Chapter 17
The phone kept ringing for a full minute before going silent again. He looked at the name flashing on the screen, but didn't dare pick it up. It had been a big mistake!
A few tears streamed in his eyes as he remembered his behavior from the previous evening. His sister - the sister he so dearly loved - had come to see her after so many months and what had he done. He had called her a...
Manav hid his face in the pillow feeling like a pile of shit. He yearned for the embrace of his sister's arms - wasn't she always there when he screwed up something like this to hug him, console him, gently make him understand, help him make it all good again? His sister was the rock of his existence, and he had insulted her so badly!
He remembered how Madhu di had cried. She had never, ever before cried in front of him without making an immediate attempt to hide those tears away. Not even when their father had died.
Manav was too small when their mother passed away. Madhu was the only mother he really knew. She protected him, pampered him and loved him more than either of his parents. After their father lost his job, he had noticed how he became more disturbed and abusive. He was never warm, but now his coldness was palpable. He noticed how Madhu sent him to Shaurya's house - his neighbor and best friend- every single time things started to get volatile. One time, he had seen their father slap her. His blood had boiled and he had yelled in rage at their father, almost knocking him down with the force of his anger. Madhu had held him back. Madhu consoled him and made him apologize for being disrespectful to their elders.
After that, he noticed how he was increasingly spending days and nights at Shaurya's place - not that he minded - in those months prior to his father's demise. Madhu told him she wanted someone to keep an eye on him while she was busy. When it wasn't Shaurya, it would be Mukund who Manav always looked upto as someone uber-cool. He took him on bike trips and taught him crazy tricks like using eggs in a catapult. If Madhu was closer to being a parent, Mukund was more like an elder sibling in Manav's eyes.
He knew money had become a problem in his house even though Madhu tried to make him feel it was all normal and made sure he got what he wanted. But when she quit her studies and started teaching in a school full time, he cut back his demands. Instead, he turned to Mukund bhaiya who always got him the latest shoes, his football etc., especially because Madhu didn't object to Mukund's gifts as much as she did to those by other people.
Eventually, as much as Manav loved the freedom he got from all the time outside home, he had started to feel his elder sister was protecting him from something. He never forgot the haunted look in her eyes and the memory of the imprint of their father's slap on her cheeks. But it was nothing like the flurry of pain he saw on her face the previous evening. All because of him! He had hurt her so much.
He had abandoned her and run away from the scene. Worse, he had come to his room and called Mukund from his cell-phone - a cell-phone he wasn't even supposed to have. He had bought it from the money Madhu had sent a few months back at his birthday, but hadn't told her about it, mostly because he knew she wouldn't approve. Nobody in their town let 14 year-olds have phones. His rich classmates had phones and he wanted one too, but that didn't stop him from feeling guilty for being sneaky about it. But he couldn't have told her about it because he didn't know how to get in touch with her. She had written in the note she had sent on her birthday that she had moved out of their small town and will contact him soon. That hadn't happened, until yesterday.
Thankfully, Mukund didn't pick up the phone last evening. Manav was angry when he called him, angry knowing Madhu had abandoned Mukund and wanted him to do the same without even giving a reason, angry believing Mukund bhaiya must have been hurt, angry thinking she was talking about pulling him out of this school which he so loved! A school where he was popular and girls...
But this morning, as anger subsided and realization hit him about what he had said to Madhu, he felt horrible. If didi said to stay out of Mukund bhaiya's way, there had to be a reason. He had begged sickness and excused himself from class. He lay in bed thinking about how to apologize to his sister and assure her he will do whatever she said if she forgave him, when his phone rang. He hoped it was Madhu, but that was impossible. Instead, it was Mukund, probably returning the missed calls from an unknown number.
Manav did not pick up.
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"Happy birthday Rishabhji"
"Happy birthday Rishabhji"
"Happy birthday Rishabhji"
Rishabh read the three words on the hurriedly scribbled note over and over. His heart beat was racing at a pace too high to be healthy. Without warning or anticipation, a feeling bubbled in a corner of his heart, breaking through the gloomy cover of pain and rage.
A feeling that could only be called happiness.
Happy? Why did he feel happy? Rishabh was shocked at his own reaction.
"Happy birthday Rishabhji"
Only one person in the world called him Rishabhji. He looked at the pen in his hand. Why had Madhu bought a gift for him? Why did knowing that make him feel happy - he didn't even like his birthday. What did it mean? Did it mean anything at all?
"I said, I think, Madhu is falling in love with you."
Trishna's words rung in RK's ears. He had spent the last hour rationalizing away any significance behind Trishna's theory, but this gift, these sparkling initials of his own name and his own strange reaction brought him smack back to square one.
Could she...? Was he...?
No. No, no, no. But she did care for him, he thought remembering a million different little moments when she had been there for him, looking out for him.
No, no, no, no. But he did feel drawn to her in a way he couldn't explain, he thought remembering the little moment the previous night when he had woken up in the car with her in his arms and forgot that anything else existed in this world.
No, no, no, no. She was just his mistress. He wasn't supposed to...
But the thought of her leaving, of going back to Tony and her previous life in a week revolted inside him.
No, no, no, no. He was a broken man. A monster. He didn't deserve love or compassion.
But she had given him boundless compassion even when he had hurt her brutally for no reason.
"Happy birthday Rishabhji"
He glanced at the note and suddenly remembered Madhu's smile. Her rare, real smile. A smile he so longed for, so missed, so... Had she smiled when she wrote the note?
"Dammit!" RK swore as he stood up and threw the pen and the note on his bed. "Trish you've screwed up with my brain." he swore loudly.
"So what if Madhu picked up something for me? It's no big deal. It doesn't have to mean anything. Just like it didn't mean anything when I got her those bangles." Rishabh admonished himself aloud.
Oh really? a tiny feeble voice inside him whispered, but he ignored it. Restless, he decided to get dressed for work.
He spent thirty minutes getting ready, another 20 answering emails, another 10 on the phone, and yet an hour later, his brain kept going back to the same questions.
'Why can't I ever resolve things when it comes to this girl? Why is it so hard to know?' RK wondered with irritation at his own confusion. The speck of curiosity he had acknowledged earlier in the day reared his head back. He felt like he didn't know enough.
He was not in control, and Rishabh Kundra hated not being in control.
He was torn, and as he often did of late when he was torn, he walked towards Madhu's room. He would see her, and he would know. Right?
Wrong! His rational mind which had taken a back seat in this hurricane of perplexing emotions made a heroic re-entry and RK halted in his step.
"What the hell am I doing? What am I thinking? This is not even a real option. Even if there are any...feelings...on either side, it's a bad bad idea to give them any weight." Logic yelled, loud and clear. He had to nip this in the bud, whatever this was, if this was anything.
Whatever gooey, unnamed, ugly yet beautiful, comfortable yet discomforting thing there was between RK and Madhu, it couldn't grow any further. It could never become a relationship of any sort, not even a friendship. That's final!
Feeling a sense of control and reaching deep within him to bring out 'RK the businessman's' roughness and strength, Rishabh Kundra knocked on Madhu's door to make sure she understood as well where the faultlines lay.
This had gone too far!
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There was a knock on the door followed by his voice, calling her.
"Madhu"
The voice was cold and urgent, angry even, and Madhu hurried off the bed where she'd been weeping all morning to open the door.
He stood there, dressed for work, an indecipherable expression on his face.
"Ji" she feebly spoke, feeling suddenly afraid of him. He felt different thqn he had in all the recent weeks. The air between them suddenly dropped several degrees in temperature.
She met his eyes and felt a storm coming. Was he angry at her? Did she do something wrong on their trip to Panchgani? Did she say too much to Trishna ji the previous day? She shouldn't have agreed to be friends with her...maybe she had told him about it. But what could she do? And it wasn't like it was going to mean anything...
She prepared for a blow, but suddenly something changed. His eyes thawed. He almost took his gaze away but stayed in place. If Madhu didn't know better, she would think he looked surprised to see her standing in front of him.
"B...breakfast?" was all he muttered before he turned away. Even though she wasn't dressed yet, Madhu couldn't refuse. She straightened her dupatta and walked behind him as they climbed down the stairs.
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An eerie silence enveloped the breakfast table. Both RK and Madhu looked up at the person sitting across from them every now and then and found them gazing into their breakfast plate as if it was the most interesting thing on earth, especially because neither of them were really eating.
"Are you okay?" they both spoke at the same time, looking up.
The moment RK had looked at Madhu's red, puffy eyes as she opened the door, he had been thrown completely off course. Like a giant broom, that one glance had swept away all his thoughts.
She had been crying. She had been CRYING. That was all he could think of ever since that moment until now. It must have been bad, for this was the first time Madhu had failed so horribly at masking her emotions.
"How's your fever?" she asked first, breaking RK's speechlessness.
"I am fine. You didn't have to..." RK stopped as Madhu grabbed his left hand.
"Have one more tablet before you leave. You're still a little warm." she said and removed her hand. All RK could do - like an idiot, he called himself - was nod.
"Madhu" he spoke again after a couple of minutes of composing himself. "Are you...I mean yesterday...do you want to talk..."
Seconds passed. Madhu opened her mouth, but just then RK's phone rang interrupting the conversation before she had the chance to respond.
He blinked at her, and picked up the phone once he saw it was his lawyer.
"Yes Mr Agarwal."
...
"Date's come? So soon? When?"
...
"Hmm. I know why they need to expedite this. That's ok. We can handle it. We still have eight days till the 1st."
...
"Don't talk in puzzles to me. What's the issue?"
...
"What? What picture?"
"Patil kaka, where is the newspaper?" RK suddenly yelled, terrifying Madhu both with the decibel and the fury of that voice. She looked up at him as Patil kaka ran with the newspaper. RK held his phone to his ear with one hand and rapidly turned the pages with his other hand.
"What the f**k!" RK screamed as his eyes fell upon the offending picture and the caption under it. He stood up, picked his jacket and walked out, not paying head to Madhu who was gesturing him to finish the food.
"Meet me at the office in twenty minutes, Mr Agarwal." he yelled into the phone as he walked out.
Madhu saw him disappear outside the house, then turned her eyes to the open newspaper and the picture that had clearly made RK very upset.
"Kundra group CEO's latest rain romance?" read the headline, and below it was a damning, if somewhat blurry picture, of a drenched RK walking hand in hand with another girl, crossing a hilly road, the focus of the picture was on RK and the tight grip holding their hands - hers and RK's.
Edited by teekay - 10 years ago
CID
Music Corner
