It is a curious and often lamentable truth of social circles that a man’s greatest enemy is frequently only a friend who believes himself superior
Raphic Burdo
It is a curious and often lamentable truth of social circles that a man’s greatest enemy is frequently only a friend who believes himself superior. In the curious case of Shan and Josh, the latter harbored the former in his heart, while the former merely kept the latter in his periphery, a necessary fixture for a higher ambition.
Some prizes, as Shan often mused with a cynical smile, must indeed be left unclaimed. Prize or not, precious or what, Josh had left Nina unclaimed, or so Shan thought. Nina was Josh’s wife, or, more precisely, his former wife. To be absolutely precise, the consensus of the drawing rooms held that the story of Josh and Nina had reached an unhappy terminus; the erstwhile ‘sweet couple’ was separated, never to unite again. Shan was the staunchest believer of them all. With friends like him, Josh certainly required no enemies. This is the story of the three, or rather, a fleeting but fatal episode in the collective life of Shan, Nina, and Josh.
Shan, a man of fifty with a self-proclaimed sharp wit, was utterly convinced of his own destiny. Josh, happy-go-lucky and still a boy in his mid-forties, was simply a soft obstacle. And Nina, a woman of graceful composure in her early forties, was the object.
This episode belongs to one fateful afternoon where the characters of the three were finally, violently, rewritten. The air in the upscale Islamabad café was a sterile, expensive relief from the harsh June sun, yet it failed to disperse the tense expectation Shan carried. He watched Nina, who looked perfectly composed, utterly unlike the distraught, single woman he had convinced himself she must be. He had come here, in his own fashion, to secure her. For Shan, Josh was an inconvenience, a placeholder, a man whose continued friendship served only to keep him within Nina’s orbit. Her separation, whispered about in hushed tones, was merely a bureaucratic delay in Shan’s master plan. Nina, he was certain, was now the beautifully wrapped gift Josh was too incompetent to keep.
Taking advantage of the merciful scarcity of patrons in the high-ceilinged café, Shan leaned forward, his voice a low, rehearsed purr designed for immediate, unearned intimacy.
“Nina, I’m happy for you. Relieved, to be honest,” he murmured, casting Josh aside with a verbal flick of the wrist.
Nina remained unmoved, her face a mask of impenetrable composure.
Shan pressed on: “I’ve always sensed your potential was stifled.”
Nina looked down, a quick movement that Shan mistook as bashfulness or suppressed grief. He saw only a vacuum he could fill.
“Nina, you deserve someone who operates on your level.” He let his gaze linger, conveying a depth of admiration he certainly didn’t feel, but which he knew was required for the execution of the seduction.
Nina set down her cup of green tea. Her quiet grace, usually an attractive trait, suddenly felt like an impenetrable shield. “Josh and I are working through a situation, Shan. It is either a misunderstanding or a necessary period of space. It might be temporary.”
Shan smiled thinly, sheepishly, his confidence only momentarily checked. “My dear, separations are rarely temporary.”
Without waiting for her to offer a single word or a genuine expression, he prattled on: “Frankly, why would you go back to him? When something breaks, it shows its weakness. You need strength, Nina, not weakness.” Misreading her sustained calm for inevitable submission, Shan made his final, fatal error.
He edged his hand across the table, his fingers finding the cool porcelain of her saucer. “I always harbored a deeper admiration, a desire for you. I always knew you were too good for him. We share an understanding of ambition, of life’s real potential.”
Nina didn’t flinch from his touch. She simply fixed him with an expression that contained no anger, only a profound, devastating pity.
“You speak of weakness, Shan, but you are the weakest thing I have seen, all these days,” she spoke, her voice soft yet piercing. “You heard of our rift, a potential vulnerability, and you pounced.”
She stabilized her voice, allowing the true weight of her observation to land. “Here you stand not as a friend, but as a scavenger.” She looked straight into Shane’s suddenly terrified eyes and uttered the word he could not evade: “A vulture.” She paused, allowing the gravity of the word to settle. “You have mistaken solitude for loneliness.”
Shan felt the blood rush to his face, a searing sting of humiliation unlike any he had ever experienced. Her words, so raw yet so controlled, did not sound like the desperate outcry of a scorned woman; they sounded like the final, unappealable verdict of a judge.
He watched her rise, gathering her simple clutch bag. He scrambled for a rebuttal, anything to restore his crumbling control. “Wait, Nina, you don’t understand…”
She didn’t stop, but she did look back over her shoulder, just for a moment, and her expression was not one of disgust, but of cold, strategic triumph. She stopped and shot one more arrow of words into his heart.
“You know what, Shan?” she said, her voice delivering the ultimate, ironic blow. “The only reason I agreed to this meeting today, was because Josh needed proof.”
Shane stared, his mind reeling. “Proof? Of what?”
Nina turned her back fully, beginning her final walk toward the exit. “Proof that I was right. That he needed to know which people to finally cut out of his life.”
The doors hissed shut behind her, sealing him in. Shan remained frozen, the café’s controlled air suddenly feeling like the vacuum of space. He realized with chilling certainty that he was not the sophisticated predator; he was the crude bait. He had despised Josh for his weakness, yet he had just been used by him and the woman he coveted, to confirm his own utterly disposable nature.
Read: The Door Stands Open
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Raphic Burdo, hailing from Sindh, is public policy expert focused on impact of digital technologies on leadership, governance, education and markets
