Blood Lust

Yash had always hated the smell of burning wood but, in this moment he hated it more than ever, like a snake wrapping its scales around his heart and coiling around it before it sinks its fangs filled with the most paralyzing toxin right into his heart chambers spreading through his veins. He stood there, in his white shirt and dress pants, the stain on the collar of his shirt and neck completely brown. The last fading remnant of what happened.

Watching her body slowly turn into ashes, hearing the pop of her bones, alongside her family as he holds her mother in his arms who is beyond the respite of grief and her brothers and fathers standing tall and unblinking like the men the are supposed to be. Yash didn't know what had happened or why it had happened, all he knew that the one person who had stood by him all these years up to adulthood had vanished in one night in his arms like a dying flame of a candle on a stormy night and had left more questions than answers in her wake. Yash and Aamina grew up in the city, one floor, opposite apartments and two loud ten year olds; that's how their friendship had begun. Aamina's family was very open minded, her older brother was gay and in a relationship with another man even if they could not marry. Her middle brother was married with a child on the way. He remembered how excited Aamina was just a day before her death, she had bought four onesies and so many baby clothes and blankets for the child. Aamina was the youngest, she wasn't a Ray of sunshine and Yash could bet her soul would curse him for eternity if he dared talk of her like that. She was loud, bold and extremely brutal with her honesty and her boyfriend Manish, was the opposite. Polite, soft spoken, docile to the point of flaw; that man was the water to her flame and also the gasoline depending on the situation.

Manish was also dead. Both of them found dead in his apartment. Yash could not imagine how the man who never yelled at Aamina, strangled her to death and then drank poison himself holding her dead body in his arms with a suicide note that was in both their handwriting that they were departing the world on their own accord. Yash had found them, alongside Manish's friend - Rahul. Yash had never thought grief could be so hard. He didn't love Aamina, he loved her like a friend, he grew up with her. He saw her become the woman she was, their kiddish sleepovers, playing ghar - ghar together where he pretended to be her husband and she the wife, the laughter of her girlish years to her womanhood, the way she cursed like sailor, to the way her long hair turned into wolf cuts only. The way she had begun to enjoy trying on new things like lenghas and dresses. It was like the grief was all consuming inside Yash's body as he held her mother in his arms helping her up "Aunty, we have to go home" his voice cracks and catches in his throat unable to say further but forces itself regardless "They are putting her ashes in the urn aunty, we have to go" he helps her up, his arms flexing their muscles harder, the weight of the guilt making him feel like he is no longer strong; his strength was being drained and chipped away bit by bit as he walks home with her. His ears full of static, only the wails of aunty filling his ears like white noise. He didn't want to see it; he didn't want to see the urn for it will be true that she's truly gone. Up till now, Yash wanted it to be just a hyper realistic dream that he will wake up from soon, bury himself in his pillow and his phone will ring at seven in the morning with Aamina scolding him for messaging her during the night and when she would hear him crying she would soothe him by saying

"Oi, you bottomless bottom! Why are you crying?! It is nightmare, not the reality. I am still on my two legs standing! I will haunt your ass with my paleness"

It would all be good. She would still be alive and he would crack a joke about how she's too pale to be a human. Life would be okay, he would wake up soon. But when, his eyes see her photo with a floral garland adorned on it, her urn in front of her on the table and everyone coming in and going, that illusion shatters. Yash is pulled back again to reality that Aamina won't scold him anymore, she won't wake him up. He regrets not recording their calls, he regrets not going to the Mysore trip she wanted go to, wanting to visit the palace, reading its history and, most importantly he regrets making her marriage pinterest board for a wedding he will never have the blessing to plan. Yash wanted to forget, he had to desperately forget - he busied himself in taking care of aunty, helping his father and her brothers with things he could, the blood stains on his collar and neck still there; dried. Everything was a blur for Yash until the last relative left the small apartment. Yash stood at the ledge greeting his brothers - Amar and Arshaad; the oldest and the middle "I will see you around" that's all he could say without not falling apart because it felt like if he started crying he would never stop or that he would scream so hard that he could never get his voice back. With shaky hands, he starts his car and drives to his apartment. He couldn't even place his key into his house door properly for about ten minutes until, he was able to and shut the door with a loud thud.

Yash felt his body slowly sink onto the floor, the soles of his feet skidding as his back slips lower and lower using the door as the support. It wasn't a dam breaking, it was glacier melting rapidly as the flood destroys everything in it's wake, it was the screams. Of sheer pain and agony. He had to cover his mouth because he didn't want his neighbors to complain about him again. Yash, was in utter despair and he didn't know how to get out. It was like a muddy quicksand under water. He knew he was drowning, but he let his feet still get stuck in it and let it sink, his hands extending to the sun filtering through the water, hoping that the rays are Aamina's gentle touch as they slowly fade to endless, bottomless darkness of the ocean. For Yash, the sadness didn't seem to end throughout the night as he laid on his living room floor weeping into himself curled up like a fetus, unable to comprehend how could so much sadness encompass his body.