Coloured Me Grey (Book Two)

Chapter 38

For the first time since I could remember, I was calm in front of him. Not just bewildered and too stunned to speak, but calm and composed enough to push his pillar of a body off me.

It was like standing alone at the seashore in the dark of the night, watching the waves crash against the sand, brushing past my feet in all its foamy galore. I walked into it. The undercurrent made the sand shift wherever I stepped but I kept on going, wishing to be where the sky met the sea. I knew that you cannot be at the horizon. It was an illusion. Like I thought the quicksand below my feet to be. The only difference being that the quicksand was very real.

"I - You – WHAT?"

I tuned out my father's booming voice. Lately, I had been getting good at it. Mother stared at me in gaping wonder – horrified, to be specific.

Not what you would expect in every household, right?

Baba was unimportant.

Zara?

I looked around frantically until my eyes landed on her small figure peering stealthily from behind her mother. She wasn't looking at me – of course, she hadn't understood what I had implied. Instead, Zara's gaze was on our father, reading his every movement like the deer waiting for the hunter to strike.

The hunter and the hunted – I have been both.

"I – I took every precaution I could to be a good example of a man for you. What happened, Riyaaz? Where did I go wrong?" My father held on to the back of the sofa and leant against it for support. His voice was softer; his eyes lost and wandering, unable to find their way home.

"In thinking that all those beatings will make me forget who I am." I slumped down on the floor with my back against the wall and sighed. "You made me hurt one of my closest friends. Sure, I was the one who really did it, but you can't deny your most generous contribution in making me that way. You were almost successful in making me as bad as you are. But then I saw them. They did not deny themselves and they were happy. Ishan is happy with another boy, Baba, and I used to hate that it wasn't me!"

Baba clutched at his chest. "You can't do this to me, Riyaaz. I am old now, my heart cannot take this much longer."

I shrugged. "There used to be a time when I would have felt bad for you."

Just like an old, wounded tiger the gives a desperate chase to its weakest preys to sustain itself for a few more weeks, my father bounded across the room.

Should one be moving so much – one with palpitation of the heart?

"You will not speak to me like that, do you understand?" he held up my chin in between his fingers. "Not in front of your sister."

"- and sometimes I used to wonder how your home was, that it made you this way." I did not care anymore.

"Will you ever be a man if you live like this? You are young and impressionable. If you continue to be this way like a delinquent, you will never be able to become a father. Do you want that? Don't you want a normal family?"

"Baba, please, don't hurt him."

Zara, no. You are too close.

"Stay-" Baba raised his hand.

NO.

"-QUIET," the back of his hand would have met Zara's cheek if her mother hadn't caught it mid-air.

"I never want to be a father if it means I have to treat my children the way you do," I pinned down his hands with all my body weight. "There is nothing normal about this."