8. THE FALL
The news broke before dawn.
I woke to the sound of my alarm buzzing . As soon as my eyes opened, my thumb hovered over my phone, still wanted to he see Vijay Sen’s pathetic face all over the headlines over and over again.
The screen lit up, spilling harsh white light over my face.
“Prominent Alumni Arrested in Decade-Old Abuse Case.”
“Elite School Faces Investigation After Damning Reunion Leak.”
Vijay Sen’s name. Everywhere. Still! My stomach tightened. I should have felt relief. Maybe triumph. Maybe vengeance finally served cold. But it wasn’t neat, it wasn’t simple. My chest ached with a mix of exhaustion, disbelief, and a hollow sort of satisfaction that I couldn’t quite put into words.
Outside the window, the city carried on. Cars honked, markets opened, stray dogs barked, children ran to school. Nothing had stopped. Nothing had changed. And yet, everything had.
Sometimes I felt, 'Do I still like him?'
I felt disgusted and weird.
I sat at Harish’s flat with my tea on hands. Untouched. Watching the sunrise wash over buildings that didn’t care neither about Ragini nor Vijay. The sky was pale orange, washed with streaks of gray clouds, the kind that made everything look soft and fragile. I felt the fragility too.
Harish emerged hours later. Hair messy, pajamas sagging, dark circles under his eyes faint but present. He looked at me, half-smile, half-tired. The weight of everything we had done pressed under his skin, but he carried it differently — quieter, steadier.
“You slept like a log,” I said, holding out a cup of coffee.
“Thanks,” he muttered. Took it, but didn’t drink. Neither did I. The tea was just a prop now, a thing we did because we had to feel normal. But normal had snatched away years ago from our life.
I went back to staring out the window. People below were already living their ordinary, indifferent lives. Harish sat beside me, scrolling through news headlines on his phone, calm, collected. I envied him for that. I wanted that. But I had been fire for too long to be calm.
“You should be happy,” he said gently, almost like he was testing if I still felt anything at all.
I wanted to say I was. I wanted to say it loudly. But the truth didn’t fit into words. I wasn’t sad. Not exactly. But I wasn’t whole either.
I had imagined this moment a thousand times. I had seen him fall, imagined the panic in his eyes, the laughter drained from his face. But when it happened, it wasn’t glorious. There was no fanfare, no dramatic storm. Just… rain. Gray, gentle, soft and quiet... eerily quite.
“I don’t know.”, My words came out whispered. My voice was small, hesitant, unsure. I stepped onto the balcony, letting the cool air touch my face, my hair damp from the condensation in the air.
Harish came up behind me. He leaned against the railing, silent, letting me take my space. The city smelled of wet concrete, smoke from somewhere far away, the faint sweetness of a bakery living the day. The ordinary smells of the city felt jarring after everything.
Vijay Sen was not the hottest topic anymore but still appears everywhere.
“Do you ever think about what could’ve been?”, he asked after a long silence.
“All the time.”, I said. My voice still small.
Ragini’s face haunted me for years. Not as a ghost from my past, not as someone I had known. But became the reason everything had started, as the fire that had burned through every plan, every sleepless night. Her absence had been a compass for both of us. Harish loved her. I didn’t, but her suffering became my war. Her story had become mine.
We returned from the aftermath of the arrests in silence. I was drunk yet sober. Harish took me home. No words. No laughter. No celebration. Just the heavy quiet of people who had fought a war they never wanted but won anyway.
That night—
We burned everything.
The documents.
The forged identities.
The careful plans, the years of strategy, the proof of every corruption, every lie.
The smoke curled up in the kitchen like ghosts of the past, and I let it wrap around me, let it whisper memories of long nights and secret rendezvous, of stalking and watching and waiting.
“Now what?” Harish asked, voice calm, steady, like he had already anticipated the answer.
I looked at him. His eyes focused on me. Then it hit me. I didn’t feel like Kamna. Not Kaira. The identity I stolen from a dying girl to survive. I didn’t feel like anyone anymore. I just felt….
“Now we try,” I said, hesitant, uncertain, “to live?”
I left Harish's house that morning thinking the purpose of our meeting was accomplished. We might never meet again.
Days later, reality hit in the mundane way life always does. My condo had been reclaimed — the owner needed it for his daughter’s boyfriend. I packed again, quietly, without argument. Kaira’s world, her name, her stolen life, disappeared from the apartment I had tried to make a home.
Harish came to pick me up while I was cleaning.
"How do you know?", I asked,
He just smiled like usual. Now less hollow.
Harish offered me a room in his flat. No questions, no judgments. Just a room. Just space.
I agreed as my bank account screamed for help.
And my life began to settle into something that resembled ordinary.
I reclaimed myself. Kamna. My degrees in Kaira’s name were reversed, my documents my own. The shadow of someone else’s life finally lifted. I whispered an apology to Kaira’s memory, hoping that somewhere, somehow, she could forgive me.
I started working in Harish’s café, handling logistics, deliveries, supplier calls. The hours were long, the work grounding. The smell of fresh bread, coffee, and roasting beans replaced the stench of scheming, fear, and adrenaline. It was mundane, honest, alive.
Harish's father was worried about the stock market crash following the downfall of Vijay Sen. He had no idea that his son was the cause of such a massive financial crisis. Every companies in India were busy reclaiming their goodwill again. Harish’s meticulous planning saved his company from bankruptcy.
At home, life was simple. Harish cooked breakfast while I washed the dishes. I folded laundry while he fixed the leaky faucet. Sometimes we argued over books, the right way to arrange shelves, or the proper temperature for tea. Sometimes we didn’t speak at all. Just sat, letting silence fill the spaces between us.
It was messy. Real. Alive.
Weeks later, one evening, I found an envelope tucked behind his books. Old, brittle like it was folded many times. Inside, a photograph of Ragini. She smiled brightly, a moment frozen in time — the girl who had started it all, the reason I had survived fire and darkness.
On the back, in Harish’s careful handwriting:
“She deserved better.”
I held it in my hands for a long time, letting the edges curl against my fingers. Relief, grief, satisfaction, and an ache of what could never be reclaimed all pressed into my chest.
I placed it on the bookshelf, next to a small frame of me — younger, lonelier, wearing that cursed red dress, the one that had been my armor and my shame. Two ghosts side by side. Silent. Witnessing.
I whispered to the empty room:
“Rest in peace, Ragini. Your story didn’t die. It can't die. Harish will not let it die."
The city continued below, indifferent. Cars honked. Children lively. Dogs barked. People lived their lives, unaware of the battles fought in the shadows, the justice served quietly, invisibly.
I still can’t draw without my hands trembling. Harish still flinches when promises are made too loudly. But we are not running anymore. Not from the world, not from ourselves.
We are learning to live beside our ghosts, to carry them without letting them consume us.
The routines — breakfast, dishes, laundry, deliveries, dinner— become small acts of reclaiming life, moments stitched together with patience and care.
We aren’t in love. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. But there is respect, trust, a bond forged in fire and shadow.
And every night, before sleep, I see Ragini’s smile in the photograph, feel it in the corner of my mind, and whisper:
“I hope you can rest now. I hope the world remembers you, even when it tries not to.”
And in that moment, I feel it — the pulse of freedom, messy, incomplete, but utterly mine.
We aren’t perfect. We aren’t complete. But we are alive.
And maybe, one day, that will be enough.
The life continues even if we can't. It will drag us to the limit where we can fight a monsters we never knew existed. Our work is just to live.
