.

Why would her mother tell her something like that after so many years? Was it better for her to live believing that her dad was dead? She felt sick to her stomach for thinking that way about her own father. But that was not the end of the surprise. She also had a brother!

Her father was the last person she wanted to talk to or think about after all the stories she heard about him and after what had happened to her, she could never unsee the things he had done to her mother. But then her brother? She had grown up as an only child all her life and now, she found out she had brother. She had always wanted a brother all her life, someone to dote over, someone to be there for her, someone to protect her.
She had to speak to her father first to get through to him. Should she call? Should she just show up at his door after all these years? She wondered what she would even say to him. “Hey Dad! This is me, your daughter, the one you walked out on after beating my mother nearly to death.”

She searched for him online and found his profile there. She looked more like him than she looked like her mother. She hated that. They had the same eyes, the same high cheekbones. Her smile was like her mother and she was grateful because she thought she would never want to smile again otherwise.

It took her a few minutes to think, whether she should simply ignore it. May be it was a bad idea to message him. She was rewriting the message in different ways in her head. “Hey, Dad! This is me, your daughter, Mina. I didn’t even know you existed.” Or may be just a “Hi!” message. She was feeling nervous and also nauseous about this whole thing but she was inquisitive about it too. She wanted to see how he was for herself, how it felt to call someone “Dad”.

She hovered her mouse-pointer over “Send Message” and she finally sent him a message. He replied in a few minutes and to her surprise, he seemed to take it so casually and seemed unfazed despite the fact that this was his daughter who thought him dead or missing was reconnecting with him after 14 years.
They exchanged a few messages. They were to the point. He asked her what she was doing with her life. It was superficial and to the point, perhaps even cold. She wasn’t ready to talk yet. She didn’t know what to talk about or how to ask him the tons of questions she had rattling in her head, like, why he abandoned her and her mother, or why he never bothered to visit them even once? Did he even have a small tiny tinge of love for her? Did he have any care for her mother? Mina held back her questions because all of that did not seem to matter but she was dying to ask him about just one thing – her brother.

She finally got to the point though she couldn’t word the question any less awkwardly.
And then he stopped responding.

It was not completely unexpected as her mother had told her a lot about her father, he wasn’t the most caring or compassionate person in the world and he only thought about himself. He was abusive and tortured her mother everyday for 11 years of their marriage, but she stayed with him for all those years. Then one day, he left and was never heard from again. But he didn’t leave alone. He took her son with him. Not for love, but because he needed labour, he needed someone who could earn for him, for his drinks.

She willed herself to not check her phone to see if he had replied. It had been about three days now. She hated that she was constantly checking his ‘last seen at’ status and yes, he had logged in just five minutes ago. Yet she couldn’t stop herself. This sinking feeling to find absolutely no communication from him was becoming unbearable, almost torturous.

And then, just as she sat down in her chair, her phone vibrated. With her heart thudding in her ear, she unlocked her phone and stared at the screen. Finally! It was his message.

But when she opened it and read it, she nearly stopped breathing. She didn’t know if he was joking or not. What was this?

She froze. Her phone slipped out of her hand as the message burned into her eyes. She wanted to look at her phone again but couldn’t find the courage to do it. Her mouth dried up and though she screamed inside her head all she could manage was a whimper. Her breath became slower and slower until there was hardly any motion on her chest wall.

Her mother came in right at that moment, and though she could hear her, she couldn’t answer or move any part of her body.

Her mother cried out to her. An ambulance was called and she was rushed to the hospital immediately. The voices came in like distant echoes, the sight before her was blurred like she was sitting in a thick glass box. She could hear everybody as she was taken through the corridor of the hospital’s emergency section. She could hear her mother crying and the doctor asking her what had happened.
Her mother desperately begged him to save her and she could hear her say that she had no idea what had happened to her.

Mina was taken to another room to be examined. She could hear the nurses talking, the sounds of the machines, the beeping and the orders that the doctor was giving and then finally the doctor asked one of nurses to call her mother in.
The doctor said, “The patient is in a coma but the baby is alright. Please come to my office, I need to ask you a few questions.”
The doctor and her mother left the room.

She could hear the doctor’s words echoing in her ears over and over again. “The patient is in a coma but the baby is fine. The patient is in a coma but the baby is fine.” The voice became louder and louder and it just didn’t stop. She wanted to cry, to shout out. She wanted to kill herself, to kill this baby! Her baby! Their baby! It was revolting.
She cried and screamed inside her head but could make no voice. She didn’t have the strength to or the willingness to. All she managed was a tear, a tear that told the whole story, that expressed everything in just that one drop.

Later that evening Mina’s mother went home to collect her clothes and pack a few things for her. She sat on the chair exactly where her daughter was sitting, she was trying to figure out what had happened.

Mina had gone through a lot in the last one month. She knew that she shouldn’t have told Mina about her husband and her son. She didn’t want her daughter to have anything to do with her husband but she felt that her daughter needed her brother. She wasn’t enough to protect her. Flashes of what happened came in front of her eyes. The memories of Mina’s screams were torturing. That man had come into the house, tied her up and gagged with a gun pointed at her head. Mina did whatever he told her to though she tried to protest, all to protect her. Then that bastard, he raped her. He raped her daughter in front of her own eyes. She screamed, she screamed so much and cried but before anyone could come, he ran away. The coward! She was too weak to save Mina from the evil.

Her daughter was lying in a pool of blood and she couldn’t do anything about it. Mina didn’t want to complain to the police. She had begged not to go to them. She was scared that even if the police found him, he would get out, and then he would come back and kill them both. Mina wanted to just forget about it all. She wanted to move on. But now she was pregnant! Pregnant with this monster’s child!

She couldn’t think about it anymore. Her heart was pounding inside her. But if Mina’s brother was there, he could have protected her, protected them both.
The last time she saw her son was when he was six. He would have grown up now and she knew that no matter how her husband was, her son would have grown up to be a gentleman. She had spent every minute of those six years with him, she had taught him to be different, much different from his father. He was a very loving child and even at that age he was taking care of his sister who was just two. She smiled thinking about it. It was the happiest days of her life when she had both her children around her. They gave her peace in that hostile life. Her daughter was too small to understand what was happening around so all that she did was smile at her even if she was crying. It was her son who had understood what was going on and he knew that his father was a bad man. He would come and say, “Ma, when I grow up and have muscles, I’ll grow up to be a good man and I’ll protect you from him.” Those were the words she was longing to hear again but this time, for his sister.

Just then she saw Mina’s phone lying on the ground with the screen faced downwards. She picked it up to put it in the bag she was packing for her. She saw the phone was unlocked and to her surprise she saw the man’s picture who raped her daughter on the screen. She froze. It was a message sent by her husband. Underneath the picture was the message: Mina, this is Jackie, your brother. Call him on 849000054