A member of the mafia, Nawab, falls prey to the temptation of wooing a woman during a mission outside Mumbai. Under the identity of Manik Malhotra, he meets Nandini Murthy, a walking-talking panic button, and feels undeniable attraction for her.
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𓆩𓆪
Nandini's brain had been muddled with various information that she could not think clearly any longer.
A mind map was essential to visualise the sequence of transpiring events.
At the temple, she had seen a flash of white light while she had been silently praying but when she looked around, she couldn't find its source. Taking it as a divine message from a superior power, Nandini stood to her feet and encircled the shrine meditatively.
She had returned from the temple with immense clarity and an intuitive drive to piece together whatever she had. Her stationary cabinet had been scrounged for some supplies. Packing them in her pink tote, she reached for some paper too, and decided that the A4 sheets were not good enough for her task. Several of them would have to be laid down as tiles, and taping them together to expand the drawing area was an unnecessary distraction.
From her friend who had access to the main server room, she had grabbed an A1 size sheet. Holding a paper cylinder that was half her size, Nandini stumbled into the library. She swiped all the items on a secluded desk and unravelled the roll, placing her pencil pouch and her bag on opposite corners.
With firm, intentional strokes from a red sketch pen, she drew the red star she had seen on Smaran's wrist on one edge of the sheet. That had been her very first clue in this tangled web of information.
From it, she drew a branch pointing to Manik's name; Smaran's narrations of his selfless friend and the symbolic star that she associated with Manik were both intuitively leading her to that correlation, but presently there was a lack of evidence to back her assumption up. Beside his name, she had scribbled some question marks, marked it as assumption number 1, and in brackets added: hisfriend?
On the right-hand side of the sheet, she wrote down to the best of her ability the approximate date she met Manik, and the week that he left her. The rough timeline of Manik's appearance in her life was to prove that: if Smaran lost his friend before Nandini met Manik, Manik was definitely alive and well. Without her conscious effort, she was beginning to harbour hope for that possibility.
Underneath the illustrated star, she wrote down bullet points from her sessions with Smaran while referring to her notes from bottom to top... in the reverse order of the timeline.
Lost his friend forever.
Friend jumped into the enemy boat.
Could not see the ship on the dingy's handheld radar.
Heard a steam powered ship - some handful of miles away.
