Recovery
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended. Mann Kee Awaaz Pratigya belongs to Spellbound Productions, Walkwater Media Ltd, STAR Plus and others.
Krishna remembers the first conversation. It feels like nothing he's heard or lived since has been fully real; those few tortured words they exchanged that first day torpedoed his reality.
Pratigya had made the announcement in front of everyone, and he'd tumbled headlong into denial. He'd told her not to make a joke of such a serious thing, not to lie, not to talk nonsense. He'd told her she had to be wrong, the doctor had to be wrong. He might have his worked his way to something more useful, but the family jumped in with their mockery, their recriminations, their heaps and heaps of abuse. And he had been too lost, too stunned, too entirely overset to hold them off. To even hear them.
Pratigya had endured in silence. They told her then and there that she was to leave. She made her way to their room and he'd followed, blinded by tears he refused to acknowledge.
She pulled out a suitcase and started tossing things in it. His mind caught up with his eyes, catching on the awful, tearing thought that she really was going to leave him.
He caught her arms, forced her to stop and speak with him. "What are you doing? You're not going anywhere. You can't go anywhere."
"I have to. I have to, don't you see? I can't stay here."
"Nevermind - nevermind them! We don't - we'll make it work. There's no reason -"
"I can't stay. I can't give you what you want, what you need. The whole reason I am here - I can't stay. I can't." Pratigya continued her packing, ignoring his pleas and questions.
"Where will you go? What will you do? You're my wife, damn it. That's the whole reason you're here! It – "
"I have to go." That was all she would say. She finished gathering her things, and then she was gone.
Two years of his life, their life together, ended and erased in the span of a few hours. He never quite woke up afterwards, after it became clear that they wouldn't let her stay in his life and that she wouldn't try to keep her place in it.
He had to let her go. It wasn't a choice; she left, and he...he had to go on.
Somehow he kept away from the edge of madness, wandering through his despair without destroying himself.
They brought him someone else. He was too lost to realize he should resist. He didn't.
Then the sordid drama began again. Only this time - only this time, no one could hide the truth.
When he finally finds out, he wakes up. He sorts out the detritus of his life and he goes after her.
In the three years since that first conversation, he has never allowed himself to imagine what this conversation, their reunion, might be like.
He worries he will find her - lost to him. His heart can not accept that she would take another into her life, but he can't ignore the fact that he had and so she could.
He worries he would find her someone else's wife, mother to someone else's child.
He searches anyway.
And when he finds her, she is as she had always been, still his. She looks up at him in shock, and then falls sobbing into his arms.
"Fool," he murmurs against her hair. "Did you think I would never find out?"