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Seeing Ranjit’s back, as Dhruva turned pensive, Rani, failing to enliven him with her coquetry, nevertheless, managed to cajole him into breaking his silence; he said he was worried that the foisted case on Pravar might end up hurting Kavya in inexplicable ways. Rani wondered how that could be and he elucidated the intriguing features of the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’.
“It’s a psychic state in which the kidnapped turn sympathetic to their captors after they are freed,” he said. “It is said that the survival instinct activates the defensive mechanism in the captives to let them identify themselves with the captors to ward off possible violence against them. In that state of emotional stress and physical duress, accentuated by a sense of helplessness dominated by fear, the captives magnify small acts of kindness by their captors. Wonder how I failed to factor that!”
“What an irony is that!” said Rani.
“Courtesy those four days in Pravar’s captivity, apparently her latent sympathies for the underdogs resurged,” he said pensively. “Maybe, she came to identify herself more with her depraved captor, than with her mean man, who came to enjoy her father’s largesse.”
“I’ve heard of a story, fact or fiction I can’t say,” said Rani. “Seeing a murderer being paraded to the gallows, it was love at first sight for a girl, and what’s more, she wanted to marry him before he was hanged, and so begged the king to spare his life; my memory fails me at that.”
“Dear, it’s all about the imponderables of human psychology,” said Dhruva. “Coming to Kavya, it is possible that in Ranjit’s move to deny Pravar the ransom, she could have seen the propensity of the rich to deprive the poor. Now that Pravar was falsely implicated, her sympathy for him would have acquired weird emotional wings; given Ranjit’s deceitfulness towards pravar, she might even begin to lean towards her ex-captor even more. Where it all might lead her to, her fate only would know; how I wish she wouldn’t become another Patty Hearst. You may know that Hearst became an accomplice of her captors to assist them, of all things, in bank robberies. May God forbid that to Kavya, but the silver-lining was that Hearst could come out of her psychic aberration to disown her gory association. Maybe, as I created the mess, I may have to clear it up as well.”