SS: A Bend in the Road [Wattpad link-P.126] - Page 74

Dev,

I write this sitting next to you as you sleep. You would half expect me to do this. Maybe three years of our marriage could not make us enough acquainted with each other. But you could guess it now how much of a coward I am.

I have always been Dev.

Mira, my sister had always been the prettiest amongst us two. Growing up, there was a part of me who tried being her, but never could even hold a candle against her.

And then I have seen how her beauty became her bane. I have seen gazes stuck her, mentally stripping her, I saw the touches that lingered until she started doubting every intention, every person around her. I saw when she fell in love, she had hard time believing someone loved her for more than how she looked.

I saw the insecurities right there and I was too young and too immature to understand that.

I wondered if I looked like her, I would in no way worry about anything in the world.

And then Samrat, the guy Mira loved met someone else. Someone who wasn't beautiful in true sense but whom he fell in love with.

I saw how my sister was heart broken. I saw how she wouldn't look at herself in the mirror, starving herself, becoming a shadow of someone she had once been.

We moved to our guest house at Nainital, since our family doctor thought the change of place would do her good.

She had attempted suicide twice by then, cutting herself, and survived.

There were times she looked normal, sometimes she was so different from the person I grew up with.

I was with her during her last days when she hated every moment of being alive, when all she wanted was to be free.

I could still remember her hugging me and sleeping the last night before she passed away.

When I woke up the next day, with her cold body hugging me, I couldn't believe that she's gone.

Will you believe Dev, that she had talked to me that previous night?

"I am sorry Tara that I have become a pain" she told me that night. "I want to be normal again. Will you help me do it?" She asked.

As a reply, I hugged her real tight, scared that her once porcelain skin now looked transparent, looking so delicate as if one small scratch, and I'll draw blood from her.

We stayed such and went to sleep.

I believed come tomorrow, I'll double my efforts to make my sister normal again.

But come tomorrow, she was gone. And I stayed there feeling empty.

Six months to that incident, I met you.

When you slept with Geet that night, it was an old insecurity that slashed my heart. That one falls in love with a beautiful heart and not the outward appearance.

I could see how one could fall in love with that young girl who trusted, who loved. And I felt dirty from within.

I could never offer you love, I could never make you feel complete.

But Dev, I want you to know something. You told me if given a chance, you would go back to the day when you first met me.

If given a chance, I would undo a lot of things, I would want to ensure my sister lives but I also want to undo what we could have been.

Maybe it was too late and maybe it wouldn't even define this deep pain in my heart that I feel now, but Dev, I love you.

And I'm sorry you ever had to meet me. Had you met someone else, maybe your story would have been different.

Tara.

_____

Next to the letter was a rolled up sheet that had a painting of a portrait his wife had drawn.

A portrait that she usually paints when she wanted to get over someone. When she needed a closure.

In there was a portrait of him, Dev.

There are days when a blur of his past didn't bother him much. And there are days like these, when one thing led to another and everything came back to him, wrenching his gut.

The photograph in his purse which stayed dormant and which he never acknowledged otherwise made his heart constrict.

The picture was a family photo of their now broken family.

His grandmother and the three children were looking at the camera. The youngest brother was standing closest to the oldest sibling.

The closest hurt the most, Vikram thought as he saw Maan and him standing next to each other.

If there was any one he didn't want to hurt, it was Maan but knowingly or otherwise, it was him that he hurt.

When Vikram found out he was a step brother and he was taken under the wing along with his brother Dev by Savitri Devi and Maan, he was disturbed. He was more shocked than anything. This didn't change anything he felt for Maan.

But knowing somewhere that his mother and her association with his father had hurt another woman, Vikram questioned everything about himself. He had gone to this party by his friend with a f**ked up mind and had one drink too many.

The stupid masquerade theme of the party gave him a perfect excuse to be anything he wanted under the mask.

And when he happened to meet a girl and make out, as a distraction, he didn't think much about it. Until he saw the mask come off, of the girl's face and recognized her as Sameera Kohli, the woman his brother Maan dated.

That day Vikram felt disgusted at himself. He was not like his mother he never knew. But he was far worse, and the blood that's running in his veins was enough of an evidence.

He drove away from the city and didn't stop until morning.

When he had reached at the edge of a cliff, by morning and a hundred kilometres away from his city, he no longer wanted to go back.

He had left a note, a text to his brother asking him to not send a search party and that he wanted to figure out a few things, he had thrown the SIM card away.

And that was that.

He had come a long way from there and he no longer looked like his old self or kept contact with anyone from his past.

Six months later, after going to places with many a different identity, he had gone back to his city knowing that it wasn't a place they would search for him, thinking it was too obvious. And he continued his studies, running a Taekwondo class, a hobby that now was useful for him in more ways than he had thought.

He knew of the break up of his brother soon after he left, he had not once thought to go back to his house, even pass by the premises to catch a glimpse of the man he had respected so much.

And so many days after that fateful day, he had felt life came a full circle when he saw Neelima take a call from his brother.

"I'll come home tonight" she had said from the other side of the door.

Neelima, the same woman he was dangerously close to some moments ago.