"What do you feel towards your wife, Mr. Rathore?"
"What are my options?"
"Well, it's not exactly a multiple choice question. There is no correct answer."
"I don't entertain questions that have no answers."
"Alright. Then let's tackle this bit by bit. Do you have feel strongly about her?"
"Weak is never a word I would use to describe anything associated with her, least of all what I feel about her."
"That's good. Would you say your strong feelings for her come under what one may call a 'negative' category?"
"Are you asking if I hate her?"
"I wouldn't put that so bluntly, no."
"I sometimes felt I did. Most of the times I wished I could. But no, it's not what you can call hate."
"How about anger?"
"There was a time that was all I felt. Not anymore."
"Okay. Do you perhaps resent her for what happened?"
"Contrary to the popular belief, I am a human being. I couldn't have gone through what happened without feeling an ounce of resentment. Towards her, but perhaps, more towards myself."
"You feel hesitant to blame her, Mr. Rathore."
"Imagine, if you would please, an ocean. Imagine strapping the biggest oxygen tank you could find to yourself. Imagine being prepared to the best of your ability and resources and jumping into the ocean. To explore it. To discover its depth. What do you think would happen?"
"Well, I would be able to see the depths that others standing at the shore cannot. I'll experience a hidden world from an intimate distance. I suppose it would be scary at first but a unique experience like this would be worth the fear."
"Now, imagine while you are within the ocean, you get obsessed with the idea of reaching its very bottom. The urge to be the only one to be get to its depth, the only one to so intimately know the ocean that it bears all its secrets to you pushing you forward. You keep going down and you feel the oxygen running out. But you push on regardless. Because you just know that there's an abundance of air at the bottom which will keep you alive. The struggle to reach there is worth it. Imagine the ocean pushing you back, it refusing to make you the only person to know it to its very core. It resists and keeps you at a distance. It doesn't allow you to be anything special. Imagine you being involved in a battle with the ocean's immeasurable vastness and depth with your depleting amount of oxygen and your weary limbs. What do you think would happen?"
"Well, unless I don't get back to the surface, I'd surely die when my oxygen runs out."
"In this situation would you blame the ocean for its vastness or your oxygen for not being enough to take on the ocean?"
"It would be absurd to blame the ocean."
"Exactly. My oxygen ran out. How can I blame the ocean when I was the one who jumped in knowing that its depth is unconquerable?"
"I cannot blame the unconquerable depth of the ocean. However, I can blame its stubbornness. How can the ocean be so cruel to the person who it knows has risked their all to try to reach its depth and push them back right when they are already struggling for their survival?"
"Ah, now that is a point worth pondering upon. Do I resent the stubbornness when it was its very stubbornness that I had taken as a challenge? The unflinching, unbending, unbowing nature of the ocean which had attracted me to it in the first place. I questioned myself, was it right of me to resent the very things I fell for when they turned were turned around to hurt me?"
"It is very much within the realm of possibility. After all, as you claimed it yourself, you are a human being."
"It took her a long time for her to admit that, you know."
"That you are a human?"
"That I am a being."
"It surprises me how inconclusive your answers are about how you feel towards your wife when you clearly still think about her a lot."
"What I shared with her might have been brief moment of time but it was all consuming. She reigned over my every sense; every cell of my body yearned for her. The time apart from her will never be enough to rewire my entire existence so I would stop thinking of her."
"Circling back to where we started from - do you love your wife, Mr. Rathore?"
"Oh, god no. I could never love her. Not after everything that happened."
"You contradict yourself, Mr. Rathore."
"I can be many things but never a hypocrite. Yes, I feel strongly for her. Yes, it's not a negative feeling. Yes, I think of her still. No, I do not love her or anything remotely close to that. All these statements are true."
"How? Logically speaking, all these statements cannot be all true at once."
"It never was science with us."
"Okay. Maybe not love. But do you care for her?"
"No."
"Do you still nurture a wish to be with her again?"
"Not in this lifetime."
"Do you ever get the idea of reaching out to her to get to know what she is up to?"
"I am sure she is thriving in her life. I don't have to waste my time or energy to confirm that."
"So, when you say you still 'think about her', what is it that you think about?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing."
"Are you saying this because you are unable to explain what you think about or-"
"No. I think about her. She wanders in my thoughts at any moment of the day without any warning. I would be drinking my black coffee and her thought would wander in my mind. Or I would be in my bed and I'd think of the nights she'd reach out for my arm while still deep in her sleep. The click of the seat-belt of my car would trigger a vapid thought about her. I think of her. Then I blink. And the thoughts are gone. This happens to me everyday. It has happened me to thrice just during the course of this conversation. Just like we never actually learn how to breathe, we just do, I think of her. I don't do it as a habit or routine. I don't even know I am doing it. I just do."
"Ah but breathing is explicitly tied to survival. If you thinking of her is like breathing, one can interpret it as you hinging your survival on her thoughts?"
"I could very well stop breathing but her thoughts would still find a way to accompany me. As long as a single cell of my body persists, her thoughts remain."
"Your talk reeks of the passion you still feel towards her and yet you call it nothing? Who are you trying to fool here, Mr. Rathore?"
"Why are my simple truths never construed as such?"
"Because the reflection between what you say and how you behave is distorted."
"It's not just her thoughts that make me feel nothing. She herself doesn't make me feel nothing. Does that clear the reflection a little bit?"
"Not enough."
"I saw her. After...days? Months? Maybe it was years. I don't know. The time as I know has been cleanly divided as Before Her and After Her. Anyway. Sometime After Her, I saw her. During that bit of time I had gone through the whole gamut of emotions you are probing me about. I was feeling so much that I couldn't make sense of anything. And before I knew it, I was in the car and I was driving towards where she was. She was never too far away for me to track down. Not like she had made any efforts to stay hidden either. I knew where was she; she knew that I knew where she was. Perhaps in that time we were both waiting for the other. Me for her to return. Her for me to bring her back. Anyway. That past is now a long forgotten history.
It didn't take me long to reach her. I didn't have to navigate through the unmade, twisting roads of the village that led to her house to see her. There is a huge field within a short walking distance of her village's residential area. Anyone who wishes to go to the village first has to pass by that field. There is a huge tree there. It is a favorite spot of the children of the village to play at. I had stopped my car near that tree when I had noticed a small crowd of children huddled around the tree. Within that crowd of laughing, jumping, carefree crowd of kids, I saw her."
"What was she doing?"
"There was a swing. A simple thing really with two long ropes tied strongly around a thick branch of the tree and a wooden plank serving as the seat. She was sitting on that swing. And as the kids around her cheered, she used her feet to push the swing higher in the air. Higher and higher she went, her smile turning into a grin then into a laugh with each push. My gaze was transfixed on that laugh as I went through all the emotions a human being could possibly feel all at once. Before one of those emotions could overpower the others and becoming the dominating one to control my reaction, my gaze went from her face to her lap.
There was a child sitting on her lap, a girl, held tightly within the secure grip of her arm. She too was laughing. The pair of them, laughing, as the swing went up, then down, and then up again; higher in the sky then coming closer to the ground, before going up again. Up and down they went. And they were laughing."
"And you?"
"I waited. Waited for the emotion to dictate my reaction. But nothing came. I felt everything all at once and I exhausted all my emotions, all at once. I was left with nothing. So, nothing I did."
"That's...intriguing."
"Is it? I don't think so. There's a limit to everything. Emotions included. Isn't that why we can never feel just one emotion all the time? Even grief goes through stages. Happiness can trigger sadness. Melancholy gives way to pessimism. Mourning can also change into celebration of a life once was. Emotions have a limit. I just exhausted all the limits of my emotions at one time instead of using them up throughout my life."
"So, a constant state of apathy is what you feel?"
"It's a constant state of nothingness. It's like I am standing in a void. I reach out and it's nothing. I look around and the vastness of nothingness greets me. It's not suffocating. It's not liberating either. It's just...there. Like I am here. Talking to you but feeling nothing. There's no closure. There's no enlightenment. I am not stuck in the past, or living the present; I am not even expecting the future. I live because I breathe. I work because I move. I eat because I am fed. I sleep because the day wouldn't end. I reply because I am talked to. I smile when it's expected of me to smile, frown when it's expected of me to frown. There's no emotion guiding my actions. Just the years of muscle memory at work here."
"What a morbid life you are living, Mr. Rathore. It's quite...pitiful."
"There was a time I would've taken offense to that. But now I just feel-"
"Nothing."
"Nothing."
"Tell me Mr. Rathore, what if she comes back? That fact that despite everything that happened, despite the time apart, she is still legally tied to you in a relationship, must mean that the path she could take to come back still exists. What then? Would your Nothing change into Something?"
"Can she even come back to me?"
"She could. Time heals many wounds. Why not give entertain this possibility?"
"I asked 'can' she come back to me. I know she will come back eventually. To my home. To my room. To my life. But to me? I doubt that."
"You said so yourself 'weak' is not something she is. She broke down your walls once, she could do it again."
"Voids of nothingness don't have walls or doors for anyone to break in through.There is no me that she knows of to come back to. Instead of me there's just nothingness. Her Everything wouldn't be able to withstand my Nothing. She'd lose.
And besides, I don't plan to let her win this time anyway."
-x-
a/n: nothing just venting. not even watching the show anymore but i see how this show, specially this fd, has done aryan dirty. i see it and i seethe in rage. and sadness. but above all i just feel for this character. my aryan singh rathore. who has done nothing wrong ever. but this world just cannot understand him. but i do, oh, how i understand him and cherish him and love him. for who he is. all that he is. every single of HIM that he is.
*hugs aryan singh rathore to give him the love&protection&safety that he is the most entitled to*
Bhabhi Ji Ghar Pe Hain?
