# DHUAAN (धुआँ) — "Smoke"
### Story Document v1 · the unknown gunwomen
*(companion to CONCEPT.md — honor as the engine, the enemy fictional, the title is the theme)*

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## Series Synopsis

In a nation that buries its soldiers in the light — flags folded into widows' arms, bugles over open graves — there is a war it can never admit to fighting. **DHUAAN** is the unit that fights it: a deniable program with no roster, no medals, no record, that recruits the women the country left behind. **MEERA the Eye**, **TARA the Blade**, and **RANI the Ghost** — three war widows, each married to a man who gave his life in uniform — do not come to the work broken or bitter. They come carrying their husbands' unfinished honor like a second wedding vow. Hunting a faceless cross-border terror network through ruined border country, they strike across the line and vanish before the dust settles — seen for a heartbeat, then gone like smoke. Their husbands died in the open, named and honored; these women die in the dark, nameless and unthanked, and they ask for nothing back. *Seva*, not vengeance. Devotion, not grievance. It is the lineage of Rani Lakshmibai carried into a war the country will deny to its grave — and every operation that proves them also quietly hollows them out, until the only question left is what remains of a woman when even her sacrifice has no name.

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## THE RECRUITMENT *(opening sequence — treatment)*

We open not on a battlefield but on a **memorial parade ground at dawn**, the kind where the nation performs its grief well. A line of widows in white receives folded tricolours from gloved hands. Slow, dignified, beautiful — and unbearable. A bugle. A volley. The flags go into their arms like sleeping children.

The camera finds **MEERA** last in the line. She does not weep. She watches the honour guard the way she will later watch a target through glass — measuring distance, wind, the exact second a thing becomes inevitable. When the officer presents the flag, her hands do not tremble. She has already decided something. We just don't know what yet.

Cut to **three lives, three months later** — the country has moved on; they have not.

**TARA**, widow of a commando, runs a roadside *dhaba* near a garrison town, ladling dal to men in fatigues who will never know her husband's name carried farther than theirs ever will. At night she does not sleep so much as wait. We see her hands — a cook's hands, a fighter's hands — and the scar across the knuckles she got the day she identified his body and put her fist through a wall. She is fury with nowhere to go.

**RANI**, widow of an intelligence officer, has the worst inheritance of all: *the knowing*. She sat across embassy tables from her husband's killers at receptions, smiling, because that was the job and she had learned it from him. She walks into a room and reads it in three seconds. She is the one who walks out clean.

The **grief-to-honour turn** lands on **MEERA**, and we earn it with one image, held long.

It is the night before *Karva Chauth* — the fast a wife keeps for her husband's long life. Meera sets the small brass *thali*. She lights a single **diya**. By tradition she would wait for the moon and then look at her husband's face through a sieve before she breaks the fast — his face the first thing she sees. There is no face now. So she does the thing anyway. She lifts the sieve. Through it, in the diya's wavering light, she looks at the **folded flag** on the shelf where his photograph used to lean. Then — and this is the turn, done without a single tear — she reaches under her collar and lifts out her **mangalsutra**, the marriage thread she has not removed, and she does not take it off. She closes her hand around it, the way you'd close a hand around a trigger. *I am still married to this. I will finish what you started.* She blows out the diya herself. Smoke rises off the wick — the motif's first breath — and curls up past the flag.

A knock. Not loud. The kind of knock that knows it will be answered.

The **recruiter** is **COLONEL ASLAM VARMA** — though by the time anyone says his name out loud, three operations have already happened. He is the architect of DHUAAN: a man who has spent a career signing condolence letters and has decided the country owes these women a war, not a pension. He is gentle, exact, and entirely without comfort to offer. He does not promise them justice or peace. He sits at Meera's table, declines the tea, and tells her the truth, which is the only currency he has:

*"The men who planned your husband's death are alive across a line on a map our soldiers may not cross. I command a unit that does not exist. If I am right about you, you will not exist either. No medal. No grave with your name on it. If you are taken, I have never met you."* A pause. *"Your husband went into the light. I am offering you the dark. Most people I would never insult by asking."*

He says the unit's name once, and we hear it as he leaves: **Dhuaan.** Smoke.

We intercut the same offer reaching Tara — who answers by wiping her hands on her apron and taking off her apron — and Rani, who is already packed, because she read the car in the street an hour ago and knew.

The sequence ends on the **forging**: a disused border outpost, dust and ember light. Three widows, three weapons chosen as if the weapons had been waiting for them — the long rifle finding **Meera's** patient eye; the blade settling into **Tara's** scarred hand; the silenced pistol vanishing under **Rani's** smiling coat. Varma watches them become a single instrument. The last shot is the three of them stepping into a slow wall of dust kicked up by a departing truck — and simply not being there when it clears. **They walk into the smoke. They come out as DHUAAN.**

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## FIRST MISSION — *"The Bridge at Zeher Nala"*

The fictional network's regional facilitator, codename **THE QASID** ("the courier"), is moving a financier and a hard drive across the border at a derelict customs bridge over a poisoned river. DHUAAN's first job: take the courier alive, the drive intact, and leave nothing the country has to explain.

### Beat sheet

1. **The brief, no comfort.** Varma lays it out cold: take the Qasid breathing, the drive whole, no signatures left behind. He names the cost up front — if it goes wrong, there is no extraction, no acknowledgement. They accept without ceremony.
2. **Meera takes the high ground.** Up a collapsed grain silo across the ravine, she builds her nest before first light, ranges the bridge, and becomes *the Eye* — the only one who can see the whole board.
3. **Rani walks in the front door.** Posing as a fixer's interpreter, *the Ghost* talks her way onto the bridge approach, counting guns, marking the financier, confirming the drive is on the courier's body, not in the vehicle.
4. **The count goes wrong.** A second vehicle arrives unscheduled — more guns than the brief promised. The math no longer works. Meera, watching, has to decide in seconds whether to abort her sisters or commit.
5. **The signal.** Rani drops a teacup. Meera reads it. The op is live.
6. **The Eye opens the door.** One impossible shot across the ravine takes the lookout who would have seen Tara — clearing the lane no one else could clear.
7. **The Blade comes in past the wire.** Tara crosses under the bridge deck and rises out of the dark on the courier's flank — close, fast, hands when she has to.
8. **The Ghost secures the prize.** In the chaos Rani lifts the drive off the courier and keeps him alive with a pistol pressed exactly where it will make him obedient instead of dead.
9. **The smoke arrives.** A phosphor flare and the river's own mist roll across the bridge; the three move through it as the enemy fires blind into nothing.
10. **The button — the cost.** Extraction. No one thanks them. The button scene (below) closes the theme.

### Fully written scene — *the bridge, the smoke pays off*

Meera lay in the silo's broken throat, cheek welded to the stock, and let the world narrow to a circle of glass. Below her the bridge ran out over the Zeher Nala like a rusted spine. Rani was down there — a slim figure in a borrowed shawl, laughing at something a gunman said, her hands open and harmless. *Six men. No — eight.* The second truck had bled two more into the dark.

Meera breathed out half a breath and held the rest. The wind came off the river, left to right, the smell of the poisoned water riding it. She didn't think about her husband. She thought about wind.

On the bridge, Rani let a teacup slip from her fingers. It broke on the deck like a small bell.

*Now.*

Meera's rifle spoke once. Two hundred metres away, the lookout who had just turned toward the under-deck shadows folded without a sound, and the lane was open. In that same breath Tara came up out of the dark beneath the bridge — she had crossed the girders hand over hand, the blade already in her grip — and the courier's flank was suddenly, impossibly, hers. One man reached for an alarm. Tara reached him first. It was close work, ugly and silent, finished before the body understood it had lost.

Rani was already moving the other way, smiling still, drifting through the confusion like she'd been invited. Her hand found the drive at the courier's belt; her pistol found the soft place under his jaw. "*Tum zinda rehna chahte ho?*" she murmured — *you want to live?* — and felt him decide to.

Then the flare went up — a phosphor sun — and the river answered with its own white breath, and the mist and the smoke rolled together across the deck and swallowed the bridge whole. The enemy fired into it, into everything, into nothing. Muzzle flashes bloomed and died in the fog like distant weather.

When it cleared, there was a courier on his knees, a drive gone, three of his men down, and no one left to fire at. No attackers. No bodies that belonged to anyone. Only the smell of phosphorus and river, and on the wind, already thinning, the last grey threads of smoke.

*Up in the silo, Meera was already gone.*

### The button

The extraction truck idles in the dark across the line. Tara cleans the blade on her sleeve, hands steady now. Rani slides the drive into Varma's gloved palm without a word. Meera comes down last, the long rifle broken open over her arm.

Varma does not say *well done*. He cannot — there is no record for it to go on. He looks at the three of them, lit by one weak cab light, and says only the true thing: *"No one will ever know."* Meera closes her hand once around the mangalsutra under her collar — the same gesture, the wedding thread, the unbroken vow — and answers for all of them. *"He knows."* The truck pulls away. Dust rises in the red tail-light. By the time it settles, the road is empty, and there is only smoke.

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## Future Episode Loglines *(each woman's deeper wound)*

- **MEERA — "The Sieve."** When a mission requires her to take a shot that will get a man's young wife widowed exactly as she was, the Eye must decide whether duty has a floor — and discovers that the calm hands she's so proud of have started to frighten her. *(Her wound: she has stopped grieving, and isn't sure that's strength.)*

- **TARA — "Open Hands."** A captured boy soldier from the network turns out to be the age her own child would have been — the child she lost the same year she lost her husband — and the Blade, who solves everything with her hands, faces the one problem they cannot fix. *(Her wound: the fury was never only about him.)*

- **RANI — "The Reception."** Deep cover puts the Ghost back at the kind of diplomatic table where she once smiled beside her husband — and across it sits a man who knows his face, and whether she can stay smoke or finally becomes a ghost depends on whether she can keep playing the wife of a man the country says never existed. *(Her wound: she has worn so many masks that she's forgotten which face he married.)*
