O Saathi Rey

Chapter 11

There comes a time in everyone's life, where they get put in their rightful spot. Their ego and pride comes crashing down, slowly then all at once.

Karma does the deed. And it did so even now, in case of the Pandya family back in Somnath.

After Shiva and Raavi's departure that day, when they got to know they won't be coming back, everyone thought it was a joke and they'd be back after a week or 2, and it's not like the house will crumble in their absence.

Wrong. A month went by, and they didn't come back, and it finally sunk in that they had left permanently, for their own good, or so it was said.

Without Shiva, Gautam had to handle the store alone, given that Dev was useless, with his MBA degree that was lying in some corner of his cupboard and his utter vanilla skills at handling a store.

He couldn't handle enormous bills or help out with the heavy lifting. And if you gave him too much work at once, he would goof up everything and ruin it.

And Krish? Krish was nothing but Saif Ali Khan from Kal Ho Na Ho, trying to woo girls with the '6 Din Ladki In' method, which was utter nonsense, as claimed by the youngest Pandya. Tried and tested, he complained.

With his brothers being incompetent to run the store, and Kaka finally retiring with his Kaki, Gautam had needed some help in managing the store, not being able to handle it alone.

Which resulted in him hiring a third person to help out with the heavy lifting and vendor bargaining, meaning a part of the earning was subtracted in form of salary, something Gautam never had to worry about in all these years.

Money started to get tight, what with Gautam and Rishita being the only people earning in a household of 6 people, of which one was a partly paralysed mother with many medical needs.

Speaking of Rishita, she had goofed up one too many times at her job, with Suman sitting on her head about working AND doing the housework WITH Dhara. Once and for all, she announced that her job was more important and she wasn't going to to do ANY housework, so Dhara can have the house all to herself, as she so clearly wanted all these days.

Dhara came to realise she was old as a stick, and Raavi would have been of so much help around the house, given that it was now 6 adults that had to be taken care of, that too alone.

But what she failed to understand was that, for Raavi, her college would have been of utmost importance, and even if she had the choice of helping at home, which she was obviously good at, she'd choose the store.

Simply because she was better at doing that. Especially tallying the bills. The entire house had once agreed that she was the best at this job, even better than Shiva, when they all weren't able to figure out how the loss in the store occurred. Until she sat down and solved the issue, proving that it was actually a profit, a bonus for the store.

Shiva was secretly impressed by his Chipkali, but masked it with annoyance.

Shiva and Raavi had their own importance in the Pandya house. Which no one realised until they had left.

And now, now was the time to suffer. Karma is a bitch, indeed.

...

3 weeks. 3 weeks since they spoke properly, even though they lived in the same house.

Shiva wrapped up the class, assigning all the homework to the batch sitting in the living room, preparing for the last batch, the 10th graders.

The kids put their books in their bag, thanked 'Shiva Sir' and left, happy, smiling and giggling.