child, she'd been hurt over and over again. But she was never the girl to hide from pain. She hid in pain, and she hid for so long that the pain didn't hurt anymore.
Maybe that is why, she didn't want to hide from the storm. She wanted to hide in it. She wanted to let the storm consume her, drench her, suffocate her, maybe almost kill her until the heaven decides she had won. Until it decided that it had tested the girl a little too much. She wanted the satisfaction, to stand so close to something that could easily kill her, and yet not die.
She wanted the satisfaction to defeat death, because even with her disheveled memory, she could think of many people who couldn't.
And even if she didn't win, even if she did die, it was not like she had anything or anyone to lose.
Except one person, whom she had grown pretty close to in the past few years. And now, she saw her feelings for that person only as a weakness.
So, this was the first step that she knew she had to take. To remove that weakness.
"I like you," the girl behind the wheel said, "I'm Jeff, by the way. It's nice to meet you."
Jeff. Weird name. Pretty girl. However, Jeff was trying hard to make conversation, so she did the same.
"You have family admitted at the hospital?" She asked, although she was least interested to know the answer. It was the faint lights on the roads passing quickly that kept her eyes captivated as the car moved swiftly on the empty roads.
Jeff smiled victoriously in return, as if happy about having cracked the tough girl she had decided to give a lift. "Friend. And those idiots didn't even call me. Thank God they're famous enough for an accident to be covered by the news orelse I would have never known."
Then, Jeff added, "What about you?"
"Same," she replied, her attention at the storm that had seemed to ceased as suddenly as it had appeared.
"I'm Jeff, by the way," Jeff repeated. "And you are...?"
She shut her eyes briefly. This was what she was avoiding since the moment she got into the car. But she also knew answering this question was inevitable.
Who was she, after all?
The girl she was born and raised as, or the girl she was made to be since the past few years?
In the end, she decided to go with the answer that pleased her the most.
"Mia," she replied, almost nonchalantly. Her voice raspy, and distant.
"Beautiful name," Jeff grinned, "And it's nice to meet you."
"You too," Mia said. It wasn't a complete lie after all. She had been glad to be given a ride to her destination, no matter how much she also wanted to withstand the storm.
Jeff cleared her throat, switching on the radio that surprisingly caught network.
'–our love is six feet under
I can't help but wonder
If our grave was watered by the rain
Would roses bloom?
Could roses bloom
Again?'
"Have you ever been in love?" Jeff asked.
"Yes." She answered, and shockingly enough, not one but two faces flashed in Mia's head. "What about you?"
"I am in love," Jeff answered with a grin and Mia almost felt like rolling her eyes. Well, that explains her overjoy.
'-they're playin' our sound
Layin' us down tonight
And all of these clouds
Crying us back to life
But you're cold as a night-'
"This was his favourite song," Mia said, to herself, as a new memory that flashed in front of her eyes, of them sitting together and him singing this on a guitar for her.
"Was?" Jeff briefly turned her eyes away from the road to the stranger sitting beside her.
"He's dead."
The one thing that she felt except the pain was nostalgia. The one thought that played in her mind was of how different her life would have been if only she was given the choice.
Imagine someone giving you the choice to take it all away. To take away your pain and your hurt and your miseries and even the nightmares that keep you awake at night. They take away everything that has caused you to shed even a single tear in your life, and in return, give you years of peace, happiness, and sunshine and love, a life as close to a fairytale as you could imagine in today's world.
Sounds like a pretty good deal right?
That was what happened with her– Mia. Except, due was not given a choice. Her fate snatched away all her memories from her– good and bad, leaving her as a nobody with nothing.
And then, just when she was beginning to believe that she deserved happiness, when she was finally ready to move on and never look back at the life she had lost, the bubble broke. Life happened. The pain, the hurt, the memories, the emotions- it all came back together, and all at once, hurting a hundred times more than they would have hurt individually.
And the worst part, there was no timeline. They were individual moments dancing in the ballroom of her damaged head, like small videos and snippets of the life that she didn't remember living,
And it felt hurtful. Burdening. Impairing. Painful. Suffocating. Crushing. Soul-tearing. Unfortunately, there were only so many words created for the feeling of when it pained so much, that everything seemed hollow from within. Like she was.
It was an hour later when she got down of the car and turned to thank the stranger, who's only name she knew.
"I'm going to go park the car," Jeff had smiled, over enthusiastic for a person so early in the morning. Dawn had just broken.
"Thank you for the ride," Mia told her, walking towards her window after getting out of the car, and stood in the light of the hospital.
For the first time in the past one hour, proper light fell onto her face, highlighting her fair skin, brown eyes and black hair, that once flew freely across her back, now barely reaching her chest.
Even to a straight girl, Mia would be beautiful. Jeff just stared at her, and she kept staring, but not the way you look at someone when you find them beautiful. Jeff looked at Mia like she had seen a ghost.
Mia, confused, but didn't bother to ask her what went wrong. She had more important things to do. And so, she turned back and walked inside the hospital, which was very different from the Augustine Hospital that was so familiar to her.
Standing at the reception, she looked into the register, and read the names of the last people that were discharged.
Aliya Saxena.
Navya Naveli.
Cabir Dhawan.
Weird names, was the only thought in her head, but then again, Indian names would always be weird to a girl who had spent the past few years as an American between Americans.
And then, she found the name that she was looking for. Without the help of the receptionist, she walked inside, took the lift to the second floor, and then walked into the room number she had read in the register.
There were no doctors to stop her as she closed the door behind her, her eyes fixed at the patient lying in the hospital bed, his eyes shut. He looked weak.
His file lied on the side table, with the doctors signatures underneath.
Her thumb delicately traced his name and she spoke it aloud to herself as she had the first time that she met him. "Zubin Singhaniya."
It was only a whisper under her breath, but his eyes flew open. He had always been a very aware sleeper, but one would expect him to be deep into sleep atleast when he was sedated. Turns out, he wasn't.
Saying goodbye was going to be harder than she thought.
"Mia?" Zubin only said in a whisper. He wasn't sure if she was actually here or was his fever making him hallucinate her presence, for she had been long declared dead by the police.
A small smile played on her lips. He was the only person alive in this whole wide world who actually mattered to her. Whom she actually felt something for.
But feelings were a weakness.
Taking the pillow from the side chair, she sat beside him. "It's me," she whispered.
"Mia?" He repeated, in disbelief. Water filled in his eyes for keeping it open without blinking for too long, but how could he blink? He was afraid he'd shut his eyes and the angel in front of him would disappear into the air.
She felt like holding his hand and telling him she was here, but she didn't.
You know what she thinks by now, don't you?
That feelings were a weakness.
And every weakness had to be eradicated.
His eyes shut suddenly and a muffled scream filled the room as she pressed the pillow in her hand on his face. His weak hands struggled and tried to push her away but she was too strong and determined as compared to his sedated self.
"M– Mia," were the only words that escaped his lips.
She didn't care if he would survive this or die. She had to make her point. She wanted them to know– all of them, that she was coming.
And she was not stopping here. She was not stopping until she snatched away all of their happiness just like they had taken away hers, or atleast that's the distorted memories in her disordered mind told her.
She blamed them all for where she was today. And now they would know.
"It's not Mia," she bent down, whispering to him, while he struggled.
"Wh– Who?" He uttered before all his energy receded. His hands stopped trying to push her away and he coughed in breathlessness.
And then, it all went silent.
While tears materialised in her eyes, a malevolent smile lingered on her face as only two words left her lips.
"It's Mukti."
She did answer to his last question to her, but his eyes were shut and he probably wasn't around to hear anymore.
Wearing the hood of the jacket again, she leaving nothing but melody as she whistled away to the tune of the song that was his favourite, and now, she had decided, hers too.
'Retrace my lips
Erase your touch
It's all too much for me;
Blow away
Like smoke in air
How could you die so carelessly?'
✿