Thriller The ultimate choice 9

Episode 9​

Rajan might have lost interest in his wife, but in his entire 48 years of life, no one could accuse him of having any homosexual tendencies! So, he was in utter surprise to find himself on the stretched arms of another man. It didn't take too long for him to come back to his senses, and Boy! Didn't he blush?

"What is this Rajan Anna, what were you doing? Have you gone insane?" Putting the entire 65 kg weight of short-stature Rajan on a wooden bench, Sid asked the question angrily. He was huffing and puffing like a steam engine.

As Rajan didn't answer, it appeared to Sid that Rajan still could not come out of his stupor. So, Sid sprinkled cold water on his face. That made Rajan shriek, "Stop! What are you doing? Do you want me to die of pneumonia?"

At last, a hint of smile could be seen on Sid's face for a second. But, he asked the same question again.

Sid was very close to Rajan. He had always considered Sid as his "sodarudu". So, Rajan broke down in tears. Sid hugged him, and gave him plenty of time to recover. When Rajan stopped crying, he said, "Let's get out from here, otherwise the stupid watchman will barge into here. I had to bribe him heavily for only 10 minutes."

This time Rajan had a hearty laugh, and said, " Okay, let's have a cup of coffee at ridgeport Coffeehouse."

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Having born and brought up in a Hindu family, Archana had heard a lot of stories about heaven and hell. Archana's grandmother was a master story teller. In her childhood, she told the children a lot of scary stories about hell. Archana's childhood passed by listening myriad stories of "yamdoot" torturing the sinners. Despite living in the USA for many years, a country well known for her liberal values, Archana still had plenty of qualms about her relationship with Sid. So, she knew when she would die, she would land in hell, where the yamdoots would be waiting for her to put her in the hellfire.

She didn't know that the hell was so dark. The darkness was so severe that it appeared to her that it would swallow her like a blackhole. Just when she comforted herself from the fact that there were no yamdoots to torture her, she found someone was coming towards her.

"Who are you?" She shouted, as she couldn't see the face of the intruder.

"Yamdoot!" Someone replied with a gruff voice followed by a hysterical laughter.

"Oh my God!" Archana shrank, as her worst fear was turning out to be true.

"What did I do? Why have you come?" Archana could utter somewhat audible after putting tremendous amount of work, as her voice was not cooperating with her in fear.

Again the yamdoot guffawed and said, "But let me see your face first, and then I will decide whether to fry you in my giant wok or put you in the tandoor."

He followed up by directing red lights that came from his fearsome eyes on Archana's face. Archana couldn't withstand the light, as it seemed to her that she had been kept in darkness since time immemorial.

She screamed, "Please take off the light! My eyes are burning."

But, the yamdoot was unrelenting. He advanced towards Archana, and the brightness of the light seemed to have increased manifold. It appeared to Archana that someone was piercing her eyes with needle, and she cried, "Kill me. But for God's sake, stop the light."

At that moment, her dream was broken, and she was astonished to see bright light in the room. It took some times for het eyes to adjust to the bright blue light. After few minutes, for the first time, she could see the place where she had been incarcerated.

It was a grotty, small room, hardly 8'x8'x10' in dimension. There was no furniture in the room. There was a door, which seemed to be closed from outside, but no windows in the room. Archana wondered how she was breathing in this suffocating environment! See looked up, and got the answer. There was only one, small air vent on the top of one wall. There was a LED blue light bulb on the same wall. There was a ceiling fan on top.

Now, Archana looked at her own condition. Voila! She got a sense of relief to find herself out of bondage. She couldn't see the chains anywhere on the bare, dull, cement floor of the room. Archana was in turquoise kurti and ochre leggings. She remembered this was the dress she had worn when she boarded the New Delhi bound plane with Sidhharth on Saturday at 6 PM in evening from Chicago.

"New Delhi", "Siddharth", these two words struck a flash in her mind. But, she couldn't remember how she came here.

"What's the time now?" She frantically searched her mobile, the device that made the wrist watch a redundant thing. But, it was no where to be seen. The azure Apple iPhone 6 was perhaps the best friend of her in her boredom. She always kept it with her, whether she was in toilet, or she was doing her half-an-hour of workout on the treadmill. She kept it on the side of her pillow, even though it was switched off during her sleeping hours.

Flabbergasted, Archana now looked minutely at herself to know which parts of her body were hurt. She checked her hands, legs, ribs, chest etc, but there seemed to no injury. At last, she touched her head, and she immediately screamed in extreme pain. There was a huge bump, of the size of a large potato, on her head. It seemed that she was hit by some blunt object on her head. Blunt, because she found no evidence of blood.

To be continued on Wednesday night ​