Chapter 1
He tried to concentrate on the thing wiggling in front of him. Strange, when was the last time he had to try so hard to focus?
Well, it wasn't completely wrong for him to be out of sync. He had just lost all of his family a few hours back.
The only thing that remained was in his arms. And for some reason, he felt pure disgust for it.
Why wouldn't he. That thing had managed to take away his only remnant of a family away from him.
He heard the baby wail out loud, maybe irritated by the frigid posture his arms were in, or maybe by sensing the cold lethal loathing that was emanating out of him for the infant.
He instantly handed over the baby to the nurse there. Better that it stayed away from him.
The mother of this child had meant everything to him. She was whole of his family. And this! This child had managed to take away whatever was left.
Arnav felt empty. Even more than the last time a tragedy involving death had happened with him. Atleast last time, he had Di to hold on to.
But now with even Di gone, the spawn taking her life to fuel its own, Arnav didn't know what to do anymore.
Khushi didn't know what to do anymore.
The doctors were saying that it was difficult for him to get out of hospital. His condition was getting worse by the day, and he needed extensive care.
The problem was, she didn't have enough money to keep him here.
Her only family, her babuji, was dying slowly and painfully, and there was nothing she could do.
Dejected, she left his room and made her way to pediatrics. All her days here, whenever she had felt down in the dumps, she would go there and play with the children, somehow gaining her spirit back with them.
They seemed to give her the energy to survive all of this mess.
Life hadn't exactly been kind to her.
First Amma's accident.
Then Babuji's cancer.
It almost made her feel she had been born at some inauspicious time. Nothing good ever seemed to come her way.
And she tried. Tried as hard as she could. But it was as if the gods didn't want her to be happy.
Now the doctors wanted to start the chemotherapy, but how would she afford it?
She tried to find herself a job. Even went to some firm for a month or so. But a mere office assistants' job wasn't enough to finance her father's treatment. And when the boss had started demanding something else altogether from her, she had quit.
She jerked out of her thoughts by hearing a baby's wail. She realized she had reached the neonatal area. There were times when she came here to watch the babies sleeping away in the incubators. They looked so serene, without a care in the world. Drowsing away comfortably into an entirely unknown land.
She had always been good with babies. What with the amount of time she spent in Pradaan, the orphanage which was so dear to her heart, she had almost got fine-tuned to babies.
But this baby, its crying seemed to disturb her somewhere deep within. She looked around to find where it was coming from.
And for the next few moments, she froze.
Never in her entire life had she seen a man's face laced with disgust at holding a baby in their arms, and right now, in front of her eyes, she saw him, giving the child away as if the mere touch of it was so repulsive that he would puke any moment.
How could a man be this frigid?
The baby cried even louder, and Khushi's heart ached some more at that sound. How could his not? She wondered.
He was dressed in all black, more heavily than the weather in Delhi demanded right now, and somehow the aura covering him felt as if he was in mourning, not celebrating childbirth.
What a weird sight he was!
"Mr. Raizada, when will you be taking the baby home?" the nurse enquired with him.
Like he had the answer to that. If he had it his way, that baby would never be in his vicinity.
But then, his sister wouldn't want that.
And even if she wasn't with him anymore, even if she chose the baby over her own life leaving him completely alone, he would still never deny Di what she wanted.
He cleared his throat before he spoke, unsure of his voice after ages.
"Would you keep it here a little while longer? I have to take care of things first."
"I understand your loss Mr. Raizada, but I am sorry. The hospital cannot hold a healthy baby for more than 48 hours." The nurse uttered helplessly, knowing full well the grief this young man was going through.
"Thank you." He said lifelessly, taking heavy steps to get the paper work done to prepare for Di's antyeshti.
Khushi saw the guy leaving, and then, ran towards the nurse that was carrying the baby.
"Yeh chup kyun nahi ho raha?" She asked, worried.
"Ho jaaega… It's normal for newborns to cry this much, Khush..." the nurse smiled, while cooing to the baby to stop.
She couldn't take his crying anymore, and took him in her own lap. Quite miraculously, the baby stopped crying.
"See, I told you. It's normal. Now put him in the crib. Poor baby…" the nurse said and left.
While Khushi ignorantly nodded with the nurse, thinking the nurse was stating about that dark and twisty man just now.
Arnav had just brought it home. And it just wouldn't stop crying! What the hell happened to the babysitter the nurse in the hospital had promised to send asap?
What was he supposed to do? For a split second, he thought of calling Aman and asking him to babysit, when he heard the doorbell ring.
He hurried to the door, heaving a sigh of relief that the babysitter had finally arrived. Yet what he saw as soon as he opened the door made him doubt the nurses' sanity. There was a frail looking girl standing there, who probably looked as if she had just turned 18! How did she even have any experience with this sort of work?
"Hello. I am Khushi, The caretaker you had asked for." Khushi introduced herself, her smile disappearing as soon as she saw it was that same man she had seen the other day in black.