When Jantu is in hospital taking care of her baby brother, she makes friends with a boy named Duoic, wounded in a land mine explosion. Her insistence that he find the strength and courage to help himself is a manifestation of the novel's thematic emphasis on the need for courage to come from with in. As such, it is also is a lesson for Dara, an example of the sort of courage she needs to find in herself, and eventually does.