Chapter 5
Chapter Five
DHRITHI
Her name is Dhrithi.
The sound of his voice trickled through her system like hot chocolate on a cold winter’s day. Dazed and disoriented, she stared at all the people crowding her hospital room. Her mother tried to stroke her hair again, but her finger caught in a particularly bad tangle, pulling on Dhrithi’s hair and making her already sensitive scalp sting.
Her gaze swept the room, stopping on Amay who stood to the back, his arms folded across his chest as he leaned against the wall.
Varun was dead. She stared at Amay, wondering what he thought of that fact. But his eyes and his expression gave nothing away. He was nothing like the boy she’d once known. The boy she’d once forced herself to mock and scorn along with everyone else. The boy who’d –
“Mrs. Gokhale.” The policeman’s strident voice cut through her muddled, maudlin thoughts. “We need to ask you a few questions.”
Mrs. Gokhale. But Varun was dead, so she wasn’t Mrs. Gokhale anymore. She was Dhrithi. Just Dhrithi.
Her name is Dhrithi.
A strange bubble of elation swept through her.
“Can you tell us a little more about the accident Ma’am? Do you remember anything from that night?”
Her bubble popped. Her gaze swung towards her father who was standing to the back of the room, stone-faced. Dhrithi’s heart started a frantic thrumming, the machine she was hooked on to beeping in tandem to it.
The other doctor who’d been doing most of the talking to her parents only frowned at the machine, but Amay pushed off from the wall, stepping closer to her bed. He didn’t say or do anything, just positioned himself near her bedside, his intense stare fixed on the policeman.
Dhrithi belatedly realised that everyone else was looking at her, barring Amay. “I-I-I,” she stuttered. “Don’t really remember much.”
“Where were you going? Do you remember that?” The lady inspector spoke for the first time.
“Out.”
“Out where, Madam?” The policeman looked a little annoyed now, his avuncular smile fading.
“I didn’t have a specific plan,” she murmured, deciding to stick to the truth as much as possible. “I just wanted to get out of the house.”
“And your husband?”
Her eyes shot to her father again. He looked away, not holding her gaze. Dhrithi’s hand clenched in the white, hospital sheet.
“He-“ She fell silent.
The entire room watched her quietly waiting for her to finish her sentence.
“He followed me,” she whispered, finally, unable to see a way around the question. “He wanted me to come home.”
Silence greeted the admission. She saw Amay’s hands flex at his side, those long, surgeon’s fingers vising into a fist.
“And you didn’t want to go?”
Her mouth felt dry, panic pounding in every cell as the memory of that night flooded through her.
“I wanted to go out,” she said again.
“The patient needs to rest,” Amay’s hot-chocolate voice interrupted. “Can we resume this tomorrow?”
“I understand Sir but no. I’m sorry.” Inspector Mathur shot Dhrithi a pitying look. “But the thing is the initial crime scene report came in,” the mustachioed police man said, coming closer. “And it looks like the accident was well, not an accident.”
Amay’s entire body stilled, the ice emanating from his form making Dhrithi shiver reflexively. Her mother gasped, a loud melodramatic sound that had the female cop giving her a narrow-eyed look.
“Did your husband try to kill you, Mrs. Gokhale?”
The words were a bucket of ice water in her bruised and cut up face. She sucked in a breath, the influx of air feeling like shards of glass in her sore throat.
“No,” she said, when she was able to force the word out. “No!”
“We know that your husband rammed your car with his.”
The truth was a many layered thing, she thought dimly. Varun had rammed his car into hers but he wasn’t trying to kill her.
“Ma’am.” The lady cop kept her voice soft and conciliatory instantly making Dhrithi’s hackles rise. “Your husband wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and the impact of the crash sent him catapulting through the windshield. His skull fractured in three different places, and he had a broken femur, a punctured lung from shattered ribs and –“
“Stop.” Dhrithi turned away blindly, bile churning in her throat as she struggled to keep the images the words painted out of her head. “Please stop.”
“I think that’s enough,” Amay said, his voice quiet and authoritative. “She needs her rest. She isn’t going anywhere in this condition. You can speak with her tomorrow.”
When they didn’t immediately back off, he added, “She is the victim, is she not?”
The inspectors exchanged a loaded look before nodding. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”
They bade them goodbye and walked towards the door, the man glancing back at her one last time.
“Inspector,” Dhrithi croaked, pushing herself up, painfully, on one elbow. “Varun was not trying to kill me.”
They stopped, turning back towards her. “You’re sure about that, Madam?” the lady asked.
“I am. Varun didn’t want me dead. He wanted me to come back home.”