Chapter 35 #2
“If you had known she had a miscarriage you would have spared her your words that day?” Amaal smiled hollowly. “Come back the next day to finish?”
His eyes squeezed shut — “You don’t understand.” He muttered.
“I don’t understand what?”
“That they are responsible for so much that has gone wrong!” He pushed back, turning away from her.
“I am not a part of the core team I built, I am not holding my militia, I am not serving my constituency like I promised them, I am not running the Health Ministry for which I have been doing grunt work and ground work for three years, I am not even living in the place that had been the only home to me!” He whirled, the storm raging now.
“I am a party president who is a tool in the CM”s hands because everybody knows that a party in government is only ever run by the head of that government! ”
“And this is because of Atharva and Iram?”
“Who else?”
Amaal stared at him. Unblinking. “You know who else.”
“Me?”
“You know you are responsible for it.”
“So it’s all my fault? For wanting justice, for serving the truth, for implicating Aamir Haider, for saving Atharva’s life, for crossing party lines to keep him safe, for doing my damnest best at every point where a choice was impossible!
It is my fault that I always fell into making choices between worse and worser and did what I found the most appropriate?
It is my fault that Atharva, Adil and Qureshi stepped into the light and handed me the reins of their dark world?
My fault that their hands remained clean while mine are bloodied?
What do you mean to tell me, Amaal? Is it my fault that I was a prisoner of war and saw the end of my brothers and Chaturvedi?
Is it my fault that I still cannot sleep at nights and not because of nightmares?
I just can’t! Tell me if it’s my fault that I cannot look at Iram Haider, despite everything, and not see Sia Chaturvedi alive.
Iram may be an angel, but all I see is the end when I look at her.
I just don’t like her. I cannot like her.
She is everything that should not have been!
She is the dead Sia to me, and misguided Atharva.
Do you understand me? I have so much going on inside me for Atharva right now, he is the man I relied on, the only family I ever learnt to trust and be dependent on, the man who I knew would never abandon me just like I wouldn’t abandon him and now I look at him moved on in his life, not even caring to look back and see what happened to me!
He threw me out of everything he knew I had worked…
” his breath swelled. Samar gasped, closing his eyes. “Sorry.”
Amaal didn’t want to let the shell around her heart crack.
She did not want to let anything make her soften towards him again.
But the echo of his words still reverberated within the four walls of her office.
He was not justifying his actions. He was laying bare what had happened inside him.
And Amaal had worked long enough in the world of media and politics to know that there was no one truth.
There was always ‘your truth, my truth, and the truth.’ The world was subjective. Humans, more so.
She filled a glass with water and held it out to him. His eyes opened. He shook his head. “Forget I came here.” Samar turned his back on her and strode to the door.
“Stop.”
He didn’t.
Amaal got up and sprinted to him, catching his elbow before he reached for the door handle.
“Samar.”
‘What?” His head turned over his shoulder.
“Don’t snap at me!” She barked. His eyes softened.
“Amaal, you do not deserve this rage inside me. Don’t offer to collect it.”
“I am offering you a seat and water.”
He stared at her for a long moment. Then sighed.
They went to the sitting area across from her table. He took the seat at the centre of the long sofa, and she sat on the lone armchair, a distance ripe between them.
“Water?”
“I’m good.”
They sat in silence then. Minutes passed.
She had work to do. She had a long night.
He had to go do whatever he had come here to do.
But it didn’t matter right now. They were sharing the same air after seven months, after that miserable day when he had told her what he had done.
Her first instinct had been to run away from him.
All she had seen in him that moment was a monster who had given a woman knowingly into another monster’s hand.
All aspects of the Samar she had known had vanished in a split second.
And then he had pressed his car key into her hand and walked himself.
It had still taken her a long time to reconcile those two facets. To trust that the one she had known was real, too. His rant just now had… shockingly reiterated that the man she had known had not been an illusion.
“Do you regret it?”
“What?”
“What you did to Iram?”
“Every day,” he deadpanned, eyes on the glass of the coffee table. A second ticked, and he said — “I did not do it because I did not like her.”
Her jaw clicked. Samar’s eyes rose to her, and she held his gaze.
“It was on the night of the blast of Leh rally. Atharva was losing it in front of my eyes and I thought… I now see in hindsight how selective my mind became that I believed Sufiyaan Sheikh’s rant about Iram being his sister, belonging to their fathers’ party.
But in that moment, I was blinded with anger and helpless seeing Atharva brawl with the Police.
He was on a mission to destroy himself and our party for her.
When I got to know that Atharva was leaving her alone in Leh, I passed on that information, thinking it might work for us.
I wanted to show him that Aamir Haider’s daughter would turn in a minute if she got to go back to her father’s party. ”
“That is sick,” she said, and his eyelids dropped. A bitter smile crunched on his mouth — “It’s not even the beginning.”
Her throat tightened.
“While Sufiyaan had her kidnapped from the train, Atharva rescued her and ran away. He sent me his coordinates and…”
“You sent it to Sufiyaan Sheikh.” Amaal completed, not even appalled anymore. But Samar’s raging eyes snapped up to her. “I had to let her go to save Atharva!”
Her mouth dropped open.
“I was desperate and lost and without any solution in that storm, and again in hindsight it seems like I did it out of spite but I did it to keep Atharva alive!” He raged. “Atharva always lives!” He pulled off his specs and dropped his eyes into his fingers.
Silence.
“It is true I gave her to Sufiyaan Sheikh,” his voice softened.
“But it is also true that after that I did everything in my power to protect her, to ensure Sufiyaan Sheikh stays out of her circuit, I made sure that Sayyid Butt got involved and held Sufiyaan’s reins where Iram was concerned.
When Atharva was arrested, I still did my best to keep her safe in whatever way I could.
” He shook his head, and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“And I haven’t been able to sleep easy for whatever little time I do ever since. ”
His thumb and forefinger turned red on the bridge of his nose, and he pulled back up with a resigned exhale. Their eyes met again.
“Want to know more?”
She laughed bitterly. “What can be worse?”
“My militia kidnapped Adil.”
“You can’t be seriou…”
“He was not in an accident,” Samar said what Amaal had suspected then. But like always, some things were never asked in this founders’ circle. She had assumed this was one of them.
“I found out that Atharva and Adil were tampering with tapes that could incriminate Aamir Haider. I put men behind him. They were supposed to just take the tapes but they took him too…”
“Did you do that to him…? He was…”
He shook his head.
“Then?”
Samar exhaled. “It happened while he was trying to escape.”
“And what did you do? Let it happen?!”
“I wasn’t even there!” He barked back. She glared. And he relaxed. “I wasn’t there.”
“Do I even know you?”
“I didn’t want to kidnap Adil, Amaal. But he recognised them and then there was drown or cross over.
Every day he was there I kept apprised of him, I kept on top of his health, I made sure he was taken care of.
Is it sick? Yes it is! But you don’t know what equations we share and what he did before this happened, so before you question if you even know me, think, do you even know him or Atharva or anyone else for that matter?
” Samar panted. “People lie through their teeth, people you trust, people you rely on, people whose hands you put your lives in. Adil and I sorted this out and I don’t want to revisit those weeks when I was pushing, pleading, begging them to tell me what was going on.
They knew what this meant for me, and yet they went at it.
So that they could bury it if it came to it.
Aamir Haider was just another criminal to them.
He was Sia’s murderer to me and only me. ”
He came up for breath, staring at her. She couldn’t take that torment in his eyes. She hated that she was angry at him, and still understood where he came from. She hated that he was wrong, and yet she wanted to listen to him.
Amaal turned her eyes away. And let the room breathe. Again, everything went silent. This time she did not count minutes, or look at him. He sat, too, without saying anything.
“Iram and Adil,” she finally voiced. “Anyone else?”
He did not respond, meaning the end. She had seen enough of him to know which silence meant ‘no comment’ and which silence meant ‘the end.’ Amaal hated that she understood that too.
“I have many sins to my name and many more regrets.” He put his specs back on. “These live at the fore of my eyes every day. You were right, there is no justification.”
“Did you apologise to Adil?”
He looked at her. Which meant he had.
“And yet you do nothing to behave with Iram.”
His mouth pressed together. He opened it, then snapped it shut. Then opened it again.
“I am guilty of what happened to her,” he said. “But I am also unable to force myself to pretend I like her. I have never been able to pretend.”
“Does Atharva know this?”
“What?”
“That you regret it?”
“It doesn’t change anything. And I understand him. If it were you, even I wo…”
The air stilled inside the room. Her breath stilled with it. There was no oxygen anymore.
Samar rose to his feet. “You have a long night, I have to finish candidate feedback forms with Zafarji.”
“Yes.” She got up too.
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
He stalked to the door and grabbed the door handle.
“Samar?”
“Hmm?”
She hesitated.
He stood there, his back tightening with every empty second that passed.
“Maybe…” she said. “The start to your peace is becoming independent of Atharva. If you spent your prime years on something with your core team and it didn’t work out for you, you have another mature decade to spend on something all on your own.”
His head turned over his shoulder, his eyes cutting to her, hopeful, needy, looking more innocent than they ever had. Amaal smiled — “And I am told politicians become better with age.”
A small wrinkle dipped into his cheek in what was a semblance of a smile.
“Hmm.”