Poles Apart

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Hi! Long time, no see. Hehe. My fault. But I'm here now, so there you go—

Author's POV

Arvi:

One day before the vote for electing the CEO, Arvi turns and tosses in bed, plagued with thoughts about Kalyan and theories about the Board Members' honesty.

Her main concern? What if they were all lying? What if it was an elaborate ruse to undermine the family's position in the company?

For each of her hypothetical questions, she'd come up with a real-life scenario where such a thing had happened.

Frustrated by herself and her thoughts, she tried to sleep at 9:00 in the night, but that hardly helped anymore than it would've under other circumstances.

Sleeping at 9:00 in the night on a normal day would've been hard enough, but with her overbearing thoughts tonight, she couldn't sleep at all.

~.~.~.~.~

Naveen and Madhurima:

"Arvi seemed tense today," Madhurima remarks to Naveen, who was thinking along the same lines.

Naveen shakes his head at his wife, lost in thought about his daughter. "She's fine."

Madhurima sighs. She had been married to Naveen for nearly thirty years now, and she'd known him for longer, but she could never tell what he thought.

Did he care about his daughter? No, she'd never question that. Arvi had always been Naveen's greatest pride and his chink in the armour, all at the same time.

Naveen wasn't appreciative of her attitude towards certain things, and he knew she was much like him in her disposition. After all, he had helped make her.

Naveen Ravichander was once a man that felt and expressed. Until he realised he couldn't- shan't, not in the world that he belongs to. Feel, he still did, but he was always wary of expressing it, and it continued until he shelled up to his own family.

His eyes had become wet at the thought of his daughter and her wedding that was coming soon, way too soon for his liking.

If he could have it his way, his daughter wouldn't be married for the next five to ten years.

But his wife had asked Naveen for one thing, and for all the time he'd known his Madhu, he hadn't said 'no' to anything she had asked. It was his one aim of life, to give her everything her heart had desired.

Madhurima's father had been sick, and wanted to see his granddaughter married before he breathed his last. It wasn't a secret that Arvi and Avni were practically everything to Narayana Paruchuri.

He wanted to see at least one of them married, and happy with their partner. To him, there was one way to be happy: to be married. Narayana strongly believed that one could achieve complete happiness only when they had another to share it with; not a sibling, a friend, parents, or grandparents.

He knew he had achieved complete happiness only after he had been married. He had been happy before, but he'd never seen the sort of happiness his wife brought him.

To him, there was no greater bliss than being married to someone who understood and supported him in the toughest of times.

"Madhu," Naveen addressed, attracting Madhurima's attention.

"Hm?" Madhurima turned to face her husband.

"Arvi likes Arjun, doesn't she?" It would never be too late to break it off. Ram was and is a good friend, that he would forever be in debt to, for he had bailed Naveen out when the company was sinking, but in a list of priorities, at the moment, his daughter's happiness was at the very top.