MehRya OneShots - The Butterfly Effect - 3rd Shot/Page 7 - Shaurya POV

"Inhe kaise bataun ke woh khadoos Shaurya Khanna ka chehra dekhte hi na, main sab kuch bhool jaungi." - Mehek

It takes most people years to figure out who they really are, but not her. She has known who she is since she was fourteen years old.

Quiet, shy and homely. That's how she remembers her mother. And she's spends so much time missing her; she doesn't even realise when she actually becomes her. Only remembers being told she's her mother's mirror image a few years after the accident. And she embraces it like a comfort blanket. Wraps it around her little body and relives her mother through her memories, keeps those memories alive through food. Like she had been doing for so long.

Somewhere over the years, that deep-seated realization slowly turns into quiet acceptance. And as she grows older, a calming sense of confidence creeps in as well. She knows exactly who she is, what she is and she doesn't need to look anymore. Her journey over, she's at home in her skin.

Carefully then, she restructures her life around her now realised self. Carefully picking, choosing and selecting the people she wants around her. So meticulous is she in her approach that by the time she's done, she's only left with Sonal and Chacha.

Sonal who with her honest quirky outlook becomes her binocular to the world and Chacha, a thin thread that ties her to the world outside her mohallah and keeps her from become completely enclosed. An illusion of social norm, she holds on to him in an attempt to convince herself of her normalcy. He also keeps her family at bay, stops them from saying she should meet people, interact, go out, explore and discover more. That she hasn't already become the person she was always meant to be.

Chacha cements her identity, while Sonal embraces it and her family, with all their well-meaning intents, have learnt to accept it.

Mehek feels at peace in her world, delights in it. Let's the calm and comfort of it wash over her, like a gentle tide and lets her life continue to flow along, one meal at a time.

The first rambles of an incoming storm in her carefully-crafted life appear as these things often tend to, without warning and under a false guise. And at first, it seems inconsequential, almost arbitrary.

Ajay was only meant to be just another rishta, another rejection waiting in the wings to happen. A slight hiccup in her quiet routine, a sudden gust of wind that should have, like many others before it, just disappeared after shaking her world for a while.

It doesn't.

Instead, Ajay and his mother turn into the unexpected whirlwind that changes her course, forcing her to break away and overlap the shores she trusts. Before long she finds herself molding and contouring, heading fast towards a new foreign path.

One that brings her crashing into the jagged ridges and sharp edges of an immovable cliff, shattering the serenity of her life.

The impact leaves her reeling and pierces through everything she holds dear. On the surface, the shift appears imperceptible, a temporary jolt with ripples that slowly ebb away but the echoes sink low. And she finds herself delving deeper and deeper to hold her cautiously constructed identity afloat, struggling to keep her essence alive.

Soon after, her gentle tides turned into stormy waves foaming with an urgency born of a need as old as time. To not conform, to survive, to come out victorious head held high.

Her decade old identity changes in the blink of an eye (too sudden, too quick, too soon) and all it takes is an instant - a cliff, a challenge, a man - for her to realize, it is not who we are but what we go through, what we become, that forms the fabric of our lives.