|The secrets we take to grave|✔︎

20(Anubhav's words 5)

Song for the chapter:Mishri by Anuv Jain

Sia

I fish the keys from my bag and step inside my hotel room. Despite severe insistence from both the father and the son to spend the night in the penthouse suite of the Greenwood franchise at Port Blair, I have been adamant to refuse. Gaurav's pleas come as shocking because he knows how much I refrained from using other people's belongings, including my Jiju's car. But when given the option to choose between Sharmas' luxurious SUV and Jiju's one, I preferred to borrow the latter for a day.

My heels are tossed and lying in some haphazard fashion. I am still unbothered by the black blotches that my footsteps have imprinted on the marble flooring. Gaurav would have been so displeased. But currently, I have other things occupying the rooms of my brain than the cleanliness of a place I didn't belong to.

I hesitate before the tap.

Anubhav's writings have always made me emotionally exhausted. But something about these autobiographical notes strike differently. Not because I am there, because I have known now that a lot of female characters in his books carry my shadow.

Probably, reading him this time also comes with me grasping the fact this is the very last of him that I can ever read. The last one with the least of the lies.

My fingers tap on the documents as I plop on the leather couch. Six more chapters to go.

I have to do this.

Chapter six

Sia had been living here for a week since the unfateful night. The new house at Malad had asked for security twice her bank balance, I suggested offering her some loan, she refused.

"I would move in with my friend Safeena in west Bandra, that way I can be close to my office as well" She said the night before. I didn't object. It was her call, in the end.

But then she had started weeping as she said she had no idea what to tell her friends. How would she explain a breakup right after the wedding proposal. I patted her back and told her that things like that are the common occurrences of the day. People split up all the time and not just because the love died but because the level of their compatibility had taken a toll.

"Everyone is going to consider Gaurav as the abuser. But he is not. Only you know that apart from me"

These are the words she said at that time. These words would indefinitely stay with me even when I am lifted on the sandalwood pyre..

But Sia's arrival in my house was not just about weeps and sad hugs. She lit up my whole house, and even though we slept in separate rooms, I slept on the living room's couch. She ensured that my whole house was clean and made up. She did that before her office and while she stayed at her office, I visited my psychiatrist.

I loved the way she owned the whole house of mine.

Chapter seven

She had moved in with Safeena, and two days later, Gaurav had parceled off all her belongings. Though she says , it was merely half what she had back there.

For the other half that included the refrigerator and washing machine as well, she said she would go and have it moved across when she gets a permanent place to stay by.