Splinter/Whole

By Shivansh Mishra

K and he were friends since the age of 13. They met when K rescued him from a particularly painful tussle with a bully. More a beating than a tussle, as he later described it. K had what he wished he did; gumption, the power to take a beating, and then hit back. He brought K home. It had been five years and yet they’d been inseparable. This was not the case with his parents. They never really saw eye-to-eye. Their marriage was more an exercise in convenience than love and his birth was nothing than a comma in another otherwise unremarkable story. Years went by with each of them wishing they’d spent more time with him and he growing up with the realization that perhaps the dysfunctional group that he called his family was to be this disjointed mess forever. Over time, he learned how to move on, take care of himself, and before he knew it, he had grown up. All the while, K was right by his side.

It was however, the arrival of the people next door that made the sinking feeling that he very often had while thinking about a family, even more pronounced. This family of four had announced their arrival at his doorstep in what he described to K as an anti-climax. After all, who visits their next-door neighbours these days? But the family – parents and their two daughters – seemed to have stepped right out of a fairy tale. The working father was mild-mannered, the daughters even more so. The mother was the embodiment of affection and didn’t waste any time in inviting his family over. His parents – ever so untouched by gestures of love – seemed ill at ease, doubtless in part because of the shadow cast over his face.

In the coming days, he left no stone unturned in making sure that he was in the vicinity of the family, whenever time permitted. He would listen to the mother fussing about her daughters’ hair, the father taking them out for an ice-cream, the family watching the TV together. A chance occurring at the park - when he brought the youngest daughter, injured by a fall from her cycle, to her home – introduced him to the family properly. The intensity of the love he experienced that day shook him. He had to rush back home, holding tears back, but finally letting go once he was in his room, safe from the quizzical eyes that followed him from the door to the top of the stairs. This unexpected pouring of love perplexed him. He felt loved, protected, but at the same time, weak in the knees. He shared this dilemma with K and somehow, he seemed to understand. It was, K said, perfectly normal for him to feel what he felt. That it was okay to let go. That this was the perfect family.

He mingled with the family, taking walks together, tutoring the daughters, helping the parents with shopping. His own parents found this to be a welcome change in what they considered a lost cause. Then, the daughters started confiding in him. Whispers of the father who wasn’t what he seemed like, of the demon in the bottle that often reared its ugly head when things didn’t go as planned outside of the realm of the heaven that was this home to him, of the mother who held it together yet. But it was fine – he said to himself. So long as they were all happy. So long as he was a part of this happiness. So long as the perfect family stayed together. K agreed.

And then it happened.

Months later, unsuspectingly, the demon unravelled itself yet again. But this time, he witnessed it himself. The mother, as much ashamed of what was happening, wanted to assure her daughters that it was okay. That things would be alright. She pleaded him to leave. But he could not. He wanted to protect them. His perfect family. He couldn’t just stand like a mute spectator while this home, built brick-by-brick by the ones he loved like his own, came crumbling down. And right when he needed him, K too was standing at the door. Silently telling him that it would be fine. But the father, sloshed and angered that he was being stopped by an outsider, charged instead at his own. What his swinging hands met instead was K, baseball bat in hand, giving him back what the father intended to give in the first place. But then K kept going. Unstoppable, blood splashing over the bat. It was only the cries of the mother and the shove from the eldest daughter that brought him to a stop. The father didn’t move. He wouldn’t dare now. That will teach him to love, and cherish.

Looking in the mirror over the mantlepiece, he saw K telling him, ever so silently, to believe him, and that all would be fine.

By Shivansh Mishra