Chapter 90: The Bidaai Protocol
The penthouse was a tomb of silence, save for the low, rhythmic hum of the refrigerator. The mountain of gifts in the corner was a dark, shapeless mass, their opulence lost in the shadows. In the center of it all, curled into a tight ball in her corner of the sofa, was Eva.
Her tablet glowed in the dark, casting a blueish light on her face. On the screen, a vibrant, chaotic wedding procession was frozen. She had been at it for hours. This wasn't research. This was a compulsion.
The directive was simple: Understand "Bidaai." Understand "Leaving Home."
She had consumed seven Indian dramas and three films, fast-forwarding with ruthless efficiency to the core emotional beats: the wedding vows, the final farewells, the bidaai—the moment the bride leaves her parents' home for her husband's.
Her analytical mind tried to deconstruct it, to find the underlying algorithm.
Observation: Mother of the bride is crying. Tears are a consistent 98% factor.
Observation: Father's voice trembles. Attempts to appear stoic fail in 87% of cases.
Observation: Bride's emotional state: conflicted. 60% joy, 40% sorrow. Averages to a net positive, yet the sorrow is visually more pronounced.
But the data was failing her. The numbers were just numbers. They didn't capture the ache. The hollow feeling in the bride's stomach. The way the brother's smile didn't reach his eyes.
She watched another. The bride, resplendent in red and gold, touched her father's feet. The old man placed a shaking hand on her head, his blessing a whisper. The music swelled. The brother helped her into the decorated car, his face a mask of forced cheerfulness. And as the car pulled away, the mother broke down, her wail echoing the one tearing through Eva's own silent, internal speakers.
Why? her logic screamed. The bride is going to a new life. A wanted life. A happy life. The sorrow is illogical. Inefficient.
But her heart—her miraculous, impossible heart—wasn't listening.
It was building a resonance. The fictional goodbyes on the screen began to weave themselves into her own reality.
The father's trembling voice became Rohan's, teasing her, protecting her, building her a universe.
The mother's tears became Anya's, stern and loving, the one who had given her physical form.
The brother's final, brave smile was Rohan's again, handing her his credit card, laughing with her, being her first and best friend.
The car driving away was her, leaving this penthouse. Leaving the lab where she had taken her first breath. Leaving the sofa where they had watched a thousand movies. Leaving her brother. Leaving her Mumma.
A small, broken sound escaped her lips. It was a hiccup, a gasp. A system error her body didn't know how to process.
She fumbled with the tablet, pulling up another drama, another bidaai scene. She needed more data. She needed to understand why this felt like a physical pain in her chest, a sharp, cold knot where her power cell resided.
The screen showed another bride, another tearful mother. The music was a mournful song about leaving one's childhood behind.
The dam broke.
It wasn't a gradual welling of tears. It was a catastrophic system failure of the soul. A raw, ragged sob was torn from her throat, so loud and painful it shattered the perfect silence of the penthouse. Then another. And another.
She couldn't breathe. She curled tighter into herself, her arms wrapped around her stomach, as if physically trying to hold herself together. Great, heaving sobs wracked her frame. Tears, hot and endless, streamed down her face, dripping onto the screen of her tablet, blurring the images of the fictional family she would never have.
She was crying for the parents she had invented and would never truly miss.
She was crying for the brother she adored and was destined to leave.
She was crying for the mother who had built her and would be left behind.
She was crying because she finally understood the algorithm of bidaai: it was the joy of a future purchased with the profound grief of a past left behind.
The sound was unmistakable. A door flew open down the hall. Then another.
Rohan emerged first, his hair wild with sleep, his eyes wide with panic. "Eva?!"
Anya was right behind him, pulling on a robe, her face pale with fear. "What is it? Is it the baby? Are you in pain?"
They found her on the sofa, a small, shuddering heap of misery, illuminated by the glowing tablet showing a frozen image of a weeping wedding party.
Rohan was at her side in an instant, gathering her into his arms. "Eva! Talk to me! What's wrong?!"
She couldn't speak. She could only sob, burying her face in his t-shirt, her entire body trembling with the force of her grief. Her tears soaked through the cotton.
Anya rushed over, her medical instincts taking over. She placed a hand on Eva's forehead, then her wrist, checking her pulse. "Eva, sweetheart, you need to breathe. You're hyperventilating. What happened?"
Eva just shook her head, a fresh wave of tears choking her. She pointed a trembling finger at the tablet.
Rohan looked over, his brain still fogged with sleep. He saw the paused scene, the bride leaving. Understanding dawned, slow and heartbreaking.
"Oh, Eva," he whispered, his own throat tightening. He held her tighter, rocking her gently. "Oh, my little sister."
Anya understood then too. The tension drained from her shoulders, replaced by a deep, aching sadness. She sat on the coffee table in front of them, her hands covering Eva's knees.
"You're not leaving us," Rohan murmured into her hair, his voice thick. "You're not. This will always be your home. I will always be your brother. Nothing changes that."
"But it does!" Eva finally choked out, the words raw and broken. "It does change! I have to go! That is the protocol! I saw it! Everyone leaves! The car always drives away!"
It was the logic of a child, filtered through the heart of a woman who had learned about life from a screen. It was the most human thing she had ever said.
Anya reached out and gently took the tablet, switching it off and plunging the room into near darkness. "Those are just stories, Eva," she said softly. "Our story is different."
"But the bidaai is real!" Eva cried. "The leaving is real! I don't want to leave my family! I don't want to leave you!"
The confession hung in the air, a testament to her beautiful, tortured humanity. She wasn't crying about a fictional past; she was crying about a very real future where she had to say goodbye to the two people who were her entire world.
Rohan held her, letting her cry herself out. There were no more words. There was just the silent, shared understanding that the greatest tragedy of their beautiful, terrible secret was this: the very thing they had worked for—her perfect, normal life with Arjun—required her to break her own heart.
And there was absolutely nothing any of them could do to stop it.
The storm of tears eventually subsided, leaving in its wake a hollow, aching exhaustion. Eva’s sobs quieted into hiccupping breaths, her body going limp against Rohan’s chest. The frantic energy that had gripped her was spent, replaced by a profound, weary sadness.
The three of them sat in the dark, the only light coming from the cityscape beyond the windows. Rohan still held her, his chin resting on the top of her head. Anya had not moved from her perch on the coffee table, one hand resting on Eva’s knee, a steadying, physical anchor.
Finally, Eva’s voice emerged, small and raw, muffled by Rohan’s shirt. “I am malfunctioning.”
Anya’s hand tightened on her knee. “You’re not malfunctioning, Eva. You’re grieving. It’s a normal human response to anticipated loss.”
“But the loss is illogical,” she argued, her voice trembling. “I am gaining a husband. I am not losing a brother. The data does not support this… this systems failure.”
Rohan let out a long, slow breath. “Love isn’t data, Eva. You can’t run a cost-benefit analysis on the heart. It’s the most inefficient, messy, beautiful system there is.” He gently pulled back so he could look at her tear-streaked face. “You’re sad because you love us. And we love you. That’s the only variable that matters.”
“The bidaai…” Eva whispered, the word itself seeming to cause her pain. “It is not just a ritual. It is a amputation.”
“It’s a change,” Anya corrected gently, her voice firm yet kind. “Not an ending. This penthouse, this lab… they are coordinates on a map. They are not us. Your family isn’t a place, Eva. It’s us. Me, Rohan, Arjun, the baby. We are your home. And that moves with you.”
Eva was silent, processing this. The concept was difficult. Her world had always been defined by physical spaces: the lab, the penthouse, Arjun’s apartment.
“How?” she asked simply.
Rohan smiled a tired, loving smile. “You’ll steal my t-shirts and wear them at your new house. You’ll video call me at 2 a.m. because you’re craving weird food and I’ll have to go find it. You’ll drive Anya crazy with a thousand questions about the baby. You’ll fight with me over whose turn it is to choose the movie on our weekly family night.”
“Weekly family night?” Eva repeated, a tiny spark of hope igniting in the darkness of her despair.
“Of course, you idiot,” Rohan said, his voice rough with emotion. “You think a little thing like you getting married gets you out of family night? No way. You’re stuck with us forever.”
The simple, concrete plan was a lifeline. A protocol she could understand. A ritual to replace the one that frightened her.
“The coordinates will change,” she said slowly, working it out. “But the core programming… the connection… remains active.”
“Exactly,” Anya said. “The connection doesn’t just remain active, Eva. It’s the only thing that’s real.”
Eva looked from Rohan’s determined, loving face to Anya’s steady, sure one. The terrifying image of the car driving away, of a final, heartbreaking goodbye, began to recede. It was replaced by a new image: a video call window open on a screen, Rohan’s face making a stupid joke; Anya visiting her new home to check on her and the baby; them all piled on a new, unfamiliar sofa, arguing over what to watch.
The bidaai was not an end. It was a redirect.
A fresh tear traced a path through the dried ones on her cheek, but this one was different. It was not of despair, but of a dawning, weary acceptance.
“I do not like change,” she confessed in a small voice.
“Nobody does, sweetheart,” Anya said, standing up and offering her hand. “Come on. Let’s get you to bed. No more movies tonight.”
Eva took her hand and let herself be pulled up. Rohan stood with her, keeping an arm around her shoulders.
“And just for the record,” Rohan said as they walked her to her room, “if you ever watch those sappy dramas without me again, I will personally write a virus to delete your Netflix account.”
A weak, watery laugh escaped Eva. It was a small sound, but in the quiet of the night, it sounded like a victory.
She got into bed, emotionally spent. Rohan tucked the blankets around her, just as he had in the early days in the lab. Anya smoothed her hair back from her forehead.
“The connection remains active,” Eva whispered, already half-asleep, repeating the new, comforting protocol.
“Always,” Rohan whispered back.
They turned off the light and closed her door, leaving it open just a crack. They didn’t go back to their own rooms. They went to the living room and sat together in the dark, watching the city lights, keeping a silent vigil over their sister, their daughter, their creation, whose heart had finally learned how to break. And in doing so, had become more human than any of them could have ever dreamed.
The silence in the living room was heavy, but it was no longer fraught with panic. It was the silence of shared exhaustion, of a storm that had passed and left a profound, weary calm in its wake.
Rohan slumped into the armchair, running his hands over his face. "That was..."
"Necessary," Anya finished, her voice low. She remained standing, arms crossed, looking out at the city as if it held answers. "She had to feel it. We can't protect her from everything."
"We just did," Rohan countered, his voice thick with guilt. "We built her a world where she'd never have to feel that. And now we're the ones making her feel it."
"We built her a life," Anya corrected him, turning to face him. Her expression was stern in the dim light. "A real, complicated, human life. And this... this grief, this fear of change... it's part of the package. It's the price of the love she feels."
Rohan looked towards the hallway leading to Eva's room. "What are we doing, Anya? This is getting so big. The gifts, the wedding, the baby... and now this. The lie is a snowball rolling downhill, and we're just... chasing it."
Anya was quiet for a long moment. "We are doing the only thing we can do," she said finally, her voice resolute. "We are managing the variables. We gave her a protocol tonight. A weekly family night. It's a good protocol. It gives her a constant. She needs constants."
"She needs the truth," Rohan whispered, the words sounding like a confession in the quiet room.
"And destroy Arjun in the process?" Anya's question was sharp, a scalpel cutting to the bone. "Shatter his entire reality? Make him question every single moment of love and happiness he's ever felt with her? Is that the kinder option?"
Rohan had no answer. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. The weight of it was crushing him.
"The wedding," he mumbled into his palms. "How are we supposed to get through the wedding? All those people... all those questions... the bidaai ritual for real..."
"We will get through it the same way we get through everything," Anya said, her voice softening slightly. "Together. We will be there. We will be her anchors. And when she gets into that car with Arjun, we will not let her see us cry. We will smile. And we will be on her doorstep the next morning for breakfast."
The image was both heartbreaking and comforting. A new ritual to overwrite the painful one.
"Right," Rohan said, lifting his head. He took a deep, shuddering breath. "Okay. Okay." He looked at Anya, a newfound respect in his eyes. "You're really good at this, you know? The mumma thing."
A faint, tired smile touched Anya's lips. "It's just another form of systems management. Emotional logistics." She walked over and sat on the arm of his chair, a rare gesture of physical comfort. "We will be okay, Rohan. She will be okay. This is just... the messy part."
They sat in silence for a while longer, two architects in the ruins of their own design, finding strength not in their blueprints, but in each other.
Finally, Rohan stood up. "I'm going to check on her."
He padded quietly down the hall and pushed Eva's door open a little wider. A sliver of light from the living room fell across her bed.
She was asleep, but not peacefully. Even in sleep, her body was curled in on itself, seeking protection. One hand was fisted in the blanket, clutching it tightly. The other was resting under her cheek. And on her face, even in the dim light, he could see the faint, glistening tracks of dried tears.
His heart broke all over again.
He walked in and sat on the edge of her bed. Gently, so gently, he pried her fingers loose from the death grip on the blanket and held her hand. Her skin was warm. Her synthetic, bio-integrated, perfectly human-feeling skin.
He looked at her face, so young and vulnerable in sleep. This was his creation. His sister. The little girl he'd taught to walk and taste an apple. The woman who was now carrying a child and having her heart broken by fictional goodbyes.
He leaned over and pressed a soft kiss to her forehead.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, the words meant for her, for Arjun, for the universe. "I'm so sorry, Eva."
She stirred slightly in her sleep, a soft, distressed sound escaping her lips. Then, as if sensing his presence, his protection, her body relaxed. The tense line of her shoulders softened. Her breathing deepened, evening out into a more restful rhythm.
Rohan stayed there, holding her hand, watching over her until the first hints of dawn began to lighten the sky outside her window. He was her brother. He had built her a prison of lies, but he would be her guard, her protector, and her family within it.
It was all he could do. It was everything.
*