The Strangers - Across the Silent Heartbeat-Chapter 13: Echoes of Silence

As months heaped upon days, so Arjun's life began to turn into what it wasn't. The shock and incredulous dismay at Ayesha's disappearance had turned toward dark, simmering despair that threatened to overwhelm him outright. His bright, hopeful demeanour had dulled into sombre routine marked by waiting—everlasting—and an unspoken grief.

Arjun had never stopped sending messages to Ayesha. Every day, he would key in sincere notes, imploring any hint from her. He took it that she had drafts that he had sent through; drafts on his phone passing through unsent messages that had never really reached their target recipient. He poured out in words, in each message, what was going through his mind—the fears and the love—in the hope against hope that somewhere, somehow, she would see them and start responding. The silence at the end of each of his messages cut to bring home the realization that she was gone, and with each unanswered note, another gash sliced into his already lacerated heart.

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This emotionally began wearing him down. He slowly began to detach from the world around and turned into more of an introverted and reserved person. The change in him was not missed by friends and family, though Arjun had been very good at concealing his pain. He would come up with some flimsy excuse for being antisocial: for instance, he had too much studying to do or just preferred to be by himself. Truth be told, it was difficult to bear the vacuum created by Ayesha's sudden exit.

That effervescent personality was now dulled. He no longer found interest in things that he normally would do, nor in his hobbies. These very exciting coding projects began to look exhaustive. Even socializing, once done effortlessly, became apparently insurmountable hurdles he just did not have the energy to cross. Arjun became really like a shade of himself; that gnawing ache just never went away.

Time seemed not to heal him from any of his wounds. He was always playing Ayesha in his mind and holding on to those very moments they shared. His heart was heavy, longing for her, yet at the same time tussling with the bitter realization of her absence. He felt a gnawing uncertainty in her well-being.

As the weeks passed, more and more, a blacker thought at last crept into his mind: might not some calamity have overtaken Ayesha? He began to allow that possibility that she might be lost to him for good.

The unendurable thought which he would not let himself drive away by argument dogged him on subliminally. It shadowed all things in his life.

And another part of him would not believe it. He could only maintain a tenuous hope—that one day Ayesha would re-enter his life, that she would explain all of this and the two of them could somehow work it out, could be together. He clung to the fact that she might still be out there, somewhere, and therefore held off from submitting to despair altogether.

The first anniversary of Ayesha's disappearance was nearing, and of course, Arjun looked back in time. He still loved her a lot, and the pain of her absence was still there. He had got used to the silence she had left behind, but the heartache remained as fresh as ever.

One evening he sat quite alone in his darkened room, looking at the pictures of Ayesha that he had saved. Those chats, dreams, and plans that he had with her now seemed very old news to him. That bright, enterprising future he had visualized with her now appeared an illusory trap, brutal to the core; the crunching reality of her non-being wielded an irritating nag against what could have been.

A soft knock on the door broke into his concentration. It was his best friend, Vikram, who had come to see if everything was fine with him. He could feel a tinge of concern etched on his face, so he made a feeble smile. Though all of Vikram's constraints were put in a good spirit, he was not at a place to describe how much hurt he had inside of him. How can one tell this deep, feeling-of-a-loss story to a person who hasn't gone through it?

In that brief conversation, Arjun did not talk about Ayesha and made a few general responses to the questions about his well-being, feeling a wall that had gone up around him. He did not probe around. He turned to leave, promising to be around should Arjun ever need him.

And then the footsteps of Vikram died in the distance, and Arjun sank again into his loneliness. He lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, while in his head there whirled a veritable gale of emotions.

That year pressed like a weight so heavy upon him; its weight was almost crushing, whose suffocating silence he could scarce breathe.

A spark of hope was alive in him, but it died with each passing day. He kept fighting away the feeling that Ayesha might now have moved on or, worse still, may never return. He held hope in the darkness: that one day there would be an answer or maybe another chance with the loved one, the one he wanted so much.

By the time the episode comes to a close, Arjun is still caught in his emotional labyrinth, his heart wailing for an answer that he can barely sketch. Slowly, the screen goes black, leaving one in a despondent mood regarding the never-ending true love of Arjun and the depth of the dent that Ayesha left in his life.