The First Fall

Chapter 17

I was barely controlling my anger which was trying to claw out of me with all its might. The funeral went in a haze. I was relieved to hear about Nina’s decision to not attend. He didn’t want her here. I couldn’t face her  and I knew that seeing her will break my self control and I didn’t even know what might happen. Every single moment of the funeral was very painful. Alex was always near me as if he was expecting me to make a scene the very next second and was ready to pull me out of there.

I really envied his self control. How the hell was he doing it? He was tolerating the pain of losing Roy, offering his shoulder to Roy’s parents, taking care of all the requirements of the funeral and helping Dad with everything, managing the media, taking care of office affairs through phone and the most difficult task, taking care of Nina which I royally ignored. I was a coward or far worse than that. But I was not yet ready to face her.

I drove back home as if in a trance. I went straight to the bar and poured a fairly good amount of whisky into a glass and drained it and repeated it again and again. All the rage which was boiling inside me was making it difficult for me to do anything normally. I was sure that I could not control it for long. I threw the empty glass into the wall with all my strength and repeated the same with the bottle. The servants came running and I escaped into the sanctuary of my room.

I lied down on the bed looking up at the ceiling for a very long time. The light dimmed and darkness fell but I didn’t care to move. In my mind I was replaying all those time I spend with Roy. After the incident at school I didn’t had the courage to let him out of my sight for a very long time. The fear of losing him forced me to take such a decision then but finally I did lose him.

That little boy followed me like a pup from the time when he first learned to walk on his two tiny feet. I smiled automatically thinking about the sight of him in diapers. We had plenty of photos in our family album of him following me, trying of grab my legs, sitting on my lap, making faces at me and Alex, and after growing up, doing everything a guy will do in his brother’s company. The latest memories were the most painful because she was in it and because of their feelings for each other . I have witnessed everything that has happened in their life from the very beginning after they met.

God! What will happen to her now? I asked to no one in particular. I have never seen something like what they both had for each other in my entire life. I always used to think that those kind of feelings didn’t exist in this world. But both of them proved me wrong. They taught me what real love was like. I had resisted the feeling from the very beginning whenever I felt like I was going to fall hard and when it happened to them, they both never tried to fight it. They let it flow through them, let it change them forever, let the feeling make them complete and they were happy to. I couldn’t even imagine how connected they seemed to be with each other’s thoughts and feelings.

How could two people love each other like that without talking or touching ? It was completely out of my intelligence to even think about such a thing and seeing that happening in front of me was life altering. I respected them both for their self control, their faith in each other and the way they made each other stronger and far richer than any other person alive. Their story was like a beautiful song and all the heartfelt melodies were about lost love. Tragedies of the extreme kind have always captured our hearts from time immemorial.

I remember making fun of Shakespeare and others for ‘writing such blunders which will never happen in a normal human being’s life’ during the literature classes throughout school and college. I even used to fall asleep during such classes. See where it took me? I had the great fortune of seeing something very beautiful happening right in front of me with my own two eyes and I will never forget those moments.