Stabak 2012 sharodiya edition | Page 63

His parents however had remained unfazed, “You might not want to right now but eventually you will!” they had said and had continued to collect photos of girls as before. (3) Satyaki should have guessed something was not quite right but he was thoroughly infatuated with Natasha to notice anything amiss. Infatuation often does that to you! He was growing increasingly careless. His friends had tried to warn him, “Why is she paying you so much attention? You had said yourself that she can have much more wealthy and handsome guys than you by just snapping her finger!” Satyaki however had not paid any heed to their warnings. Colorful dreams had totally blinded his vision. One day he couldn’t find one of his files from work. He was sure he had brought it home with him but these days his mental state was such that ordinary mundane things like location of files didn’t seem like something worth remembering. The next day strangely he found the file, in the exact same place where he thought it should have been! It was a little bewildering because he felt he had looked in that spot the day before and it hadn’t been there. In similar fashion things kept disappearing and reappearing in the weirdest ways imaginable. Satyaki had put it down to the after effect of falling in love! It happened the day he had decided to give Natasha the ring. It was 8 am and Satyaki was getting ready to leave for work when two police cars and a white car screeched to a stop before his house. Several cops leapt out of the cars and rushed in. They handcuffed Satyaki in his bedroom and Natasha in her basement unit. As they dragged an amazed Satyaki to the car they just said, “You are under arrest! You have a right to remain silent!” and the whole spiel. (4) Slowly Satyaki began to learn all the details. Natasha was supposedly a Russian spy in the US. Her mother hadn’t come to here with her as a baby. All the things she had told him about herself except for working at an escort service had been lies! The police and the FBI refused to believe that Satyaki had no idea about anything. One of the FBi officials had even taunted him during the interrogation and said, “Exactly what were you thinking? Why do you think she rented the rooms in your house? Why did she socialize with you? The amount of money she eared was enough to buy her three houses like yours! Didn’t you ever think of that? Or try to figure out what a girl like her was doing with a man like you?” Satyaki had stared at him with vacant eyes and said, “No…” And then it hit him like a bolt of lightning! He worked at the ‘Barren Island’, which was one of the many nuclear power plants in the US. She had become his tenant so that she could get some information about the plant. She had begun to get intimate with him for the very same reason and he had made things very easy for her! In fact she had been on the lookout for a repressed sucker like him to serve her purpose! Satyaki felt bitter bile rising to his mouth and a wave of nausea engulfed him. (5) Satyaki has been suffering from severe depression these days and has been taking antidepressants like candy! He has obviously lost his job. Thankfully he had already gotten his