I hope this part is more worth than the previous one!

𓆩𓆪

Three months later...

Placing her Appa's pen gently on her notepad, Nandini interlocked her hands on each elbow. "Before we check in with how you're feeling today, I have something for you." She said, raising an index finger in the air with a characteristic smile. As she crouched and searched her desk cabinet, Smaran's eyes softened at her thoughtfulness of keeping him in mind and bringing him something.

Three months ago, if someone was chirpy and happy-go-lucky around him, he would instantly look down upon them or go as far as to detest them and pass judgements. He reminisced how much things had changed ever since starting therapy, how accepting he had become of himself and as a result, the people around him.

In the same room some weeks ago, Nandini had passed him a stack of formally typed out sheets.

"As part of your official onboarding, I want to go over what you can expect from these sessions. Your treatment will be primarily focusing on expressing what's on your mind in whatever way you like – that way, we can figure out what's affecting you most and tackle it safely. In front of you are some pens and paper if you prefer writing, some colours if you're more of a visual person and a tape-recorder, in case you feel safer filtering your thoughts on your own before you talk to me about them." She had said kindly but professionally.

Smaran had been preparing to be ripped apart by incessant nosy questions in the name of therapy but was pleasantly surprised by the different mediums that sat between them and the importance she shed on safety.

"You are at free will to share how much ever you please, my only job is to help you better understand yourself. At any point if you feel uncomfortable about a topic and I notice it, I will either divert you to a different question or will respectfully ask you to stop talking." She looked at him for a moment, meaning what she said. He liked that she was setting the boundaries of what therapy would entail for him upfront. An aura of emotional availability surrounded her, and had brought his discomfort down several notches.

"I want you to know your emotional safety is my priority. Nothing you express will leave these four walls unless you are in immediate physical danger to yourself or those around you, in which case I will have to refer you to my senior, for your safety." Smaran tensed up, but continued to listen to her.

She softly smiled. "You are not obligated to share anything with me that you don't feel comfortable talking about. If you understand all these, can you drop in your signature, full name and today's date on this form? You can also read it thoroughly on your own before committing to anything."

He wanted to say he trusted her, but could not pinpoint where that feeling of safety stemmed from.

"I understand, Doctor." He assured professionally, promising himself that the step he was taking was in the long run going to be in the right direction.

Nandini had opened her mouth to add: just Nandini will do, but backed off at the last moment, remembering a promise she made to herself.

She would not repeat her mistakes again. Part of her job as a professional was to not latch onto cases and clients and make their problems her own. That meant she would only focus her time and energy on her patients on a professional level, while barring herself from overly analysing or sympathising with them.

On either sides of the table, promises were made, some to be kept to protect oneself while some to be broken for selfless goodwill.

When she rose again, she had a round stainless steel box in her hands. She opened the container and extended it towards him. Smaran peered into the hole to see a handful of fried snacks. One of the older staff members specifically made it for Nandini after noticing her dull mood earlier that week and deducing it was homesickness.

"Bajjiyaan?" He asked almost to himself, exposing none of the excitement he internally felt on tasting something that was not military mess food.

As she eagerly juggled the box, Smaran interpreted the signal and picked one of them. It was deliciously reminiscent of street food from the corner shops near his home, and he could not stop at eating one. While he reluctantly held back his craving for more, Nandini read his hesitation and left the box on his end of the table.

"It's all for you," she said gently, foregoing her evening plans of relishing the delicacy with a nice cup of homemade masala chai.

His eyes widened, "All of them?"

She nodded with a wide smile, admitting to herself that there were far more opportunities for her to enjoy treats of that kind. It meant the world to Nandini when that cleaner Didi kept her in mind and brought her the box, but happiness like that deserved to be shared. It was, after all, a small gesture that would impact her patients' lives; why would she not do it?

He smiled genuinely at her, "Thank you!" and took a bite off another.

"So, how are you feeling today?"

His mouth invariably moved while half-stuffed with the fried snack, "I'm doing okay, I think the last time you caught me was during one of my lowest days."

On their last session, he had unexpectedly broken down while narrating one of his childhood memories. While the brunt of his childhood was quite contrasting to the picture he painted to her in their first session together, a tendency Nandini made note of, some hidden gems were discovered from the pile of trauma: one of them being Smaran's unshakeable trait of never giving up on people he loved.

What a desirable quality to possess, especially when reciprocated...

It was not the appropriate time to delve down a path of self-pity and self-loathing. Instead, she diverted her mind from her unfixable personal problems and focused on her patient's resolvable trauma, "That's good, because today you'll be able to rationally look at your experience without being clouded by your emotions." She explained, feeling content that he was in better spirits.

The topic Nandini had in mind for that day was one of Smaran's triggers, and for that, he needed to be in a good mental space at the moment.

"How do you feel about discussing your insurgency operation today?" Nandini asked nonchalantly, a skill she had picked up over the last three months that was a stark contrast to her inherent curiosity and empathy for other's pain.

"I think I can – I can talk about it." He said uncertainly.

Nandini picked up the gold-encased pen. "Would you like to... talk about your friend?"

He nodded as he took a careful breath to calm his nerves, "Everything here in the army is not as glamorous as it seems." Nandini nearly scoffed at the dimmed-down adjective he used to describe his daily duties. Glamour was out of the question in military life.

"But there's also no easy way out. I came in here with negligible self-esteem, we've spoken about that a little already... no particular affinity for anything in life because I wasn't worthy of anything; heh... I guess I thought nobody would care if I lived or died until I walked into those walls." He drew an imaginary circle around them.

"But you do matter to so many people around you," She assured, relating to the void within her where her self-worth once resided. What she needed to hear, she was telling someone else in the hopes of mending their broken soul; in a way hers couldn't be.

That was not to say she was not doing better. Life over the last few weeks had not been nearly as revolting as her first month in Ahmedabad.

She had settled into the new city and had known basic fares to the different spots she visited on the regular; thanks to her Chacha's middle-class mentality, Nandini had mastered the art of bargaining with the auto-rickshaws and emotionally blackmailed them into accepting her quoted fare for the ride! New friendships were formed with other staff members who worked on the camp during the day, many of whom refused to have lunch in Nandini's absence.

Most of her first month in the city, she had spent in voluntary solitude, but as the days passed, her withdrawn energy was warmly accepted by those around her who found excuses to be around her and involve her in their plans. She slowly learned to smile at others again, share her love for food with others around her, and give back to the temple community that held her at her worst – to name a few heartwarming changes.

Like magnets, her life attracted characters from different walks of life and evoked glimpses of the old Nandini Murthy back in her. Regardless, none of them had anywhere close to the same place in her life that Navya and Soha did. Without them, half of Nandini Murthy remained deeply hidden in the dungeons.

Smaran was still talking, which snapped Nandini back to reality, "I'd never imagined meeting so many people who had the same outlook on life until training. All of us with nothing to lose, except our physical, insignificant bodies that would amount to nothing in the grander scheme of things." He dryly chuckled to cushion the uneasiness; how disposable had he been feeling to say such a thing without hesitating?

"But lonely souls too end up seeking impermanent bonds." That sentence spoken by him shook Nandini at her core. She met his cold, detached eyes and partially dissociated from her current world. Instead, she was in a world where a man had meant everything to her, and his sole purpose in coming into her life was just to destroy her – the old Nandini Murthy.

Smaran rubbed the base of his nose along his finger. "For the first time, I found someone who was my platonic soul mate."

Platonic soul mates... that was the perfect definition for Nandini's friendship with her girls; although she wasn't sure they felt the same about her anymore, now that she wasn't the old Nandini Murthy.

"I could give up everything I had for him, even my own life if it came to it. I think he would have as well, if he was here today," He completed. Nandini shuffled in her seat, imbibing those words like a prayer and vouching the same for her friends, even if that meant putting her life on the line. Indeed, her life was nowhere near as risky as Smaran's, but if it did come to that, she would not think twice...

Seamlessly weaving the monologue into his story, Smaran shared some titbits about the insurgency operation that took place at sea. They had busted a gang that was smuggling tens of thousands of rupees worth of government weapons, explosives, and armour across maritime borders halfway between Goa and Mangalore.

Their suspicion was that the party had departed from Goa, had planned to meet another party in Mangalore, and then head across international waters. Somewhere amidst that first wing, someone had tipped them off about the military's arrival, and the crew had steered westwards into the middle of the ocean without reaching the Mangalore checkpoint.

Smaran was beginning to succumb to some deeper breaths to combat his restlessness. "This was a small ship, by the way, and had about twelve druggies on board. As we split up and tackled them from three dinghies, the whole encounter escalated into a chain reaction of attacks. The resources they possessed outweighed what we had on us, and the worst part was, as government servants, we were under-equipped, and the criminals – on the wrong side of the law – had the upper hand."

Nandini was blown by the unnaturally calm manner in which Smaran narrated the dangerous encounter, unlike instances where minute mentions of things would act as triggers. He had been detached from the situation and was talking about it as if he were an outsider overlooking it. One of the biggest tell-tales of a trauma survivor. She scribbled those in her notepad as swiftly as she could.

Some questions sprouted in her mind, but she sidelined them, not wanting to interrupt the meditative flow Smaran was immersed in. "I distinctly remember losing a bit of myself with every bomb that was set off, and was scalded more so by the fallen warriors around me than any injury I could have sustained myself."

It was only after vocalising that realisation that Smaran felt light-headed. As he pressed his temples, Nandini handed him a bottle of packaged water. He unscrewed and gulped its contents thirstily. Taking out his pocket square, he covered the top and dampened one side, brushing the wetness over his face too. Nandini periodically exaggerated her own breathing to get Smaran to follow along.

"You don't have to indulge in this topic any further if –"

He interrupted and continued his stream of thoughts, giving her more content to write notes on. "Till date, I can't shake that horrendous thought from my mind, the selfish guilt of doing nothing – not even in the name of revenge – out of sheer shock for people I didn't even know! I feared for my life more than anything else, something I thought I would never experience in my lifetime."

Nandini understood his dilemma and comfortingly said, "It's a completely human response. None of us, no matter how much we're trained to, can bravely face death without at least flinching. It's just not possible... our survival instinct literally fights it."

"I guess you're right." He said and paused for a long moment as if composing himself. "And then somehow, I'm not even sure if this was a figment of my imagination at this point, I picked up on a steam engine sound in the vague distance. Not more than five or ten nautical miles away, because a ship that size could not possibly be moving fast."

Nandini frowned, "Ships these days aren't steam-powered, are they?"

"That's what I thought as well, I thought my mind was acting up because it didn't appear on the radar. But I'm almost sure I know what I heard. Some part of my flight and fight response activated, I think, and a few injured teammates and I seized the gang's stash. Bullets were fired in both directions, but I wasn't responsible for it. In fact, I had completely checked out. And a moment before the crew was arrested, I was pulled in as a hostage. A blunt force hammered in my head, and the last thing I saw was him jumping in to rescue me."

Him.

Smaran had touched the star tattoo.

A vision of Manik holding another man in a wrestlehold manifested in her imagination as he fought criminals to save his friend.

Why in the world was she associating a noble soldier with a molester? That could never be possible.

What she had failed to notice was that she too was not reeling in her deep-rooted emotions; ironically, she was an outsider to her own life as she helped others navigate the cloudiness in theirs.

"We were already completely wiped out, and the few of us that remained alive desperately needed to return to the shore required urgent medical treatment, and had to bring back the seized military goods. I returned, but he... didn't."

"I'm... I'm so, so sorry for what happened." As Smaran choked up, Nandini clasped his hand softly. "Did you report what you heard that night to anyone?"

He spent a few moments in silence, which Nandini felt was reasonable.

"I did mention it to our chief in command that night, but nothing happened after that. Instead, every paper the following day was proudly honouring the men that fought and served their country. Their sacrifices got a quarter page worth of content on popular media, but we gravely bear their losses every single day." The gravity of those words was sinking into Nandini too.

Everyone else in the world who watched them as an outsider saw their mortal sacrifices as a moral duty, an obligation to fulfill. After all, did they not willingly sign up for those consequences? How dare they complain about loss and death?

"And shortly after, those surreal sensations increased in their frequency, and I was finally referred to you as a last resort. But the fact of the matter is... Several decisions that night could have stopped what happened from happening. If we took the whole troop instead of hand-picking a few, we could have outnumbered them."

If Nandini had not suggested spending the night with him, she would not have been as devastated as she was in that first month.

"If we had even half the weapons they had, we could have all made it out in one piece."

If Nandini had even half the self-awareness she had today, she would have thought twice about blindly trusting a man in the name of love.

"If my friend hadn't swapped places with me, today would have been a vastly different day. It really makes me wonder, are we indeed serving a better cause? When our army clearly knows the risks of what we're encountering and still chooses to put our people at risk, would you call that an honourable death or a foolish one?"

That she was, foolish indeed; but it wasn't hurting her anymore. She was not emotional about any of it because the way she was viewing her problem had changed, all thanks to the enlightened perspective Smaran shared with her. At the end of the day, actions were just temporary decisions. Its consequences were what every individual lived with.

If she wasn't an indispensable example of that realisation, Smaran's deceased troop was; while she had solely been responsible for destroying herself, Smaran's seniors had the blood of several innocent souls on their hands.

Sure, she spent days crying about him, weeks repenting her mistakes, and over a month punishing herself and keeping her distance to protect her loved ones from herself – but those were the consequences she chose to live with.

Because of her recklessness.

All because of one man's actions.

She could not give him that much power over her life, and why was she suffering every step of the way when he who actually took advantage of her innocence and committed the heinous crime was freely roaming around? Smaran was right in questioning the ethics behind choices, and the intentions behind actions.

Why was Nandini punishing herself and her loved ones for the actions of one man?

She would not be so foolish any longer.

Swirling her father's pen between her fingers, she distractedly murmured, "There's indeed so much to us the rest of the world does not see."

𓆩𓆪

But the real question is how does she piece the puzzle to lead herself to Manik? Jaanne ke liye dekhte rahiye! :P

In every character's 'search', stars and darkness connect to Manik, is there anything between the lines that we don't know about? ;)

Please keep your votes and comments flowing <3