Operation: Dard and Devotion

17 | Kin & Kind

For once, it did not seem as though Ahsan would budge in telling me for how long Al-Tho'baan knew who I was. I had pressed the matter for days by blatantly nagging him or by slyly throwing in the question when he was in the middle of talking about something else. Nothing worked.

When it seemed like a few days had passed, I eventually decided to give up. When I thought about it, it did not seem to matter to me whether or not the terrorist group pre-planned the schoolhouse attack and knew that I had existed before that encounter. I simply stopped caring. What did it matter anyways?

He stopped by occasionally to hand food to Saad and I, but then I had told him about Tala, who seemed to be even more malnourished than I was. He wasn't very pleased that I requested some food to be given to her, too.

"I don't own a giant hypermarket for you to be distributing food to the entire world," he had growled.

I had rolled my eyes. "It's not the entire world, it's just one extra person! And look at her, she's so underfed!"

"Sorry," Ahsan had said after giving the sleeping Tala the briefest of glances. "I am not Mother Theresa to be sympathetic towards every scrawny creature on the planet."

I had gasped at his bluntness. "That is so rude and disrespectful."

"Unfortunately for you, nobody pays me to be nice, so you'll have to deal with rude and disrespectful," he had hissed and leaned against the door frame.

"Oh, so you get paid for being an asshole? Good to know," I had told him. "You couldn't have chosen a more suitable profession."

Fire had ignited in his eyes. "I didn't ask for your input."

"I didn't ask for you to come down here."

"You just asked for food!"

"Yeah, only because you came down here first. But, since talking to you is absolutely hopeless, you can leave." I had slammed the door in his face. It had been liberating, to say the least.

A few days after that incident, Tala had been supposedly summoned by Faizan to go to one of the dormitory rooms. The poor girl was dragged across the room by two of Faizan's men, none of which seemed to have been Ahsan, but she did not leave the room without putting up a fight. Frantically kicking and punching the men did not help her for the men resorted to forcefully dragging her up the stone stairs. I shuddered as I heard the sound of her knobby knees collide with the steps, her cries echoed throughout the entire church dungeon. And that was a few days back.

A bizarre doubt floated around my head: did Ahsan have something to do with Tala being taken away?

The thought vanished as quickly as it came because horribly enough, I felt that I was gradually being desensitized to everything that I normally would have cringed over. Blood didn't bother me so much anymore. Tala's detailed accounts of the things she'd seen or gone through didn't faze me so much as they did initially. When hearing that more children were beheaded or minorities being cruelly tortured, my new reaction was now, "Oh."

I hated what I had become, the 'new me'. Normally, before all this, I was a very emotional and expressive person. If someone else cried, I'd cry with them. If someone was going through a tough time, I would have dropped everything and figure out a way to help them. At the very least, I'd give that person a hug. Nowadays, I didn't have the energy to do even that.

I would have committed suicide somehow, but that meant giving Saad up to these monsters, and I could not allow myself to do that.

Saad was becoming louder by the hour, and I couldn't blame him for giving me sleepless nights. The only times he would stop crying was while he was sleeping or eating, the latter being more impossible because Ahsan hadn't come by at all since the last dispute. Perhaps I shouldn't have snapped at Ahsan; he was the only one here who would give us food. I grew accustomed to the frequent growling in my stomach and tried to console Saad into taking more continual naps. There was nothing else I could do.