Chapter 1: Raina

 "I should probably get some coffee", she looks at the clock and back at her blinking screen. It's 2 a. m. and she has a deadline hanging on her neck like a sword. Her eyes are getting puffier by the day. 'Maybe I should resign and find another job' and as quickly as that idea came in her mind, she shrugs it off.

Raina Kashyap is a 30 year old girl working as a Business Consultant in one of the leading consulting firm in Pune. With an average built and dusky complexion but sharp features, Raina stands out in the crowd as a charismatic person who could charm the audience with her feminine yet husky voice, and ever smiling face.
Finally she wraps up her work and closes the flap of her laptop and heaves a sigh of relief. It's 2.30 a. m. and she's famished.
She lifts up her water bottle drinks the last two remaining sips, slides off her bed and walk towards the kitchen to cook some ready to eat Maggi noodles for herself.
Maggi noodles would always be an oasis to bachelors in a never ending desert of the question "What should I cook that's easy and quick and delicious at the same time?"

Her other flat-mate, Shikha, is asleep in her room. And there's a stark silence in the atmosphere. All she could hear is the noise of distant passing by vehicles, dogs barking and those unknown nocturnal birds chirping. She kind of like this unsettling silence. The kind which makes your stomach flutter sometimes and you feel like peeing.
'How could he not have noticed that I was wearing that purple top which he once complemented? Maybe I should have wore my glasses, my eyes are swollen lately or maybe he likes it without glasses' a chain of thoughts run through her mind about Raghav, her boyfriend who's living in Bangalore. Both of them were colleague until Raghav switched the company and shifted to Bangalore to work for a startup.
Their usual catch up in nearby cafes are now reduced to mere WhatsApp video calls.
She's chopping tomatoes and onions and spring onions for her noodles. The knife is sharp and in one go the onions are getting sliced 'stt-stt-stt-stt'. She loves the sound of it. It's weirdly satisfying.

'I miss how your hairs felt on my face when we used to sit by the Lavasa lake on a drizzly evening.' Raghav's words always cheers her up. Remembering little things, tiny details always makes day.
stt-stt-stt-stt, she looks down only to realize that she had cut her finger. The onions are red with her blood. Ideally she should panic, but she keeps looking at her finger, blood dripping drop by drop. She sucks her finger to stop the blood, which by now has covered her palm and encroaching the veins on her wrist. She sucks her index finger to stop the blood. And she couldn't help but like the taste of how her blood tastes. Somehow the bleeding stops.
She hurriedly washes her hand and resumes her cooking and finishes off without getting lost in another chain of thoughts.
Pouring the noodles in a bowl, she goes to her room. Put some light music by Frank Sinatra and sits by the window and eats her noodle gazing out in the dark, all she could see is dim street lights and lights in the neighboring societies.
She finishes off her noodles and go to the kitchen to wash her hands and she's too sleepy to do the dishes, so she just put them all in the sink along with the chopping board, when she realize that she hadn't washed the onions which were soaked with her blood.