"I wish you were never born!" ... "Just die already!" ... "You're a curse to my life."
These words used to haunt a very sweet girl, who grew up way earlier than she should have, and started looking at life the way it stands in the corners, the dark alleys and the shadows. Atreyee sat up on her bed, drenched in sweat, panting for breath, as if she was being held down by some unseen force. Her throat felt tight, and her head was heavy, breathing was painful, and her chest hurt with every heartbeat. She slowly got out of her bed, looked across the room towards the mirror fitted on her dressing table. Her hair was all over her face, her eyes were dark with lack of sleep, and she could barely sit straight with her fatigued body. She found her slippers on the doormat, placed nicely beside each other. She had always had these nightmares as far as she could remember, and there are fragments of her memory which she doesn't really understand well, but she's just scared to think about them.
"Anandi, your breakfast is ready. Come down quickly. Also why were you up so late yesterday? I saw the light in your room turned on at 3 in the night! Think a little about your health, will you? I'm worried you know, I'm getting old, you're so childish you make your old aunt worry about you."
Atreyee smiled. Her nightmare was no longer there, she could see her aunt in the kitchen, chopping away at the carrot, while a bowl of carefully washed spinach leaves rested on the kitchen cabinet. Something was sizzling on the fry pan, and the smell it emanated made the hungry little girl's mouth water. In a short while, breakfast was laid out on the table, and by that time, Atreyee had raced through her morning activities, although she wasn't really satisfied with the very short shower she got to have.
"Fast Anandi, fast. You'll be late for school again!"
Anandi was the name her aunt called her by. She adored this name, and even as a teenager with enough common sense, often fought with her aunt to change her name to Anandi altogether. But her aunt talked some sense into her and she, although grumblingly, started to accept the fact gradually. Sometimes her childishness reminded her aunt of her childhood days, and a dark cloud is cast in her mind. As much as she wants to let her dear Anandi know her life as it was, she fears that a part of her dear child will die with the truth. After she witnessed the events that unfolded almost ten years ago, she is really concerned about her dear child. Atreyee was the only thing that kept her from taking her own life. As she sat down at the table, looking at the excited girl tearing away at her omelet and light fried salad, the part of her life that she desperately wanted to forget flashed before her eyes.
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Adrija was rushing through the streets, panting like some rabid animal. She didn't care that people were looking at her as some mentally unstable woman running through the streets. Sweat was rolling down her hands, she was panicking to the extent that she fell and injured herself even when she was running on a well-paved foot walk. She had been dialing her husband's number for quite some time now, but he has quite suddenly stopped receiving her calls. Her stress levels were increasing every passing moment. Her vision started to blur out, and she actually hit a person walking the opposite direction. The man was startled, but he quickly proceeded to pick up the almost unconscious woman lying at his feet. The man was sprinkling water from his bottle on her face when she came back to her senses, but she noticed she could hardly move her limbs. She had overstrained her body to the point that it refused to even move at this point.
"Where were you going, dear lady? I can drop you there if you want."
Adrija was just too tired to notice, but she realized that the man she bumped into was quite an old gentleman, and although she felt very bad to ask for a favor from someone she just knocked over, she was in a rather helpless situation, and she could only manage to say a few mumbled words before she lost consciousness again.
"Sir, please get me to this address as fast as you can, and please call the police."
She gained consciousness sitting in a cab, with a shawl drawn over her. The cab driver was relieved to see her awake and suddenly asked her if she was okey, and kind of blatantly asked her if the old guy was someone she knew. Although a bit dazed, she remembered the incident, and read the situation, and quickly defused the misunderstanding. The old guy, who was sitting beside her quietly until now, gave her a kind smile. She noticed that he was dressed very formally, in what looked like office clothes, and in general gave off a very important individual aura.
The cab stopped at the familiar side street, Adrija could recognize all the shops that surrounded the place, and then her dread caught up with her.
"Sir I'm so sorry I dragged you into this, but I must thank you for helping me reach this place."
The old man held her hand in a prayer, put his hand on her head, stepped back and told her," My child, you had a mild heart attack, I'm sorry I had to perform some preliminary care on you without your permission, but you seem stable now. I wish you a good life, dear. And don't overstrain yourself, your heart doesn't seem to respond well to stress."
The old man then bowed in namaskar, handed a startled Adrija his card and walked away. She momentarily glanced at the card. He was a doctor, a cardiologist, Dr Aniket Chatterjee. She shook her head," Now is not the time for this". She quickly started jogging her way to the apartment of her cousin, Atreyee. Her eyes were tearing up at this point, she could hear the police sirens blaring behind her, an officer ran up to her and asked if she was the one who requested a welfare check at this address. She nodded and the officer called over two more female officers from their van, and the three of them proceeded towards the apartment.
As the officers got near to the door, a child's whimpering was clearly audible from the other side of the door, Adrija tried to scream her name to reassure her, but the female officer held her mouth shut.
"Mam this can be serious case, and we don't know how the individual inside the apartment will react to your voice. Please keep your composure, we'll ensure that no harm comes to the child."
Although she was taken over to a side to be questioned by another female officer, she couldn't keep herself composed when she could hear her dear Atreyee crying. Moments later, officers carried a crying, blood-soaked Atreyee out of the apartment, and Adrija went into a shock when she saw the baby like that. Before completely blacking out, all she could here was the officers calling for backup, someone shouting orders to clear out the building and seal off the scene, and some panicked officers calling for a medical team to be immediately dispatched to the location. After that, everything went black.
Three days had passed since the incident and Adrija still hadn't woken up from her shock. Shubham was sitting beside her bed, face clasped in his palms, sobbing profusely, as everyone waited for her to open her eyes. The doctors at the hospital concluded from their interaction with the officers that Adrija had suffered a major heart attack after seeing Atreyee that day and had immediately collapsed. The doctors have been trying their best, but she was still not responsive. Shubham was brought out by the nurses from her cabin when the visiting hours ended, and he sat on the steel chairs in the waiting area, staring blankly at the ceiling, tears rolling down his tired face. A few officers came up to him, and after some deliberation he was walking along with then to the van, apparently, he was summoned for questioning regarding a double homicide. When he heard this, he broke down crying profusely, even the officers at the scene had a hard time consoling him, he was wailing like an animal, punching the ground until his knuckles started bleeding, and at the end, the officers had to restrain him just to keep him from further self-harm.
Atreyee was being monitored in the psychiatric ward of the same hospital, where three officers were stationed for the safety of the little girl, and where doctors were trying to understand her condition. From the moment she had stopped crying, she hadn't spoken a single word in the past three days. The doctor who was looking after her was genuinely concerned that she might have lost her ability to speak due to the immense psychological and mental trauma she went through at such a young age. There were always young doctors trying to initiate conversations with her, nurses showing her tricks. But all the toys, tricks and other approaches have been utter failures, as she sat on her bed, like a living glass doll, with her doctor pacing outside her cabin, looking at her through the huge glass partition. He was genuinely considering the idea of shifting Atreyee to a better facility, where she can have better treatment. Just then, news started spreading among the staff at the hospital that the woman who was unresponsive for the last three days had woken up.
Adrija had woken up.