An unknown welcome.

"Just say it," you silently reminded yourself. You know you'll regret it if you don't. It's been forty-five seconds since you decided that today's 'the day' but your throat is as dried up as the well in your grandmother's house eighty-nine years old and your heart is racing faster than a wild dog unleashed. But you just have to spit it out. As you practice the speech in your mind again and again, you see him getting farther than a second ago. "I'm pregnant", you blurt out without context. Guess you uttered those words a bit too loudly than you'd had hoped. The moment you realized that, the next thought that came out in haste, of your mouth, was "SHIT", as if the previous sentence didn't catch enough attention. Milind stopped and looked back with a bolt out of the blue. Your glance fixed at him and his at you and time seemed to have stopped, and resumed its course with the sound of your mother's wine glass shattering on the floor. That sound has brought you back from the bubble you were in and now you realise what you've done. You can hear all the guests murmuring. You hold your velvety royal blue gown up and run towards the stairs. All you can think about right now is the blunder you've done and that there's no escape from it. All the lessons of moral standards and clear conscience have poof-ed in the air and you're surrounded by terror. 

As you drive towards the beach with your phone switched off to prevent the innumerable phone calls from playing hindrance to your thoughts, you think of the night you locked inside your head, the night that you dread talking about, even thinking about. You stop the car near the beach and open your glove compartment and ravage through the papers until you finally get hold of a bottle of bourbon half-empty or half-full, you don't give a shit about, and just drink as much as you can in one go. Tears run down your cheeks with smudged kohl as you revisit that room you left behind two months ago; a room filled with horror. 

The antidepressants have taken off the edge of the pain, the vision has kind of blurred and the anger has shrunk now. People you called friends would say that it was not as you remember, that you're too drunk to remember. They'd say that you weren't too careful. They'd say, "Shit happens. You just have to live through it". And, somewhere down the line you started to believe it. You began to tell yourself that you're okay and that everything's Okay. Rape is okay. But you couldn't live with yourself with the thought of justifying a heinous crime. Life everyday is a nightmare living with that feeling of being violated and you know how many times you've tried to slit your veins and let that pain flow. You remember how much you despised being alive, especially being alive around people who don't understand.

The cool breeze from the ocean blows on your face and you open your eyes to look at the moon standing guard of the darkness; your sole solace. You can't stop crying and you don't want to either. The moon is doing to your pain what it does to the ocean, create massive waves; waves of sorrow destroying all walls. And as you let go of the leash, you start to remember that face. 

The man from the bar who seemed decent enough, who spoke with rhythm and asked you to dance. You remember how jealous your friends were as he approached you. You remember how soft spoken he was. After your dance, he invited you for dinner and you remember bonding over Wordsworth. You so wanted to kiss his mouth filled with beautiful reveries that you couldn't stop blushing. You went to the washroom for a quick touch up and as you returned you saw two glasses of red waiting on the table. You sipped from yours and he did from his and you spoke about literature some more. You remember your head spinning, obscure words. The next thing you remember is you on the bed, naked. White linens, dipped in shame, guilt, anger and so much pain. You try to move but your thighs ache unimaginably. You remember dragging yourself to the washroom with tears in your eyes, soaking yourself in a cold shower and you hoped to merge into oblivion as you stood there still, ashamed and devastated, for almost thirty minutes. You dressed yourself and came back to your house and nothing ever was the same. You remember thinking that you'll never be open to trust again. The conservative family you grew up in, you knew they'd never understand. So you concealed it behind pretension. A friend had suggested that you should get married as your parents were already looking for potential grooms and it would help you forget and you remember yourself considering that option. To leave it all behind. 

You take another sip from the bottle and place your hands on your belly. You've now lost count of times this little life growing inside you has saved you from falling off the cliff. It's been seventeen days since it came to your knowledge and even when your first thought lacked any form of decency, you couldn't really arrive at abortion. You thought to yourself, "maybe it's the anger I can't let out and that's why I wanna keep it, to punish it, to tell it how much pain it's father made me go through, to make it suffer too." And some days you'd tell yourself that it's a part of you too, maybe much much more than it is of him. Everytime nightmares would devour you or anxiety would claw at you and all you could think about was to jump off a bridge, it has saved you. It has given you courage and still continues to. 

While all of these are rushing through your head, you suddenly remember about Milind. A good man, you murmured under your breath. You know that you've never indulged in knowing him anymore than you indulge in a fly hovering over your head as all you ever wanted from this relationship was a sweet lie of distraction, but now it seems futile. There's no point engaging a person in a relationship where there's nothing but lies. 

It's 6.20 in the morning. You didn't realize when you dozed off. The sun seems brighter today or it's just the conscience, you don't bother overthinking. You take the car to a coffee shop, take a regular Espresso, dump a considerable amount of bourbon in it and drive towards your house. You stop the car two blocks away and practice your speech. "I was raped two months ago and a few days back I realised that I'm pregnant. I wanted to abort it and continue my life on your terms but I couldn't do it. So I'm gonna keep it and I'll do it alone somewhere far from here to save you from further embarrassment if that's what it takes. I apologise for putting you in this situation but I don't think I'll apologise for anything else." Then you take a deep breath of faith and take the coffee and drink it whole in one go. As you park your car and waddle towards the house, you see Milind. He's sitting on the staircase. He gently opens his specs and cleans it with his handkerchief. His eyes are swollen. He cried. That liquid courage you gulped minutes ago seems to wear off now. You stand there with your head stooped low awaiting resentment but in lieu of that you feel him walking towards you and politely asking if you could kindly have a conversation. He offers to drive. At the nearest Walmart parking, he parks his car and looks at you. As you commence your speech, he stops you and says that he already knows it. He says that he had hoped that you could gather the courage to say it before the engagement. He says he came to know about it from your friends as you didn't open up much, but the pregnancy was news.

As you stare at him in confusion and disbelief, with thousands of questions rioting inside your head, he tells you that it doesn't matter to him. He tells you that he'll tell everyone that it's his. You ask him why he'd do such a thing and he just smiles and says, "Love makes us do crazy things, I guess. And I love you with everything. I love all parts of you including that life inside you that's growing each day." You know that you've not yet reached a stage where you can trust another man but it's a start. Seeing you lost in your thoughts he says, "we'll figure it out, together" and smiles. All of a sudden you feel the sun shining on you brighter than ever.