When The Darkness Meets Light

Chapter 55

Radhika's POV

Sometimes I feel God played a big joke on me. My mom died when I was six and I thought God took her away because she was a poor soul. From that day I had spend nights crying myself to sleep, my pillow drenched with my tears of pain and I cried until I had no tears left. When I grew up to sixteen years of age, I somehow managed to live with myself without my mom.

I was a good daughter to my dad although little did I know that my father wasn't exactly an angel I thought him to be but he loved me to the moon and back only if that love was enough to turn him into a better man. Rahil and I were best friends until he distanced himself  from me and said that Man who is on the top is always alone and so should he be! He indulged himself in being the second in command and his dream to be in dad's place someday took away my brother from me. I took that blow of my fate too.

I was always a lonely kid who tried to keep herself happy in company of her Barbie dolls and Easter bunnies. They were my only friends who listened to my grievances but never consoled me or wiped my tears but at least they listened or I thought they did. How could they?! They were not heart, bones and flesh but still they were my only friends. I had the best comfort in my life but what I craved for was warmth. Warmth of love which I lost too early in my life. I know my father and brother loved me but they had no time for me because they were always busy making innocents suffer. I always knew their onslaughts on families meant a lot of loss of life and many more casualties but I was too helpless or should I say who I could put a finger on?! My father and my brother who were my only family although we were never together. My life was empty right from the beginning to the point that I had stopped feeling anything because there was no one for whom I could feel anything.

Then he came and struck me like a bolt of lightning. The first time I saw him at the airport when he protected me from getting manhandled, I was drawn to him like a moth is drawn to fire. Call it my inexperience or my craving for love but I felt short of breath the first time I saw him. In my college there were guys but I was always under the scrutiny of my bodyguards. Only friend I had was Neil who did not treat me like I am some Aphrodite like other guys did. He filled the vacant place of a friend, philosopher and guide. However we lost touch in course of time.

What differentiated Arjun from all other men in my life was that he came with a devious motive to destroy me but still he was kind to me. He gave me attention even if it was in form of his brutal punishments. Attention was what I had craved for all my life and he gave me all of it. I agree what he did was wrong, very wrong but what my dad did with his mom was worst! I still remember Mary's words that he could have done worst like raped me without sacrament of marriage or passed me on to his men then to some auction. He could have done that but he didn't, he held me close to him like a possession dear to him, like I was a parrot and he was the demon whose life resided in that parrot in cage. I loathed him in the beginning but then I realised what I have got to lose if I grew affectionate towards Arjun. He wasn't my Mr Right but he quenched my thirst of attention. He came like a storm and shook me, uprooted me but he made a new me fit for him. I learned to be happy with him because there was no one and there could be no one other than him. He is my husband and that itself gave a chill down my spine but I knew I could trust him. The night he took my virtue not by my will but still he unified us. He might have bedded many before me but he was my first and he will be my last but that night he rescued me from the darkness of loneliness, my pain, my loss. I knew I never had to be alone again and find companions in lifeless Barbie dolls and Easter bunnies.

Soon I realised that even he was battling his own demons of his past. There was still that little boy inside him who had lost his mother before his own eyes, that little boy was still stuck in that part of his life, that little boy just needed a hand to pull him out of that darkness but what he got wasn't an angel's hand but a mentor who brought him in line not by love or tender care but infused hatred in him and he was fed hatred and only hatred.