Come morning, the people of the palace were up with the sun rising from the horizon. Flocks of birds were seen fluttering across the sky and around the tombs. Sunlight seeped through the jalis and cast their shadows on the marble floor in the corridors. The gardeners were seen watering the plants and trees in the lawn. A few maids were feeding the pigeons by the water fountain, and the blossoms were being changed in the pool again. Cooks were busy preparing breakfast in the kitchen, wafting the rich aroma of various spices in the air.
The prayer hall echoed with the recitation of the Qur'an. Among the kids and ladies, Izzah sat with her head leaning against the wall, her brain still numb from all the aggressive crying she had done the previous night. She was zoned out the entire class and excused herself right after her lessons. Loosening the dupatta that was wrapped tightly around her face, Izzah walked barefoot down the corridor, watching the landscape facing the palace. When the morning breeze hit her face, she paused and wrapped a hand around herself, hugging her body while strands of her hair escaped from her dupatta and brushed against her face. She pushed the strands out of her face, and just as she opened her eyes, her gaze fell on two figures entering through the palace gate.
Kamran Masood and his favorite nephew, Aadi Masood. Clad in track pants and T-shirts, they seemed to be returning from their morning jog with four fully armed guards right behind them.
Her father was laughing and chatting with Aadi as they made their way to the building. Izzah tried to remember the last time he had a friendly talk with her, let alone laughed with her.
Perhaps, when she was little and certainly before Aadi moved in. It didn't matter. It was already a fading memory.
Izzah's cellphone chimed, and she turned the device in her palm.
It was a text from Hamzah.
Hum To Fanaa Ho Gaye Uski Ankhein Dekh Kar ghalib,
Na Jane Woh Aaina Kaise Dekhte Honge!!!
(We were completely mesmerized just by looking into her eyes, Ghalib,
I wonder how she looks in the mirror!!!)
Despite the state of mind she was in, Izzah felt her lips twitch as she read the poetry he had sent her along with a good morning text.
Although she never entertained romance between them, it didn't stop Hamzah from expressing his feelings for her. He texted her every morning with poems because he knew how much she loved them. She had given away the presents he had bought for her to the poor kids on the footpath in front of his eyes, and yet, it didn't stop him from buying her more presents. He always told her he loved her even though she never said it back.
Secretly, she loved having his attention.
When a person was deprived of love and affection from their family, they tend to accept it from anyone who offers it.
And that was what happened with Izzah. She accepted the love Hamzah offered her because she had never felt loved by anyone other than him.
★★★
Izzah got distracted momentarily by Hamzah's text and forgot all about the previous night. It was only when she went down for breakfast and saw him laughing with Dadi that the bitterness returned.
Feeling revulsed by the idea of sharing a meal with him after what he had put her through, she was about to turn around and leave when her grandmother called out to her.
"You are not planning on skipping your breakfast, are you?" she questioned.
Izzah didn't answer, knowing she wouldn't be allowed to go to college without breakfast.
Taking her silence as a cue, her grandmother patted the empty seat next to hers. "Come, sit," she invited.
Slumping her shoulders in resignation, she went and sat next to her, avoiding the man seated across from them.
Aadi leaned back in his chair and studied his favorite cousin, dressed in a mustard anarkali suit, sporting an unsmiling, unapproachable, stern, and stoic expression.
She was apparently ignoring him, but he couldn't allow that, could he?
"Dadi," he cocked his head at her, "What do you think of Romeo and Juliet?" he asked.
"Romeo and Juliet?" Dadi parroted. "What about them?"
He leaned forward and joined his hands on the table before him. "Do you want to know what I think about them?"
"Entertain me." She gave him her full attention.
"I think they were fools," he declared. "It was foolish of them to fall for each other when they knew their families were rivals and that they would never accept them. And it was their own foolishness that got them killed."
He shifted his gaze to Izzah, who had her head low, eyes on her lap. The only indication she was listening was her knuckles, which had turned white.
Keeping his eyes on her, he continued, "If I were the one writing their story, I would have saved two people from dying," he said.
"And who are they?" Dadi sounded interested.
"Let's say..." he dragged, turning and facing his cousin, "-Izzah is our Juliet." He exclaimed as if the idea had just occurred to him and as if it was not intentional.
She slowly raised her head and gave him a dead glare.
Finally having her attention, he smiled triumphantly. "And our rival, Aamir Qazi's son, what's his name again?" He pretended to have forgotten his name.
"Hamzah," Dadi apprised him.
"Oh yes, Hamzah. He is our Romeo." He tapped the table.
"Ya Allah, rehem. I don't like the idea of my granddaughter's name with his," Dadi gagged.
Izzah's jaws clenched, and she felt an unmistakable tension in her temples.
"And since I'm her cousin, that makes me Tybalt." He pointed to himself.
"The one who got killed by Romeo," Dadi raised her brow in question.
He nodded. "Except, in my version of the story, Tybalt kills Romeo. Therefore, saving his life and Juliet's. What do you think?" He grinned.
Dadi was amused and was probably going to play along but she never got the opportunity to speak because Izzah cut her off by striking a hand on the table, startling her grandmother.
"And in my version of the story, Juliet kills Tybalt." She chewed out the words, looking murderously into Aadi's eyes.
He intensified his gaze to match hers while their grandmother looked between them, confused as to why they were talking about killing fictional characters at the breakfast table.
"Who's killing who?" Kamran Masood entered the scene, taking a seat at the head of the table.
Aadi and Izzah looked away.
"In the story." Dadi explained, vaguely.
Kamran bobbed his head, "Let's eat." He stuffed one corner of the napkin in his collar.
Once served, Izzah began stuffing food in her mouth, drowning out the conversation around her. She was the first one to finish her breakfast and the first one to take her leave.
On the way to college, Izzah went over the incident at the breakfast table in her head.
Aadi was acting out of line. First, he humiliated her, and now, he chose to mess with her by carelessly taking names and comparing her story to that stupid play.
She hadn't realized it before, but the similarity disturbed her. She was afraid someone was going to get killed if words came out at the wrong time.
Izzah had thought she could handle Aadi, but her pride was making it difficult for her to submit to him.
She couldn't submit.
It wasn't in her blood.
Besides, he was untrustworthy and wasn't exactly a man of his word. He would flip anytime and spill her secrets without thinking twice. She knew the deal wasn't enough to keep him from betraying her. She had to come up with something else.
Izzah bit her thumbnail, wondering what her father would do if he were in her shoes.
If Kamran Masood ever found himself in a situation where someone was blackmailing him with his secrets, he would have dug up his blackmailer's dirt and blackmailed him back with his secrets.
"That's it!" Izzah exclaimed, her face suddenly lighting up with newfound hope.
A Uno reverse card.
He would play a freaking Uno reverse card against his opponent.
All she needed were the right cards to play. She needed to dig up dirt on Aadi. But how? It hit Izzah how little she knew about him.
All she knew about him was that he was her deceased uncle's son who lived with them for a few years before he went to a military boarding school. He visited them once a year initially, the longest gap being five years, which was recently. Izzah knew that he respected her father a lot and that he would die for him. She knew he loved Dadi, and Dadi loved him. She hated to admit it, but unlike Izzah, he had never disappointed his elders. He rarely got into trouble. Thinking about it, she realized he never got into any trouble. Not even once. He was never seen under any kind of bad influence. He was never seen partying with friends. He was never seen with girls. When Kamran Masood chose Misbah for him, he agreed to it even before Kamran finished his sentence.
She knew he wasn't a saint. It was just that the only morally wrong things he had done up until now were all on orders from her own father, Kamran Masood.
He was her father's puppet.
But personally, he was a mystery.
She didn't know what he liked, what he didn't, where he went in his free time, or who he met. Nothing. She didn't even know who he was close with. He treated all his friends the same way she treated hers. They were just friends. Not someone you would trust your life with. Not someone you share all your darkest secrets with. Not someone you would share your feelings with. They were just friends. Nothing more, nothing less. She knew for a fact it was the same with Aadi and his friends.
Rich people rarely find true friends. Most of the time, they were just friends who were with them either for their money or the limelight.
Izzah had never looked into Aadi's life in the past because he always had his nose in hers. Now it was time for her to look into him. To find out if there were any skeletons in his closet that she could use as leverage to get herself out of the situation he had her trapped in.
To begin with, she decided to track his movements and study his routine. She needed to gather as much information about him as she could. To know where to dig, she had to get familiar with the grounds first. And for that, she needed to get someone who spent most of his time with, on her side.
Who does he spend most of his time with? She wondered. He usually was either with Kamran Masood, dadi or alone. She could spy on him at home or ask one of her personal maids for help and to know what he does out of the house, she needed...
"We are here, Madam." The driver announced, pulling up in front of the college building.
Izzah glanced up and met the eyes of the driver in the rearview mirror. An idea crossed her mind and she thought, why not?
There was nothing money couldn't buy, and among the things one could purchase, people were the easiest.
★★★
After breakfast, Kamran Masood and Aadi left for the rally. It was the first time Aadi was officially making a public appearance in support of their party. Until that day, Kamran Masood had kept Aadi at arm's length from politics because he believed he wasn't ready for the spotlight yet. He had been training him since he was a teenager. Aadi knew the ins and outs of politics. He knew people he shouldn't, had connections he shouldn't, and had done things for his uncle he shouldn't. All of it was necessary to mold him into a politician. He was not being trained to be a minister; he was being trained to be the king. When Kamran Masood retired or perhaps died, the public should be familiar with Aadi enough to accept and trust him with the responsibility of the city.
Aadi's military background was an X factor for him. People already seemed to like him. He was winning hearts with his looks and manners. He was good at putting up a convincing act in public, playing kind and humble when, in reality, he was just an emotionless, cruel bastard. He was manipulative and knew how to play games.
Aadi was another Kamran Masood in the making. He blindly trusted his uncle. He loved and respected him so much that he would kill for him and wouldn't hesitate to die for him. He believed he owed it to his uncle, the person who took him in after his parents' death and made him what he was today.
Kamran Masood wasn't just his uncle; he was also his father, his brother, and his best friend. There wasn't anything about Aadi that his uncle didn't know.
Or at least that was what Kamran Masood believed.
"Could you please pull up? My friends are waiting for me at the café on the corner," Aadi requested the driver as he and Kamran Masood were returning home later that day.
The driver obliged, stopping the car on the left side of the road.
"Did Misbah tell you that she and her family are joining us for dinner tonight?" Kamran Masood reminded him as he was about to leave.
"She did. I'll be there," Aadi reassured him, popped the door open, and stepped out of the car.
As the driver started the engine and drove forward, his eyes moved to Aadi's reflection in the rearview mirror. He watched him cross the road and disappear from his sight.
He made a mental note to come back for him later.
★★★
The girl counted the money in her hands and glanced up at the receptionist seated behind the table, a glass wall with a hole in the center. She had been waiting in line to pay her tuition fees for hours now. When the man before her moved, she stepped forward and slipped the wad of cash (which she had saved from tutoring five students for six months) toward the receptionist.
"Ayaat," she said her name after dictating her student ID and other details.
"Full name?" the receptionist demanded.
"Ayaat Damda."
The receptionist looked up at her with a confused expression on her face.
Ayaat knew that expression. She knew what it meant. She knew what was coming.
She knew what the receptionist was going to say even before she said it.
"Your tuition fees for the semester are already paid," the woman informed her, surprised that she was unaware of it.
But oh, she had expected it. Yet it didn't stop her from saving money in case it wasn't paid.
But it always was, wasn't it?
Ayaat swallowed and asked the question she had been asking at every reception.
"May I know who paid it?"
The woman ran her fingers over the keyboard, moved, and clicked her mouse before answering her.
"It was from an anonymous source."
Why did she even bother asking when she already knew the answer?
Someone behind her began protesting, and she had to move out of the line.
Ayaat clenched the wad of cash in her hands, wondering who was behind all this.
They had been anonymously paying her tuition fees since she was in school. Her poor parents had no clue who it could be either. They were just glad it was paid, no matter how or who did it.
People told her that she was worrying for nothing, but she found it very disturbing that she was being watched. She was anonymously stalked. That this anonymous person was paying for her and nobody knew why they were doing it. How was she supposed to sleep peacefully at night when they even knew she had moved to a hostel near her university and had cleared the rent in advance for the entire semester?
Ayaat was constantly living with a strange feeling. She was afraid of this person because it was a lot of money. She had been keeping count of every penny that person spent on her. It was so strange that she even thought of filing a complaint against this person once or twice.
But what would she tell the cops? That she wanted them to find the person who was paying her rent and tuition fees anonymously? They would think she was mental. They wouldn't take her seriously.
And for some weird reason, she didn't want to put this person in any trouble. She just wanted to know who they were and why they were doing it.
Lost in deep thought, Ayaat walked into the hostel room, only to be stunned by the scene before her.
"Ayaat! Your angel has sent you gifts again," her friends exclaimed, jumping up to hug her.
Ayaat stood like a statue in the center of the room, eyeing the gifts that her friend, Rumesa, had unpacked and laid on the floor.
Robotically, she dropped herself down and checked each present.
Books.
They were the books she had added to her Goodreads list.
Clothes, shoes, bags, and accessories.
They were the ones she had added to her wish list on online shopping websites.
Her favorite chocolates.
Her favorite flowers.
How did this person know all that?
How?
Ayaat had nowhere to turn for answers.
★★★
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