Silent Love

| 31 |

Sidharth

“He’s lying.”

He had to be. There was no other way he’d be breaking so well under the pressure if it weren’t for the lies he was so cautiously masking under that deceiving face of his.

“I wouldn’t be so sure.” Mused the gentleman in uniform.

Both of us were standing outside the room where the interrogation was taking place. The man I had been intently observing the entire day was proving to be very annoying as he was insistent on standing on his original answer.

He confessed that he was a poor man that could barely make the ends meet every month. His old Volkswagen had been troubling him for quite a while now, and since he earned just enough to keep the family from drowning, he had managed to ignore the services that were demanded by the faulty vehicle.

He paid the price of his ignorance when the brakes on his vehicles betrayed him right when he was speeding past the expected limit in one of the deserted streets of Mumbai. Unfortunately, he was not the only person who had paid that price. Along with him, it was my sister that had fallen prey to recklessness, where she decided ta cross the rather empty road whilst talking on the phone before his faulty vehicle had run over her.

Afraid that a criminal record was the last thing he needed in life, and after imagining getting jailed for the rest of his life, he made the second grave mistake that day when he called for the ambulance and flee the area before anybody could suspect he had caused the accident.

Unfortunately for him, the police in Mumbai had enough experience with accidents like these that they didn’t require a great deal of time to figure out who caused the accident in the first place and where he lived.

This was the story he had been trying to feed us all day and despite my best efforts to see honesty in his eyes, I couldn’t find any. The only truth that I believed would convince me was only if it involved the doings of Akshay.

I could sense the adrenaline rush
in my body when I realised that the interrogation was finished and the culprit had been given the benefit of the doubt. The police were buying his story and there was no way in hell I was going to accept it.

“He is clearly lying,” I insisted the senior officer that was looking at me with despondency. “How can you not see that?”

“I have been in this field long enough to know when a criminal in lying, Sidharth, so trust me when I say that he’s not,” were his final words before he had closed the case.

The culprit had been booked under the case of hit and run and nothing more. There was no mention of a powerful Drug lord that had secretly carried out this mission of revenge after he realised that one of the men he had working under him had turned out to be a spy working for the American intelligence group. My mind had been certainly disappointed at that because I was so keen that it was the only possible reality of the situation. I have had no open mind of accepting other possible outcomes.
But I knew that the officer was right. The man indeed wasn't lying. I had been so caught up on doubting everything around me that I failed to look at it with a detective's perspective. I was looking at it like Shanaya's brother and the spy that was working closing with a mafia don. With that perspective, there was no way my thoughts could be rational. After having realized that, I trusted my instinct to let the police do their job and be a mere spectator at everything that's yet to be unfolded.

Since the entire process took almost two nights, I had no idea of the time and date it was by the time I made my way into the hospital. I briefly informed my mother about what was happening and warned her not to tell anything to Shanaya. After having a brain surgery, it was in everyone's best interest to make sure she didn't have to endure a lot of mental pain. My mother agreed with me on that.