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58 | Dear Diary (18/05/2021)

May 18, 2021

Thursday,

00:20 a.m.

Dear Diary,

During my professional tenure in France, with the construction giant VINCI & Co. from May 2015 to September 2018, I used to work directly under the CEO Edward Leroy as a civil engineer cum architect.

I don't know how much of a trustworthy man I was in his eyes, but the cynical Leroy was distrustful of every other object or human that crossed his eyes. Everything and everyone except his fifteen-year-old daughter from his first wife, who had died after a prolonged period of terminal illness.

With his neck deep in a divorce from his second wife scheduled in around a month more, back in 2016, the man would weirdly repeat the same sentence over and over again—

'If your reason to live is alive and thriving, if your reason to live has not given up on you or themselves yet—you are not ruined yet. You are not dead yet. You are alive, and you will survive.'

Perhaps it was his way to console himself, to help himself out of the grief that had choked his throat the moment he had held his first wife's dead body in the hospital years ago, leaving behind his only reason to live, their daughter.

Some time later, in his own right, he thought getting married again would help him gain a mother for his daughter and provide him with a second chance at life. But the rest is history anyway.

It was in one of those cold and dark nights of winter in 2019 when I felt those hands on me, on my body, like a slimy little snake crawling up my skin. Maybe she thought that I could not hear everything or I could not feel anything. But I did feel everything. My eyes were definitely closed, but I did hear everything. And perhaps my closed eyes were the reason I mistook her for the woman I was once married to, Shivalika.

But then what would you even expect from a comatose patient if not closed eyes?

If it were not for Karim and Manoramaa's quick wit to put my body double, my hologram, and all sorts of godforsaken technology in action, the world would have long known that the Chairman and President of the Dogra Corporation was a half-dead comatose patient, that too twice, once due to an accident and the second time due to drug overdose. Something that left a hefty number of pages in his diaries empty.

Anyway, in that state of deep sleep, my night terrors seemed to just go on and on. They were never-ending. A normal person could have at least shouted, screamed, or cried for help and relief. But what was I supposed to do in that state?

Nothing.

Because my body was not in my control. Just like my verdicts on my own life and death were not.

It was something in my surname and in the blood flowing in my blood vessels that made them that bloodthirsty. And they had a part of us captured too, on top of that.

When I woke up the first time, Shivalika was already six months pregnant, and I possessed the belief that the woman that night was Shivalika. So, despite how much I abhorred her at that time, and no matter how hard it was for me to meet her eyes, I took care of her. Because, quite obviously, at that time, in my eyes, I was the father of her child.

I stopped her from aborting that child, thinking that it was mine—only to be proven as a fool later on—because the foetus growing in her womb was not mine. And that woman whom I felt on me that night was not Shivalika either. It was someone else.

And me being aware of this fact scared them even more, so I was down in the dark abyss of another fatal attack on my life in no time, rendering me as a half-dead man again.

When I woke up for the second time, I found out that I was the father of a five-month-old baby boy.

I found it difficult, extremely difficult, to even look at him, let alone hold him, being aware of the fact that innocent infant was a result of something that made me feel disgusted of my own body.

But then I slowly started noticing the tiny black curls on his round head. They were identical to mine. I saw his brown eyes. They too were like my own eyes. His nose, his cheeks, his tubby legs, or his rotund little stomach, they blended so well with my own image as an infant back from Zoraawar Mahal.

He is nine months old now, and I don't restrain myself from holding him anymore.

After Aisha passed away, I had installed Jason Chacko in her place to look after her—the girl from the hills.

And he did his duty quite well. He followed her around even when I was not in a state to talk to anyone and even when she passed out of NFSC and cleared her civil services entrance examinations.

Currently, receiving her training at the academy, she will receive her first posting order next month, most probably.

When my hands regained back their strength, the first call that I placed was a call to Jason. And not very astonishingly, he did affirm my suspicions.

According to my previous knowledge, when she was in college, she used to leave her hostel on every Saturday evening and search for something tirelessly on Sundays. Suddenly that stopped out of nowhere. Instead, she started leaving the hostel on Saturday evenings, only to go to someone's bungalow in the Kerala bureaucratic enclave. She would stay there on Sundays and return back to her college in the wee hours of Monday mornings while looking extremely tired, as if she was involved in some form of extensive physical labor.

I wonder if she will ever find out that I know her secret.

And I wonder if she will ever know my secrets too.

With every second that is passing by, it is as if she is not only inching closer to her aim but also closer to me, one step at a time.

It is hard to explain, but I am in awe of the way she is positioning her pieces on the board.

It's interesting how my surname would entitle me to walk two steps ahead of her after a year, but all along, it was her shadow that was walking ahead of mine.

Slowly yet steadily, things are changing, though, because the gap between our respective umbras is slowly narrowing into nothingness, with the tips of our respective swords ready to align in around a year more maybe?

Without her knowledge, obviously.

I hope so.

Signing off,

M.D.

P.S.: I have the answer to all my previous questions till now. I am not ruined yet. I am not dead yet. I am alive, and I will survive. You know why? Because she is alive. And if my reason to live is alive and thriving, if my reason to live has not given up on either herself or on me yet, even if I am unknown to her, I won't give up on myself either. Edward Leroy was right after all. 

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If you have understood even one percent of Mahadevan's persona by now, you will know that out of all the things that you read above, every fact is hundred percent the truth yet it's still half the truth.

Also, I guess now it is pretty clear, what 'half-dead' meant all along?I hope it is.

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