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Kavya’s Quagmire
When Radha took Dhruva to cloud nine, as if to bring him back to mundane world, Dicey fell seriously ill; though he felt gratified to see her tending the pet like her own child, when it succumbed to the mysterious ailment in a week’s time, he was truly downcast. While it took him quite a while to recover from his loss, courtesy Natya, Radha coverd much of Pravar’s crime ground into which Kavya had ventured.
After she got him bail, Kavya was wont to spend long hours with Pravar to prepare his defense. While he was charmed by her suaveness, she was sympathetic to his rustic ways, and believed that by putting up with him, she was only atoning herself for Ranjit’s foul on him. While Natya was all empathy for Kavya, for her sympathy for them, their proximity that exposed Kavya’s allure to him made Pravar fantasize about the mature woman, and it was only time before he turned obsessive of possessing her, by means fair or foul. What with her empathy for him blinding her vision, Kavya mistook his advances as manifestations of his exaggerated gratitude for her, and Natya, though quick to sense his intentions, yet failed to caution her, for the fear of losing her support, all the while pleading with him not to scandalize their benefactor. Yet he wanted her to pander to Kavya, and as she refused, he threatened to end his life, which made Natya see the merit in the adage of ‘yielding to the temptation as a way of avoiding it’. Reckoning that he would get over his passion for her rival only in her possession, Natya became his accomplice to drag Kavya into his bed.
Pravar faked suicide, ostensibly to save their benefactor from his passion for her, and Natya played upon Kavya’s sympathy for him to try to woo her into his arms but Kavya, disturbed at the development and embarrassed to the core, was at a loss to know how to handle her unrequited love. Were she to shun him altogether, it would amount to her rescinding his vakalat, and with Shakeel braying for his blood, wouldn’t that mean throwing him to the wolves? Why abandon him after all the hard work and on the verge of success? So she thought that she would put sense into his deranged head that it was not proper to covet a woman old enough to be his elder sister. While she strived to put sense into his head to put an end the nonsense, he reiterated his resolve to end his life if she were to fail to cater to his passion that was killing him any way.