Manik & Nandini - Requiem for a dream

So there was this song from one of the MTV Splitsvilla seasons. It went something like this.

From the time Nandini Murthy stepped foot into Manik's life , it was never the same again. She riled him up like nobody ever did. She tugged at his heart in a way no one ever had. The furious rage she sent him flying into, the heights of euphoria she took him to ... no human being had ever managed to evoke such feelings in him, before her. And despite all the fits and all the fights ... they somehow always found their way back to each other.

At first she was a nightmare to him. Punching him in front of the entire college and openly defying him and his unchallenged supremacy in SPACE, humiliating him like no one ever dared to. And then some time passed. And during that time, the events that transpired between the two of them, caused those nightmares to turn into wishful thoughts for the days and dreams for the nights. She was suddenly the bewildering answer to all questions he hadn't quite formed in his mind but had been wanting to ask for a very long time. He had always been taken by heavenly bodies loved to watch at them at night ... but one day he realized, he didn't need to anymore ... Suddenly, right next to him, was a girl, whose beauty surpassed that of the moon. In his eyes of course 😆. As beautiful as our Nandu is, we all know , there's no one quite like the moon 😛. But for Manik ? Nandini was the sole chaand to his sky. And that just says it all, doesn't it ?

She was was the yin to his yang. She was the reflection looking back at him when he looked deep in his soul. He found her, within himself. And in doing so, was reacquainted with himself. In a whole new light. She was him, he was her.

And then he started feeling things. If he was drowning in life and its follies , she was the distant shore that beckoned to him and kept him afloat. She evoked a series of desires in him like he's never felt before. While with Alya, life was like a well oiled machine, it was also pretty much just that, DEAD and mechanical. But with Nandini. He felt alive. And longed to live and love. If Alya was passion, Nandini was rapture . She was rhapsody, she was Nirvana. And she was so much more. When Nandini came into his life, it was like the parched sands of a desert, with no love to spare and none to imbibe. But she gushed forth, like a spring, right in the middle of the unforgiving Sahara. And suddenly there was an oasis. And in that bloomed the kind of love that was so beautiful it was almost a mirage. And he knew, once again, that she was him. He was her.

And so when today he had to cut her off from his life, for whatever reason (I hope the 'reason' burns in HELL 😡) it was pretty much like dying himself. In hurting her today , the way he did, he killed a part of himself. The part of him that FELT.

But then again, as T.S. Eliot once said, "We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

Today both of them died a little bit. While Manik devolved into a poorer entity of himself, Nandini will reemerge from the ashes as fiery as a phoenix. One so much more weaker, and the other much much stronger. But because they will already have been dead to each other for a while, the resentment that Nandini might have for Manik & the regret Manik for Nandini, will go away too. With time ofcourse. All that being said and done, that time, is not today, not tomorrow, not the day after. Not REMOTELY anywhere near in sight. For an indefinite amount of time, they will hurt. But this is a storm they NEED to weather out before they can start over.

We all know Manik is fragmented as of now and the pieces that made him whole are now smithereens. The hearty and warm Nandini is now devoid of all optimism. She let it all fly away as she sent her fireflies off. But you see, Destiny has this ridiculous sadistic streak. It makes soulmates meet and fall in love, and then it shakes up their lives in a tremor that uproots them and chucks them far far away from each other. But when it is done laughing, it also resets the gameboard. Which is why I have hope that Manik and Nandini will heal, they will grow, and they will find each other again. And most of all, they WILL love again, albeit two very different versions of each other.

Just that,this time their story will not be the one of dreams, but the requiem of them.