Gazing at the brilliant morning sun, would not be harder. Swara could not look in to Sanskar’s face as she listened to Ragini. Previously she had tried to stop her, as she started unearthing the skeletons but the look Sanskar gave her, that utterly nerve-racking glint in his eyes had dried her throat of words. Instead she started at his clenched fist on the table next to her, where she could see the pulsing veins sticking out and hope against hope that her last minute move might work out as the voting ended.
They were discussing the merger with Agrawals and Ragini had just questioned Sanskar’s right to head the Maheshwaris with all the information she had unearthed on his birth story. Looking at Ram Prasad Swara could see her own mask of composure over guilt, fear and anger reflected there. Her eyes shifted to Ragini who had a victorious glint in her eyes. Then she looked at Lakshya, who was eyeing Sanskar with a mixture of awe and pity…she would have a word with him later. Finally her eyes rested upon Annapurana, who held her gaze and smiled slightly.
Swara’s memory shifted back to the phone call she had taken to Annapurana that night as she confronted Ragini. She looked back at Ragini, after a low exhale. She did not know that her biggest pawn had changed sides yet.
The voting ended and Ragini looked up, keenly as the results were announced. As she had hoped her stunt had wavered the thirty percent Swara and Sanskar had claimed with the pen drive. But Still…the final verdict is that the merger will not take place.
The utter shock reflected in Ragini’s empty eyes made Swara grin, despite her situation. Hers and Sanskar’s twenty, joined with Annapurna’s twenty five was unstoppable. Turning sideways she saw Sanskar glance at her briefly. She could not meet his eye yet. The assembly slowly filed out.
‘You knew,’ Sanskar said slowly.
Finally taking a long encouraging breath she placed her eyes on him. He looked a different person, burning in raw agony once more.
‘Sanskar I didn’t mean to…’
‘Did you know this or not?’
‘Yes I did. That’s why I had…’
‘Collected Badi Ma,’ saying shortly Sanskar stood up, and stretched his hand for her, with a very formal, very plastic smile. ‘Well played Swara.’
‘Sanskar, listen…’
He gestured her to be silent.
‘What I’ve heard is still ringing in my ears, so please, pardon me!’ With that said in a brisk empty tone, he left the conference room, the quickest his legs would manage.
*
Swara was no longer surprised at her fate. It had a way of pushing her in to bottomless depths with simple pushes. Always, her one wrong choice sends her spinning in to the chaos. When, Ragini was trying to murder her, it had been her choice to go and meet her. It had been her choice to give up the pen drive; it had been her choice to trust Sanskar. Those choices had ruined her peace of life.
Then, it was her choice to pull Sanskar in to this battle with her. It was her choice to make him fight Ragini and thwart her plans for her. It was her choice to dig his past and then it was her choice not to open that e mail.
‘Ugh!’ she said to herself as she banged on to her cabin, trying desperately to call Sanskar. No, he was not picking up. Had she opened that e mail a little earlier, she would have stopped Ragini before she had staged that entire drama. How dare, she insult Sanskar, she thought furiously. How dare she question his legitimacy, his right to head the Maheshwaris. Ragini, had no right to talk to him like that.
She took a long breath trying to calm herself when Lakshya entered her cabin, as usual without knocking.
‘Swara, where is Bhai?’ He asked urgently, she eyed him with all the frustration she could manage and a heavy dose of loathing.
‘What?’ She asked. ‘Have anything left to say? Just how much more insults are you going to throw at him?’ She started him down as she approached him. ‘You and your wife both can go to hell Lakshya, I’m not going to let you anywhere near Sanskar again!’
Lakshya held her by her shoulders and shook her.
‘Where is he? Tell me!’
‘I won’t! I’m not going to be intimidated by you Devar Ji!’
‘I’m not with Ragini,’ Lakshya said exasperated. ‘Please Swara, he is in danger!’
‘Wh…what?’
‘Ma told me everything you’ve discussed then I heard Ragini talking in the phone with Chandraraj, they are going to kill him.’
Swara felt her vision going darker as the words etched in her mind. She had pushed Sanskar in to this. She had finally ruined him as she did to everyone who came to her life.
‘They know your marriage is fake,’ Lakshya was saying. ‘I know, don’t ask me how. But…if something happens to him everything falls apart Swara, please tell me where is he?’
Swara bit her trembling lower lip as her eyes welled up with tears.
‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘He rushed out as soon as the voting ended and he’s not answering my calls!’
‘Oh god!’ Lakshya said. ‘This is her plan,’ he looked at Swara. ‘She would easily prove he was distracted and crashed his car or something.’ he almost took a step towards the door. ‘Just like she had tried to kill you and make it look like you had committed suicide because our marriage broke, we need to leave right now.’
‘You go,’ said Swara.
‘What?’
‘I have somewhere else to go, this is most urgent too.’
‘Umm alright then.’
She watched him leave, feeling her veins fill with the venom of fear and her cells crawl with pain. Her fingers were trembling as she reached for the car keys. She would not be able to find Sanskar even if she set out with Lakshya, but she could make sure nothing happened to him. If Chandraraj thinks he can destroy Sanskar he deserved to be destroyed too.
*
‘It was nothing personal Mrs. Maheshwari.’ Chandraraj said as he lowered the folder he was reading and looked at her. ‘But I can’t afford your husband’s decisions at the moment.’
‘Of cause it was personal,’ said Swara as calmly as she could manage. ‘If it was another, you would not have taken this decision Mr. Agrawal, you did it because you want revenge from my father in law.’
The man crooked his eyebrows a little but looked at her in an understanding look.
‘You know,’ he said slowly.
‘Yes, both what you know and what you don’t.’
‘Then you might understand why I can’t sleep peacefully until I have made sure Ram is awake in his agony. Until I’m sure he is as lonely as I am.’
‘You think he was the reason you lost your love?’ Swara asked slowly.
There was a long pause in which Chandraraj dropped his impassive mask completely and looked at her with his pain purely visible in his eyes. No one had ever raised this topic the way she had and no one had made him want to answer them.
‘Yashodara,’ he said softly. ‘Was never meant for me. We loved each other dearly, we tried to hold on to that relation too, but circumstances pulled us apart.’
‘She never married Papa,’
‘She never refused to either,’ pointed out Chandraraj. ‘It was Ram who had married another, Yashodara always loved him.’
‘And…you left her?’
‘If Ram had agreed to marry her would she ever objected? How could I continue to sacrifice everything I had for someone who was not ready to love me back with the same intensity? Only if Ram hadn’t tainted our love…’
‘That’s where you are wrong,’ Swara said slowly. ‘Papa was never a character of your love story. He had married mom because Yashodara Masi had told him to break off their marriage.’
‘What?’
‘You claim to love her but you never understood her yourself did you Mr. Agrawal? You loved what you imagined Yashodara to be rather than what she really was. She was afraid to oppose her family openly hence she had taken Papa’s help. There was never anything more between them… You were her only love that I can guarantee.’
Chandraraj looked at her with a new found curiosity.
‘Why should I trust you?’
‘Because she is speaking the truth,’ said Sujata whom Swara had brought with her but had asked to wait in the sidelines until this moment. ‘I am the other character in the tale, I can vouch for that. You might realize Agrawal Ji that I would never lie on this account.’
Chandraraj pinched the bridge of his nose.
‘I pity you Mr. Agrawal,’ said Swara. ‘You’ve been burning on a self made pit of coals for so long. What you imagined was not the reality of your world.’
‘Then the child?’
‘You don’t understand the depth of your misunderstanding yet, do you?’ Swara asked a little sarcastically. ‘You baseless rage had built a ice wall so thick around your heart that made you so blind, you ended up hurting your own child, spilling you own blood.’
‘No,’ Chandraraj said slowly.
‘You haven’t ruined Papa; in fact you have ruined your salvation. Sanskar is your son. If he dies I don’t think you’ll ever find peace. Do you see it now; this is what Ragini does to her pawns. She destroys them after the battle is fought. She has done the same with you.’
Chandraraj buried his head in his arms, his features rigid with pain.
‘The man you’ve hated so passionately had always been your friend Mr. Agrawal. He had protected your love and its only symbol left, he had lost everything, shattered his image in front of his family, given up all his dreams for that one purpose. Is this how you repay him?’
‘Stop it,’ said Chandraraj. ‘Stop it please. I…I cannot take it anymore.’
‘I won’t,’ said Swara.
‘Because I want you to go through the same pain I am going through at the moment. The pain of realizing what you have lost only after losing it and cursing yourself for bringing this fate upon something you’d die without. If the people you send have accomplished their task I want you to suffer as much as I would, all my life. Still when I die I would curse you, for you did not get love yourself and did not let me attain it either.’
*
There had been two turning points in Sanskar’s life. Both of them drastic enough to claim his life, both of them terrible enough to make him lose his senses but ultimately both had made him a little tougher than he earlier was and a little more immune to the games destiny liked to play with him occasionally. First had been Kavita’s death, second had been the truth he came in terms with recently. It would not be a lie to say that the first had only hardened his heart and darkened his soul; the second had completely broken him in to countless pieces. What else would someone do if another so bluntly proved their entire life, all the beliefs, everything on which their conscious was based on was nothing but an illusion; than leaving the place to brood over the abyss of thoughts they were now left with?
Was that the reason Bade Papa said Swara was his destiny? Because without her he would not be able to claim the Maheshwari Empire and was that the reason Badi Ma always had resentment towards him, because he reminded her of all the pain her sister had gone through? How could he live on with all these thoughts pouring over him like hot lava and eating away his heart and soul?
Ragini would not have to plan his death at the moment; another minute of that lonely agony would have killed him. But no, his father had reached him before that. Most of what he said made no sense to him, but some faintly registered his mind. This had been a plan. Ragini had planed it. Chandraraj was after it as well, but no longer. Swara, again had saved his life. She had told Chandraraj the entire truth.
Truth, there was more to it. More white hot blades of words. Even what Ragini said had not been complete. He listened in silence as his father talked, all the while holding his shoulders, looking in to his eyes, making sure he was there, unharmed.
As he talked Sanskar saw that other Ram Prasad once more. It was the man he would have called his father proudly. But no, they shared no such relation. With guilt he realized how wrong he was about this man. In fact he was the strongest Maheshwari he had ever come across. Who on earth had that much capacity to hold so much agony and love so selflessly.  How could someone be so pure? First time he looked at the man (he had so long only formally called his father,) the way every son would gaze upon their fathers. As if he was the hero of their world. Never in his life would he find another man to fit in this category of selflessness his father had shown. For the first time of his life he was not ashamed to be this man’s son, but alas! The destiny would not bestow that honor upon him anymore.
Ram held his face, made him look in to his eyes as he said those last words.
‘You are my son,’ his tone was firm and unyielding. ‘Never dare say anything against that. I have protected you with my entire life. No one in this world would snatch that right from me, not even you. Chandraraj and Yashodara never existed in our world and they never will! You are my son. The son, I lived and would someday die for!’
*
Swara was taught from her early childhood that never should a respectable woman work on their first impulse. But seeing Sanskar in front of her, all right and unharmed, his eyes dimmed with that much pain, she had forgotten that lesson. Running to him, in a few quick steps she threw her arms around him, knocking the air out of his lungs and hugged him tightly. At the moment it did not occur to her that he was perhaps avoiding her after his discussion with his father by heading straight in to his penthouse instead of coming home.
But she could guess why he did so. That home was no longer his, he would not find solace from this storm there. Perhaps he wanted to find shelter in his isolation and memories of Kavita like he might have done after her death. Swara could not risk that. His last attempt of relieving himself from pain had trapped him behind so many ice walls that she herself had to freeze her heart before reaching him. She would not let agony destroy him again.
‘What are you doing here?’ He asked her slowly as his fingers ran through her hair absentmindedly. ‘You shouldn’t have come. I’m alright.’
‘I didn’t come to console you,’ said Swara looking up at him, drinking in the sight of his beloved face, thanking heavens for keeping him safe. ‘I know you’ll be alright. I came here because I am not.’
‘You saved my life, fought the entire battle single handedly and still you need me to console you?’ He sounded surprised.
‘Perhaps that is the downside of being a queen.’ Swara said slowly. ‘You’re always incomplete without the king.’
‘I am no king,’ Sanskar corrected her.
‘You are, even without a crown.’ Swara told him. He raised a crooked eyebrow and grinned slightly at her. ‘Tonight I won’t ask you for any explanations. We had a lot of truth that is enough for the day. But you owe me one explanation.’
‘I’m in your debt,’ Swara agreed. ‘Let’s just spend this night in silence and gladness that battle was fought and won with both of us still firmly standing on ground. We have a life time to talk and explain.’
‘And to heal,’ Sanskar agreed.
‘Yes, to heal.’
*