Of Pain and Puzzles.
If there is anything Sanyukta Agarwal knows, it's pain.
She has been a silent sufferer, held her tongue and taken everything life thought fit to throw at her. She has closed her eyes and faced the darkness, the loneliness and the misery. She has felt tears leak out of her eyes
es. It's not a new kind of pain.
She can endure.
But what she can't endure is this.
Randhir Singh Shekhawat, looking like a broken man.
His pain doesn't map his face like hers does.
It stays dormant in his eyes, because he is holding it back, because he is strong enough.
But not strong enough to really hide it, not strong enough to bear it alone.
No one is.
She can't bear to see that dead look in his eyes, that lack lustre one, the one that tells her he is far from the MCP she loves to hate, hates to love and still loves.
She tried so hard, talking to him, quietly, almost begging.
Pleading him to share his pain, his burden, his sorrow, trying to convince him he's not alone, he doesn't have to be.
He roared then, like a wounded lion.
And she had to let him be.
Pain, pain. Pain she can see all over him, seeping out of him.
Pain she wishes she could heal.
And pain, she sometimes, wishes she could forget.
Her biggest flaw, she thinks, is that she has become so attached to him, that he is a part of her.
And now, pain is a part of him.
And it hurts her more than she can take, the injuries cut into her mind, heart and soul.
His pain hurts her deeper than her own sometimes.
It is unnatural to feel so much and it exhausts her sometimes.
And so, as he sinks deeper into his pain and hers.
She tries to submerge herself into puzzles.
Puzzles that may, if she tries hard enough, make her forget about Randhir and his sad eyes for a minute.
But the biggest fact is, he's made a jigsaw puzzle of her heart.
And kept the biggest piece for himself.
Pain is a part of him.
And he is a part of her.
The pain is a part of her.
And so are the puzzles.
Of him and her.
Of them.