Chapter 5
Alter ego
He watched her walk away, helplessly.
Sahir had never been particularly skilled at communicating with people to begin with. Somehow he had always found it somewhat difficult to understand people. Small talk with complete strangers, especially, was an absolute nightmare. When it came down to networking in order to advance his career prospects, he found himself to be fairly competent, because networking, as per his careful analysis, involved set formulas, easily learnt, retained and replicated. There were algorithms in place, rules... it was all logical, comfortingly so.
But anything beyond such rehearsed civility, anything that required a spontaneous earnest reaction, rendered him completely clueless.
Maybe it was because he was, after all, what his university peers had tagged as a nerd. He had never found the label offensive in any way, because he did find more solace and companionship within the pages of books than amongst humans with whom he was barely able to connect.
It may well have been a choice that he had made at some point during his early teenage years, to escape his dysfunctional, fragmented family. It had felt liberating to strive to excel in everything he did, to take refuge in the future as he envisioned it... a future where he would have everything at his fingertips and the world at his feet. A future where nobody would look down upon him or chastise him on his every move, so that those who once did, would see how wrong they had been.
And soon, just like that, his self-imposed solitude had merged with the hatred he felt for them, for all of them. The anger had consumed him. The road to excellence had begun to cross with a thirst for self-validation, for vindication and vindictiveness.
Being in the legal profession had not exactly helped matters either. It was a world that thrived under high pressure, not just time-wise, but more generally, in terms of the pressure that was placed on everyone to be the best and even more importantly, to appear to be the best. It was a world where one was constantly judged, sized up, compared. Sure one could be a mediocre lawyer and survive in anonymity, dragging one's feet from day to day. But to become a star lawyer whom journalists would clamor around for news bytes, to somehow be the one of the few to make it amongst so many other strugglers, in a world of big names, big achievements, nepotism and underhand dealings - that, was the challenge. That was the only way to be. The be-all and end-all, of it all.
It may well have been a somewhat subconscious choice of his, but he had been the way he was for so long now, that he knew no other way to be, other than detached and aloof, hateful and resentful. It was hard to admit that such an overt show of weakness could be admirable, but a part of him had secretly marveled at how Arzoo was able to bond with people, how she happened to know more about the staff at the firm than he did, even though he had been there for much longer, how she empathised with clients and made them comfortable, how she seemed to brighten up the days of random strangers by the little thoughtful things that she would do or say. She just always knew what to do, what to say.
He watched her walk away, helplessly, and wished that, in that moment, he too could know what to do, what to say. He realised, as he watched the distances between them grow, that some stifled part of his robotic being, was still breathing and thumping within his frenzied, burdened heart. But that part was now rusty from disuse, and try as he might, he could not bring himself to do anything but watch her form grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared around the bend.
Then again, he asked himself, what could he have possibly done to stop her? What would he have said? They were not friends. He had rarely condescended to even be cordial towards her. Ever since her first day at the law firm, he had almost instantly taken a dislike to her.
He had been silently fuming when they had entered the conference hall. He just could not get over the fact that she had kicked such a fuss about the clothes being "too revealing," when she was perfectly okay with wearing short skirts at the office. Oh, how she enjoyed irritating him! She had no idea how much it meant to him that he had an opportunity to attend the conference and make a good impression on some of the stalwarts that would be there. Thanks to her childish shenanigans, they were almost late. The speech of the plenary speaker started just a few minutes after they had sat down. The only good thing that had ensued from all that hullaballoo, he had concluded, was perhaps the fact that they did not get seats together.
And then, just as he was glaring at her back angrily, sitting in the seat directly behind her, she had bent down to retrieve her pen that had fallen on the floor, and in that instant, everything changed. The dupatta that she had tightly wound around her shoulders had glided off slightly and revealed on her back, a long half-healed scar of what seemed to be from a blow that she had received. He leaned forward and squinted through the translucent fabric of the dupatta and realized that that was not the only scar on her back. There were so many, crisscrossed in an angry pattern that sent a chill down his own spine.
He could barely bring himself to focus on what was being said at the conference after that. They were just words, sounds, an undecipherable din that he could not care less about. It all seemed so petty in the face of what she would have undergone.
It was not the first time that he had witnessed such signs of physical violence. He had in fact been privy to much worse. He had had all sorts of clients - rape victims, victims of untold violence, mental as well physical. But they were all so distant from him. They were just cases, and he diligently found the applicable law and ushered them in the path of justice, as his oath of office as a lawyer required of him. But this was Arzoo. The girl who smiled at him even though he would never smile back, the girl who would wish him good day as though she meant it, the girl who would rush to clean off coffee that he would have spilled on his jacket in a moment of distraction, the girl who would get excited because it was raining, or because the sun was out, the girl with that uninhibited laughter that was irritating but yet, somehow, heartwarming. Someone who had in her own unassuming manner grown so close to him.
Those scars, however she may have gotten them... they narrated a story of pain, the sort of pain that he would never have associated with her, not in a million years. She was such a young girl, like a child, careless, harmless, guileless. How could she have sustained such wounds?
And how did she do it? How did she manage to be so cheerful, to bring a smile to people's faces, never giving a single clue of the pain that she might have been in herself? What was this girl made of? And how could he, who prided himself on always being right, have been so wrong about her? He had never felt so small in his life.
A flood of recollections rushed towards him like a gust of cold wind slapping him out of his false pride. Why had he hated her after all? She had always been dedicated in doing the work that had been assigned to her. No matter how arduous the tasks that he would give her, she would always try her best to accomplish it. She had always been respectful towards her seniors, and as a matter of fact, every person at the firm - from peon to partner. Faced with the epiphany that struck him then, suddenly, he could remember no wrong that she could have ever done to him. There had been no real reason for him to treat her with disdain as he had so often done.
And yet the only time when he had felt the slightest ounce of regret for his words, she seemed to have forgiven him before he could even apologise. She did it again at the conference. When he tried to apologise to her during the break, she cut him off again, looking embarrassed at the fact that he was apologising to her in the first place, even though his apology had only been limited to the fact that he had scolded her when she had made a fuss about the clothes. She did not even allow him to get to what he really meant to say.
Why could she not understand why it was so important for him to take that weight off his chest? He did not like to be wrong, he never thought that he could even be wrong. And yet he had misjudged her. Or perhaps, he should not have judged her to begin with.
Who was he after all? It was all a sham, his show of power and superiority. He was just as insecure as the next man, perhaps even more so, because he felt the need to hide it. He was not like Arzoo who could fearlessly ask question after question; he could only pretend to know all the answers.
But still, he had felt entitled to show her down at every point, when she was in more than one way, a better person than he could ever be. What was wrong with him? How had he become like that, filled with so much bitterness? And why? The questions remained just as frustratingly unanswered as ever. Cracks were forming in the walls around him, something had thawed within him, but he still did not know what to do, what to say, in the way that Arzoo would have.
Perhaps that was why he had asked her about her scars in such an abrupt way, not knowing how else to go about it. And there, before his very eyes, the facade had finally dropped. The hollow smile of hers gave way to a deluge of tears, of anger.
And in that moment, as she looked at him with fire spitting out of her eyes, he felt himself break away into smithereens of pain and shame. For the first time in so many years, as he beheld that quiet sense of self-respect glowing on her tear-stained face, he felt a longing to be somebody's friend, to understand their pain, to feel human warmth, and express emotions that he perhaps did feel after all. But then she was gone and his unsaid words resounded within himself, deafeningly.
He looked around him. There was nobody but his loneliness. His self-constructed ivory tower echoed with his own thoughts, his own words, but the echoes could no longer soothe his ego. For everything that he had done, for all the milestones he had achieved, he had failed at the most basic thing of them all. He did not know how to bring happiness to another person, how to wipe away someone's tears. Arzoo was not the weak one, he was. She did not need him, he needed her. He needed her to teach him how to be human again. If only he could be deserving enough.
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Edited by _.serendipity._ - 11 years ago
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