An Uzair Baloch x Reader o/s
Masterlist
a/n: Canon divergent. This is solely based on Danish Pandor’s portrayal of Uzair Baloch in the movie Dhurandhar and has nothing to do with the gangster Uzair Baloch in any way, shape or form. I sincerely hope he meets a horrible death. This has also not been proofread. Rest of the notes are below!
click here for the song
Uzair had been warned about heartbreak before.
Pyaar kar, Rehman bhai had told a thirteen-year-old Uzair, after listening to him ramble about the girl who lived two streets away, the one whose schedule he had somehow memorised without meaning to. Beintehaa pyaar kar. Lekin yeh mat sochna ki sirf pyaar karne se sab theek rahega. Ki har baar pyaar hi kaafi hoga.
Ulfat had nodded from where she sat near her husband, handing him a cigarette before turning to Uzair again. Aur bilkul yeh mat sochna ki woh tumhare dimaag mein ghus ke tumhare lafzon ka asli matlab samajh legi. Say things properly, she had meant, for a relationship could not survive misunderstanding cloaked in silence.
He had rolled his eyes then, filing their words away under the same mental category reserved for advice old people gave without understanding how the current world works — the kind that sounded unnecessarily serious when you were thirteen and convinced love was supposed to be simple, fulfilling, and, most of all, an unstoppable force that could survive even the worst of tides.
Now, he wished he had heeded his bhabhi’s advice.
He stood in front of open, black gates, watching the lights change colour from red to yellow to red again, the chatter from the guests turning into unintelligible noise to his ears. He knew what was happening — the news had gone beyond the two streets he once called home — and he also knew he wasn’t welcome.
Phir le aaya dil, majboor kya kije
Phir le aaya dil, majboor kya kije
Raas na aaya rehna door, kya kije
He had promised himself he wouldn’t come. Promised himself that he wouldn’t sneak into your haveli again. Promised himself that he would drink his problems away in the sanctuary of his room, playing Rafi over and over again till his voice eclipsed the sound of tears and the heaviness of regret and love that still pressed his chest every waking moment.
His heart, however, had a wish of its own.
He stared up at your balcony, pretending like every ridge of it wasn’t memorised already — the chipped corner near the railing, the windchime that only rang properly when the breeze came from the east, the faint patch of paint your younger brother had ruined with a cricket ball years ago. His eyes traced the familiar path instinctively, like they had done a hundred times before.
“Pagal ho kya?” you had hissed the first time he climbed up, grabbing his wrist the second his head appeared over the railing, pulling his form from the night. “Koi dekh leta toh?”
He had nearly slipped trying to pull himself over properly, landing awkwardly on your balcony with all the grace of a falling bookcase, still not used to the height he had gained a year ago, right before he turned sixteen.
“Are, par aaya toh na,” he had muttered defensively, dusting his trousers off like that somehow restored his Balochi dignity.
You had stared at him in complete disbelief.
“Kuch ghante mein school mein milne vale the. Tab tak intezaar nahi kar sakte kya? Raat mein aane ki kya zaroorat?” you asked, glancing nervously towards the door like your father would appear anytime during his nightly rounds.
He, however, had just run a hand through his hair. “Mujhe bas meri chaand dekhna tha. Socha abhi aa bhi lu, teri ghar itni paas toh hai.”
“Agar abbu ne dekh liya na, hum dono zinda nahi bachenge,” you had whispered harshly, hazel eyes widening. “Tumhari laash balcony ke neeche milegi aur meri ghar ke andar.”
“Mujhe koi taqlif nahi hai,” Uzair had grinned quietly, unable to stop looking at you. “Kam se kam aakhri cheez jo dekhunga, woh tum hogi.”
That had made you laugh softly, your cheeks blooming pink like the roses Ulfat bhabhi grew behind the haveli, the shyness in you still untouched even a month into dating. You had looked away almost immediately after, hiding your smile behind your hand while scolding him under your breath, the fabric of your white nightgown swaying in the breeze as you kissed his cheek.
And Uzair had remembered thinking, very clearly, that sneaking into your balcony was probably worth dying for.
Dil keh raha, use muqammal kar bhi aao
Woh jo adhuri si baat baaki hai
He tore his eyes away from the balcony, forcing himself to act like he was admiring the haveli’s decor instead, his gaze drifting toward the courtyard where strings of jasmine had been woven around the trees. A single flower loosened from above, falling slowly through the warm air before landing in his open palm, its smell wafting through the breeze as it entered his lungs.
For a moment, he simply stared at it.
Jasmines were never his favourite flower — indeed, he used to be partial towards sunflowers — but that had changed when you first sat next to him in eighth grade, after months of him pestering Fathima ma’am to let him sit with his friend. She had raised an eyebrow then, considering Uzair was always around his friends, but there was a sly smile on her face when she finally gave in.
“Yeh lo,” you had grinned, dropping a crushed jasmine flower on his history notebook two months later. “Teri khadoos handwriting se thodi achchi khushbu aayegi. Pass kaise hua mujhe pata nahi—”
Uzair’s jaw had dropped as he stared at you incredulously. “Meri handwriting utni buri nahi hai!”
“Andha ho gaya hai kya? Uzair, Allah ki kasam, doctor bhi sharma jaayega yeh dekhkar.”
You had laughed before he could retaliate, stealing his pen and scribbling your name dramatically across the top of his page instead, ending it with a small heart. He still remembered the jasmine tucked behind your ear that day, the faint smell following him long after you had left.
Since then, jasmines became his favourite flowers, because they were your favourite flowers, and he used that to his advantage, especially after you started dating. He always made something out of them, be it small bouquets, bracelets, anklets, or just pieces that decorated your carefully maintained hair.
“Main baat kar rahi hu tumse.”
Your voice had sounded older that day. Quieter. Exhausted in a way his twenty-year-old mind had not known how to respond to. And Uzair, irritated by the tension gathering between your brows and the constant snapping, had simply reached over and tucked another jasmine flower into your dark tresses, hoping your annoyance would dissolve the way it usually did.
But he realised that too late.
Woh jo adhuri si yaad baaki hai
Woh jo adhuri si yaad baaki hai
The flower fell from his hands, and he stepped out into the lights again, praying desperately in his mind that your brother was occupied with stuff inside the house to notice his presence. Not that he would do anything — Uzair’s reputation for being a seasoned killer had grown a bit too much for that — but it was probably for the better that his presence remained a secret. He looked around.
Tables had been arranged across the courtyard, surrounded along the perimeter by an elaborate buffet, the heavy aroma of chicken korma, paneer rolls, and mutton biryani slowly drowning out the faint traces of jasmine that still lingered in the warm night air. Waiters moved hurriedly between guests, balancing silver trays, laughter rising and falling beneath the music, the haveli glowing so brightly that it almost looked like the house was inhabited by a picture-perfect family.
Oh, but he knew how far from reality that was.
You had let it slip while dining at the Baloch haveli on your anniversary, your presence in his house more routine than new. Rehman bhai had passed you another plate of hot naans, and you, too comfortable to observe formalities, were chattering away to glory.
“Rehman bhai, Ulfat bhabhi, daawat ke liye shukriya,” you had thanked them between morsels, wiping palak sabzi from your chin with the back of your hand. “Ghar mein hum aise nahi khaate. Kabhi ammi apni diet ke liye gyaraah baje khaati hai, Faraz football practice ke baad teen baje khaata hai, aur abbu toh har din daftar mein hi rehte hain, aur main baarah baje khaati hu. Aur—”
Rehman bhai’s expression had shifted almost immediately, concern softening the amusement in his eyes as he exchanged a glance with Ulfat bhabhi.
“Aap log saath mein khaana nahi khaate?” he had asked carefully.
You had blinked at the question, like the answer was obvious. “Eid pe khaate hain?”
The silence that followed had felt oddly heavy before Ulfat bhabhi quietly added another spoonful of biryani onto your plate.
Uzair chuckled dryly at the memory, at the way Rehman bhai and Ulfat bhabhi had slowly begun treating you like family long before anyone said it aloud, like your place beside him had become such an obvious truth that nobody felt the need to question it anymore. Two children who had loved each other since thirteen and dated since sixteen — nothing was supposed to go wrong. His life had been supposed to move forward with yours stitched into every part of it. He wasn’t supposed to be standing here now, learning how enormous loneliness could feel when shaped exactly like another person’s absence.
Lost in the haze of memory, he barely noticed when the smell of mouth-watering food dissolved into sophisticated room freshener and louder congratulations, the warm orange lights of the living room-turned-banquet hall spilling across the marble floors as he wandered closer.
Karte hain hum aaj qubool, kya kije
Ho gayi thi humse bhool, kya kije
For a second, Uzair didn’t even look up. It had been six months since he last heard that sound, and for one foolish moment, he convinced himself he had imagined it again, his heart conjuring familiar beauty to survive your absence.
But, he couldn’t keep his gaze averted for long.
He slowly raised his eyes to look at you, taking in the soft pink of your anarkali — your dream walima outfit, as you had described to him so many times during late-night conversations — the delicate embroidery glimmering beneath the chandelier lights every time you moved. Your hair now fell over one shoulder in loose curls, softer than the tight braids you used to wear with him, and the diamonds resting against your throat caught the light whenever you tilted your head to laugh again.
He couldn’t remember the last time you laughed with him so freely.
Your husband — Uzair swallowed that word with a bitter taste in his mouth, relishing how it got stuck in his throat like his body was refusing to believe it — wore a matching suit, his arm resting around your shoulders with the same shyness and hesitation that Uzair recognised from his first month of being with you. The unfamiliarity of it struck him unexpectedly; once upon a time, you had looked at him like that too, all shy smiles and nervous glances, before the passage of time had made touching each other feel as natural as breathing.
Somewhere along the way, Uzair had mistaken that comfort for permanence.
Karte hain hum aaj qubool, kya kije
Ho gayi thi humse bhool, kya kije
In hindsight, the signs had been painfully obvious.
He would return your calls hours later. Forget details you repeated thrice. Promise he would make time after one last job, one last delivery, one last mission. And you — who once waited awake for him without complaint — had slowly begun sounding quieter each time he came back.
At first, it was alright. You understood where he came from and the demands of being Rehman’s right-hand man, and even encouraged him to pay attention to his work during his work hours and bother about everything else later. College had occupied your mind too, with courses and academic excellence becoming your priorities.
The plan was simple during your first year — you would call him at 9 pm, when the lights in your house would dim, and he would answer on the second ring if he was free, the fifth if he was slightly busy, and just not pick up if he was caught up in work. It worked fabulously for a year, but the demands of his job caught up, and most times, he wouldn’t even call you back later.
He still remembered the first time that happened.
It was during your final exams, and after careful consideration, you had decided that the only call that week would be on a Tuesday, the day after your toughest exam, giving you enough time to recharge before drowning in revision all over again.
The worst part was the fact that he didn’t text you until two days later.
Uzair: Sorry baba, thoda busy ho gaya tha, delivery mein thode problems ho gaye the
Uzair: Exam kaisa gaya?
You hadn’t replied till that night.
You: Haan kyunki do din ke liye tune apne phone ko ek baar bhi nahi check kiya, na?
Uzair: Tu jaanti hai vaisa nahi hai. Bas busy tha
You: Do din ke liye koi utna busy nahi hota. Rehman bhai bhi mujhse mile the kal aur unhone bola ki tera kaam kal hi khatam ho gaya tha. Kya teri ‘chaand’ ko ek text bhej nahi sakte?
Uzair had started typing an explanation, but your next messages stopped him in his tracks.
You: Chhod
You: Tum samjhoge nahi
You: Main padhne ja rahi hu
Uzair had stared at the messages for a long time afterwards, irritation slowly eclipsing the guilt gnawing at his chest. A part of him understood why you were upset, but another — the louder, more defensive part — couldn’t understand why love suddenly seemed to require constant explanation from him. He had spent the last two days exhausted, handling work that left his bones aching and his mind numb, and somewhere in his nineteen-year-old brain, he had convinced himself that you should simply know that none of it changed how deeply he loved you.
So he had put his phone aside and told himself he would make it up to you later.
The problem was that ‘later’ kept arriving too late.
Dil keh raha hai, use mayassar kar bhi aao
Woh jo dabi si aas baaki hai
Your brows furrowed, eyes glazing in the way they did when you hadn’t eaten or drunk something in a long time, and Uzair felt the primal urge rise inside him again — to take you away from the noise for just an hour. To pull you out of the house, bedecked in your wedding finery, sit you inside his jeep, and drive you to that tiny chai stall on 4th Street where the owner had stopped giving the two of you menus years ago because he already knew your order by heart.
The place where you always stole fries from his plate while insisting yours tasted worse for some reason, where your head would eventually fall against his shoulder once the day got exhausting, where the two of you had once spent three straight hours discussing baby names before dissolving into laughter halfway through because neither of you trusted Uzair to name a living human being responsibly.
“Mehmood-ul-Machhar?” you had wheezed between peals of laughter, nearly dropping your chai in the process. “Aisa naam rakhoge? Trauma milega use.”
Uzair had nearly spewed chai through his nose from laughing so hard. “Trauma nahi, izzat,” he had argued between coughs, taking another sip before he could start laughing again. “Saare machhar uske paas jaayenge aur phir woh unko maarega. Puri Lyari uska shaan karega. Mehmood-ul-Machhar, machharon ki faateh!”
Your eyes glinted with mischief. “Aur siyasti log hamare bacche ko dekhne ke liye itna paisa denge na, hum is sheher chodke Switzerland mein settle ho jaayenge.”
“Switzerland?” Uzair had covered his mouth in mock horror. “Phir beta ka kya hoga? Switzerland mein agar machhar nahi hai toh? Kisko maarega?”
The way your nose had crinkled lived in his memory with painful clarity, your laughter dissolving into quiet giggles as you leaned forward to swat his arm, muttering something about never letting him name your future children. That right was always going to be yours, and he also signed a ‘contract’ — a hastily scribbled note on a tissue — that he wasn’t going to dispute you, whatever name you chose.
And here you were now, probably explaining your baby names, your migraines and the effects of dehydration and hunger to someone who was going to learn all those signs too — and, maybe, even see the new ones that would rise with age. See the irritation. See how your eyes would glaze over. See how you would press your head against the pillow and scream into it. See how you would still play with children, even when the pain threatened to make your vision white. See how you would be as a mother. See how you would be as a wife.
See a future Uzair thought only he would be privy to.
Woh jo dabi si aanch baaki hai
Woh jo dabi si aanch baaki hai
Woh jo dabi si aanch baaki hai
The room plunged into darkness.
Uzair’s body instinctively lurched forward in your direction, but his hand grazing against a marble pillar snapped him back to reality before he could take another step. Around him, laughter and startled murmurs rose immediately, guests pulling out their phones and turning on their flashlights as the sudden absence of music swallowed the hall whole for a second.
Your husband sucked in a sharp breath, and Uzair just knew it was because your fingers were tightly clasped around his arm, your knuckles turning white while you fought to keep your breath steady. You hated the feeling of being enveloped in darkness, hated how it clung to your skin and entered your body like it was eating you up from the inside out, and it was probably worse since you could hear voices but not see anyone, and the feeling of your heavy anarkali, the jewellery you hated wearing and the hot air of the room made it worse.
Uzair remembered the first time he saw it — it was in tenth grade, and all the students were ushered into the new auditorium. The only sources of light were a few flickering lightbulbs, but Jamali sahab could inaugurate it only on that date, so every single student was trying to contain their sweating and swearing in the stuffy hall, wondering when Jamali would show up. You were standing next to him, too, cursing the full-sleeved kameez of your uniform, while he tried not to look like a lovesick puppy. Half the school had already started shipping you; there was no reason to add more fuel to the fire, even if he wished that rumour was true.
Suddenly, the current went out.
Your hand, which had been adjusting your braid, suddenly clamped around his wrist, and through the commotion of the blackout, Uzair heard how uneven your breathing had become. Your grip was tight enough to leave crescent marks against his skin, but he barely noticed. He had only pulled you closer instinctively, guiding your head against his chest, his palm moving slowly against the back of your head in gentle, steady motions — the same thing his mother used to do whenever nightmares jolted him awake as a child.
“Saans lo,” he had murmured, lowering his voice beneath the noise around you. “Main yahan hoon.”
A few minutes later, the current finally returned, flooding the room with white light and a chorus of relieved laughter, but you had immediately stepped away from his chest like the brightness had reminded you where you were. Your fingers slipped from his wrist slowly, before you lowered your eyes and muttered something quiet about needing to rejoin the girls’ queue before anyone noticed you were gone.
You had explained your fear of the dark later that night in a voice so casual that it unsettled him more than tears would have. Your parents, you had admitted with a shrug too practised for your age, used darkness as punishment whenever you disobeyed them as a child. Uzair had been furious enough to consider telling Rehman bhai immediately, but you had shut the idea down before he could even finish speaking, insisting there was no point risking another fracture in Lyari’s already fragile politics over a fear he would rarely even witness.
And now, for the first time, someone else had.
The current returned abruptly, snapping Uzair out of his daze. Across the room, your husband immediately leaned toward you, brows furrowed with quiet concern as he asked something Uzair couldn’t hear over the returning music.
Uzair slipped behind a nearby pillar before either of you could notice him staring, suddenly wondering when exactly he had stopped being the first person to recognise your fear.
Kismat ko hai ye manzoor, kya kije
Milte rahe hum ba-dastoor, kya kije
A relative wandered over to you and your husband with yet another booming congratulations, and Uzair noticed the way your smile strained at the corners almost immediately, your eyes slowly losing their brightness beneath the weight of endless conversation and polite laughter. A chuckle escaped him before he could stop it.
Guess your husband still hadn’t learnt that look yet.
Hadn’t learnt that this was usually the point where you needed to be pulled away somewhere quieter for ten minutes — a balcony, a terrace — anywhere you could breathe properly again. Maybe with chai. Maybe with silence. Maybe with one stolen drag from his cigarette while you complained about people until the light returned.
“Honeymoon ke liye ise kisi beach pe le jaana,” the relative was telling your husband enthusiastically while his wife adjusted the edge of your jewellery. “Bahut pasand hai isse samundar. Jab chhoti thi na, har mauke pe beach bhaagna hota tha is shehzaadi ko,” he said, pulling your cheeks in adoration.
He was right, you did love the beach. But that was before he ruined it for you.
“Is relationship ko sirf beach trips nahi sambhalega, Uzair.”
The waves had been crashing violently against the Clifton shore that evening, the wind carrying salt into the silence stretching between the two of you as he stood there, cigarette dangling loosely between his fingers, while you stared out at the sea instead of him for perhaps the first time in years.
He had taken a long drag of his cigarette before turning to you.
You turned the seashell over in your hands, fingertips moving across it like you were trying to memorise every inch, but he knew you were finding the right words to voice your frustration. He had seen you angry before — furious, even, refusing to pick up his calls for two weeks straight till you forgave him — but he had never seen you look so tired.
“Matlab agar kisi bhi jhagda ho na, tum mujhe manane ke liye apne jeep mein bithakar mujhe beach nahi leke sakte ho. Teen baar ho gaya. Tum kaam pe kahi jaate ho, mujhse baat nahi karte, aur main sochti hu ki meri aukaat bas tab tak hai jab tak tum Lyari mein ho..”
Uzair had huffed. “Vaisa bilkul nahi hai. Tum mujhe do hafte ke liye bina bataaye baat nahi karti ho, meri taraf dekhti bhi nahi, aur tum yeh expect karti ho ki sab theek hi hoga?”
“Agar tum hamare 9 o’clock call nahi uthaoge toh main kya karun?”
“Uske liye tum do hafte ke liye mujhse baat kyu nahi ki?”
You had blinked away the tears in your eyes, far too exhausted for the banter he kept resorting to whenever conversations became too hard for him to handle.
“Tum samajhte kyun nahi, Uzair?” you had asked, and the desperation in your voice nearly made the cigarette slip from his fingers. “Mujhe teri calls se problem nahi hai. Main bas thak gayi hoon yeh soch soch ke ki hum dono ab hai kya. Tum mujhe apni zindagi mein rakhna chahte ho, lekin jagah banana nahi chaahte.”
He had apologised then. Held your face carefully, kissed your forehead the way he always did whenever he thought love would do more than his words, and for a few joyous months, he genuinely tried. Calls returned on time. Meetings kept. Nights carved out for you despite work clawing at his hours. And then, the cycle repeated. He stopped all of it. Slowly at first, but the pattern was all too familiar to you now.
This time, you hadn’t tried to hold the relationship together. No more frustrated tears. No more desperate attempts to explain yourself so he would finally understand. You had simply begun drifting away from him, exhaustion replacing anger so fully that Uzair hadn’t even realised how far gone you were until you looked at him one evening and told him, very calmly, that you were done.
And perhaps, Uzair thought, that was what killed him in the end — not losing your love, but realising he had slowly turned the person who once fought hardest for him into someone too tired to keep trying anymore.
Kismat ko hai yeh manzoor, kya kije
Milte rahe hum ba-dastoor, kya kije
The breakup didn’t stop your lives from moving, though.
Your mutual friends from school started graduating. Moving abroad. Dating. Marrying. And while most of them knew about the relationship’s end, some even knew the details, the friend group was too tightly knit to have weddings without you or Uzair. Both of you were invited, and everyone could just hope that nothing went south.
In fact, that was the first time Uzair saw you after the breakup.
It was during Farhaan’s wedding — while he wasn’t Uzair’s closest friend, he was still an integral part of the group — and Rehman bhai had urged him to stop moping around and drowning himself in work, that shuffling between the factory and his room was not doing him any good and that a bit of fresh air and meeting his closest friends would add some light to this never-ending darkness. The concern on his face was what pushed him to actually attend it — he couldn't bear to see his elder cousin look so downtrodden.
So there he was, standing at the wedding, laughing with Omar in a rare moment of joy. None of them had brought up the breakup, and Uzair was so thankful for that, because he had been sure the mere mention of your name would send him into a spiral again.
But that wasn’t necessary, because you walked in.
You were wearing the same suit you had worn on your school’s graduation day, the deep green anarkali making the brown in your eyes seem almost golden beneath the lights. For one second, Uzair was nineteen again — waiting in front of the school with flowers awkwardly hidden behind his back as you ran down the steps, grinning at finally being free from uniforms forever.
You clearly hadn’t seen him — or maybe you had, and your body moved before your mind could catch up — because you walked over to Omar to say your greetings so naturally that Uzair barely had time to process your presence beside him after weeks of distance.
Hell, for that matter, it took him a while to realise there was distance in the first place, because muscle memory took over.
A waiter was moving a bit too close to you, and Uzair’s hand had drifted close to your waist, not quite touching it but not too far from it either — a habit he had developed once he realised how clumsily you could be on the road — and you had, without looking, brushed off a stray thread off his kurta, flicking it off with the same familiarity that you and him had carried for almost seven years.
The motion lasted barely a second.
Uzair watched the realisation crash onto your face at the same moment it hit him — the intimacy, the breakup, the fact that your bodies still hadn’t learnt the distance your minds had forced into place. You stepped back first, almost immediately, murmuring something incoherent to Omar before disappearing toward the women gathered near the buffet tables, while Uzair retreated toward the balcony like the room had suddenly grown too small to breathe in.
He stood there alone, the cool air hitting his face, and understood the reality of what you had been trying to tell him all those years.
That just loving you was not enough to make you stay.
Dil keh raha, use musalsal kar bhi aao
Woh jo adhuri si raah baki hai
Another uproar from your relatives brought Uzair back into the present, and he watched your husband shift awkwardly in his suit beneath the attention, fingers tugging faintly at his cufflinks, while you sat beside him with a poise Uzair had never seen on you before. Your shoulders remained straight despite the exhaustion and irritation lingering in your eyes, your smile soft and measured as you greeted yet another relative leaning in to bless you both. You accepted the grift with practised grace and kept it in your bag while the photographer began arranging the huge family for photos, murmuring something about an aunt forcing her way to the front.
The shutter snapped, and your husband left the room.
The commotion around you settled for a few moments, everyone choosing to let you breathe for a few minutes before showering you and your husband with gifts and wishes. The music softened into the background, conversations dissolving into quieter murmurs as waiters weaved through the hall carrying trays of kebabs and soft drinks beneath the lights hanging from the ceiling.
Uzair took the lull as an excuse to look at you properly — not the fleeting, stolen glances he had been surviving on all evening, but truly look at you the way he used to, like every small shift in your expression carried meaning only he knew how to read. How your nose crinkled whenever someone wore an elaborate floral arrangement. How the jasmines in your hair were wilting slowly, finding purchase on the embroidery of your anarkali. How you rolled your eyes when your parents gestured for you to act like a traditional woman. How your feet shuffled beneath the skirt, clearly uncomfortable in your heels — Uzair used to carry a pair of comfortable shoes with him whenever you wore heels, knowing you could subject your feet to aesthetic torture for exactly two hours before threatening to walk home barefoot — and how your fingers kept absentmindedly twisting the edge of your dupatta whenever too many people spoke to you at once.
And this, he realised quietly, was how everyone else saw you too. Beautiful. Graceful. A well-raised girl dressed in pink and gold, smiling politely beside her husband while relatives praised her upbringing and beauty in equal measure.
But Uzair had known the parts of you that no crowded hall ever would.
The way you cried angrily instead of sadly. The way you laughed so hard at your own jokes that you snorted occasionally before threatening violence if he pointed it out. The way you spoke to stray cats as if they understood human words. The way you always stole the crispy corner piece from his samosa and pretended innocence afterwards. The way your voice changed when you were half-asleep. The way you went quiet whenever something truly hurt you.
And now, standing across the room, Uzair understood something even more unbearable:
Your husband was going to learn versions of you that even he would never get the chance to know.
He was going to discover the woman you became at twenty-five, thirty, forty. He would learn what your face looked like first thing in the morning after years together. Which side of the bed you eventually claimed permanently. Whether you still cried in the dark. Whether you still loved the sea after everything.
Because that was supposed to be Uzair standing beside you tonight. Supposed to be Uzair greeting the guests and kissing your forehead and massaging your feet later that night. A future he thought you were assured of.
A future he had ruined with his own hands.
Then, as if the memory of him still lived somewhere inside you too, your eyes slowly lifted across the hall until they found his.
Woh jo adhuri si chaah baaki hai
Woh jo adhuri si chaah baaki hai
He didn’t even know what he was hoping for. For anger? For regret? For you to kick him out? For you to run to him and tell him you would run away with him? For you to scream at him? For your expression to harden before you looked away, perhaps, so leaving would become easier somehow?
You didn’t match any of those thoughts.
Instead, you smiled, softly.
It was a smile he could’ve missed had he not watched it form in real time. Not the polite one you offered relatives whose names you barely remembered, not the strained grimace you kept swallowing whenever the smell of rich food drifted too close, and not even the tired, resigned smile you had given him six months ago when you ended things.
This one was smaller. Infinitely sadder.
The kind that only existed between two people who had once loved each other enough to build entire futures in the spaces between conversations.
And as it settled onto your face, Uzair realised with a tug in his chest that you were grieving him too. Not in the catastrophic, life-ending way he once imagined heartbreak would feel at thirteen, but quietly, privately — like someone mourning a home they could never return to.
And suddenly, the noise around him disappeared.
The congratulations, the music, the chatter — all of it faded beneath the familiarity of your brown eyes.
No husband beside you. No guests. No wedding lights.
Just Uzair and the girl from two streets away.
Your eyes travelled across his face slowly, carefully, like you were searching for traces of the boy who used to climb your balcony at seventeen, the man who promised you beaches and forever at twenty-one, the idiot who loved you deeply and failed you anyway at twenty-three.
A thousand things passed between the two of you — hearts scribbled in notebooks, missed calls, chai cups, the first time he called you 'chaand', after seeing you in white for the very first time in twelfth grade, jasmine flowers, Clifton waves, cigarettes shared beneath rooftops, your laughter against his shoulder, nights spent planning futures neither of you reached together.
It lasted barely seconds.
But Uzair heard an entire conversation inside that silence anyway.
Mohobbat karta hu tujhse.
Maine bhi tujhe utna hi dukh di.
Your smile became a tad more heartbreaking for an infinitesimally small second.
Maaf toh tab hi kiya tha, Uzair.
A tear slipped from his eye, and he wanted to tell you everything then. That he should have stayed longer on the nights you asked him to. That he should have spoken instead of assuming love would translate silence for him. That every version of his future had somehow ended with your voice, your snark and your laughter in it, even after the two of you broke apart.
But your husband returned, saying something that pulled your attention away.
And just like that, the moment ended.
A moment he knew would never return.
Uzair smiled to himself, lowering his eyes before turning toward the gates of the haveli. His chest still ached, regret still sat heavy in his ribs, and perhaps some part of him would always mourn the life the two of you never reached together.
But behind him, under golden lights, music, and the chatter from people who would soon turn into family, you looked happy enough to keep living, even if it was a life neither of you had ever imagined in your worst nightmares.
And this time, Uzair let you.
Woh jo adhuri si chaah baaki hai…
a/n: so this wasn't the fic I was originally planning, but I've had a miserable week; therefore, it just felt right to write this. Also, I feel this takes place in the same universe as Kalank; something about the Baloch brothers losing their first loves is so poetic to me.
Tags:
@ishq-e-rehman @minnielovesme @shadylovedhurandhar @rini4everdreaming @satorustorm @cloudmast @layinglowkey @kisswithknife @gulaabjamun08 @humsafarhumhihai @mrgrungusthefrog @quillbyana @sea-breeze-in-my-hair @goodasaysboo @goodnightkatherine
