cruel beauty

chapter 1

Devgarh City Hospital, fourth floor, ICU Bed Number Seven.

It was six in the morning, and Sunita Chauhan sat, as she did every day, on the steel chair beside her daughter's bed. In her hands was a small tiffin box holding half an apple, cut at home. Her daughter couldn't eat, yet every morning Sunita brought something anyway. Perhaps because coming empty-handed felt as though hope itself had come empty-handed.

“It’s so cold today, Aaya,” she said softly. “Your papa worked overtime again last night. He says the contractor gave him an extra shift. I know he’s lying. But what can I do? I can’t tell him not to go.”

The green line on the monitor rose and fell. *Beep… beep… beep…*

“I took your favorite blue slippers out of the cupboard. Wear them when you come home. They’re not that old yet.”

No answer came. In three months, none ever had. Still, Sunita kept talking, because the doctor had told her, “Keep talking to her. She can hear you.”

And Ayat could hear.

She was only somewhere very deep, in a dark well where voices reached her from above, drowned in water, broken into pieces. Sometimes it was her mother's voice. Sometimes a nurse's. Sometimes the machine's, which kept reminding her that the count hadn't stopped yet. But in all these months, she had never once heard her father's voice. There was only the occasional whisper, and silent words, nothing more.

And whenever the voices faded, the scene she was running from came back to her in the dark.

---

**FLASHBACK: Hotel Grand Crown**

*Three months earlier.*

It was nine at night, and the lobby of Hotel Grand Crown glittered like gold.

Ayat studied her face in the cab's tinted window. She had asked the driver to drop her a hundred meters before the gate, so that no one would see what she had arrived in. She was wearing her most expensive dress, the one she had stubbornly insisted on buying three months ago, the one whose installments were being paid off with the money her mother made from selling tiffins. It didn't sit right on her. Then again, hardly any good dress came in her size. She knew all of this. Over it, she had pulled on a long jacket.

*Today everything will go well,* she told herself. *Today, Aditya will see me.*

Aditya Khurana had been a year ahead of her since school. When she found out which college he was going to, she had begged, fought, and pushed her way into Royal Crown too. He was her first love, the boy she'd fallen for at first sight, and she would have done anything for him.

Today was Aditya's birthday. The whole university would be there, or at least the part of it that mattered. Ayat had been at Royal Crown for four months now, and in those four months she had heard more laughter behind her back than in the rest of her life combined.

“Look, she’s coming… what’s her name? Ayat? Yeah, her…”

“Seriously, does that dress even come in her size?”

“Shh, she’ll hear you.”

She did hear. Every time. And every time, she smiled as though it didn't bother her at all. After all, she was the one who had wanted so badly to move among the high-status crowd.

As she walked toward the hotel's main gate, she smoothed her hair, squared her shoulders, and lifted her chin. It was the only weapon she had: pretense.

Two guards stood at the gate, one young, one middle-aged. The older guard's blue uniform was worn thin at the shoulder, and his cap sat slightly crooked, as if he tugged it down too hard every single day.

Ayat's steps faltered.

*No.*

How could this be? Papa's duty was somewhere else, at some office complex. She had watched him leave with his tiffin that very morning.

But the contractor must have sent him here on an extra shift tonight.

Ramesh Chauhan raised his head. His eyes found Ayat, and in an instant his whole face lit up, the same smile that appeared every time he saw her, unasked for, unconditional.

“Aaya, beta! You’re here?”

His voice held such joy, so plain and so clear, that something cracked inside Ayat's chest. But what came out of that c***k was fear, not anger.

Right behind her, through the glass doors of the lobby, four or five boys and girls were stepping out. Aditya's friends. One of them was holding a phone, its red recording light glowing.

“Hey, Ayat!” one of them laughed. “Does this uncle know you?”

Time stopped for a moment.

Ayat looked at her father. Then at them. And then she said the thing she could never take back.

“Oh… no, no,” she said coldly. “I don’t know him.”

Ramesh's smile didn't fall. It simply froze, as if someone had pressed pause on a photograph.

“I see,” he said, very quietly. “Sorry, beti. My mistake.”

Then he lowered his eyes and straightened his cap. His hands were trembling slightly.

Ayat hurried forward. Laughter rose behind her, but this time it wasn't aimed at her. In truth, it wasn't even really about her. It was meant for someone else, over her shoulder. Yet the wound landed on no one but her, right in the middle of that night.

By the next morning, the video had reached seventeen thousand people across the college and beyond, spread by an Insta page.

* * *

The video's title read: **“The guard’s daughter who refused to recognize her own father.”**

The first post had come from **@crown_confessions**. Below it, thousands of comments.

*“What kind of person does that?”*

*“She should be ashamed.”*

*“Fat, arrogant, and doesn’t even acknowledge her own father. Amazing.”*

In the corridors of the college, Ayat learned for the first time in her life just how loud silence could be. Wherever she walked, conversations died. In the cafe, no one sat near her. In class, Aditya didn't even glance at her, as though she had never existed.

When she got home, Papa was standing in the kitchen doorway, still in his uniform. He said nothing. No complaint, no question. He only asked:

“Will you eat?”

Something inside Ayat began to scream. She needed him to yell. To be angry. To curse her. Anything, anything but this silence.

“What does it even matter to you?” she burst out. “It’s because of you that I’m like this! Because of you my life is like this! If you were even a little higher up, a little better… but no, you want to disgrace me with your poverty! As if this ugly face and body weren’t enough, now I have to listen to all this because of you!”

She stopped. The rest of the sentence stuck in her throat, because she had seen her father's face.

Ramesh said nothing. He only leaned against the wall and said, very softly, “It’s all right, beta. It’s my fault. You rest.”

She went into her room and slammed the door.

Outside her room that night, no one made a sound for a very long time. The kitchen light stayed on late. And then came a muffled, choked-down voice, probably her mother and father's, talking about some accounts, some debt, some new little loan paper that Ayat hadn't known existed.

*“Amount: ₹1,80,000. Interest rate…”*

And below it, Papa's signature.

For one more installment of her fees.

* * *

Right there in her room, her phone buzzed with a notification from **@crown_confessions**. This time it wasn't one video but many. In the first, she was proposing to Aditya that night, and he turned her down.

In the second, she appeared to be stealing from an expensive supermarket. But that was fake. It had been edited, and in reality nothing like that had ever happened.

There were countless more edited videos like these.

And below them, comments that could break anyone:

*“Ever looked in a mirror? And you went to propose to a guy like Aditya!”*

*“Got rejected, so started stealing from supermarkets? Cheap.”*

*“Such a fat, ugly girl thought Aditya would say yes? What a joke!”*

*“This is the funniest video of the day! Look at that overconfidence.”*

Then, that same night, a door closed.

*(And after that, nothing. Darkness, only darkness.)*

In the well of the coma, this was all she could hear:

Someone screaming, “Didi! Didi, open the door!”

Someone pounding on the door.

Then the sound of an ambulance. And her father's weeping, the kind a person cries only once in a lifetime.

---

**Evening**

Arnav had come straight to the hospital from college.

A thin seventeen-year-old boy, with a worn-out bag on his shoulder and dark circles under his eyes. This was what he did every day: classes at a government college, two hours of tutoring, and then studying on the bench outside the ICU.

Today a single page of his civil engineering textbook kept snagging his attention: *Beams and Columns.* He had never liked the subject. His dream had been computer science, those nights of code, teaching a machine how to think. But he had locked that dream in a drawer and thrown the key away somewhere.

His mother had spoken to the nurse and gotten him permission to go in.

“Just ten minutes today,” the nurse said. “We can’t have too many people around the patient.”

Arnav pulled up a chair and sat. He looked at Ayat's hand. It had grown thin in three months. For the first time, it struck him that Didi had never looked this light.

“Didi,” he whispered, “today I topped the university again.”

No answer.

“You always told me I think too little of myself, remember? Today I raised my head and answered in front of Sir. Everyone clapped.”

His voice began to c***k.

“But when I got home, you weren’t there. And I wondered, who was that applause for?”

He fell silent. Then he spoke again, very softly, as if not to anyone else, but to himself.

“I never hated you, Didi. Not ever. I just felt like you never really looked at us.”

He opened his book, kept holding Ayat's hand, and fell asleep right there in the chair.

The book slid from his lap and landed on the floor.

* * *

The green line on the monitor moved as it always had.

*Beep… beep… beep…*

Then, for a moment, one beep came a little faster.

Then a little faster again.

Ayat felt the darkness of the well growing lighter, as though someone had lowered a rope of light from above. The voices were no longer under the water. They were coming closer.

Someone was holding her hand. A warm hand. Small, but firm.

*Annu…*

She tried to open her eyes. They were heavy as stone. Once. Twice.

On the third try, a thin line of white light slipped in.

The ceiling. A fan. The smell of medicine.

And on the left, in a chair, his head tilted to one side, his mouth slightly open, a boy was sleeping. His hand was still holding hers. A book lay on the floor, and on its page someone had written in pencil: *“I have to try for Didi.”*

Ayat read that sentence, and something inside her broke, this time without a sound.

Her lips moved. No voice came. Her throat was full of sand.

“A… nnu…”

Arnav's eyelids fluttered. He snapped his eyes open all at once, as if someone had called his name right into his ear.

He saw Ayat's face.

Ayat's eyes were open. For the first time in three months.

Arnav's lips moved without sound. The book had fallen completely from his hands. He stood, the chair toppled backward, and he ran for the door.

“Doctor! Doctor! Nurse! My sister… my sister has opened her eyes!”

Running footsteps echoed down the corridor. Someone shouted. Someone's slipper skidded across the floor. A nurse came rushing in. Then her mother's frantic voice, and at the doorway, one heavy, shuddering breath.

And behind that crowd, on the other side of the glass, a man in a blue uniform had sunk to his knees on the floor. He was crushing his cap in both hands, and his shoulders were shaking.

Ayat saw him.

*Papa.*

And then, for the first time, a voice came back to her, one that someone had spoken in the deepest part of the well: