Operation: Dard and Devotion

43 | Heartache & Hardship

It couldn't be.

It just couldn't.

What was Ahsan doing in my brother's yearbook?

Perhaps Ahsan had a twin?

No, no. Surely a twin would have been in at least one of the photos his mother had given me.

This was just a doppelganger, a lookalike.

I stared at the photo of five young men, clad in crisp, white medical coats. Most of them were smiling except for the one who had stuffed his fists in his pockets.

He looked eerily familiar.

"Oh, from our white coat ceremony?" Hydar turned his head at an angle, giving me the briefest of glances at my odd behavior. "Uhm, which person? There are five of us in the picture."

I tried to steady my pointer finger as I pointed to the one with the darkest eyes. "Him."

"Oh, Ahsan?" Hydar waved his hand casually. "He was a good friend of mine."

I froze.

"W-what...what do you mean was?"

"Well, I mean, I haven't spoken to him in a couple of years. He wasn't big on social media and his cell phone number doesn't even work anymore."

Oh no...

How do I keep interrogating him without seeming suspicious?

I feigned a cough to clear my throat. "How many years has it been exactly?"

"Maybe two or three years." Hydar's face scrunched up as he thought about it. "Why?"

I ignored his inquiry. "If he was your friend, how come you've never brought him over like you did with your other friends?"

"I rarely brought anybody over here," Hydar said slowly, raising an eyebrow. "We all had apartments near campus and I couldn't come home much due to my old schedule. Plus, Ahsan didn't like to go out much like the other guys. He was more quiet and reserved."

"Oh." Dread consumed me as I anticipated the identity of this mysterious Ahsan lookalike. "Why do you think he was like that?"

"Eh, I don't know exactly." He shrugged. "The last time I spoke to him, I think he said something about quitting med school because the rest of his family was back in Syria and he had some issues there. I guess his situation then is not much different from my own now."

Oh, you have no idea.

Hydar's words were gradually proving my gut feeling to be true, but I was still skeptical. "So if he was so reserved and quiet, what made you two become friends?"

"We first met at a study session and he was a mentor. He didn't talk a whole lot then, but when he did, he seemed really intelligent. I heard he was a few years ahead, too. Apparently, he finished his bachelor's degree really early and got a head start in med school. He's also a couple of years older than me. Ahsan didn't have a whole lot of friends, though. I guess people mistook his silence for arrogance. Overall, he was a nice guy, but often misunderstood."

I stared at Hydar with disbelief. There were too many coincidences. "Was he always so reserved?"

"Pretty much." Hydar looked bored with the conversation until his eyes brightened. "Oh, wait! There was this one time, literally once, when he stepped out of his usual behavior completely and shocked us all!"

"What?" I asked frantically. "What happened?"

"After finals, my whole study group - there were about twenty of us - went out for dinner. I persuaded Ahsan to join us as well. Anyway, we were on our way towards the subway to come back to campus, and the station was in a run-down area. The girls in our group were walking ahead of us and some random guys catcalled them for five minutes straight. Then, out of nowhere, Ahsan ran up, pushed the girls out of the way, and utterly knocked out all of those guys. It was like something straight out of a Bollywood movie! All of them had bloody noses and I'm pretty sure some of them had dislocated jaws. It happened off-campus and it was never reported, so he didn't face any consequences. The rest of us were too stunned to do or say anything. The girls were even too freaked out to even thank Ahsan."