It was almost midnight...The old lady was already huddled in bed and kept urging her grand daughter to finish work so that she would be able to hit the bed early...Niyati was used to with such repeated nudging of her nani and she usually everyday dismissed it with an affectionate smile, but tonight she was already in a perturbed state of mind and anger was fermenting listening to the unrelenting whines of her nani...She felt it distinctly that her hands were not deft tonight and every work had been taking much more time than usual...
When she reached at the bedroom, the old lady had been sunk into deep sleep...Her sleeping face was serene and child like and staring at her face very abruptly something welled up within her...Something which could only dissipitate if she would be able to sob her heart out...Patting gently over her dishevelled hair,she left the room and stopped coming before the window...Waves of pain which were shoving upon her heart...couldn't be alleviated and she sobbed as silently as possible for about five minutes until her stronger self appeared before her to snub at her censoriously...
:'what has happened to you?' she put it before her with a sanctimonious smile and added,:'shame on you...Now a days you can do nothing except crying like a coward...Do you forget that you are a confident forensic expert and a responsible grand daughter of your grandmother...Do you forget that you wanted to be the support of your helpless grief stricken grandmother? You not only wanted to fill up the absence of your grandfather but...you wished to vanish the pang she had due to the untimely death of her daughter and son-in-law...But...
Niyati's face suffused with tears as she asked herself,demandingly,:'kkya...main khud...us dard se...bahar aa payi hun? ' her teary eyes glistened within stark darkness as sheer restiveness reflected through her eyes...:'kkya main khud...us ghao pe...marham laga payi hun?' her gaze roamed through the aquamarine sky and she almost jolted as someone's grin was getting visible there and as if he shaking his head with a bantering gesture answering her question,:'jee nahi doctor...Ghao pe marham to tab lagega na...jab aap lagane ka koshish karenge...' he paused and Niyati noticed bewilderingly that his solicitous face was gleaming with the moonlight...
For about a minute Niyati waited with bated breath and just when she was going to break the silence, the grin blended with the floating white cloudlets...Niyati felt the urge to yell with all her energy,:'aap ko kaise pata? aap ye kaise keh diya ke marham lagane ka koshish nahi kiya tha main?' Beads of sweat started standing over her forhead as she felt her rising heart beats...
:'aap kyu agaye beech me? kya jante hain aap mere bare me? aur agar ana hi hain...to...to aise...lukachhupi kyu khel rahe hain aap mere sath? kyu? ' she revolted inside herself and kept gazing at the floating clouds for at least ten minutes until felt worn out...She heaved a long sigh of tiredness and then picked up her cell attached with ear phone...With hesitation she pressed the radio button...her lips curled involuntarily thinking something but soon her face turned ashen listening to something...
socha tha jaisa waisa hi jeevan to hai magar
ab aur kis talash me bechain hai nazar
kudrat ne to meherban hai dariyadili ke sath
phir bhi koi kami si hai kyu zindegi ke sath
yu to guzar raha hai har ik pal khushi ke sath
phir bhi koi kami si hai kyu zindegi ke sath
A ghazal programme was running there after midnight and Niyati accidentally became one of the listeners...It left her perplexed and fizzled...It left her ruminative and reflective...Darting her eyes here & there she tried to forget that...the words were so true for her own life...She endeavoured to erase the touching tune that abruptly piercing into her heart...causing an unrelenting aching pressure in the centre of her bosom...She switched the radio off and coming at the threshold of the bedroom she once checked her nani... before almost tiptoeing into her study room cum library...Turning on the table lamp she came before her book shelf and rummaged in there for a diary..Her face was glowing with desperation and an inexplicable yearn...quiff of hair was falling into her eyes repeatedly and everytime she moved it aside with something akin to a mixture of arrogance and frenzied passion in order to comb through every diary and finally the visible restiveness was soothed...Her agitation was seeming to be assuaged...She slowly dragged herself into the chair and keeping the diary over the table she took a photograph out of it...
Blowing air from her lips she tried to wipe the dust off it and then patted someone's face wth care with just one finger of her...Her eyes deepened and gleamed...crimson colour of pain rushed into her seeming to be strong face and her jaws bobbed up & down in her effort to check tears...Nine years back...when she was a part of CID as a forensic expert, it was clicked then...It was Frerick's birthday and everyone was gathered to celebrate it...But why her eyes fixed at once place and more specifically at just one person in it within the crowd? He had been flashing such a pure grin-she never had noticed it before...or might it be possible that she could gauge the intensity of his innocence only now-after long nine years...She patted it several times before smirking at her idiocy and then locked it back where it had been kept in the past...She shook her head to get rid off the unsolicited shame she was feeling for behaving like a silly scatterbrain...Her fingers grasped a pen tight and then she ventured to scribble something in a page of that diary...But her fingers denied until she could slowly spelled ...'You are a liar'...her pen stopped as her nose wrinkled in suppressing a surging emotion which perhaps could be called huff...She further wrote,'your words has no weightage..you can't make your words true...' and then suddenly his woebegone face of morning sparkled before her eyes and she felt everything blurry infront of her eyes...
With a whimper of pain she darkened those words she had just written and tearing the page roughly she smashed it into a ball and then threw it at a corner with force...Tears made runnels down her cheeks and she with a crumpled face tried in a vein effort to wipe her tears off and then held her pen again to write further...
'I am a liar actually...What I wished couldn't reveal it...It's not your fault...you always have an unerring attitude towards everything...Never a tint of pretence I had seen within you...It was my niggardly attitude which always becomes culprit...Can you tell me with your prudence why ...why I lost ...I lost everything due to my coarseness...my arrogance? Even if late...but I have started feeling that I have strangled my true self considering that the hard outer shell of mine which...I had ...impelled to make at one point of my life was my identity...I have confined myself foolishly with smug satisfaction that I had become a strong woman...but had never understood the rudiment of life that strength could be felt even in the absence of brashness and arrogance...I buoyed myself up with a feeling that arrogance was the other name of strength and in order to protect oneself everyone should have to be aggressive and curt in behaviour...
...I...I am confessing...before you...that...I was terribly wrong...and perhaps you have no knowledge about the fact that I was able to detect my error...just...because...because...of you...' she stopped and startled skimming over the words she just wrote like a storm and once she wished to tear this page also making it a smashing ball but...A smirk came in her lips as her mind murmured inside her,:'us kharoos kaise pad sakta hai ye sab?' she exhaled and closed the diary to keep it at it's orginal position with an affectionate smile...It seemed that she had been succeeded in getting rid off a heavy burden temporarily..She turned the light off and kept sitting there twiddling with her cell phone...After much irresolute efforts she searched his number and then continued dangling between pressing the call button and not pressing it...Her tired and a little puffy eyes fell upon the wall clock making her aware that it was half past one and she released a long sigh perceiving the fact it was not the appropriate time to call a stranger man...Stranger? Is he? Niyati's lips curled as she allowed her thoughts to stray...He couldn't be called a stranger...After all she had worked with him as a team for more than one and a half year and...shared so many brief yet indissoluble moments together...She leaned back languidly as her eyes almost closed in trance cogitating about those moments...
Oh that moment when she made him scared telling a lie that she had a heart attack!..Niyati's face broadened converting into a grin while her eyes gleamed with an inexplicable glow...
'stupid' she whispered to herself and then she started laughing though with low voice remembering the staggered face of Daya when the whole team rushed into forensic to see how she had been coping with heart attack...but...very abruptly the laughter dried away as a pang started squeezing her heart...She felt perplexed...until her one self lambasted censoriously :'didn't you know at the time of cracking that joke that he would be the person who would be worried most to hear such a news...? why should he get worried for you? It was not the fact that he had any special interest in you but he had such a nature who got worried for everyone..He had an unstinting generosity for every team mates...and Niyati...if you are brave enough you admit...it is not called stupidity...but solicitude...It is not something for which he deserves a mere disdainful laugh off but he deserves respect...'
Niyati stared vacantly at the top of the table for some times unknowingly making her face ashen...It seemed as if she was sitting breathless till her lips were pressed with a faint chuckle and her glance deepened...She kept ruminating about all the incidents with a note of rippling bliss blended with a fright...perhaps fright came as she discerned that she was standing at the edge of discovering a new angle from where everything seemed ineffably beautiful...Another incident came floating to her mind when she jestfully had pretended to drink something which could be poisonous and then seeing everyone silent she had teased him with candour saying that she had expected atleast from him to rush to her and stopped her drinking that poisonous liquor...A soft glow seemed raditaing from her face as her mind asked herself,:'did you say it without any cause or...did you really expect something from him? Wasn't it your yearn to know how he would react seeing you in danger?'
'perhaps' murmured Niyati unknowingly,:now a days I can't understand myself...'she lied there with visible nonchalance as a rare lassitude descended upon her...A frisson of excitement suddenly passed down her spine as she remembered how mischievously Daya flirted with her praising her smile...Did he say it just for having fun? or...did he mean it...Her brows puckered together as a huff tried to gnawed at her heart badly...She closed her eyes further and ventured to recall the scene...ACP sir was almost dancing in delight having a misconception that she had concluded wrong about the death of the victim...He thought it had been a heart attack while it turned out to be the venom of snake...Daya had delivered with humour that they should leave forensic as it seemed that it had been a fun day for forensic...She herself promptly urged him not to leave forensic but to dance along with ACP sir not feeling shy...and then only Daya divulged though with a little hesitation that he hadn't any qualm of dancing as she had been in good mood and that she ...looked beautiful...when she smiled!...Niyati felt further her raising pulse as Daya's voice seemed to tingle her neck..:'haste huye aap bohut...khubsurat lagte hain...'
Her eyes flung open...with a fright...and she started panting darting her eyes around her...She scrabbled for the clock and it indicated 2 A.M..She released a long sigh as a thought hit her that how much time she would have to spend to see the sunlight...because...she started scaring the nights...the silent nights...the lonely nights...the nights of bearing surging pain...the nights of hidden sobs...the nights...of remembering a grin...of someone...and...
She sprang up from the chair toying with the idea of going out into the lawn...But as she came beside the window,she felt that something she couldn't discard from her mind...Her eyes almost closed in trance as she kept ruminating whether it would be right or not to call him in the next morning...but...would she be able to talk normally with him suppressing the immense peevishness which she was toteing since the evening...Why didn't he come once? why didn't he keep his spoken words? Was it the fact that he simply had forgotten to visit her aged grandmother whom he perhaps considered like an old sourpuss and her wish as capricious whims or...her catty comments in the morning...prevented him from coming further...Couldn't it be possible that he felt affronted by her curt behaviour and thus refrained himself from visiting her granny even if he had enough crave...Perhaps her inordinate indifference hurt him...He...seemed to be...a sensitive man...and even if he had maintained silence...her words wrapped in superfluous impertinence might play a role in hurting him...
A mocking smirk curled in the corner of her lips as she realised that the man had gradually learned to alleviate his displeasure...The man now had become more subtle and patient...He hadn't started any wrangle with her for her unfair brashness...He hadn't put any effort to prove himself right...Instead, he learned to madden her by his silence,by his forbearance...She felt as if blood in her body had been trippling in an inexplicable restiveness...As if her eyes were burning with yearn to see him at a glance...as if her ears yearned to listened to his voice...as if her lips were craving to have a witty repartee with him...Her glance deepened and a wisp of her curled hair came falling before her engrossed eyes...She closed her eyes in daze...Cool onshore breeze fanning her face making her hair unkempt until she startled to see the bantering smile of the man...
:'Doctor...CID wale...bada khudgarz aur moorkh hote hain..' the jestful yet ineffably attractive smile ebbed away making her staggered...befuddled...and something welled up inside her...It seemed like a flame of fire that she hadn't been able to extnguish in any effort...Was it just now ignited or had it been ignited long ago...even without her awareness? Hadn't she ventured to camouflage her emotion since she had worked in CID's forensic department? she felt her fists were tightened as she tried to transfer every discomfort there...but that couldn't help her either...and she resorted to a non fictional book based on history...but the lines were getting blurred as she felt a heavy burden descended upon her eyes...