"Ar... Arjun?" Adaa stuttered into the phone.
"Adaa? What happened?"
"I think I'm lost." She sniffed.
"What do you mean lost? Where are you?" He demanded.
"I don't know!"
"What happened?"
"I stopped to put on my helmet, but when I looked up they were all gone," she gulped, she had forgotten how scary her brother sounded when he was angry. "And I called Siddharth but he didn't answer the call."
She stopped for a breath.
It didn't make much sense to him, but he waited patiently.
"And?" He prompted.
"And I don't know where I am. I'm lost."
"How can you not know, Adaa? Where were you going anyway?"
She was so scared, more of him than of being lost, that she began stuttering again.
"We were on this road trip, and everything was fine. Until they all left me."
He realised that he was shaking in rage now. Calming down a bit, he went on.
"Are you sure you don't know where you are?"
"Honest."
Arjun sighed. He, of all people, knew too well how it felt to be stranded in an unknown place.
"Anything of significance around? So I can send someone to pick you up right away."
She explained her surroundings to him and waited for him to reply.
"I think I know this place. I'll send someone soon. Stay safe, get it?"
"Arjun," she spoke slowly. "You pick me up."
Arjun went blank for a moment. He knew how much he mattered to his sister and that he was one of the few people she trusted. The very thought made him smile.
He also knew that he had to rush to get her back or she'd be too scared. And then he'd have some other people to attend to as well, he thought, angrily.
He rushed to his car and fiddled for the keys. As he did so, his thoughts raced back to the time when he had been abandoned on a family trip for almost half an hour.
He had been barely a month over five when this incident had taken place. He had been forgotten on the beach and his family had started back without him. Until the little girl started asking for her brother.
Adaa.
Even as a toddler, Adaa had always been extremely fond of her elder brother. And Arjun had grown up being looked up to by his sister. He could never forgive his parents for the abandoning, though he knew it wasn't intentional. And he could never forget the fact that his sister's attachment to him had brought him back home that day.
He reached the place before he could know and looked around for his sister. He sighed out of relief when he found her playing with a litter of puppies by the road. He walked up to her and she turned before he could call her name.
"Arjun!" She hugged him.
"It seems you've been enjoying this. And I got so worried about the whole thing." He faked an accusative tone.
"I was scared. Until I found them." She gestured at the puppies. "Apparently, abandonment is a routine thing for them."
One look at her and he knew what she was going to say.
"No, Adaa. You can't take them home. Mom will never approve any more pets."
"But. They're by their own here. What if something happened to them?"
She sounded so sad, Arjun almost forgot it was the same girl who was scared just a few minutes ago.
"Let's see what we can do about them, alright? Now tell me what brought you here? Why didn't I know anything about this?"
She braced herself for the worst and began narrating the whole thing to him. How Siddharth and her other friends had asked her to accompany them on this road trip and how they had left her when she only stopped to wear her helmet.
Arjun could sense his body warming with anger. When she was done narrating, he hugged his sister once again, glad that she was fine and took her back to the car.
He also picked the three pups and put them in the back of the car, as he knew Adaa wouldn't move without that being done.
"I'll drop you home and go take care of those people. I'll make sure they'll never mess with you again." He spoke in a gruff tone.
"Like you used to take care of the people who bullied me in school?" Adaa smirked at her brother.
"Exactly."
"And the pups? Can I keep them, too?"
"No. You already have enough dogs. I'll take them to the nearby shelter, so someone else can have the privilege of having a dog to love them." He looked at the puppies, dozing off one over the other in the rear mirror and smiled.
Adaa nodded and sat back in the seat.
"Arjun?" She spoke up after a long pause.
"Yeah?"
"You've always been my ray of hope. And, I love you."
He looked at his sister and saw the same toddler who had grabbed his finger as soon as she had reached him on the beach sixteen years ago.
He could only smile at her. And he didn't even have to tell her, she knew he loved her back, more than words could define.
