Sandcastles | A Virat Kohli Fanfiction

19 • the sunrise

Virat's POV

Time slipped through my hands like a mixture of thorns and sand - pricking me as it descended yet caressing the cuts. After I returned from Goa, I took my family on a small trip outside Delhi.
I wanted to be there for as many people in my life as I could.

I changed myself, just to see if my life reciprocates with a similar positivity.

In July, we went to West Indies for a long cricket tour. I thought I could prevent jet lag if I slept on the flight but Shikhar, Hardik and Rahul - literal chaos makers of our bunch didn't let me sleep in peace. Yuzi helped them further in their shenanigans.
If Mahi bhai had been with me, the torture would've been half of what it was right now. That made me miss him more. He was going to come directly to Florida for the T20 series.

So when we landed on The Carribean, I locked myself in my room and slept like a sloth while the rest of the boys went to parties and pool.

The next morning, as I casually went down for a walk, my eyes fell upon a paperback of The Great Gatsby - from which Kavya had quoted me before the green day - on a book stand at the corner of my floor lobby.
I quickly bought it without reading the back cover or price label. I mean, I didn't need to because I completely trusted the recommender. I carried the book with me wherever I went, though I couldn't read it until it was bedtime.

Our net practices started after two days. I did harder gym sessions because once people start to expect from me, they are unstoppable. So I have to be limitless in my training too; that's the only way to balance and improvise.

There was a three-day match first, which ended with draw between both the teams. I scored a half-century and we were performing efficiently as a unit. So each night, when I went to bed after all the exertion I did all day long, I would scroll down my phone gallery and stare longingly at our dream-like snapshots from Coorg.

I giggled to myself when I saw the picture in which she was shivering under the waterfall and where I had wrapped my shoulders around hers. Well, in the moment when it was candidly captured, I was actually panicked but looking back at it now, that seemed innocent and adorable!

The following day, I called a small meet-up with the team after the breakfast in the hall. Just some sentences of raw and real advices that a big brother would give and then we did our stuff doing very light practice or nothing at all because a day before test match is a day to relax and fuel up.

I read The Great Gatsby through the evening, occasionally looking out from my window towards the vastly spread ocean. The thing about me reading something is that I don't rush through the story. I let it seep into my fingers with every turn of pages and into my heart with every turn of the twists. I look away for a while, sometimes closing my eyes to feel it better. I dive into that world, literally.

The coincidence that the plot of the book was set on an island, and the fact that I was reading it from an island as well, formed an ineffable connection - between me, the story and the recommender herself.

In the middle of the book, I came across that whole green light imagery! It dawned on me like a revelation; that the metaphor stood for unwavering love and hope, despite of the distance and torment.

I finished the book some minutes before it was 11 p.m. and just wrapped it in my hands and sank in empty drifting thoughts.