Beyond Lies

by Alka Dimri Saklani

  Did he listen to my moans?

  I nod stupidly and then push out the word, “yes,” but I can’t avoid my voice from shaking, hell I can’t even stop my body from shaking back and forth. I have no control, absolutely no control over my body. It’s quite some time before I can force myself to get up and wash my face. Once my breathing is under control I walk out preparing myself to see the monster standing outside.

  He is standing at the door and doesn’t allow me to step out before touching my shoulder and asking, “What happened, why are you crying?”

  “Nothing.” I jump back, away from his touch. .

  His eyes narrow at me and I am sure my panic is evident. It takes effort not to cry. I know I am going to hate him from the depth of my core…but I don’t know how I will ever unlove this man standing in front of me. How will I erase the most beautiful memories of my life? How will I look back at the moments I just spent with him with tarnished emotions?

  Bloody psychopath. I want to scream, but instead I give a nervous smile and say, “Oh I forgot my watch in the washroom. Can you please get it for me?” I hug myself to get a grip on my shaking.

  He looks at me with confusion. My smile, my shivering, my statement, nothing is in synchronization. For a brief second, I think he might refuse but he nods, still studying me. He walks towards the washroom and spins around to look at me. I force a smile. His eyebrows drew together as he walks inside the washroom.

  I jump swiftly to the washroom and lock it from outside.

  “Tia…what are you doing?” He shouts banging at the door. “Open the door Tia. What happened? Why are you behaving so weird? Open the door Tia.”

  Without bothering to reply, I rush towards the door and outside and then towards the life and soon I am out of his flat and finally I can breathe.

  He glances out of his window. Shit. He has broken the door and he will be here any moment. Kiara, where are you?

  I see Kiara’s car speeding towards me, and I rush inside and we speed off.

  “Speed off Kiara.” my voice is shaky, and I am trembling all over.

  “What happened Tia?” She looks at me with a worried expression.

  “Just leave from here. Now.” I try to scream, but my voice isn’t coming out any more than a whisper. My head has begun to spin.

  She contemplates asking me something but the panic on my face warns her and she speeds off. I look back and though I can’t see Samar, I know he will follow, then soon far away I see his car following us.

  “Kiara, outrun him.” I almost jump on my seat. “We need to escape him, he can’t get us.”

  She puts the car in fifth gear without asking anything. Before his car nears us, she takes a turn and then another, and then yet another. She makes so many turns in the crowded lanes that within sometime Samar loses our track and I can’t see his car anymore.

  She tries to slow down, but I scream, “Don’t! Don’t reduce the speed. And…and…we can’t go home, he must be waiting there, mom-dad are not at home, even Avinash was going to stay at a friend’s place. We…we…will…be alone. I should call… inform mom. Oh, shit shit shit. I forgot my phone at Samar’s home. Shit.”

  “Calm down Tia. You can call from my phone, but first you need to calm down. Relax, breathe.” She leaves the steering to touch my shoulder but then immediately holds it again when we are about to hit a car. “I will think of something. We can go to my friend’s home and then you call your mom from my phone. Okay?”

  “It was Samar.” I close my eyes tight and I am vaguely aware that I am clutching the seat beneath me tightly. I even feel the covers in my nails. “I recognized his perfume in that tiny room, but I was a fool, I was a fool, I didn’t, I didn’t’ trust my instincts, I was a fool, I am a fool, the ring I found there was his ring…it was Samar’s ring…” I bend down so quickly that my head crashes on the front and the cries I had been trying to contain breaks violently.

  The car comes to halt with a screeching break on the side of the road.

  “Oh Tia,” Kiara touches my shoulder, but then immediately pulls back. She is still scared I am wary of human touch…and the memories of the past few hours winds around my throat and chokes me. I don’t hear what she says after that, because I feel his touch on me and my body goes numb. I am tired, drained, vaguely aware that my mind is shutting down. I close my eyes in a futile effort to drift away in some unknown world, where there is no love, no lies, no hatred…and no pain.

  I am vaguely aware that Kiara is tapping my cheeks trying to keep me awake. “Look at me Tia.” I force my eyes to open and look at her. We will go to the polic….her voice breaks and she doesn’t even try to finish her sentence because she knows the police can’t do anything other than arrest him and I am glad that she shifts her focus on driving rather than on me and lets me slip into the oblivion.

  Next, I remember she is tapping my cheeks.

  “We have arrived Tia, come.”

  I open my eyes and it takes me a while to look at my surroundings, its dark, but I don’t focus on anything and just follow her blindly. We reach the house and she unlocks the door with…

  …Three ticks.

  58. Kiara

  Tia’s face is pale like a white sheet. Damn. She must have recognized the three ticks of the lock. I should have been more careful. But it all happened so suddenly. This was not a part of the plan. Tia shouldn’t have seen that ring. Not now.

  “What happened Tia?” I ask cautiously.

  “This place feels eerily familiar.” She is suddenly alert and is staring at me with confusion. But confusion is good, I can mislead her. I give her a slight push to enter in. She hasn’t seen the place after all. She was blindfolded the whole time.

  Her steps are slow, and she looks at the bed for a while. She sits on it cautiously as if it is a mine.

  “You wait here. I will bring water for you.” I say and push open the kitchen door. It was locked when Tia was here, so it’s good in a way. Tia knew of a home where she was locked in a single room. She knew of no kitchen in that place. Of course, she can’t. She is dumb in a way.

  I take deep breaths and fill the glass with water. I am buying time to calm down myself. When I go out, she is feeling the things with her hands and her eyes closed. She feels the bed; she measures its length with her hands.

  Her face is ashen, but the shock gives in to fear when she opens her eyes and finds me standing in front of her.

  “Who are you?” she asks me, her body still, her tone emotionless.

  “What do you mean Tia? I am Kiara.” I try to act normal. I am a good actress and well, I have already proven it.

  She walks towards me, staring at me as if she is looking at me for the first time. “I am not talking about name. Underneath that name, who are you?” She taps at my chest with her finger.

  “Your best friend.” Now it’s not a lie.

  “How…how… are you connected to Samar?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Stop acting!” She screams “It was Samar’s ring, and this is your place. What’s going on? Were you backstabbing me? Is this the place where you met behind me?”

  Oh my god, that was a nice story and against all my desires, it wasn’t true.

  “Shut up Tia. Your mind is overworking.”

  “No. It’s not. Tell me what’s going on. Did you both mess up? You could have told me directly; I would have left. Why go to this extent? You could have told me you loved him.” She closes her eyes. “Why? Why Kiara, why?”

  Damn it. It wasn’t supposed to go this way. I put the glass on the floor and step towards her. “I only love you, Tia.”

  She takes a step back “Yes, I am your friend and you love me, but that’s not what I am talking about.”

  “I know, and I mean it. I only love you, Tia.” I let the façade in my eyes melt. I let the love show. But the way she is looking at me, I know she can’t see the love. All that she sees is obsession. Like everyone else, like my parents.


  Like Samar.

  But no one can understand me. No one. Who can understand a girl whose own parents failed to understand her longing? Who can understand the pain of a little girl whose parents forgot her in a house that was burning down to ashes? The day the neighbour pulled me from the burning house instead of my own parents, who after saving themselves even forgot I was inside, the little girl who begged for love had died. The little girl who waited every night for her parents to kiss her good night, who waited drenched in heavy rains for a mother who forgot to pick her up from school, who waited for her parents to wish her happy birthday until the clock stroke away the last second of the day….that innocent who waited was gone.

  A new girl, a determined one, was born instead. A girl who knew how to claim love. A girl who couldn’t share love.

  All my childhood I craved for mom’s love, but it was all reserved for dad. What option did she leave me? Was I wrong when I planted the seeds of doubt in their married life? Was I wrong when I lied in front of dad that Kapoor uncle spent time in her bedroom when dad was on tour? It was enough to break the solid walls of their marriage. But I didn’t do it out of choice, that was the only option left for me. Dad left mom. And, finally, I had mom all to myself.

  Without any competition.

  Simran hates competition.

  But that woman was lost with her marriage, she hated me. She hated the girl who lied, who broke her marriage, but she never loved the daughter who was lonely and broken.

  “Kiara?” Tia’s breaking voice pulls me out of my reverie, and I realise I am staring at nothing in particular with wide eyes.

  Tia…

  Yes, I love this girl. I can’t believe once I wanted to kill her. How deliberately I had followed Samar and seen them together. The way Samar looked at her that day at the Juhu beach, that look in his eyes, that familiar look and then a glimpse of me and it was all gone. It was a fleeting second when our eyes met and then I was lost in the crowd. I went to the parlour to have my hair straightened and used hazel colour lenses. I totally changed the way I dressed so if in a fleeting moment he ever saw me, he would second guess his mind. I rented the house opposite Tia’s place. My plan was to follow her routine and strike at the proper time. But this damn girl spoilt it all. She was a nosy little bitch.

  But she cared.

  She cared for me like nobody ever cared for me. Not even my mother. Tia’s caring was a like a drop of water in the barren land of my life.

  That night when Tia came to me asking for help from that stalker, she found comfort in me. All my life I was the one who sought comfort in others. That made me the weaker person in every relationship. Even in my relationship with Samar he was controlling. I was always the one who needed comfort. I could have straight away told Tia that it was Ritesh who was following her. I had seen him lusting for Tia. From my window I had often seen him taking her snaps when she wasn’t looking. But then what? She would have known and wouldn’t seek any comfort in me. I only needed to cut her ties with everyone around her and she would be mine. But their bond was strong, dropping off sentences about her parents here and there didn’t work. The sleeping pills I dropped in her drink on important occasions just created rift, but nothing more. But during the police investigation when I came to know she was an illegitimate child born out of wedlock, that was a lottery.

  “Kiara?” Tia says loudly. Oh, she had been expecting a reply. I try to remember what I told her last. Oh yes, I admitted my love for her.

  My mother’s words echo in my mind. “There is a hell of a lot of difference between a man’s love and woman’s love.” She had said this when dad divorced her. He had affairs; we all knew it, but mom always forgave him. But he didn’t even bother to dig deeper into my lie before asking for separation. I expected mom to hate him, but she failed to hate the man she should have hated, instead she diverted her hate towards me, the little girl she should have loved.

  Men’s love is fleeting, temporary. Like Samar’s love. Women’s love is constant. Solid. The way Tia loved. Her love changed me inside out. Most people in life who get love easily don’t understand people like us, people who have longed for love, even begged, and when nothing worked, snatched it away. The longing runs so deep that it can change the very DNA of our soul.

  Tia’s love filled me with hope I didn’t know existed in me. But the problem with this girl is that she loves everyone. Pure, unadulterated love.

  But Simran can’t share her love.

  I step towards her.

  “I love you, Tia. Not in the romantic way.” I pause. Ponder. “Well, maybe. I don’t know. Look, I never wanted to harm you.” I walk towards her and touch her face, after a long, long time and it feels good. I don’t need to worry anymore that she might recognize the aura if I get too close. Though I wore a leather jacket while kidnapping her and during her captivity so that she wouldn’t’ recognize my touch, I was always wary she might recognize the aura. She steps back. What is that expression on her face? Fear? Panic? Hurt? Shock? She doesn’t need to fear me.

  “Don’t touch me.” She pushes away my hand indignantly.

  “Baby, you don’t have any option.” I pull her towards me, but she slaps away my hand.

  “Just don’t touch me, I said stay away.” She manically keeps pushing my hand away until I step back a little.

  “Why Tia? What has changed? You wanted to know what the connection is between me and Samar? You remember the boy I talked about, the one who was madly in love with me, who broke the engagement a few days before our marriage. It was Samar.”

  I give her time for my words to soak in. The hatred for Samar would have been sown long back in her mind. But damn, my plan failed.

  Oh, how deliberately I let her run out of the captivity before the drug took effect, my plan would have perfectly worked if I dropped her near Samar’s flat in the dead of the night, but the uncalled police patrol because of a false alarm of a bomb near Samar’s flat ruined my plan, all the roads were covered with patrols and in panic, I had left Tia near to Ritesh’s home where I was sure there was no CCTV or police patrolling going on. A little background check on Samar would have unearthed the fact that his previous fiancée died a few days before his marriage and he was a pyscho killer who tried to do the same with his second fiancée, but she escaped. During Tia’s captivity I even used the woody perfume Samar used during our dating, though I wasn’t sure if he still used the same, but it did nothing to warn of this stupid girl. And damnit, nobody thought Tia could have been kidnapped by anyone else except her stalker during the investigation and after she was found there was no chance.

  I look at Tia, I mean, I was looking at her entire time, but my mind was somewhere else. Now I focus on her. The way her lips are shivering, I am sure she is trying to frame a question, but at the same time she dreads the truth. The truth will shatter her, so I let her shatter. After all, I am always there to gather her pieces.

  “He tried to kill me. He is a bloody murderer. He pushed me in deep waters of a raging river. And he knew I couldn’t swim.”

  Her legs give away, and her knees hits the ground.

  “No…” her voice trembles, but I know she believes me.

  Have you ever seen a person who has been pushed from the 15th floor of a building, like I pushed Samar’s mother? The moment before they hit the ground, when they know they can’t survive this…That expression of dread…That’s how Tia looks in this moment, like she has lost all hope of surviving this fall.

  59. Samar

  “Damnit. What the hell!” I bang the steering wheel. How could I lose their tracks? My car is in front of Tia’s home but it’s dark and the house is locked, her parents are out of town attending a wedding and won’t be back before midnight. Avinash was going to stay at a friend’s home. I even checked Kiara’s home, but it was locked. I took Tia’s responsibility. Damn, damn, damn I repeatedly bang the steering wheel.

  I pick up Tia’s phone from the side seat and re-read her message to Kiara. Nothing
makes sense. How can she be so sure my engagement ring was at her captor’s place? How? She is mistaken. It might be a similar ring, but not the same, because my ring? I returned it to Simran the last time we met.

  The last time we met… in the night that was eerily, sinfully scarily dark. As if the night had swallowed the last bit of light from the universe, the same way that hatred had consumed the last bit of love from my existence. At least the night was tinted with the full moon that was playing hide and seek with the clouds, but inside me there was no moon, no light, just the darkness of a harrowing revenge.

  “It was Simran who pushed me. I am dying, Samar, but I hope you save yourself.” Mom’s last words on her deathbed didn’t disperse in the air, they were floating around when she closed her eyes, when I filled in the forms in the hospital, when I took her for last rituals, to this day her words sometimes echo in the hollows of my heart. The truth was like acid to my soul. With the last rituals, I burned everything, the parts of me that dreamt of giving a happy life to mom, and the parts of me that loved Simran, and then nothing was left of me. Nothing. Simran and I shared the same childhood, when most of the children considered their father as their role model, ours left us alone, as if we meant nothing. She was not only my future, in her I also saw my past. Some people are bonded by physical attraction, some by sharing their joys, we were bonded by pain beyond everything else. And trust too. If trust must ever leave us, it must happen in bits and pieces, when something that defines us abandons us in a moment, the shift to the new person is dangerous and I was a living example.

  It was a struggle to conceal my emotions during the last rituals, to not allow Simran to see the hatred eating me alive, keeping her unaware of the truth I had learned.

  And then, when we were standing at the bridge where we first met, where I proposed her, where we dreamt of a happy future together, where it all started, where it would all end, I held her close. “Simran, now I only have you in my life, you and only you.” Wasn’t that what she always wanted? Why had it taken me so long to understand her? Why did I never question her when everyone I loved drifted away? When she poisoned me against my friends, my cousins, everyone. I should have dug deeper when she left unfinished statements about them.