Fizah

مذاق|Mazak

"بعدِ  فنا  بھی ہے مرضِ عشق کا اثر
دیکھو کہ رنگ زرد ہے میرے غبار کا"

Zahid, Saleh and Arham stood near the entrance while everyone else was in the middle room, paying visit to the dead. After years of mourning, Zahid thought he could finally be happy with the woman he had chosen to love and to live a life with her where there would be no problem or better no Waseem Adnan but his father didn't allow him to have his way. Knowing the truth, he could have saved his son from going through that rough phase again, he could have saved him from losing someone who stood by him throughout years, he could have saved a life. Zahid glanced at his father who stood at a far end, rendering nothing. The man should be ashamed of himself for trading his own family for power.

People kept pouring in, carrying apologetic looks and remorse towards Zahid. Everything felt the same and as though he relapsed to being a thirteen years old who had come back home to find his sister in the middle of the living hall. The looks, the murmurs, the fake condolences, his father's impassive face, the muffled cries from across the hall. It pierced right through his heart to have fallen in the same hole again- to have felt the same ache of losing someone so dear. Not once, not twice but thrice. His father sold the members of his family for nothing.

He had premonitions, only the person he guessed was wrong. It wasn't Fizah they targeted this time or it was safe to say that they might never get a take to target her because he was going to get back at everyone after the burial. He wasn't keen on making anyone, aside his father, pay for their deeds but this time, it wouldn't be the case. Everyone including his father would be paying.

On the other hand, Fizah sat near the kitchen with Ayda staying on her side. She was devastated. This wasn't what she asked for when she signed up for a family. She couldn't be any more grateful now that she had an identity but why was it costing her the ones she loved. Ayda's hand was coiled around hers, in an attempt to give a little warmth to her body that had turned cold ever since she flew down from London. Her body mourned because she didn't spend time when she could have and it was going to haunt her for the rest of her life.

"How is she going to take it?" Saleh rasped, taking a look at her colorless face, "How are you taking it?" He tilted his face to examine Zahid's. What came after this silence would be something that the world would never imagine. He knew it because he had seen it.

"Seeing someone I loved die is not new for me," His gaze then shot to her disheveled self, "I just have to take care of her." Saleh placed a hand on his shoulder in consolation. Rage in Saleh cooled down the moment his regard fell on her disrupted self.

Death wasn't something they had seen coming their way, there was everything in the traps that the friends had laid out to get to his father but death was not easily one of them. It hurt that their retaliation ended up taking life from someone.

"Go, sit with her." Arham suggested but it wasn't easy as they had made it. For a fact, he didn't know how she would react to it since she was countering someone's death after Rumaan passed away.

"I can't." He whispered out. The pain faded his words when he looked at it. The lifeless face. Burns from the accident. It stirred his soul and a new pain rooted in his body. He was aching both physically and emotionally. He was simply draining his energy.

He then turned to his left, "What happened?"

"Baba couldn't make it but ammi is taking the earliest flight to Karachi." Ehan announced, establishing himself next to Arham. He folded his arms across his chest to pay condolence. 

Nothing hurt more than the sting of brimming hot tears, equally painful as the cracking of the heart. Fizah had grown affection for his mother in her, for she gave the love Fizah always longed for– love of a mother. Shaking her head in negative at everything Ayda said to her, she had her gaze fixated on the woman laying lifeless. What a game her fate played with her. A woman in the form of a mother was introduced after being unloved from her own and when her heart started to open up for her, she was snatched away.