In a bid to save the man she loves, Amrit ends up making a deal with the uncompromising Kuwar Veer Pratap Singh. Bound by mutual weaknesses and wounds they hide from the world the two goes from unwilling pretenders to unlikely allies. Sometimes, it...
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Summary: Your royal highness Indra Veer Pratap Singh, Shrighar mein aap ka swaagat hai..!” ◇◇◇
The darkness swirled, slashed by rapid bursts of crackling light and followed by claps of thunder. Ravishing the lamplit lawns and vast stone terraces in a slashing sword dance of blinding purple and silver an unexpected summer storm fell upon Shrighar. The shadows from a time gone scratch at the surface of a forced calm and Veer swallows thickly, nails scraping across the window ledge he’s been gripping all this while. The voices around him have melted into a hum of incoherency, rising and falling like the breaths that he tried to keep a count of and occasionally smudged with a tinkling of a glass, feet on the polished wood or other insignificant cluttering noises.
Anwar approaches him wearily, making note of the tensed angles of his shoulders, the rigid lines of his jaw and when he turns – the swimming ghosts in his eyes.
“We shouldn’t have come here – we shouldn’t – “Veer says without preamble. “Ab dheko –“
Anwar swallows the well-meaning suggestion of sharing the dinner he had brought over and sets the laden plate aside, before laying a hand on his oldest friend’s shoulder.
“Yeh aap ke bachpan ka Shrighar nahi hai, Rana sahab,” he says instead, knowing full well where the ghosts that weighed Veer down came from. The storm ranges outside and the window lights up in a flash of lightning, Anwar watches how it casts Veer’s pale face into hues of brilliance before pointedly turning back to the room at large, allowing and willing that when Veer’s eyes followed his, he would be taking in the room in the same light that Anwar sees it in.
Heder and Omar where teaching Raghuveer and Yashodara a complicated card game, watched by a fascinated Kabir who they had deemed too young to allow his hands on the cards. They were keeping the children occupied in the absence of their mothers, aunts and nannies and in the process filled the room with laughs and excited chatter.
The halls in themselves were different, somehow cozier, somehow airy, somehow filled with warmth despite the ravaging storm outside. His father’s portrait from Rani Ma’s old office has been returned to its original place overlooking that grand room – some oil paintings by his Daadi sahab hang in a cluster nearby, a treasure trove of childhood photographs that Amrit had somehow hunted, scavenged and dug up from God knows where were scattered across the room – all hinting at happy moments.
“Yeh aap ka Shrighar hai, nothing untoward would happen here.”
“But this storm –“
“Imagine, Bhabhi jaan having managed to get to the hospital earlier and you being stuck here when the storm strikes…imagine.” Veer shudders and Anwar nods knowingly. “That’s what I thought. Aur waise bhi, one is born where one is fated to. After all isn’t your child the heir to all this – and – you were born here Veer, so will your child.”
