Living in a Mirage

Chapter Twenty-Five

"Your relationship is not supposed to be perfect all the time, your business is not supposed to do well all the time, your soufflés are not supposed to raise perfectly all the time. Everything is designed to go wrong so that you can gain the skills of rediscovering your tracks, even in difficult or frightening circumstances. Especially in difficult and frightening circumstances."

~ Martha Beck

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Manik has changed...

It wasn't something Nandini hadn't expected. Of course, after experiencing what he had, there was no surprise that he has changed. He has grown up and matured in these years they had been denied to live by each other's side, and so has she. It was natural, given...

She had mentally prepared herself for such changes and in the past weeks, she had confirmed some physical changes she had been able to pinpoint when she had seen him for the first time. In that one glance, after four years, she had wished to capture all of him. She had thought she had been ready to face hell just to get him back; went back to India to ask for Mr Malhotra's help, got trapped in Malhotra mansion by Nyonika, and then embarked on the journey that now has finally led her to Manik...

And as she had told Cabir, there were changes: there was a slight limp in the walk, not that noticeable if one wasn't paying attention to it, and his forehead had a scar that started from the side of his forehead and was hidden in most parts by his hair, she needed a closer inspection to know how long was it - that she would do if he just let her. He suffered from intense migraines, which could be due to his head injury caused by the accident or a side effect of the medicine that he had been forced to take unnecessarily. Now that they knew the possibility of it, the doctors couldn't confirm which was the case but he probably would suffer from it all his life, that was guaranteed. There were small scars on certain places on his face, his hands, and probably the rest of his body: glass shards, Doctor Waltz had explained. She needed to confirm where else and how many, but again, if he ever let her. And that's what made her come back to the same thought...

Manik has changed. A lot, beyond the physical changes that came with age and due to the accident. He now possessed a certain detachment, coldness, and a maddening impassiveness that old Manik, her Manik never had. He felt like a foreign entity wearing her Manik's face. It felt like there was nothing left of her Manik in him. And it was a scary thought, something she shouldn't entertain, something she couldn't entertain, yet something that kept haunting her...

It was too soon to tell anything, she, again and again, tried to console her, warding away paranoid thoughts...

But it had been one month. One whole month to the day she had finally found Manik yet not her Manik. He was there, within her reach, yet never in the past four years she had felt so far away from him as she did now. There was a silence between them that she couldn't break. No matter how much she tried, she couldn't reach him, there was something wrong and broken beyond what appeared to be...

Ever since she had gotten that call about the accident, her life had stopped, she had continued moving, done things for the sake of her family and for the sake of finding him, sure that once she would find him, her time would start to flow again. And it had happened, but just for a few hours, just for that one day. That one day, Manik had seemed her Manik, he had reached out for her, had held her hand, had whispered her name, had looked at her, and his grip on her hand hadn't loosened until he had once again fallen asleep. But for some reason, that had been it, the next day, the same had happened, Manik had woken up and found her there and the same thing had repeated as if he had forgotten that he had met her the day before. Dr Shah had told her that it was due to stress, a side effect of every lie he had been told about her, and that Manik would want surety of her being there until he would be assured that she was actually there, it would take some time, he had said.