Chapter 6 – Fractures
943 Words
The city pulsed with noise. Chants, drums, and whistles rolled through the streets like an unending heartbeat. Aarav adjusted his camera strap, squinting through the haze of smoke and sunlight. Banners waved in every direction — slogans painted in red and black, anger spilling over the barricades.
He wasn’t here to take sides. He never was. His job was to capture the story, not become part of it. But even as he clicked the shutter, something inside him tightened.
The rhythm of the chants faded, replaced by a sharper sound — the thud of boots, the roar of the crowd shifting like a living creature. He framed his next shot: a young woman shouting with her fist raised, police shields gleaming behind her. The composition was perfect — chaos and courage in a single frame.
Then came the smoke grenade.
Aarav flinched as the white cloud erupted, swallowing the street whole. The crowd broke. People screamed, stumbled, scattered. His hand shook as he took another shot, then another — until the camera’s click became something else.
A gunshot.
For a second, the world folded in on itself. He wasn’t in Delhi anymore.
He was back there — the border.
Dust, not smoke. Screams, not chants.
Blood splattered the lens, not paint.
He froze, camera clutched tight. His breath came short, heart pounding in his ears. The street around him blurred into fragments of memory — soldiers shouting orders, a child crying, his friend Rajiv collapsing with a bullet in his chest.
He stumbled back, the camera slipping from his grip.
“Aarav?”
A voice broke through the noise. A woman — a volunteer from the protest — was trying to lead him away from the rush. But her face blurred too, blending with another, softer one from his past.
“Leave him!” someone shouted. “He’s in shock!”
He blinked, realizing he was crouched against a wall, his knees drawn to his chest, fingers trembling. His breath came in shallow bursts.
Smoke curled past like ghosts.
By the time the crowd thinned and silence crept back, Aarav found himself sitting near the edge of the barricade. His camera lay beside him, lens cracked. He reached for it slowly, brushing away the dust as though it were sacred.
You’re fine, he told himself. You’re fine.
But the fracture lines had already formed. Not just on the lens — in him.
He stood up, forcing his body to move. The sun was setting, a dull red smear over the skyline. He started walking, each step heavier than the last.
The city continued to roar in the distance — cars honking, people shouting, life surging forward as if nothing had happened. But inside Aarav, something had stopped moving.
That night, he sat in his apartment, the lights off, the cracked camera on the table before him. The images from the protest flickered on his laptop screen — faces of anger, fear, defiance.
Then he saw one photo that froze him.
A girl in the background, her face half-turned — sketchbook in her hand, eyes wide, not with fear but recognition. Mira.
He leaned closer, zooming in. She hadn’t noticed him, but there she was, standing near the crowd, sketching the chaos. Her pencil had been moving even as the smoke rose.
Something stirred in him again — not the flashback this time, but something gentler. He remembered her sketches, the emotion in each line. And for the first time since the protest, he exhaled fully.
He closed the laptop, running a hand through his hair. He needed air.
Outside, the city was quieter. The rain had started again, washing the day’s dust into the gutters. Aarav walked until he found himself near the river. The reflection of streetlights trembled on the water’s surface. He watched them break apart with each ripple.
“Fractures,” he murmured to himself. “Everything breaks eventually.”
But in that same breath, he realized something else — light still glimmered through every fracture.
The next morning, he received a message from a local journalist friend:
“You captured something powerful yesterday. The world needs to see it.”
Aarav looked at the photos again, hesitating. He could submit them — he should — but the last image of Mira pulled at him. The way she had looked at the chaos with such empathy, not fear.
He clicked open his phone, hesitating before typing her name into social media. He found her art page — the same initials from the sketchbook, the same raw lines that had haunted him.
Before he could stop himself, he sent her a message:
“I think I saw you at the protest yesterday. You were sketching near the bridge.”
Minutes passed before she replied.
“Yes. I was. You were there too, weren’t you? The man with the camera.”
He smiled faintly.
“That was me. Small world.”
“Big city,” she replied. “But fate seems smaller than we think.”
Aarav stared at the words for a long time. Fate. He wasn’t sure he believed in it — not after all he’d seen. But right now, reading her message, something inside him softened.
Later that day, Aarav sat again by his window, camera dismantled before him. He began cleaning each piece carefully, his movements slow and deliberate. The smell of coffee filled the air.
When he reassembled the camera, it felt lighter. As though by fixing it, he’d pieced together something within himself.
He picked it up, aimed it out the window, and clicked. The sound didn’t startle him this time. It felt… familiar again.
- Writer
