*Rewritten on Sept 2, 2024 *
There is a threshold to hurt, a breaking point at which just shedding tears is too less of an outlet against the onslaught of pain. As the sky thunders berserk, she buries her head into her pillow and screams, her scream carrying the furor of her outrage and breaking with the dolor that flows in her like blood flows in the veins. Her body pulsates with the physical manifestation of what she is experiencing, the tenderness in her breasts cascading into a throb and the infrequent cramps in her lower abdomen coming vigorously to life, tormenting her. She curls into herself, sobbing harshly into her pillow, all of it getting too difficult to handle. Why was this happening to her? After a week of such blissful happiness in terms of feeling belonged, a week of success at stitching some part of her back, after a week of thinking that since she is seldom in his way, they have at least reached an unspoken truce from the accusations especially since she is not posing any hindrance in his marital life - after all of it only to realize it had been the calm before the storm!
"Amma" she wails, desperately wishing for her mother's embrace and soothing affection, desperately wishing for her presence to tell her it will be okay, that the pain shall end, just like she would whenever Imlie got hurt. She wants to be held, to be rid of everything plaguing her, at least for some time. She wants to run outside and wail her pain in Choti Kaki's arms. She wants to be comforted. She wants to not feel alone, not deal with what feels like everything shattering, alone. And most of all, she wants the realization that has settled amidst her like the sun amidst the frontiers of pain to purge itself from her system, the truth that the one thing she has never asked for yet that has been granted to her but without the possibility of fruition, too much to bear!
Her sobs die down even as blackness begins to distort her vision through swollen eyes. Her head feels heavy, the pain in her body becoming unbearable even as a wave of severe cramp wrecks it, a spurt of blood staining her pyjama. And with that and a weak whisper of his name, she blacks out completely!
_
The ambulance siren is the loudest sound ringing in her ears as she sits holding Imlie's hand in the ambulance now headed to Sanjog hospital. She cannot hear anything else, cannot see anything else except the image that met her eyes and imprinted itself into it, in the moment when she had entered the room.
Pankaj is sitting on the other side of the stretcher while the rest of their family follow behind in their car. Aditya is the only one not here, having gone for an assignment and she is grateful for it at this moment because she does not want her son to experience something like this again, even if the person involved is not the same as the one who had been years back. She is in two places at once, in two different times but she is in the same position- still holding a hand that is not as warm as it should be, still enveloped by the same brand of paralyzing shock and still the first person who was met with the sight that she never ever wishes to see!
Everything around them is a deja vu and his eyes water incessantly as he's back in the same position, seated opposite his wife yet again in a cruel parody of the event that left them scarred ever since, the frozen terror on her face just as gut-punching as it had been back then.
The halt of the ambulance is the one that jolts them into action and they follow the stretcher, both holding onto it with a desperate grip till they reach the emergency ward.
"Please doctor, please save our child! Please!" they plead, joined in by the other members of their family who have finally reached.
"Don't worry, just keep faith. We'll try our very best!"the doctor says and steps in to inspect.
_
She cannot do this. She should be there with the others, consoling a distraught Aparna and wailing Radha. She should be in there telling Papa and Bade Papa that they shouldn't worry, that nothing will happen to Imlie. She should be but she is incapable of it. She cannot do it because she cannot see beyond the haze of her own tears, cannot feel beyond the tightness in her chest and the tremble in her fingers and cannot believe in the words of consolation she has to utter. She cannot gather herself, not in this and not again. She is too weak for it now. She is too fragile for it now.
Her Imlie is inside, unconscious, unresponsive except for the rattled rise and fall of her chest with spurts of blood staining her churidar and she cannot process anything beyond it! A pair of arms wrap around her and she collapses into them, struggling to not wail out loud even as her tears gush down with more force.
"Maa" she whispers amidst her sobs and Anu holds her closer, tightening her grip around her child the way she should have all those years back but couldn't because her own chest had been open with a wound she couldn't cure.
"Shh my child. It'll be okay. She will be okay. She has to be okay" Anu says, her voice shaky.
"Yes maa, she has to be. Else nothing else will be okay!"
Love,
Pratyusha
YOU ARE READING
Lakeerein - Ties That Bind Us
Fanfiction------ Can Be Read As General Fiction ------ One night. One event. Lives of two people altered completely. When Aditya Kumar Tripathi, Chief Executive Reporter at Bhaskar times stepped into Pagdandiya and met Imlie, he did not know how his life woul...
