The fifth year after my disappearance changed everything.
The night the seven stars glowed brightest over Delhi, General Raghav Sharma stood on the veranda for hours, silently watching the sky. He said nothing to anyone—not even to Upasana Sharma, his wife, who waited beside him, rubbing a single tear from her cheek.
"They're brighter than before," she whispered. "Do you think…"
He didn't answer. His jaw tightened, his eyes still fixed on the heavens. For five years, he had lived between hope and duty, searching for facts in a world where logic offered none. But that night, something deeper stirred in him—something his military instinct could not explain but his heart could not ignore.
After everyone had fallen asleep, he went to his private study. There, he opened a locked drawer that no one had touched since my disappearance. Inside were stacks of papers, maps, and old files marked Classified. On top lay a small photo of me wearing his military cap, the edges worn from years of being held.
He looked at it quietly and said in a low voice, "I couldn't save him when it mattered. I won't fail again."
From that night on, the General made a vow — not spoken to anyone, not even his own family. He would find me, no matter where fate had taken me.
But he was no ordinary man searching out of grief. General Raghav Sharma was the head of India's three forces once — a strategist, a leader, a man whose influence still stretched into corners invisible to the public eye. And though retired, his name still carried silent weight.
He began to move — not publicly, but quietly, in shadows.
Through trusted veterans, intelligence officers, and old allies still in command, he reopened the investigation that the government had quietly closed years ago. Officially, Mukul Sharma was declared "missing, presumed dead" after exhaustive international searches. Unofficially, for the General, that phrase was a lie he refused to accept.
He arranged meetings late at night, always away from the main house. There were no written records, no names on files. Only whispered instructions and handwritten notes that vanished after being read. People who owed him their lives from wars long past answered his call.
The Phantom Division—that's what he called them. A network of old intelligence operatives, retired soldiers, and cyber specialists who owed loyalty to him alone.
Publicly, he returned to his old role as a respected military advisor for documentaries and lectures. He appeared calm, composed, and even philosophical about fate whenever reporters asked about me. "The world is wide, and destiny larger than all of us," he would say on camera. But behind those composed eyes hid a steady, unshakeable fire.
Every month, he personally reviewed global security reports, missing child records, and unpublished satellite images. He had analysts scan disaster zones where orphaned survivors had been found—any boy between five and twelve with brown eyes and a faint star-like birthmark was flagged and investigated quietly.
Upasana, my grandmother, watched him silently for months before she approached him in the study one night. She poured tea in two cups, placed one by his desk, and said softly, "You've started again, haven't you?"
He looked up slowly, the lines around his eyes clear in the lamplight. "You know me too well."
"Do you really believe he's alive?" she asked.
He took a long breath before answering. "I believe he never died."
Her hand trembled slightly, but her voice stayed steady. "Then you won't walk this path alone."
She left the room, and the next morning, the world-famous journalist Upasana Sharma quietly returned to her craft—but not for fame this time. Using her global media contacts, she began tracing tiny details that no official agency could.
While General Sharma searched through military channels, she reached into the world of stories and whispers—the underground circuits of humanitarians, doctors, and travellers. Through her network of investigative journalists, she commissioned secret field projects disguised as humanitarian missions. In truth, each mission searched for signs of me.
"She uses the truth as her weapon," the General said once with pride. "And in war, there's nothing sharper."
They became shadows working in harmony—two pillars of strength acting as one heartbeat. The public saw only an ageing couple who refused to surrender to grief, often attending public events together, smiling politely when people whispered that they still hadn't "moved on".
But behind those controlled smiles, they built something more powerful than grief—a chain of hope forged in silence.
Every report, every rumour of a child found in foreign villages or islands, every psychic's prediction, every satellite anomaly—nothing escaped their attention. They categorised everything meticulously into separate files hidden behind bookshelves in the general's study. The drawers, now guarded by biometric locks, bore one single label: "Project Mukul".
Once every few months, late at night, husband and wife sat together in that room. The General reviewed maps while Upasana read coded letters from her sources. They spoke little, their communication smooth and wordless after decades together.
Occasionally, she would glance at him and whisper, "When we find him…"
He would look up, his eyes soft yet unwavering. "Not when," he said. "We will."
There were days of despair, too. Leads that died midway, reports that ended in disappointment. But neither gave up. For every failure, they grew only more determined.
One evening, years later, their intelligence network reported something unusual—a faint satellite anomaly in the middle of an uncharted ocean zone. It wasn't connected to any island marked on world maps.
Upasana placed the report on the general's desk. "It's a ghost land, Raghav. No coordinates match. But it's there."
He studied it long, his heart pounding harder than it had in years. A small smile touched his face. "Then maybe," he said quietly, "the world itself is hiding him."
That night, they stood on the same veranda where I used to play, the same veranda that had joined the Sharma and Yadav houses. The moonlight fell gently, and the wind brushed their hair like a memory.
"We'll find him," Upasana said softly.
Raghav placed a hand over hers. "Not just find him. Bring him home."
And that was how my grandparents—the Lion of the Forces and the Voice of Truth—took their silent vow, unseen by the world but binding as destiny itself.
They would search for me in daylight through networks and in darkness through whispers, never letting the world know how far they had truly gone.
Because the love that searched for me no longer belonged to this world alone—it belonged to fate.
And under those same seven stars glowing above Delhi, two hearts beat in promise:
"Until our boy returns, we will never stop walking."