There is a mythological demon named Bhasmasur. Lord Mahadev granted him a boon anything he touched would turn to ash.
Jaskirat was given the same gift, but in the cruelest way possible. For him, it was never a boon. It was a curse.
Everyone he loved eventually turned to ash.
He realized it too late.
First, it was his family. He loved them more than anything, and then they were gone. Those who survived wished they hadn't.
Then came Rehman. Somewhere along the way, Jassi found something that felt like family again. Fate took that too. Rehman turned to ash in Jassi's hands.
Then there was Aalam Bhai , the closest thing Jassi had to a second family. For years, Aalam survived many years . But the moment Jassi entered his life, he too became ash.
Pinda, his friend. Everything was fine until their paths crossed again. And again. Like everyone before him, Pinda too turned into ash by Jassi's hands.
Yalina and Zayan. He touched their lives too. Yalina paid for it with her love. Her future, her happiness, her entire world slowly burned into gray dust.
Every person Jassi held close met the same fate.
Ash.
In the old story, Vishnu takes the form of a beautiful maiden and tricks Bhasmasur into dancing. Lost in the moment, Bhasmasur places his hand upon his own head and is reduced to ash by the very boon he was given.
Jassi's ending is no different.
Not physically.
But one day, life made him dance too.
And somewhere along the way, he touched himself.
Now there is nothing left.
No family.
No friends.
No love.
Just ruins.
Everything he ever cared about is gone, and all that remains is a world painted in shades of gray.
Bhasmasur turned himself to ash with a single touch.
Jaskirat did it slowly, over a lifetime.
The difference between a boon and a curse was never the power.
There is a mythological demon named Bhasmasur. Lord Mahadev granted him a boon anything he touched would turn to ash.
Jaskirat was given the same gift, but in the cruelest way possible. For him, it was never a boon. It was a curse.
Everyone he loved eventually turned to ash.
He realized it too late.
First, it was his family. He loved them more than anything, and then they were gone. Those who survived wished they hadn't.
Then came Rehman. Somewhere along the way, Jassi found something that felt like family again. Fate took that too. Rehman turned to ash in Jassi's hands.
Then there was Aalam Bhai , the closest thing Jassi had to a second family. For years, Aalam survived many years . But the moment Jassi entered his life, he too became ash.
Pinda, his friend. Everything was fine until their paths crossed again. And again. Like everyone before him, Pinda too turned into ash by Jassi's hands.
Yalina and Zayan. He touched their lives too. Yalina paid for it with her love. Her future, her happiness, her entire world slowly burned into gray dust.
Every person Jassi held close met the same fate.
Ash.
In the old story, Vishnu takes the form of a beautiful maiden and tricks Bhasmasur into dancing. Lost in the moment, Bhasmasur places his hand upon his own head and is reduced to ash by the very boon he was given.
Jassi's ending is no different.
Not physically.
But one day, life made him dance too.
And somewhere along the way, he touched himself.
Now there is nothing left.
No family.
No friends.
No love.
Just ruins.
Everything he ever cared about is gone, and all that remains is a world painted in shades of gray.
Bhasmasur turned himself to ash with a single touch.
Jaskirat did it slowly, over a lifetime.
The difference between a boon and a curse was never the power.
To the author, and to the story that unknowingly changed my life forever, thank you.
Now that the story has come to an end, I keep thinking about how this was the very story that introduced you to me. It started so randomly, just me scrolling aimlessly and suddenly finding a hidden gem. I still remember asking you to tag me whenever a new chapter uploaded, and then somehow, slowly, you started personally messaging me every day when the updates came out. Somewhere between those little conversations, the ice broke.
And honestly, I think I found a diamond while simply searching for a story.
This fandom gave me something so much more precious than just a beautiful plot or memorable characters, it gave me you. A wonderful friend. Someone who cares for me in such a genuine, effortless way that sometimes it still surprises me. It feels like hitting the jackpot on an ordinary random Tuesday.
Even though the story has ended, it will always hold a special place in my heart because it became the beginning of us, our friendship, our conversations, our little routine. It feels like those scenes in coffee shop romances where soulmates accidentally meet over something small and ordinary, not knowing it’s about to become one of the most meaningful parts of their life.
Some stories end on paper, but somehow they continue living through the people they bring together. And I think that’s the most beautiful ending of all. 🤍
No babyyyy, you can’t just say all this to me and expect me not to cry 😭🤍
I’m genuinely not used to receiving this much love, and the way you put everything into words so beautifully… it honestly touched my heart so deeply.
And YOU calling me precious while being such a beautiful soul yourself??? That feels unfair 😭🤍
I swear, getting love from you feels like being loved by an angel. Thank you for staying, for reading, for talking to me, for turning random little conversations into something I’ll cherish so much.
And trust me, I also found something so special through all of this a friend who listens to all my yapping, makes me smile for no reason, and somehow became really close to my heart without even realizing it 🥹🤍
Welcome to my masterlist! I hope you find something worth your while, Jaan-e-man <3
HERE IS OUR OFFICIAL GROUPCHAT(DISCORD)
Comment or DM to be added
REQUESTS OPEN!
This list is sorted by character!
Rehman Dakait- Current
Tarun Saluja- COMING SOON
Sanjaya Baru- COMING SOON
Dev Verma
Matthew Francis
IG Tarun Ahlawat- COMING SOON
Jai Angarchand- COMING SOON
Akshaye Khanna
Major Iqbal- COMING SOON
SP Chaudhry Aslam - COMING SOON
Siyahi (platonic romantic, no smut)- COMING SOON
UNDER CONSIDERATION
Uzair Baloch
Hamza Ali Mazari / Jaskirat Singh Rangi
Himmat Singh - Special ops
PERSONAL WORK
Morning's coming soon (poetry)
Rehman Baloch Dakait- Dhurandar
Dakait Sahab ki Vakeel Sahiba Main timeline
Rehman Dakait x OC Indian spy/lawyer Rehanna Randhawa
(PLEASE PLEASE READ CONCEPT AND PROLOUGE BEFORE YOU START. IT'S VERY IMPORTANT)
Concept
Prolouge
Chapter 1- Connections are Important
Chapter 2- Ik Mulaqat
Chapter 3- Welcome to Lyari, Intehaan, Initiation, aur Politics
Chapter 4- Pehli Rally
Chapter 5 A- Office hours
Chapter 5 B- Office hours and after-hours
Chapter 6 A- Dakait Sahab ka birthday
Chapter 6 B- Dakait Sahab Ka birthday and Katili Nachaniya
PRE CHAPTER 7 AND 70 Followers Q/A
Chapter 7 A- Kuch Kaam Hai
Chapter 7B- Kuch Kaam Hai, aur Jaan Pe Khatra Bhi Hai
Chapter 8-
.........................
Dakait Sahab ki Vakeel Sahiba alternate timeline...What if it didnt end?
Siyahi ke Qhuab Vakeel Sahiba ke Naam- Coming soon
Dog days- Coming Soon
Major Iqbal Khan- Dhurandar
A Lesson in Diplomacy (Major Iqbal Khan x Indian diplomat Yamini Singh smut)....coming soon
SP Chaudhry Aslam- Dhurandar
The Aslam massla (Aslam x Indian journalist Malaika Raina Smut).....Coming soon
Tarun Saluja - Section 375
Vakeel, police, aur gunehgar agar ek kamre me bandh hojaye aur chabi gumjaye?- (Tarun Saluja x Accused Vaani Kharbanda x IG Tarun Alhlawat smut)…… Comming soon
Hell is a meeting room filled with Ex’es that you get locked in with. (Sanjaya Baru x Tarun Saluja x Malika Khar Diplomat and lawyer Smut)……..coming soon
The law school intern VS. two seasoned advocates ( Tarun Saluja x Jai Angarchand x Laila Chaudhry Smut)..........Comming soon
Sanjaya Baru- The Accidental Prime Minister
Pissed off at the PMO (Sanjaya Baru x Rani Marwah Indian Foreign Delegate smut)........Coming soon
Hell is a meeting room filled with Ex’es that you get locked in with. (Sanjaya Baru x Tarun Saluja x Malika Khar Diplomat and lawyer Reader Smut)........coming soon
Dev Verma- Ittefaq
Comming soon
Matthew Francis- MOM
Comming soon
IG Tarun Ahlawat- Dhrishyam
Vakeel, police, aur gunehgar agar ek kamre me bandh hojaye aur chabi gumjaye?- (Tarun Saluja x Accused Vaani Kharbanda x IG Tarun Alhlawat smut)…… Comming soon
Jai Angarchand- Hulchul
The law school intern VS. two seasoned advocates ( Tarun Saluja x Jai Angarchand x Laila Chaudhry Smut)……….Comming soon
Akshaye Khanna
UNIVERSE CROSSOVER
The law school intern VS. two seasoned advocates ( Tarun Saluja x Jai Angarchand x Laila Chaudhry Smut)……….Comming soon
Vakeel, police, aur gunehgar agar ek kamre me bandh hojaye aur chabi gumjaye?- (Tarun Saluja x Accused Vaani Kharbanda x IG Tarun Alhlawat smut)…… Comming soon
Hell is a meeting room filled with Ex’es that you get locked in with. (Sanjaya Baru x Tarun Saluja x Malika Khar Diplomat and lawyer Reader Smut)……..coming soon
A/N: I apologize in advance. Also I have an accomplice in my shenanigans this time, my dear kiwiji @harrystyleskiwi9 came up with the idea for the fic and one thing lead to another and here we are.(dande padenge, toh unhe mat chodna lol)
Also, credit to @jadekiddo for the final lines of love, from Hamza in this fic
Warning: @harrystyleskiwi9 and I are the warnings for this one lol.
Jaskirat had not asked for the villa, and when it was given to him after the mission, after the commendations in a closed room and the sort of gratitude that always seemed too satirical for what men like him had actually lost, he accepted it without much thought, almost as if he did not trust himself to examine what a settled life might mean. It stood on the edge of the training grounds where he spent his days teaching young cadets, and though people often mistook his reserve for discipline, it was not discipline that made him keep a distance from their laughter and careless certainty, but the simple fact that he had lived too long with consequences to fully trust innocence.
The house was modest, but over the years it gathered signs of habitation he had not put there himself. There was a house helper assigned by the agency, that he was sure was a spy of some kind, who cooked, cleaned, and, without seeking permission, began arranging the place as though she had decided no man should live among such deliberate barrenness. A brass bowl appeared by a window. A rug. Fresh covers changed without notice. Once he had returned to find cushions embroidered with flowers he had never chosen, and had almost asked her to remove them before stopping himself, for what right had he to object to life entering a house that had known so little of it.
One afternoon he came back early and saw, through the verandah grille, the helper’s young man standing awkwardly at the gate, holding a bunch of lilies wrapped in cheap paper. The girl lowered her face and laughed when he handed them to her, and the boy, with all the earnest foolishness of men still new to love, embraced her as if afraid she might disappear if he loosened his hold. Jaskirat stood watching longer than the moment warranted, and something old and terribly tender stirred in him.
Yalina had liked lilies.
There had been a time when their old home carried that scent so constantly he had stopped noticing it until he had lost it. He remembered bringing her lilies one birthday, and a pair of jhumkas wrapped so badly she had laughed before opening them.
“Tumne khud pack kiya? Pata chalta hai” she had asked, trying not to smile.
“Bohot mehenat kiya hai maine” he had muttered. “Mazaak mat udaao.”
She had lifted one of the earrings, held it against her ear and asked, “Arre mazak nahi uda rahi hoon.”Then, after a pause," Par lillies tumne jhumkon ke sath rakh diye aur ab iske petals pe impression baith gaye hain"
That evening, those memories did not leave him.
The next morning he woke with the kind of disorientation that did not belong to ordinary sleep. The room smelled of lilies.
For one suspended, treacherous instant, he thought he was back.
His hand moved, without thought, to the other side of the bed, reaching for the warmth of a sleeping body, and when his palm met only cold sheets, something inside him lurched with such primitive panic that he was on his feet before reason arrived.
“Yalina?”
He was already at the door.
“Yalina!”
He moved through the rooms calling her name with mounting urgency, opening doors, looking into the verandah, the kitchen, the back corridor, the old instincts of loss and fear rising before thought could restrain them.
“Yalina, kahan ho meri jaan?”
The helper rushed from the kitchen, frightened.
“Sahab? Kisko dhoond rahe hain?”
He turned toward her, breathing hard, eyes wild with a terror too old for explanation.
“Meri begum…” he said hoarsely. “Yahin thi…”
The girl stared at him.
And then his gaze fell upon the lilies in water by the window.
He stopped.
Everything stopped.
Understanding came, and it did not come as relief.
Because for those few moments he had not remembered she was no longer his to call.
He had lived, however briefly, inside the lie he wanted.
He walked back to his room and stood before the mirror, because the only thing left of that vanished life that could still be verified by touch was his own face.
He touched the line of his jaw. The grey at his temples. The scar near his brow.
This was the face she had once touched in anger, in laughter, in forgiveness.
The face his son had inherited something from.
The face that had lied for a nation and loved despite itself.
And looking at it, he felt the exhausted knowledge of a man who had survived too much to pretend survival was victory.
He had borne torture. Buried men with his own hands. Sent others to death. Condemned himself for his motherland.
And yet it was a room smelling of lilies that nearly undid him.
The illness began years later, so gradually that even Jaskirat, a man who had once been trained to read danger in silences, in altered routines, in the slightest fracture in a pattern, did not at first understand that something was turning inside his own mind. At first, it seemed ordinary enough, the kind of lapses old age forces upon men. He would misplace papers. Ask Dhruv the same question twice. Begin telling a story and stop midway, his eyes narrowing faintly, as though the next thought stood just beyond reach. There was irritation in him at these moments. This, he thought, was age.
Dhruv noticed before Jassi did, perhaps because he had spent too much of his life reading the man.
That had always been the strange shape of their friendship. It had begun as rivalry.
At the NDA, they had been two hard young men selected into the Balidan pipeline for the Dhurandhar project, each too proud to openly admire the other, each measuring himself against the other’s competence. There had been no affection then, only friction, grudging respect, the sort born between men who survive the same brutal forging.
Then fate, or whatever darker machinery governed such lives, had brought them together again in another country, under other names.
Hamza and Rizwan. Lyari. Aalam. Those years had made brothers of men who had once been rivals.
Dhruv sometimes thought real friendship had not begun at the academy at all, but in Karachi, in safe houses and coded exchanges, in the ugly ordinary intimacy of living daily beside death, in learning how another man breathed when afraid, what silences meant danger, what jokes meant despair.
Then Jassi, as Hamza, had risen through the Baloch ranks, and when he brought Rizwan in as his right hand, it had not been merely operational trust. It had been the kind of trust by which one man places his death, if needed, in another’s keeping.
When Hamza’s cover had been blown and he had left Pakistan, handing over all further operations to Rizwan before disappearing back into India, neither had said what both knew.
That they might not meet again.
But they had.
Ten years later, age had finally compelled the agencies to extract Dhruv too, after he had installed a protégé as successor for the Dhurandhar operation, and he had come back to India carrying more ghosts than luggage.
He had reconnected with Jassi a few months after his return.
They had trained future Dhurandhar candidates together then, old wolves teaching boys who mistook sacrifice for glory, and though others saw two retired legends, Dhruv often felt they were simply two tired survivors prolonging an old conversation interrupted decades earlier.
They retired within five years of each other.
Lived in the same society. Took tea together almost daily. Argued over politics.
Remembered men the world had forgotten.
Grew old side by side.
And perhaps because of that long continuity, Dhruv recognized the first true signs of Jassi’s decline when others still called it aging.
Jassi began confusing years. He referred to old handlers as if they had just been by. Once, he called Dhruv at dawn and asked, with mild annoyance, why he had not come from Lyari the night before, as if Karachi still existed just beyond the morning fog outside the villa. Dhruv laughed it off in the moment, but after putting the phone down, he sat for a long while staring at nothing, because there had been something too lived-in in Jassi’s tone, too sincere to dismiss.
Then came the afternoon Dhruv arrived at the villa and found him standing barefoot in the winter courtyard, without a shawl, without slippers, looking toward the gate.
“What are you doing out here?” he had asked, more sharply than he intended.
Jassi had turned and looked at him as though he were the irrational one.
“Yalina bazaar gayi hai. Akeli gayi hai.Maine usse bola tha, ki Junaid ko apne saath le jaye, par woh meri kahan sunti hai”
It was said so simply, so matter-of-factly, in the voice of a husband mildly inconvenienced by his friend's lack of critical thinking skills, that Dhruv felt something go cold in his chest.
Yalina had not been a part of Jassi's life for years.
He did not argue. He did not correct him. He simply walked over and said, as steadily as he could, “Theek hai, main dekh ke aata hoon. Aap andar chaliye.”
And later, when Jassi had forgotten the incident entirely, Dhruv sat in his own car and wept in a way he had not wept even in younger days, because until that moment he had not truly understood that his friend might not merely die, but vanish before dying.
The diagnosis came with the calm, almost insulting politeness of medical language.
Alzheimer’s.
Rapidly progressive.
Dhruv heard the doctor continue speaking of treatment, management, decline, but those words barely registered, because one unbearable truth had already lodged itself in him—that the strongest man he had ever known, the man he had seen withstand pain, treachery, guilt and moral ruin without surrendering his reason, was beginning to lose even the pain that had made him himself.
He stayed with him in the villa at first, because leaving him alone began to feel criminal. Then he insisted on specialized care when the nights worsened, when Jassi began wandering, when he mistook shadows for people and old memories for immediate emergencies. And when he was admitted into hospice care, Dhruv followed him there too, almost stubbornly, because he would not allow the man who had become a brother to spend his final years frightened in a room among strangers.
There were nights that made old battlefields seem merciful by comparison.
Jassi would wake gasping, thrashing, calling out, “Rizwan! Rizwan, Aalam bhai bula rahe hain, unhe humaari zaroorat hai, Iqbal unhe tadpayega, unki khaal udhed dega—darwaza kholo,kahan ho tum!”
And Dhruv, who the world had long known again by his own name, would become Rizwan without hesitation, because in those moments truth had no moral superiority over comfort.
“Koi nahi hai wahan, Hamza. Aalam bhai ko Iqbal choo bhi nahi sakta, woh mehfooz hai, aur main yahin hoon.”
He would hold his shoulders until the trembling eased.
Sometimes Jassi would clutch a bedsheet in both hands, believing it was Yalina’s dupatta, and whisper broken apologies into its folds.
“Maaf kardo… maaf kardo…main jhoot nahi bol raha, mujhe sach mein tumse mohabbat hai, meri jaan, Leena, tum mujh par yakeen karogi na, mere taraf ek baar dekhlo, meri aankhon mein tumhe sach dikh jayega, mujhe chod ke mat jao”
And Dhruv would sit beside him until dawn, looking at the bent, confused old man before him and remembering another man entirely—Hamza gagging over salty tea, Hamza walking into danger with the easy insolence of someone who had stopped bargaining with death, Hamza absorbing beatings without sound, Hamza falling, almost against his own will, in love.
There is pity in watching age diminish a man.
But this was not pity.
This was the devastation of seeing a giant brought low by something no courage could fight.
Dhruv learned there was a grief specific to watching a man survive every external enemy only to be undone by his own unraveling mind.
The day Sushant Bansal came remained with him for the rest of his life.
The old man sat beside Jassi’s bed while Jassi slept, his breathing uneven, one hand twitching faintly against the blanket. For a long time neither Bansal nor Dhruv spoke.
Then Bansal said, almost as if confessing to a priest, “Mujhse galti hui. Jaskirat ke liye maine galat decisions liye”
Dhruv looked up.
“Sir…”
“I should have insisted they bring his family back. Others were reunited. Others were extracted. Why not him?”
Dhruv wanted to lie. Wanted to tell his old mentor he had done enough.
But the lie would not come. Because he agreed. And perhaps Bansal knew that before he spoke.
At last Dhruv said quietly, “Shayad Dhurandharon ko sabne taken for granted samjha, sir. Decorated officers nahi the hum. Bas qaidiyon ko suicide mission pe bheja tha India ne. Humse balidaan maanga gaya aur humne har balidaan khushi khushi de bhi diya. Shayad isi wajah se sabko laga ki hume dukh nahi hota.Itne samay asset banke bita liya ki kisi ko yaad bhi nahi hai ki uss killing machine ke neeche ek insaan ka dil dhadakta hai. Humna desh ko sab de diya sir, par humara desh hume kabhi yaad nahi rakhega. Isse koi problem nahi hai sir, iss baat se hum pehle hi samjhauta kar chuke the, par jisne humse balidaan maanga, woh bhi humari insaaniyat bhool jayenge, yeh umeed nahi thi mujhe”
Bansal did not defend the institution.
Did not justify.
He only stared at Jassi for a long time with a look so full of helpless regret it seemed almost indecent to witness, then touched his hand once and left.
Afterward Dhruv sat alone for an hour, unable to move, as is mind reached painful conclusions that Jassi had always spoken of cynically on his darkest days: some men do not need to be betrayed to be broken, their own destiny breaks them with relish.
Jassi forgot entire years, people, even himself.
But remembered Yalina. That was the cruelty, wasn't it?
Because a younger Jassi, even before the illness fully claimed him, had chosen to cling to Yalina’s memories instead of his mother’s and sister’s, because those older memories carried too much blood and regret. And now, with that being almost all he remembered, those same memories tormented him.
Sometimes he would grip Dhruv’s wrist so hard it hurt and whisper in sudden lucidity, “Dhruv… maine uski zindagi barbaad kar diya na?”
And Dhruv, who had answers once for everything tactical and practical and mortal, had none for that.
Because what answer could absolve a man whose deepest wound was that he believed himself unworthy of the love that had sustained him.
He had seen his jaded friend fall in love with a naive young woman he had first meant to use. Seen that love soften what war had hardened. Seen it become his friend’s one sanctuary.
And now he watched that same love haunt him in old age, not as sweetness, but as unfinished grief.
And there were nights, after Jassi finally slept, when Dhruv would sit beside the bed and think that war had not defeated his friend, nor duty, nor betrayal, nor even guilt.
It was the love he once thought was his sanctuary.
Yalina never remarried, though there had been years when others spoke of it as though remarriage were a practical remedy for grief. Jameel, who understood danger better than most and loved his daughter in the stern, burdened way men like him often did, argued more than once that once he was gone there would be little standing between her and forces he did not trust, and that a husband, particularly one outside Pakistan, might offer the kind of protection he no longer could. He never pressed crudely, never humiliated her with insistence, but she understood the fear beneath his suggestions.
She had refused him every time.
What she could not do, however, was remain in the house Hamza had built for her, the house whose walls had held ten years of marriage, deception, laughter, quarrels, their son’s first steps, the scent of lilies, the memory of a man whose absence had never once felt cleanly like death.
Too much of him lived there.
And too much of his leaving.
So she left Pakistan instead.
Ireland was almost arbitrary at first, chosen less out of longing than distance, but once there, she bought a farmstead and built a life whose simplicity was so unlike the one she had lost that it almost seemed an act of self-preservation. She lived among seasons, rain, soil, stubborn animals, mud on boots, wind through fields, as though after a life spent too near violence she needed a world that answered only to weather.
People in the village came to know her as reserved, capable, kind when drawn out, and privately sad in a way they could sense but not name.
She raised Zayan there.
Alone. Though not quite alone.
For absence can be a third presence in a household. And Hamza, for all that he was gone, remained.
Zayan had had his father for ten years, enough to remember his voice, his height, the way he lifted him to his shoulders, the way he laughed, enough to feel the shape of absence without fully understanding its cause. But children learn early when questions hurt those they love, and he understood, long before anyone told him, that asking about his father made his mother’s silences heavier.
So he did not ask, and she did not tell, and over the years a kind of unspoken mercy settled between mother and son, not quite silence, not quite secrecy, but something gentler and sadder, as though each understood instinctively that certain questions, once spoken aloud, would demand answers neither had the strength to carry. Zayan grew into manhood with his father present in him as an outline rather than a story, as a felt absence that shaped him without fully explaining itself, and Yalina, for her part, seemed to carry the past not as something buried, but as something carefully folded and kept close, too intimate to expose to daylight. There were evenings, especially when rain lashed the Irish windows and the fields outside dissolved into mist, when Zayan would find her sitting still longer than usual, looking into the dark as though listening for something that had once called her name, and he would know, without ever asking, that she was with his father in memory.
Then the tumour came, and with it the strange, almost unbearable reversal by which the dying sometimes begin loosening what the living have spent years keeping fastened shut. What unsettled Zayan most was not fear in her, but the near absence of it. She listened to the doctors speak of surgery, of risks, of pain prolonged rather than relieved, and when he begged her to try, begged with the desperation of a son not yet ready to be orphaned, she touched his face with a tenderness that made him feel suddenly young again and said, “Bas, beta. Insaan har jang lade, ye zaroori nahi hai” Not every battle is meant to be fought. He hated those words when she said them, because they sounded too much like surrender, but later he understood they were not surrender at all, only exhaustion too honest to disguise itself as hope.
And as her strength failed, she began speaking.
At first almost casually, as though testing whether old memories could survive being voiced. She spoke of Lyari, of its cracked streets and terrible summers, of her father, of the strange half-lawless world she had grown up believing was permanent, and Zayan listened, astonished, because these were not merely stories but chambers of a life his mother had never opened to him before. Then, as though one memory naturally tugged the next behind it, she began speaking of Hamza.
Of their love.
And there was something almost devastating in hearing an old, dying woman speak of the man who had deceived her with the softness of someone remembering her first astonishment.
She spoke of how impossible he had seemed when she met him, how dangerous, how infuriatingly certain of himself, how she had hated the authority in his voice long before she understood she was listening for it. She spoke of marrying him when she still believed he was Hamza Ali Mazari, of those ten years that had been, for all their shadows, real years of marriage, not some counterfeit domesticity built only on deception.
She spoke of him refusing to leave for work until Zayan ate his eggs, of how he would come home and lift his son to his shoulders before greeting anyone else, of lilies he bought without occasion, of pendants and jhumkas brought with an awkward seriousness that made her laugh, of quarrels that seemed enormous then and almost holy now in memory. Sometimes, telling these things, she smiled in spite of herself, and that smile, arriving on a face already hollowed by illness, was so painfully young that Zayan had to look away.
And he understood, sitting there, that his mother had not spent decades mourning a dead husband.
She had spent them living beside a love interrupted, a wound never granted the dignity of closure.
Then one evening, when light was thinning and her breathing had grown shallower, she seemed to gather herself for something larger than speech. Her eyes found him and held him with an urgency that made him lean close.
“Tumhare Abbu ka naam Hamza nahi tha.”
He stared at her, not understanding.
She whispered, after a pause that seemed to cost her effort, “Sikh the woh. Indian the woh.”
And then, with the strange solemnity of someone returning a thing long borrowed—
“Jaskirat.”
The room changed for him in that moment. Or perhaps he did.
Because the father who had lived all his life in the realm of unresolved absence suddenly became a man with a name, a history, a nation, a face that might still exist somewhere under the burden of years.
After she died, Zayan found he could not leave that name undisturbed. It did not feel like curiosity driving him so much as obligation, almost filial in its lateness. He wanted, with a simplicity that embarrassed him, only to see him once. To ask whether he had thought of them. Whether leaving had torn him too. Whether his mother had been loved as fiercely as she had loved.
The search took time, and money, and humiliating negotiations with men who opened archives only when persuaded by favors or bribery, and yet doors opened because Jamali name still carried an old usefulness, and eventually he found what he had been seeking.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------It was Dhruv who opened the door when the knock came, assuming with the dull certainty of routine that it would be the night nurse come to check whether Jassi had taken his medicines, whether he had drifted into one of those troubled half-dreams where he would begin calling for Leena or insist, with gathering panic, that Aalam bhai had not returned and someone must go look for him. He rose with the slow care of an old man whose bones objected to movement, muttering to himself as he crossed the room, but when he opened the door, the complaint died upon his lips. For a moment he simply stood there, his hand still on the knob, staring as though some part of time he had long buried had come back and knocked.
The man standing outside could not have been mistaken for anyone else, though Dhruv had never seen him as a grown man. It was there at once, in the broadness of the shoulders, in the severe, almost overcomposed set of the face, in the way he held himself as though bracing against something inward. For a strange second Dhruv could not speak, because all he could think was that Jassi had waited half a lifetime for what was standing before him, and illness had robbed him so much already that perhaps fate had now arrived too late to be kind.
The young man—though he was not young, not really, merely younger than the two old men time had worn thin—opened his mouth as if to explain himself, but Dhruv lifted a hand and stopped him. There was no need for explanations between men who had both arrived there through grief. He stepped aside and said only, very quietly, “Come in, chote sultan.”
The word slipped out before he thought about it. And perhaps that was when Zayan understood he had not come to strangers.
He entered with the careful hesitation of a man stepping into a room where memory itself might break if touched too suddenly, and when his gaze found the bed and the frail figure lying upon it, Dhruv felt such a terrible ache for him that he had to look away for a moment. Because what the boy saw was not the father he had crossed countries to find, not Hamza Ali Mazari in all his dark force, not even the Jaskirat Singh Rangi Dhruv had once rivaled, fought beside, and grown old beside. What lay there was the ravaged remainder of a man illness had been dismantling piece by piece, and Dhruv, who had witnessed that dismantling day after day, felt almost ashamed to have brought the son to this ending instead of to some truer version of the father he had deserved.
Then Zayan made a sound.
A small involuntary sound, almost like breath breaking.
And Jassi stirred.
Dhruv held still.
He had seen false awakenings before, moments when his friend opened his eyes only to stare blankly at walls. But this was different from the first instant. Dhruv saw it before he let himself believe it. Something in the eyes clearing as though a veil, long drawn over the mind, had for one incomprehensible mercy been lifted.
Jassi looked at the man standing beside the bed.
Studied him. And smiled.
Dhruv felt tears burn so suddenly he nearly cursed aloud.
Because it was recognition.
“Tum Zayan ho na? Mera baccha? Tumhe pata hai, Tumhari aankhe bilkul tumhari Ammi, meri Leena jaise hain.” Jassi said, and though the voice was thinned by age, it was unmistakably his.
Zayan fell to his knees beside the bed with a broken “Abbu” that sounded less spoken than torn out of him, and Dhruv, standing witness to it, thought with a grief almost too large to contain that there were wounds so old they did not heal, they merely waited for the touch that would reopen them.
What followed passed in fragments of speech and silence. Zayan spoke of Ireland, of his mother, of her illness, of the last days when she had at last spoken Jaskirat’s name aloud. Dhruv listened, but his eyes were on Jassi, trying to read whether his friend understood the enormity of what was being said, whether he grasped that Yalina was no longer among the living, and he could not tell. For Jassi did not cry out, did not visibly break, did not react as a man newly bereaved might. Instead he turned his face slightly, as though toward someone standing just beyond the bed, and murmured something too soft for Dhruv to hear.
But Zayan heard.
Dhruv knew because he watched the young man’s face collapse.
Watched him lower his head into his father’s lap as though some force greater than dignity had driven him there.
Watched his shoulders begin to shake.
And then Jassi did something so simple and so unbearably tender that Dhruv had to turn partly away because it felt like intrusion.
He lifted his hand and began patting his son’s hair.
The way fathers soothe frightened children.
The way he had done, Dhruv remembered, when Zayan had been small and fallen running in the courtyard. And in that touch there was something illness had not managed to destroy.
Zayan wept harder, almost climbing onto the bed, clutching at the old man as though he could still retrieve lost years through sheer closeness, and Jassi cupped his cheek and whispered something that made the boy close his eyes and bow his head in a grief.
Then Jassi turned towards him.
He went forward at once, bent low, as fast as his aged feet could carry him.
And heard, with the careful effort of a man forcing each word through failing flesh, “Shukriya, Dhruv… mere bete ko bol diya hai… mere jaane ke baad woh tumhara khayal rakhega… tumhe akela nahi chhodunga… mere yaara.”
Dhruv nearly lost his balance.
Dhruv.
Not Rizwan.
Dhruv.
Because Jassi had not called him that in months.
And in that instant Dhruv knew with clarity that this lucidity was not recovery. It was farewell.
Before he could even form the protest rising in his chest, the hand in his own loosened.
The grip slackened.
Life, which had held so stubbornly through war, exile, betrayal, and disease, slipped away with a softness that felt impossible.
Dhruv looked up.
Zayan was staring at him with horror.
And they both knew.
Jassi was gone.
It seemed almost as though some final unfinished duty had held him to the world until that meeting, and once the son he had left behind stood before him in flesh rather than memory, the body relinquished what grief had compelled it to preserve.
Later, standing before the pyre as the last flames sank and the wood gave way to embers, Dhruv thought not of Jaskirat the operative, nor Hamza the phantom, nor even the friend who had been more constant in his life than most blood relations. He thought of the man he had befriended in Pakistan, sitting once in the dark after too much silence, saying almost shyly, as if embarrassed by his own tenderness, “If there is another life, I wish I meet her in beautiful circumstances where there are no shackles to hold us back, where we love like a bird loves the sky, the moon loves the stars, the flowers love the air”
And then, of an older Jassi, in a voice burdened with something far older than either of them had been then, “Love is pain which I suffer, but this suffering is what is keeping me alive, and what is keeping me close to her even we are far from each other.”
Standing before those dying flames, Dhruv understood, with the exhausted sorrow of the last witness, that his friend had not been kept alive by duty alone, nor by patriotism, nor by the iron discipline others admired in him, but by a wound he had refused to let scar over, because in preserving the pain he had preserved the only life he had ever truly wished to return to.
======================xXx=======================
Masterlist
A/N: Yep.
Taglist : @bway43 @iolahardy-blog @tere-naal-nachna @ai-manre @hamzaalimazari @harrystyleskiwi9 @misteriadare @dumbassdictionarysds @tanipartner @peach-preach @ruubby @mujhegharjaanahai @faebutterflygayaf @avilovesyou @mainyahaankyunhoon @eagleflieshighinthesky @browniemilkies @araasa @aaglagibastimainhumapnemastimain @bitchy-bi-trash @adirasenraizada @legendmoonstone @dil-ibaadat @luvmaii @pavbhajisupremacist @weepingbastiontwilight @speedyturtleprincess @sunxister21 anyone in the taglist doesn't wish to be tagged, just hmu on the messages and I will edit it out. If you asked to be tagged and I forgot to do so, please just remind me again, I am a goldfish. If you want to be tagged, also, just say so and I will do it for the next update.
A/N: I apologize in advance. Also I have an accomplice in my shenanigans this time, my dear kiwiji @harrystyleskiwi9 came up with the idea for the fic and one thing lead to another and here we are.(dande padenge, toh unhe mat chodna lol)
Also, credit to @jadekiddo for the final lines of love, from Hamza in this fic
Warning: @harrystyleskiwi9 and I are the warnings for this one lol.
Jaskirat had not asked for the villa, and when it was given to him after the mission, after the commendations in a closed room and the sort of gratitude that always seemed too satirical for what men like him had actually lost, he accepted it without much thought, almost as if he did not trust himself to examine what a settled life might mean. It stood on the edge of the training grounds where he spent his days teaching young cadets, and though people often mistook his reserve for discipline, it was not discipline that made him keep a distance from their laughter and careless certainty, but the simple fact that he had lived too long with consequences to fully trust innocence.
The house was modest, but over the years it gathered signs of habitation he had not put there himself. There was a house helper assigned by the agency, that he was sure was a spy of some kind, who cooked, cleaned, and, without seeking permission, began arranging the place as though she had decided no man should live among such deliberate barrenness. A brass bowl appeared by a window. A rug. Fresh covers changed without notice. Once he had returned to find cushions embroidered with flowers he had never chosen, and had almost asked her to remove them before stopping himself, for what right had he to object to life entering a house that had known so little of it.
One afternoon he came back early and saw, through the verandah grille, the helper’s young man standing awkwardly at the gate, holding a bunch of lilies wrapped in cheap paper. The girl lowered her face and laughed when he handed them to her, and the boy, with all the earnest foolishness of men still new to love, embraced her as if afraid she might disappear if he loosened his hold. Jaskirat stood watching longer than the moment warranted, and something old and terribly tender stirred in him.
Yalina had liked lilies.
There had been a time when their old home carried that scent so constantly he had stopped noticing it until he had lost it. He remembered bringing her lilies one birthday, and a pair of jhumkas wrapped so badly she had laughed before opening them.
“Tumne khud pack kiya? Pata chalta hai” she had asked, trying not to smile.
“Bohot mehenat kiya hai maine” he had muttered. “Mazaak mat udaao.”
She had lifted one of the earrings, held it against her ear and asked, “Arre mazak nahi uda rahi hoon.”Then, after a pause," Par lillies tumne jhumkon ke sath rakh diye aur ab iske petals pe impression baith gaye hain"
That evening, those memories did not leave him.
The next morning he woke with the kind of disorientation that did not belong to ordinary sleep. The room smelled of lilies.
For one suspended, treacherous instant, he thought he was back.
His hand moved, without thought, to the other side of the bed, reaching for the warmth of a sleeping body, and when his palm met only cold sheets, something inside him lurched with such primitive panic that he was on his feet before reason arrived.
“Yalina?”
He was already at the door.
“Yalina!”
He moved through the rooms calling her name with mounting urgency, opening doors, looking into the verandah, the kitchen, the back corridor, the old instincts of loss and fear rising before thought could restrain them.
“Yalina, kahan ho meri jaan?”
The helper rushed from the kitchen, frightened.
“Sahab? Kisko dhoond rahe hain?”
He turned toward her, breathing hard, eyes wild with a terror too old for explanation.
“Meri begum…” he said hoarsely. “Yahin thi…”
The girl stared at him.
And then his gaze fell upon the lilies in water by the window.
He stopped.
Everything stopped.
Understanding came, and it did not come as relief.
Because for those few moments he had not remembered she was no longer his to call.
He had lived, however briefly, inside the lie he wanted.
He walked back to his room and stood before the mirror, because the only thing left of that vanished life that could still be verified by touch was his own face.
He touched the line of his jaw. The grey at his temples. The scar near his brow.
This was the face she had once touched in anger, in laughter, in forgiveness.
The face his son had inherited something from.
The face that had lied for a nation and loved despite itself.
And looking at it, he felt the exhausted knowledge of a man who had survived too much to pretend survival was victory.
He had borne torture. Buried men with his own hands. Sent others to death. Condemned himself for his motherland.
And yet it was a room smelling of lilies that nearly undid him.
The illness began years later, so gradually that even Jaskirat, a man who had once been trained to read danger in silences, in altered routines, in the slightest fracture in a pattern, did not at first understand that something was turning inside his own mind. At first, it seemed ordinary enough, the kind of lapses old age forces upon men. He would misplace papers. Ask Dhruv the same question twice. Begin telling a story and stop midway, his eyes narrowing faintly, as though the next thought stood just beyond reach. There was irritation in him at these moments. This, he thought, was age.
Dhruv noticed before Jassi did, perhaps because he had spent too much of his life reading the man.
That had always been the strange shape of their friendship. It had begun as rivalry.
At the NDA, they had been two hard young men selected into the Balidan pipeline for the Dhurandhar project, each too proud to openly admire the other, each measuring himself against the other’s competence. There had been no affection then, only friction, grudging respect, the sort born between men who survive the same brutal forging.
Then fate, or whatever darker machinery governed such lives, had brought them together again in another country, under other names.
Hamza and Rizwan. Lyari. Aalam. Those years had made brothers of men who had once been rivals.
Dhruv sometimes thought real friendship had not begun at the academy at all, but in Karachi, in safe houses and coded exchanges, in the ugly ordinary intimacy of living daily beside death, in learning how another man breathed when afraid, what silences meant danger, what jokes meant despair.
Then Jassi, as Hamza, had risen through the Baloch ranks, and when he brought Rizwan in as his right hand, it had not been merely operational trust. It had been the kind of trust by which one man places his death, if needed, in another’s keeping.
When Hamza’s cover had been blown and he had left Pakistan, handing over all further operations to Rizwan before disappearing back into India, neither had said what both knew.
That they might not meet again.
But they had.
Ten years later, age had finally compelled the agencies to extract Dhruv too, after he had installed a protégé as successor for the Dhurandhar operation, and he had come back to India carrying more ghosts than luggage.
He had reconnected with Jassi a few months after his return.
They had trained future Dhurandhar candidates together then, old wolves teaching boys who mistook sacrifice for glory, and though others saw two retired legends, Dhruv often felt they were simply two tired survivors prolonging an old conversation interrupted decades earlier.
They retired within five years of each other.
Lived in the same society. Took tea together almost daily. Argued over politics.
Remembered men the world had forgotten.
Grew old side by side.
And perhaps because of that long continuity, Dhruv recognized the first true signs of Jassi’s decline when others still called it aging.
Jassi began confusing years. He referred to old handlers as if they had just been by. Once, he called Dhruv at dawn and asked, with mild annoyance, why he had not come from Lyari the night before, as if Karachi still existed just beyond the morning fog outside the villa. Dhruv laughed it off in the moment, but after putting the phone down, he sat for a long while staring at nothing, because there had been something too lived-in in Jassi’s tone, too sincere to dismiss.
Then came the afternoon Dhruv arrived at the villa and found him standing barefoot in the winter courtyard, without a shawl, without slippers, looking toward the gate.
“What are you doing out here?” he had asked, more sharply than he intended.
Jassi had turned and looked at him as though he were the irrational one.
“Yalina bazaar gayi hai. Akeli gayi hai.Maine usse bola tha, ki Junaid ko apne saath le jaye, par woh meri kahan sunti hai”
It was said so simply, so matter-of-factly, in the voice of a husband mildly inconvenienced by his friend's lack of critical thinking skills, that Dhruv felt something go cold in his chest.
Yalina had not been a part of Jassi's life for years.
He did not argue. He did not correct him. He simply walked over and said, as steadily as he could, “Theek hai, main dekh ke aata hoon. Aap andar chaliye.”
And later, when Jassi had forgotten the incident entirely, Dhruv sat in his own car and wept in a way he had not wept even in younger days, because until that moment he had not truly understood that his friend might not merely die, but vanish before dying.
The diagnosis came with the calm, almost insulting politeness of medical language.
Alzheimer’s.
Rapidly progressive.
Dhruv heard the doctor continue speaking of treatment, management, decline, but those words barely registered, because one unbearable truth had already lodged itself in him—that the strongest man he had ever known, the man he had seen withstand pain, treachery, guilt and moral ruin without surrendering his reason, was beginning to lose even the pain that had made him himself.
He stayed with him in the villa at first, because leaving him alone began to feel criminal. Then he insisted on specialized care when the nights worsened, when Jassi began wandering, when he mistook shadows for people and old memories for immediate emergencies. And when he was admitted into hospice care, Dhruv followed him there too, almost stubbornly, because he would not allow the man who had become a brother to spend his final years frightened in a room among strangers.
There were nights that made old battlefields seem merciful by comparison.
Jassi would wake gasping, thrashing, calling out, “Rizwan! Rizwan, Aalam bhai bula rahe hain, unhe humaari zaroorat hai, Iqbal unhe tadpayega, unki khaal udhed dega—darwaza kholo,kahan ho tum!”
And Dhruv, who the world had long known again by his own name, would become Rizwan without hesitation, because in those moments truth had no moral superiority over comfort.
“Koi nahi hai wahan, Hamza. Aalam bhai ko Iqbal choo bhi nahi sakta, woh mehfooz hai, aur main yahin hoon.”
He would hold his shoulders until the trembling eased.
Sometimes Jassi would clutch a bedsheet in both hands, believing it was Yalina’s dupatta, and whisper broken apologies into its folds.
“Maaf kardo… maaf kardo…main jhoot nahi bol raha, mujhe sach mein tumse mohabbat hai, meri jaan, Leena, tum mujh par yakeen karogi na, mere taraf ek baar dekhlo, meri aankhon mein tumhe sach dikh jayega, mujhe chod ke mat jao”
And Dhruv would sit beside him until dawn, looking at the bent, confused old man before him and remembering another man entirely—Hamza gagging over salty tea, Hamza walking into danger with the easy insolence of someone who had stopped bargaining with death, Hamza absorbing beatings without sound, Hamza falling, almost against his own will, in love.
There is pity in watching age diminish a man.
But this was not pity.
This was the devastation of seeing a giant brought low by something no courage could fight.
Dhruv learned there was a grief specific to watching a man survive every external enemy only to be undone by his own unraveling mind.
The day Sushant Bansal came remained with him for the rest of his life.
The old man sat beside Jassi’s bed while Jassi slept, his breathing uneven, one hand twitching faintly against the blanket. For a long time neither Bansal nor Dhruv spoke.
Then Bansal said, almost as if confessing to a priest, “Mujhse galti hui. Jaskirat ke liye maine galat decisions liye”
Dhruv looked up.
“Sir…”
“I should have insisted they bring his family back. Others were reunited. Others were extracted. Why not him?”
Dhruv wanted to lie. Wanted to tell his old mentor he had done enough.
But the lie would not come. Because he agreed. And perhaps Bansal knew that before he spoke.
At last Dhruv said quietly, “Shayad Dhurandharon ko sabne taken for granted samjha, sir. Decorated officers nahi the hum. Bas qaidiyon ko suicide mission pe bheja tha India ne. Humse balidaan maanga gaya aur humne har balidaan khushi khushi de bhi diya. Shayad isi wajah se sabko laga ki hume dukh nahi hota.Itne samay asset banke bita liya ki kisi ko yaad bhi nahi hai ki uss killing machine ke neeche ek insaan ka dil dhadakta hai. Humna desh ko sab de diya sir, par humara desh hume kabhi yaad nahi rakhega. Isse koi problem nahi hai sir, iss baat se hum pehle hi samjhauta kar chuke the, par jisne humse balidaan maanga, woh bhi humari insaaniyat bhool jayenge, yeh umeed nahi thi mujhe”
Bansal did not defend the institution.
Did not justify.
He only stared at Jassi for a long time with a look so full of helpless regret it seemed almost indecent to witness, then touched his hand once and left.
Afterward Dhruv sat alone for an hour, unable to move, as is mind reached painful conclusions that Jassi had always spoken of cynically on his darkest days: some men do not need to be betrayed to be broken, their own destiny breaks them with relish.
Jassi forgot entire years, people, even himself.
But remembered Yalina. That was the cruelty, wasn't it?
Because a younger Jassi, even before the illness fully claimed him, had chosen to cling to Yalina’s memories instead of his mother’s and sister’s, because those older memories carried too much blood and regret. And now, with that being almost all he remembered, those same memories tormented him.
Sometimes he would grip Dhruv’s wrist so hard it hurt and whisper in sudden lucidity, “Dhruv… maine uski zindagi barbaad kar diya na?”
And Dhruv, who had answers once for everything tactical and practical and mortal, had none for that.
Because what answer could absolve a man whose deepest wound was that he believed himself unworthy of the love that had sustained him.
He had seen his jaded friend fall in love with a naive young woman he had first meant to use. Seen that love soften what war had hardened. Seen it become his friend’s one sanctuary.
And now he watched that same love haunt him in old age, not as sweetness, but as unfinished grief.
And there were nights, after Jassi finally slept, when Dhruv would sit beside the bed and think that war had not defeated his friend, nor duty, nor betrayal, nor even guilt.
It was the love he once thought was his sanctuary.
Yalina never remarried, though there had been years when others spoke of it as though remarriage were a practical remedy for grief. Jameel, who understood danger better than most and loved his daughter in the stern, burdened way men like him often did, argued more than once that once he was gone there would be little standing between her and forces he did not trust, and that a husband, particularly one outside Pakistan, might offer the kind of protection he no longer could. He never pressed crudely, never humiliated her with insistence, but she understood the fear beneath his suggestions.
She had refused him every time.
What she could not do, however, was remain in the house Hamza had built for her, the house whose walls had held ten years of marriage, deception, laughter, quarrels, their son’s first steps, the scent of lilies, the memory of a man whose absence had never once felt cleanly like death.
Too much of him lived there.
And too much of his leaving.
So she left Pakistan instead.
Ireland was almost arbitrary at first, chosen less out of longing than distance, but once there, she bought a farmstead and built a life whose simplicity was so unlike the one she had lost that it almost seemed an act of self-preservation. She lived among seasons, rain, soil, stubborn animals, mud on boots, wind through fields, as though after a life spent too near violence she needed a world that answered only to weather.
People in the village came to know her as reserved, capable, kind when drawn out, and privately sad in a way they could sense but not name.
She raised Zayan there.
Alone. Though not quite alone.
For absence can be a third presence in a household. And Hamza, for all that he was gone, remained.
Zayan had had his father for ten years, enough to remember his voice, his height, the way he lifted him to his shoulders, the way he laughed, enough to feel the shape of absence without fully understanding its cause. But children learn early when questions hurt those they love, and he understood, long before anyone told him, that asking about his father made his mother’s silences heavier.
So he did not ask, and she did not tell, and over the years a kind of unspoken mercy settled between mother and son, not quite silence, not quite secrecy, but something gentler and sadder, as though each understood instinctively that certain questions, once spoken aloud, would demand answers neither had the strength to carry. Zayan grew into manhood with his father present in him as an outline rather than a story, as a felt absence that shaped him without fully explaining itself, and Yalina, for her part, seemed to carry the past not as something buried, but as something carefully folded and kept close, too intimate to expose to daylight. There were evenings, especially when rain lashed the Irish windows and the fields outside dissolved into mist, when Zayan would find her sitting still longer than usual, looking into the dark as though listening for something that had once called her name, and he would know, without ever asking, that she was with his father in memory.
Then the tumour came, and with it the strange, almost unbearable reversal by which the dying sometimes begin loosening what the living have spent years keeping fastened shut. What unsettled Zayan most was not fear in her, but the near absence of it. She listened to the doctors speak of surgery, of risks, of pain prolonged rather than relieved, and when he begged her to try, begged with the desperation of a son not yet ready to be orphaned, she touched his face with a tenderness that made him feel suddenly young again and said, “Bas, beta. Insaan har jang lade, ye zaroori nahi hai” Not every battle is meant to be fought. He hated those words when she said them, because they sounded too much like surrender, but later he understood they were not surrender at all, only exhaustion too honest to disguise itself as hope.
And as her strength failed, she began speaking.
At first almost casually, as though testing whether old memories could survive being voiced. She spoke of Lyari, of its cracked streets and terrible summers, of her father, of the strange half-lawless world she had grown up believing was permanent, and Zayan listened, astonished, because these were not merely stories but chambers of a life his mother had never opened to him before. Then, as though one memory naturally tugged the next behind it, she began speaking of Hamza.
Of their love.
And there was something almost devastating in hearing an old, dying woman speak of the man who had deceived her with the softness of someone remembering her first astonishment.
She spoke of how impossible he had seemed when she met him, how dangerous, how infuriatingly certain of himself, how she had hated the authority in his voice long before she understood she was listening for it. She spoke of marrying him when she still believed he was Hamza Ali Mazari, of those ten years that had been, for all their shadows, real years of marriage, not some counterfeit domesticity built only on deception.
She spoke of him refusing to leave for work until Zayan ate his eggs, of how he would come home and lift his son to his shoulders before greeting anyone else, of lilies he bought without occasion, of pendants and jhumkas brought with an awkward seriousness that made her laugh, of quarrels that seemed enormous then and almost holy now in memory. Sometimes, telling these things, she smiled in spite of herself, and that smile, arriving on a face already hollowed by illness, was so painfully young that Zayan had to look away.
And he understood, sitting there, that his mother had not spent decades mourning a dead husband.
She had spent them living beside a love interrupted, a wound never granted the dignity of closure.
Then one evening, when light was thinning and her breathing had grown shallower, she seemed to gather herself for something larger than speech. Her eyes found him and held him with an urgency that made him lean close.
“Tumhare Abbu ka naam Hamza nahi tha.”
He stared at her, not understanding.
She whispered, after a pause that seemed to cost her effort, “Sikh the woh. Indian the woh.”
And then, with the strange solemnity of someone returning a thing long borrowed—
“Jaskirat.”
The room changed for him in that moment. Or perhaps he did.
Because the father who had lived all his life in the realm of unresolved absence suddenly became a man with a name, a history, a nation, a face that might still exist somewhere under the burden of years.
After she died, Zayan found he could not leave that name undisturbed. It did not feel like curiosity driving him so much as obligation, almost filial in its lateness. He wanted, with a simplicity that embarrassed him, only to see him once. To ask whether he had thought of them. Whether leaving had torn him too. Whether his mother had been loved as fiercely as she had loved.
The search took time, and money, and humiliating negotiations with men who opened archives only when persuaded by favors or bribery, and yet doors opened because Jamali name still carried an old usefulness, and eventually he found what he had been seeking.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------It was Dhruv who opened the door when the knock came, assuming with the dull certainty of routine that it would be the night nurse come to check whether Jassi had taken his medicines, whether he had drifted into one of those troubled half-dreams where he would begin calling for Leena or insist, with gathering panic, that Aalam bhai had not returned and someone must go look for him. He rose with the slow care of an old man whose bones objected to movement, muttering to himself as he crossed the room, but when he opened the door, the complaint died upon his lips. For a moment he simply stood there, his hand still on the knob, staring as though some part of time he had long buried had come back and knocked.
The man standing outside could not have been mistaken for anyone else, though Dhruv had never seen him as a grown man. It was there at once, in the broadness of the shoulders, in the severe, almost overcomposed set of the face, in the way he held himself as though bracing against something inward. For a strange second Dhruv could not speak, because all he could think was that Jassi had waited half a lifetime for what was standing before him, and illness had robbed him so much already that perhaps fate had now arrived too late to be kind.
The young man—though he was not young, not really, merely younger than the two old men time had worn thin—opened his mouth as if to explain himself, but Dhruv lifted a hand and stopped him. There was no need for explanations between men who had both arrived there through grief. He stepped aside and said only, very quietly, “Come in, chote sultan.”
The word slipped out before he thought about it. And perhaps that was when Zayan understood he had not come to strangers.
He entered with the careful hesitation of a man stepping into a room where memory itself might break if touched too suddenly, and when his gaze found the bed and the frail figure lying upon it, Dhruv felt such a terrible ache for him that he had to look away for a moment. Because what the boy saw was not the father he had crossed countries to find, not Hamza Ali Mazari in all his dark force, not even the Jaskirat Singh Rangi Dhruv had once rivaled, fought beside, and grown old beside. What lay there was the ravaged remainder of a man illness had been dismantling piece by piece, and Dhruv, who had witnessed that dismantling day after day, felt almost ashamed to have brought the son to this ending instead of to some truer version of the father he had deserved.
Then Zayan made a sound.
A small involuntary sound, almost like breath breaking.
And Jassi stirred.
Dhruv held still.
He had seen false awakenings before, moments when his friend opened his eyes only to stare blankly at walls. But this was different from the first instant. Dhruv saw it before he let himself believe it. Something in the eyes clearing as though a veil, long drawn over the mind, had for one incomprehensible mercy been lifted.
Jassi looked at the man standing beside the bed.
Studied him. And smiled.
Dhruv felt tears burn so suddenly he nearly cursed aloud.
Because it was recognition.
“Tum Zayan ho na? Mera baccha? Tumhe pata hai, Tumhari aankhe bilkul tumhari Ammi, meri Leena jaise hain.” Jassi said, and though the voice was thinned by age, it was unmistakably his.
Zayan fell to his knees beside the bed with a broken “Abbu” that sounded less spoken than torn out of him, and Dhruv, standing witness to it, thought with a grief almost too large to contain that there were wounds so old they did not heal, they merely waited for the touch that would reopen them.
What followed passed in fragments of speech and silence. Zayan spoke of Ireland, of his mother, of her illness, of the last days when she had at last spoken Jaskirat’s name aloud. Dhruv listened, but his eyes were on Jassi, trying to read whether his friend understood the enormity of what was being said, whether he grasped that Yalina was no longer among the living, and he could not tell. For Jassi did not cry out, did not visibly break, did not react as a man newly bereaved might. Instead he turned his face slightly, as though toward someone standing just beyond the bed, and murmured something too soft for Dhruv to hear.
But Zayan heard.
Dhruv knew because he watched the young man’s face collapse.
Watched him lower his head into his father’s lap as though some force greater than dignity had driven him there.
Watched his shoulders begin to shake.
And then Jassi did something so simple and so unbearably tender that Dhruv had to turn partly away because it felt like intrusion.
He lifted his hand and began patting his son’s hair.
The way fathers soothe frightened children.
The way he had done, Dhruv remembered, when Zayan had been small and fallen running in the courtyard. And in that touch there was something illness had not managed to destroy.
Zayan wept harder, almost climbing onto the bed, clutching at the old man as though he could still retrieve lost years through sheer closeness, and Jassi cupped his cheek and whispered something that made the boy close his eyes and bow his head in a grief.
Then Jassi turned towards him.
He went forward at once, bent low, as fast as his aged feet could carry him.
And heard, with the careful effort of a man forcing each word through failing flesh, “Shukriya, Dhruv… mere bete ko bol diya hai… mere jaane ke baad woh tumhara khayal rakhega… tumhe akela nahi chhodunga… mere yaara.”
Dhruv nearly lost his balance.
Dhruv.
Not Rizwan.
Dhruv.
Because Jassi had not called him that in months.
And in that instant Dhruv knew with clarity that this lucidity was not recovery. It was farewell.
Before he could even form the protest rising in his chest, the hand in his own loosened.
The grip slackened.
Life, which had held so stubbornly through war, exile, betrayal, and disease, slipped away with a softness that felt impossible.
Dhruv looked up.
Zayan was staring at him with horror.
And they both knew.
Jassi was gone.
It seemed almost as though some final unfinished duty had held him to the world until that meeting, and once the son he had left behind stood before him in flesh rather than memory, the body relinquished what grief had compelled it to preserve.
Later, standing before the pyre as the last flames sank and the wood gave way to embers, Dhruv thought not of Jaskirat the operative, nor Hamza the phantom, nor even the friend who had been more constant in his life than most blood relations. He thought of the man he had befriended in Pakistan, sitting once in the dark after too much silence, saying almost shyly, as if embarrassed by his own tenderness, “If there is another life, I wish I meet her in beautiful circumstances where there are no shackles to hold us back, where we love like a bird loves the sky, the moon loves the stars, the flowers love the air”
And then, of an older Jassi, in a voice burdened with something far older than either of them had been then, “Love is pain which I suffer, but this suffering is what is keeping me alive, and what is keeping me close to her even we are far from each other.”
Standing before those dying flames, Dhruv understood, with the exhausted sorrow of the last witness, that his friend had not been kept alive by duty alone, nor by patriotism, nor by the iron discipline others admired in him, but by a wound he had refused to let scar over, because in preserving the pain he had preserved the only life he had ever truly wished to return to.
======================xXx=======================
Masterlist
A/N: Yep.
Taglist : @bway43 @iolahardy-blog @tere-naal-nachna @ai-manre @hamzaalimazari @harrystyleskiwi9 @misteriadare @dumbassdictionarysds @tanipartner @peach-preach @ruubby @mujhegharjaanahai @faebutterflygayaf @avilovesyou @mainyahaankyunhoon @eagleflieshighinthesky @browniemilkies @araasa @aaglagibastimainhumapnemastimain @bitchy-bi-trash @adirasenraizada @legendmoonstone @dil-ibaadat @luvmaii @pavbhajisupremacist @weepingbastiontwilight @speedyturtleprincess @sunxister21 anyone in the taglist doesn't wish to be tagged, just hmu on the messages and I will edit it out. If you asked to be tagged and I forgot to do so, please just remind me again, I am a goldfish. If you want to be tagged, also, just say so and I will do it for the next update.
