A Love So True

Season 2 : Chapter 21

Happy reading ❤️

After struggling through the dense forest for what felt like forever, Yash finally reached the riverbank. A little distance away, he noticed a lone silhouette lying on the ground.

The white shirt was enough. Yash didn’t need to look twice to know that the unconscious figure sprawled there was none other than Shubman Sir.

His heart dropped into his stomach.

He ran toward him.

By the time he reached Shubman, the flashlight on his phone was already on. The beam fell across Shubman’s body, making the horrifying sight painfully clear.

Blood. Mud. Bruises. His clothes were torn. His body battered.

Yash gasped.

How had this happened? How did Shubman Sir end up in this deserted forest?

Had some business rival, someone who saw him as a threat brought him here and done this to him?

For a second, panic threatened to take over. But Yash forced himself to steady his breathing. He dropped to his knees on the damp ground beside Shubman. Gathering every ounce of courage, he lifted his trembling hand and slowly brought his fingers near Shubman’s nose.

To check if he was still breathing.

Yash was terrified of blood. He had always been.

When he was a child, his neighbors had once taken him abruptly to a hospital late at night. He had been waiting at home for his parents, unaware of what had happened. When he opened the door expecting to see them, he was met instead by the grim, silent faces of the uncles from the neighborhood.

He didn’t understand why they were taking him to the hospital. What if his parents returned home and didn’t find him there?

 His little sister had been asleep in the house. The neighbor aunty who used to come every night after dinner to sew clothes with his mother was there. He had left his sister behind and gone with the uncles, confused , and a little scared too. 

What Yash didn’t know was that the parents he was waiting for would never return.

When the morgue attendant pulled the sheet away in one swift motion, it took little Yash a few seconds to understand.

The blood-soaked, crushed, almost unrecognizable bodies lying there....

They were his parents.

When his eyes fell on the silver ring on the finger of one bloody finger, reality struck like a cruel slap. 

It was his mother's ring. Once his dad gave his mother as a gift.

That was the moment he understood what fate had done to him.

But not a single tear had fallen from his eyes that day.

Grief had turned him into stone.

Later, how he had mechanically followed the elders’ instructions and performed the last rites of his parents, he didn’t even remember. 

The shock had kept him in a numb, unconscious state for days. 

Only when he began to notice fear and a hint of reluctance in the eyes of relatives did he awaken from that daze. 

They were afraid of the responsibility. 

Afraid of taking in two orphaned children.

Yash had grown up in scarcity. But he had never allowed his self respect to be trampled.