It's a fact that's been known for years in his family. Bheem loves late night walks. Yudhishthir absolutely loves raw mangoes. Nakul loves to create colours from flowers. Sahdev is irrevocably in love with wood crafting. Arjun loves rains.
They first found out about it when Arjun was four, they were still in the forest and the little terror escaped from Pandu's side to play in the mud near their hut and was drenched in less than the five minutes it took for Pandu to realise that his middle child was missing from story time.
Of course, Arjun's play time had been cut off as a punishment for going away without informing his father and subsequently getting sick, but Arjun discovered something that day: rain isn't as bothersome as Mata Kunti thinks. Water dripping from his lashes, droplets falling on his lips, the soft cold of the weather and the smell of earth and the vibrant verdant of the rest of the forest— all of it, really, was beautiful.
The taste of rain was addictive.
However, as he grew older, he realised something else as well.
No one in his family liked the rain. Mata Kunti hated the humidity. Bhrata Yudhishthir hated the dark and gloomy weather. Bhrata Bheem hated the muddy earth under his feet. Nakul hated the rain because it meant that a lot of animals would suffer from the weather due to not having proper shelter. Sahdev hated the rain because the clouds later always hid the stars that he loved to watch every night.
Every time it rained, Arjun went out of their hut, on a walk. It was his mission to spot beautiful flowers covered in water droplets and discern their smell. Rain water drenched berries tasted much better too.
He is used to it, honestly. It doesn't really bother him anymore. He just brings his family flowers from his walks and annoys them by trying to embrace them while still wet from the rain.
Multiple times, Bheem bhaiya has threatened violence against Arjun because he keeps shaking his head near Bheem bhaiya to spray him with the water in his hair, like a wet dog trying to dry off. Each time, Arjun hides behind a progressively more amused and exasperated Yudhishthir and while the eldest tries to corral Bheem bhaiya, Arjun wipes his wet hands on Yudhishthir's angvastra.
(Yudhishthir never gets annoyed at Arjun for that. He never even changes the half damp angvastra, even if he has to attend court with his little brother's wet hand print on his arm or shoulder. Arjun gets stupidly sentimental about that fact every time it rains, too.)
When they leave the burning palace behind them, Arjun, with calloused hands and aching shoulders, laughs as it drizzles, gradually curling all Nakul and Sahdev's hair. Nakul's hair remains in those loose curls and Sahdev's hair, not long enough to curl properly, sticks to his forehead in waves that look absolutely ridiculous.
He and the rest of the brothers annoy Sahdev about it until Mata herself has to step in and protect her favourite son from any further ridicule.
Arjun makes eye contact with Bheem and they both grin, knowing instinctively that they'll both be dragging this instance to irritate their youngest for the rest of their lives. If Yudhishthir squeezes their shoulders in silent gratefulness to lighten the mood, only the eldest three need to know that.
It's easy, after that. The ground under their feet softens because of the rain and Arjun ignores his brothers as they wonder if the rain had extinguished the fire in the palace and if the people would find out that the Pandavas and the Raj Mata are alive after all.
A part of him, older than blood and flesh, older than his years on earth, the part that shows strands of gold in his hair— it already knows. It knows the way of the rain as it sees the canines in Yudhishthir's smile. As it hears the booming voice of Bheem. As it smells the continuous smell of jadibootis from Nakul, despite the man never carrying those. As it sees the abnormally large irises of Sahdev.
It already knows the rain like the blood in his own vessels.
The palace still burns. The rain refuses to touch such filth.
Panchali is everything. She's fiery, she's intelligent, she's a great conversationalist, she laughs whenever Nakul sits grumpily in the kitchen because his newest try at cooking didn't meet his high standards, she teaches Bheem the different types of embroidery she knows because she knows he likes to keep his hands busy, she oils Sahdev's hair every time he gets a headache because he gets overwhelmed with all the information he understands from the stars, she banters with Yudhishthir over philosophy and does a little dance whenever she manages to leave him speechless, rare as it is. She convinced Mata to put on kajal for her birth anniversary— something that Mata hasn't done since Pitashree and Mata Madri passed.
He regrets his big mouth for putting her in a horrible position on the very first day of their marriage, but dear lord, he is so in love with her, he can spend a lifetime only observing her eyes crinkle with her big smile whenever anyone pays her a compliment.
He isn't a poet, but he thinks she's poetry in motion and he wishes he could encapsulate what she means to him in words but all the words in the world couldn't describe a miracle such as her.
The first rain after their marriage comes when she still isn't entirely comfortable in the role of the wife and is just settling as a friend first. It was something that they had decided mutually. Panchali's fate had been forced enough. She deserves time to get to know them all first and then be a wife, the expectations of the society be damned.
So when, Arjun, grinning ear to ear, tells them that he'll be back, the rest of his family doesn't react much, except the warning Mata gives him to be careful because it's twilight now and the night will soon swallow the village they're staying overnight in and with the rain, no fire will be possible to be a source of light for him to see anything.
(She doesn't see the world as clearly as he does when it rains. When thunder strikes the sky and all Arjun sees is a bright day despite dark clouds. When there's rain drops clinging to his eyelashes and his vision is ten times sharper and he can see all land where any rain touches.)
Panchali looks up from the flowers she's weaving into Bhrata Yudhishthir's hair and frowns at him, asking him where he is off to, what cannot wait until it stops to rain.
Bheem bhaiya shows all the exasperation of a man who already knows he's about to be annoyed to death when Arjun returns as he tells her about his love for rain.
Panchali raises her eyebrows, half impressed and half incredulous. She asks him if she can accompany him on this walk.
Elation rushes through his veins and he doesn't even think for a second before he says yes, his heart pounding in his chest much faster than the thunderclaps in the clouds that are not half as alluring as Panchali's eyes.
As they walk under the rain, Panchali walks beside him, matching each of his steps. The sound of rain against the earth is nothing compared to the sound of her payals tinkling and her bangles hitting the thick silver bracelet he wears. It's a harmonious sound that he wants to swallow. He wants to twist his heart so that his heart beats sound like their jewellery brushing against each other.
As the rain slowly but surely drenches them both, they come to stop under a gulmohar tree, which looks like there are rubies littered on the leaves, such is the brightness of the redness of those flowers.
"You know," she says, grinning as she wrings her hands to rid her hands of the extra water on her fingers,"I do suspect that you are quite right about this rain, husband. I have never felt so... exhilarated. The rain on the balcony of the palace and the rain under an open sky are two widely different things."
Arjun laughs, because he knows she is half truthful but half determined to not compliment him since she has learnt that he preens too much at every compliment.
(Every compliment given by her, that is. Sahdev teases him ceaselessly about being completely and ridiculously transparent in his worship of their wife. Arjun does not hesitate to remind him that he knows that Sahdev has forged his favourite delicate chain into a ring for their wife, who wears it every day and Sahdev preens much more than Arjun whenever he sees her fiddle with the ring.)
"You can admit that you enjoyed the rain, dear wife. I promise, I will not preen for the compliment you pay to nature."
Panchali laughs and moves closer to him, intertwining their arms and grasping his forearm in her hand. "Of course not, husband. I do enjoy the rain. Satisfied?"
Arjun looks down at her— she is almost a head shorter than himself— and sees that she is already looking at him.
Thunder strikes. She jumps slightly before pretending nothing happened and slipping her hand into his, slotting their fingers together.
The drops of rain cling to her eyelashes, a rivulet rides from her nose to her lips, sliding down to her throat and merges into the necklace she wears. Her cheeks are flushed and hair is stuck to her forehead and her tilak is smudged.
Arjun's stomach tightens.
All he can think is that he's seen all types of flowers covered in the rain, except the lotus.
Now, he has seen his wife's eyes under the rain. They are much better than any lotus in any water body in any land.
"And I enjoy you, sweet wife." He says, gently pushing away a wet strand of hair from her forehead so it does not fall into her eyes.
Panchali smiles, the one where her eyes crinkle, the smile she smiles when someone compliments her, and ducks her head.
It is then she realises that they are holding hands. She takes a breath sharply, squeaking as she does when she is embarrassed and the hollow of her throat is even more pronounced for a single second.
She leaves his hand immediately, but does not move away, standing shoulder to shoulder.
When they return home, Arjun and Panchali both wring their hair near Bheem. This time, Bheem almost catches and pinches Arjun for teaching Panchali his "absolutely uncivilized and annoying" habits. Panchali is about to be tickled, too, because Bheem bhaiya is nothing if not good at retribution.
They both hide behind Yudhishthir, who does placate Bheem bhaiya while Arjun wipes his hand on his angvastra and Panchali wipes hers on his dhoti, leaving their hand prints on his shoulder and waist respectively.
Sahdev pinches Arjun for stealing away Panchali from braiding his hair and Nakul grins at him because after coming back from the rain, Panchali beelined to Nakul immediately to request his help in cooking and he, at his core, is an opportunitist.
It warms his heart, really. He doesn't begrudge them. They are all opportunitists when it comes to their wife.
Not sound — noise. The particular, layered chaos of a body trying to process too much information at once: the salt-wet stink of the port two hundred metres east, the metal taste flooding the back of his throat, the specific creak of the warehouse roof in wind that has nothing to do with the chain currently being drawn, link by considered link, around his skull.
There are twenty-two bones in the human cranium.
He knows this the way he knows the names of every man he has killed — clinically, completely, in a register that has nothing to do with feeling and everything to do with survival. Eight cranial. Fourteen facial. Fused together along suture lines that are supposed to hold for a lifetime, that are supposed to be the one structural promise the body makes and keeps.
Major Iqbal is testing that promise personally.
The chain is not new to this work. He can tell by the way it sits — already shaped slightly to a skull's geometry, a groove worn into the rust at roughly the circumference of a man's head, which means there have been other heads, other Tuesdays, other rooms like this one in the man's considerable career. Iqbal pulls. The slack disappears. The first sound is not pain. The first sound is structural — a low percussive groan along the temporal bone, the sound a door makes when a house is settling into ground it was never built to hold.
Then the pain arrives, and it arrives the way water arrives in a sinking boat: not as one event but as a flooding, total and from every direction at once, no longer asking to be noticed but simply occupying every available inch of him.
He thinks: this is going to crack.
He thinks it with the calm of a man reading a weather report. Not if. When. The coronal suture first, probably, because that is the weakest of the fusions, the one evolution left thinnest because nothing in nature ever anticipated a man standing behind you with a length of chain and forty years of specific professional patience.
Iqbal says something. He does not hear the words. He hears the tone — satisfied, almost paternal, the tone of a man who believes he is teaching rather than ending — and somewhere underneath the white roaring static of his own skull, a separate observation arrives, cool and apart from everything else happening to his body.
This is not the worst pain I have ever felt.
It is, by any reasonable measure, an absurd thought. A man's skull does not know about reasonable measure. A man's skull, at this particular pressure, at this particular angle, has every right to declare itself the final and absolute frontier of suffering, the last word on the subject, requiring no further input from history.
But history disagrees.
[I need to stop here, because there is something underneath the chain and the bone that the reader has to understand before we go any further, or the rest of this will read as simply violence, and it is not simply violence.
There is a particular arithmetic that happens to a man who has lost everyone he has ever loved, more than once, in more than one language, under more than one name. He does the arithmetic without meaning to. He has done it in interrogation rooms and wedding halls and the back seats of cars driving too fast through cities that were never his. And the arithmetic always resolves the same way:
No physical pain — not chains, not fire, not the particular genius of Major Iqbal's forty years of practice — will ever, ever equal the pain of watching someone you love bleed out in front of you while you are too far away to reach them.
That is the whole of it. That is the floor beneath every other floor. Everything after this is built on top of that one fact, the way a house is built on a foundation nobody sees again once the rooms go up — but the foundation is still there. It is still holding everything up. It is the reason he can survive what is happening to his skull right now, and it is the reason nothing that happens to his skull will ever again be the worst thing that has happened to him.
Channel it, he thinks. Not survive it. Channel it. There is a difference, and the difference is the only reason men like him exist at all.]
The crate goes over before he consciously decides to move it.
This is the part of him that was built rather than born — Hamza's part, the part that does not deliberate, the part that has had the deliberation trained out of it in rooms far less dramatic than this one, rooms with whiteboards and stopwatches and instructors who measured hesitation in tenths of seconds and called every tenth a body in the ground. The table goes over. The chain goes slack for the half-second a chain always goes slack when its wielder has to recalibrate his footing, and in that half-second his hand finds what his hand has been trained, for twenty years, to find: the length of iron with the weighted ball at its end, the one Iqbal keeps coiled by the door like a household pet, the one that has opened more skulls than this one.
He has it raised. He has the arc already calculated — the precise geometry of where Iqbal's temple will be in 0.4 seconds, the force required, the follow-through.
And then the chain is a glass.
Not metaphorically. Not as some poetic flourish his bleeding brain is producing to cope. He is holding a glass of tea — over-sweet, over-salted in the way only one man in Lyari has ever made it, doodh patti gone slightly wrong in a way that became, against every culinary law, exactly right — and it is sliding from his fingers, and it is hitting a table that is not the overturned steel table of a Karachi warehouse but a low wooden one, chipped at one corner, sticky with years of sugar that has soaked permanently into the grain.
[Here is the second thing you need to understand, and I am only going to say it once, because saying it more than once would cheapen it: a man's mind, under enough pressure, does not retreat into nothing. It retreats into the people who built it.
We are about to go somewhere together, and it is not going to announce itself as a memory or a dream or a hallucination, because to Jaskirat — to Hamza — it does not announce itself as anything. It simply is. The body is dying in one room. The self is living in another. Both of these are equally true and neither one is in charge.]
"Beta, you're not even drinking it," Aalam says, in the particular tone of a man personally offended by wasted tea. He is behind the counter of his own shop — hand-painted sign, half a letter missing where the rain got to it three monsoons ago — wiping a glass with a rag that has clearly given up on the project of being clean. "I made this with my own hands. Khud apne haathon se."
"I'm drinking it," he says. Or Hamza says it. The distinction has, by this point in the dream, in this whole stolen second of unconsciousness, stopped mattering.
"You're holding it. That's not the same thing." Aalam sets down another glass, looks at him with the specific patience of a man who has spent years teaching someone how to be a different person and has, against every operational logic, come to love the project. "You know what I always say. Lyari doesn't give. Lyari takes and asks you to be grateful it didn't take more."
"You say a lot of things."
"I do." Aalam smiles — that smile, the one that made strangers trust him within four minutes of meeting him, the smile that eventually got him a bullet from the only person he had ever fully trusted, fired by that same person's own hand, as a mercy. "One day I'll tell you my whole story. Today was your day."
He lifts the glass. He means to drink it — wants, more than he has wanted almost anything in this stolen unconscious second, to taste the too-sweet too-salty tea one more time, to sit in this shop with this man one more time before the version of events where this man is dead reasserts itself —
The glass becomes a syringe in his hand.
Not held. Aimed. At his own eye, propelled by a wrist he knows, a face he knows, twisted now into something his mind does not want to render fully because some renderings cost too much.
Pinda's face.
He is against the wall before he registers being pushed. Pinda's hand on the plunger end, Pinda's whole body weight behind a thing the length of a finger, and Pinda is saying his name — not Hamza, never Hamza, has never once in this dream-warped compressed second called him Hamza — he is saying Jassi, Jassi, yeh tu hai na, bol, bol mujhe — and there is twenty years of friendship behind the hand and there is also, underneath it, the chemical, animal terror of a man who has just understood that everything he thought he knew about his oldest friend was a costume.
“You think I don’t know you?” Pinda’s voice, but wrong — slowed and sped up at once, the consonants smearing, his pupils enormous and black and swallowing the whites of his eyes entirely. “I held your hand at your father’s Akhand Path, Jassi, I know your face —”
He flips him.
This part is not memory-soft. This part has the hard edges of the thing it actually was: a fight, brief and desperate and entirely without grace, two men who grew up throwing cricket balls at the same wall now trying to kill each other in a room three thousand kilometres from that wall. He gets Pinda to the floor. He gets his weight over him.
And the floor is not a floor.
The floor is grass — packed dirt, a training mat, the specific give of ground built to absorb a body's repeated falling — and instead of Pinda beneath him there is simply the earth, and his arms are extending and lowering in the rhythm of a man doing push-ups, counted out loud in a voice that is not his own.
"Sattaais. Atthais." Rizwan, crouched beside him, counting with the flat efficiency of a man who has counted ten thousand of these and stopped being impressed by any of them a long time ago. "You're slowing down, Rangi"
"I'm not."
"You are. I can see your shoulder."
He looks up — he is going to argue, the way he always argued with Rizwan over numbers neither of them actually cared about, a small ritual of normalcy in a life with almost none left — and Rizwan's face is no longer Rizwan's face.
It is Yalina's.
And he understands, the way you understand things in dreams without ever being told — the cellular, instinctive way — that significant time has passed between one blink and the next. Rizwan's training ground has become a courtyard with bougainvillea spilling over one wall, and there is a small hand tugging at the hem of his kurta, insistent, demanding the specific attention only a three-year-old can demand without a single word.
He hears Zayan laugh before he looks down.
But when he looks down, there is no courtyard. There is no Karachi. There is a sugarcane field, green-gold and endless, the stalks taller than a grown man's head, and he is sitting — he realises, with the lurching vertigo of dream-logic asserting a new and absolute truth — on top of a manjha, the watchtower the farmers build to keep an eye on the crop, four bamboo legs and a woven platform, built so a boy with nothing better to do can sit above the green and feel, for a few hours, like the largest thing in the world.
"Oye, neeche dekh."
The voice comes from below, half-laughing, entirely familiar in the specific way only a first voice can be familiar — before the others, before all the other voices that would later learn to imitate intimacy without ever quite achieving it.
He looks down.
His hands, when he looks at them, are not the hands that just held a chain. They are smaller. They are holding textbooks — a stack of them, dog-eared, his name written inside the cover in handwriting that still has all its certainty intact, that has not yet learned to second-guess itself, that has not yet learned the particular slant a man's signature takes on after he has signed it under twelve different names.
"Padhaai karni hai mujhe," he tells her. Solemnly. The way only a seventeen-year-old can be solemn about something he has no actual intention of doing.
She is standing at the base of the tower with her dupatta tied carelessly around her neck and a look on her face that has already, at this age, perfected the art of seeing entirely through him.
"Tu kabse padhaai karta hai, be?" Her hands go to her hips. The fond exasperation of a girl who has known a boy long enough to have stopped being impressed by his performances and started, instead, finding them endearing. "Mujhse milna tha isliye aisa kar raha hai na?"
He does not answer. He grins instead — the kind of grin that is itself an answer, the kind that requires no words because the words would only get in the way — and climbs down to her with the careless, gravity-defying ease of a boy who has not yet learned that gravity, eventually, always collects what it's owed.
[I am going to ask the reader, here, to forgive me for what I am about to do. Because I am about to show you something beautiful, and I am about to let you fall in love with it the way he did, completely and without reservation, and I am not going to warn you when it ends. That would be a kindness, and this story has decided, very early on, not to be kind. It is going to be honest instead. I think, by the end, you will understand why those cannot always be the same thing.]
Her name was Simran. He never once, in all the years he loved her, called her that.
He called her Jessie — a private mangling of her name that had started as a joke when they were children and her tongue had stumbled trying to teach him an English word, jasmine, and had ended up sounding so much like her own name that he had simply kept it, repurposed it, made it his alone. Nobody else called her that.
It was the smallest country either of them ever owned, two syllables wide, and they guarded its borders without ever once discussing that they were doing so.
She was the daughter of a landowning family three villages over, the kind of wealth that wore itself quietly in Punjab — no ostentation, just better wheat, taller gates, a father who sat slightly straighter at the gurdwara. She had been sent, as a girl of nine, to spend her summers with relatives in their gully because her mother believed a child should know dust as well as silk, and in one of those summers she had ended up, by the specific accident that governs all childhoods, teaching a boy three houses down how to read his first full sentence of English.
The cat sat on the mat.
He still remembers the exact stupidity of the sentence and the exact gravity with which she delivered it, eight years old and entirely convinced she was performing an act of profound education.
By the time they were teenagers, the roles had reversed in every way that mattered. She had grown obsessed with literature that had nothing to do with the soil she came from — Arabic poets, English novelists, anything that proved the world was larger than three villages and a wheat harvest — and he had grown into the kind of boy who watched her read with an attention that had nothing to do with the books themselves.
The first time he held her hand, Pinda was the reason, though Pinda never knew it.
It was an evening at his house — the kind of evening that exists now only in the specific amber light of memory, though it had been, at the time, simply a Tuesday — and Pinda, who had never in his life met a girl he didn't flirt with reflexively, the way some men breathe, had turned his full unserious charm on Jasleen, Jassi's younger sister, who had giggled in the specific helpless way of a girl being flattered for the first time by someone she has known her whole life and never once looked at this way.
Jessie had laughed at the spectacle from across the courtyard. He had laughed too. And in the laughing, in the unguarded ease of two people watching something silly together, her hand had found his, not deliberately, not as a decision, simply as the natural conclusion of proximity and ease — and neither of them had pulled away, and neither of them had acknowledged it, and the not-acknowledging had been, in its own way, the loudest thing either of them had ever said.
They smoked their first cigarette together in the sugarcane field, stolen from his father's shirt pocket, traded back and forth with the theatrical seriousness of two people who believe themselves enormously sophisticated and are, in fact, coughing through half of it.
His sister Harleen caught on before anyone else did, the way older sisters always do — not through any single piece of evidence but through the accumulated weight of small ones, the way Jessie's eyes found him across a room and stayed half a second too long, the way she laughed slightly louder at his jokes than the joke ever earned. Harleen would catch Jessie's eye, in front of everyone, and say nothing at all except let her own mouth curve into something unmistakable, and Jessie would go the colour of overripe tomatoes, and Harleen would laugh — that laugh, the one you could hear three houses away — and never once say a single word out loud, because she didn't need to.
[I think it is important, here, to let the reader understand what kind of love this was before it is taken from him, because the rest of this story is going to ask you to hold an enormous amount of grief, and grief without a clear sense of what was lost is just noise. So let me be precise.
This was not a love built on drama. It did not announce itself. It built itself out of the small currency two people spend when they have known each other their whole lives and have run out of reasons to pretend otherwise — a held hand during someone else's flirtation, a shared cigarette in a field, a sister's knowing laugh that never required a single confession to land.
It built itself, in other words, the way the truest things always do: quietly, and so completely that neither of them noticed the foundation being laid until they were already standing on it.]
The night he told her he was leaving for military training specifically that he had signed up to be a Special Ops Commando, he walked her home along the canal road, the way he had walked her home a hundred times before, except this time the walking had a shape to it, an ending built in, and both of them could feel its edges even though neither of them said it aloud.
He had been practising shairi for weeks — badly, with the earnest incompetence of a boy who has read more poetry than he has ever attempted to write — and somewhere near the turn before her gate, with the streetlight flickering the way it always did, he recited two lines he had stolen and reshaped from somewhere, something about a star that does not announce its leaving, it simply stops being where you last looked for it.
She had stared at him.
Then she had started laughing, the helpless kind, both hands over her mouth.
"Ohoo. Mera international spy." She said it the way she said most things she found delightful — half-mocking, wholly fond, the two impossible to separate in her voice. "Tujhe lagta hai shairi karne se tu James Bond ban jaayega?"
"Main toh waise hi ban jaaunga."
"Haan haan." But she was smiling at him with something that had stopped, somewhere in that conversation, being entirely teasing. They both knew what was happening.
He was going one direction — towards a uniform, towards the particular hardening that military training does to a soft boy who has spent his whole life arguing with and reciting bad poetry to girls he loves — and she was going another, towards a college in another city, towards literature and a life that would, eventually, require her to stop being a girl from a gully and become something larger.
They were trying, in the only way two seventeen-year-olds know how, to make leaving funny instead of unbearable.
"Agla James Bond tu," she said again, softer this time, and reached out and tucked an invisible strand of hair that wasn't out of place, just for an excuse to touch his face. "Bas, jaan le lena sabki, lekin wapas zaroor aana."
He laughed — a real laugh, full and unguarded, one of the three or four laughs in his entire life he would later be able to recall in perfect, complete fidelity, every detail of pitch and breath intact — and at the time, he had no way of knowing he was laughing at the most accurate prophecy anyone would ever make about his life. Agla James Bond.
A boy who loved Simran, about to become a man who killed for a living, told by the only girl who would ever fully see both of those things in him simultaneously.
[She had no idea, when she said it, what she was promising him to become. He had no idea, when he laughed, that the laugh itself would be one of the last few things he carried fully into the version of himself that came after. I am not going to let you forget this line. It comes back. Everything in this story comes back, because nothing he has ever loved has stayed gone — it has only stopped being reachable.]
The morning he left for training, his whole family gathered in the courtyard for photographs — his father in his Uniform, standing too straight, the way men do when they are trying not to show how much something is costing them; his mother already crying, openly, without apology, the way only mothers are permitted to; Harleen orchestrating everyone's positions with the bossy competence of an eldest daughter; Jasleen clinging to his sleeve and refusing, for the ninth time, to let go of it.
Jessie was there too. Standing slightly apart, the way she always positioned herself in any group that included his family — close enough to belong, far enough to maintain the fiction that she didn't.
While the photographer fussed with his equipment, she had caught his eye, tilted her head fractionally towards the house, and slipped inside.
He followed two minutes later, on the pretence of fetching water nobody had asked for.
She pulled him into the small storage room off the corridor — sacks of grain, the smell of dust and turmeric — and before he had finished saying her name, she had kissed him. Hard, fast, with the desperate thoroughness of someone trying to compress an unbearable amount of feeling into the only few seconds they were going to be allowed.
"Aaj se padhai karna," she said against his mouth, pulling back just enough to speak, her hands still fisted in the front of his shirt. "Khub khelna. Khub daudna." A pause, and her eyes — wet now, though she was fighting it with everything she had — went hard with mock-warning. "Aur agar kisi aur ladki ko mudke bhi dekha na, toh dekh lena — jaan le lungi teri."
He had laughed. Genuinely, completely, the laugh arriving before he could stop it, because it was such a precisely her thing to say — a threat dressed as a joke dressed as the truest sentence either of them would ever speak to each other.
"Promise," he said.
"Promise nahi. Warning."
She kissed him once more, briefer this time, almost businesslike, the kiss of someone closing a door gently because slamming it would hurt too much — and then she was gone, back out to the courtyard, rearranging her dupatta, her face composed into something that gave nothing away to his family, who never once suspected, who would go to their graves never knowing.
He stood in the storage room a moment longer than necessary, breathing.
Then he went back out and let them take his photograph, and in every copy of that photograph that survives — and there are perhaps three, kept by people who do not know what became of him — he is smiling in a way that the rest of his family read as excitement for the future, and that only he and one other person would ever know was something else entirely.
[In tarot, there is a card that means almost everything when it stands right-side up — companionship, partnership, a meeting of equals walking the same road together — and means almost the opposite when it falls reversed. Imbalance. A bond that has been twisted out of true. The same card. The same image. Everything depends on which way it is facing when it lands.
Jaskirat was that card right-side up. Every photograph of him from before this point shows a boy oriented correctly — towards his family, towards a girl in a sugarcane field, towards a future built on the specific architecture of being loved and loving back.
What is about to happen to him is the flip. Not a different card. The same one. Turned over.
Everything after this is Jaskirat, reversed, and the world will spend the next twelve years calling the reversal Hamza, as though giving it a new name makes it a different card. It does not. It is still him. He is just facing the wrong way now, and nobody — not Sanyal, not the country, not even, for a very long time, Jaskirat himself — will manage to flip him back.]
He does not remember deciding to kill the first man. He remembers deciding to walk through the gate, and then he remembers being on the other side of it, and everything between those two points exists now only as motion — a body doing what a body has been built, in the space of a single devastating week, to do.
Sukhwinder Singh's house had high walls and low security, the particular complacency of a man who has never once in his life believed himself capable of being made to answer for anything. Pinda had gotten him the weapons from Atif Ahmed in UP, had driven through the night without a single question, had said only, at the gate, Jassi, tu theek hai na — and he had not answered, because there was no answer that would have been true.
He went in with twelve names already decided and a body that had stopped, somewhere in the last seventy-two hours, distinguishing between rage and purpose.
The first man dies before he understands he is dying, which is the only mercy in the entire house that night. The second tries to run and makes it four steps. The third has a gun and does not get to use it because Jaskirat's hand finds his wrist before his hand finds the trigger, and there is a sound that is not a gunshot, the specific wet snap of a joint deciding it cannot continue, and then there is a different sound after that.
He does not count past three. Counting would require a part of his mind that has, for these particular minutes, gone fully offline — the part that keeps tallies, that maintains a self separate from the action, that narrates. There is no narrator in that house. There is only motion and consequence, motion and consequence, repeating, the same rhythm his body will spend the next twenty years performing under a different name in a different country for a justification that will, eventually, feel almost identical to this one.
He finds Titto in the room at the end of the corridor — the room with the good furniture, the room a man keeps for himself when he has decided the rest of the house belongs to fear.
Titto has a gun and does not raise it fast enough, and Jaskirat is on him before the thought of raising it has finished forming, and Titto — older brother to the men who took his sister, the one who, three years prior, had decided that Jessie's father standing between them and a marriage was a problem with only one solution — Titto is saying, over and over, in the specific tone of a man who believes information is currency he can spend his way out of dying:
"Bata, meri behen kahaan hai? Bata mujhe. Meri behen kahaan hai?"
He says it four times. Five. The same sentence, escalating in pitch but never in content, a man asking after a sister he has, by every account that matters, never once protected — and Jaskirat, who has spent the last week learning exactly what protecting a sister actually costs, who has a sister of his own bleeding out somewhere in this same house, does not answer him.
There is no answer Titto deserves.
There is only what happens next, and what happens next ends the question along with the man asking it.
He leaves the room without looking back at what the room now contains. He has eleven names left, or ten, or he has lost count entirely, and he is moving towards the part of the house where the air smells different, where something underneath the cordite and the dust has gone metallic and final, and a voice that is not in his head, that is real, that is the only voice that has mattered to him for four years, calls his name once.
Just once.
"Jassi."
He turns.
[I am not going to tell you why she is there. I want to be honest about this, because I think it would be a betrayal of the reader to pretend there is a satisfying explanation waiting at the end of this paragraph. There isn't. Sometimes the people we love are simply present at the worst possible moment of our lives, and there is no narrative justice in it, no reason that resolves into meaning. She is there. That is the whole of the explanation this story is going to give you, because it is the whole of the explanation he ever got either.]
She is standing in the doorway with her hand at her throat, and for one entire second — the longest second of his life, longer than every second that came before it and every second that would come after — he does not understand what he is looking at, because his mind will not let him understand it, because some part of him is still standing in a sugarcane field watching her laugh at a boy reciting bad poetry, and that part of him refuses, simply refuses, to process what his eyes are reporting.
Then she makes a sound.
Not a word. A sound — wet, small, entirely wrong — and her hand at her throat comes away red, and he understands, all at once, with the totality of a door slamming, that there is blood between her fingers that has nothing to do with anyone else in this house.
He does not remember crossing the room. There is no memory of distance, only of arrival — on his knees in front of her, his hands finding her hands, finding the wound, finding the specific catastrophic geometry of a bullet through the throat, the kind of wound that does not negotiate, that does not leave room for a version of the next five minutes where she survives them.
"Jessie," she says. Or tries to. The word comes apart in her mouth, comes out as more blood than sound, and he is saying her name — her real name, the one he never used, the one he is using now because the private country of Jessie has, in this moment, become unbearable, has become a place he cannot stand to be standing in while she is dying — Simran, Simran, dekh mujhe, dekh, main hoon, main yahin hoon —
She is trying to smile. He will spend the rest of his life unable to decide if she succeeded.
Her hand finds his — finds it the way it found it years ago across a courtyard, during a flirtation that belonged to other people, an accident of proximity that became, over years, the entire architecture of his interior life — and she holds it, or tries to, her grip already losing the argument with whatever is happening inside her body, and her mouth moves once more, shaping something he will spend twelve years trying to reconstruct and will never, not once, manage to fully recover.
He thinks it might have been his name. The old one. The only one she ever used.
Then her hand goes still in his, and the stillness arrives so completely, so without ceremony, that for several seconds his mind simply refuses the information, keeps waiting for the next breath, the next small movement, the proof that the world has not actually done this — and the world does not provide it, because the world, he is learning in real time, on his knees on a stranger's floor with blood drying between his fingers, does not provide anything at all.
He does not scream. He will think about this later, in prison, in the specific silence of a cell built for men awaiting death — the strangeness of how quiet the worst moment of his life actually was. No scream. No sound large enough to match what had just happened. Just his own breathing, ragged and useless, and her hand going slowly, irreversibly cold in his, and somewhere very far away, in a part of the house he will never fully account for, his sister Jasleen, alive, chained, calling his name.
He has to choose.
He does not remember choosing. He remembers only that one moment he was holding Simran's hand and the next he was running towards Jasleen's voice, and the gap between those two moments is a thing he will spend the rest of his life trying not to examine too closely, because examining it means admitting that there was a moment — brief, unbearable, the worst single moment of an already unbearable night — where he had to decide which of the two people he loved most in the world he was capable of still saving, and the deciding itself had cost him something that never, not in twelve years, not under any name, grew back.
He is in a cell awaiting trial when the full weight of it arrives.
It does not arrive as grief, not at first. Grief would have been almost a relief — grief has a shape, a known progression, an end point people speak of even if they have never reached it themselves. What arrives instead is arithmetic, the same brutal arithmetic that will follow him for the rest of his life: if she had not loved me, she would not have been there. If I had not loved her, she would have married safely into a life that did not intersect with mine. If I had been smaller, asked for less, wanted less — she would still be teaching some other boy his first sentence of English in some other summer, alive, whole, unmarked by any of this.
He thinks: I have no regrets about the twelve men.
This thought arrives clean and entire and without apology, and he examines it the way he has learned, in this single catastrophic week, to examine everything — clinically, completely.
He does not regret Titto.
He does not regret the man with the gun, or the one who ran four steps, or any of the ten or eleven or twelve he genuinely cannot, even now, count with certainty. He would do all of it again, exactly the same way, with exactly the same hands.
What he cannot resolve — what he turns over and over in the dark of a cell that smells of other men's fear — is whether her death is something he is permitted to mourn as tragedy, or something he is required to carry as guilt.
Because Titto had wanted her for three years. Because Titto had decided, the day her father stood in his way, that the father's death solved the problem entirely — no father, no home, what will you do now — and had married her into a captivity dressed as a wedding, and had kept her in it through methods this story is not going to describe in detail, because some things do not need describing to be understood as unforgivable.
And Jaskirat thinks: she was punished for loving someone with aspirations beyond this gully. She was punished for loving me.
He does not know, in that cell, whether this thought is true or whether it is simply the shape grief takes when a man needs somewhere to put the unbearable weight of an unanswerable question. He will not know for twelve more years. He may never know.
What he does know — what arrives, unbidden, in the very specific quiet of three in the morning, when the prison is at its most honest — is what she would have said, if he had been able to tell her what happened to Titto, if there had been a version of that night where he got to her in time to say I killed him, I killed him the way he deserved to be killed —
She would have smiled. The real smile, not the dying attempt at one. She would have said, in the voice that turned every serious thing into something survivable, mera Jessie. Mera Jessie, James Bond. Jessie Bond. And she would have kissed his cheek, the way she always did when she was proud of him and did not want to make a production of it, a small private benediction nobody else was ever invited to witness.
He builds this scene so many times, in so many sleepless nights of his sentence, that it eventually achieves a strange permanence — not a memory, because it never happened, but something adjacent to memory, something his mind constructs and maintains with the same care it gives to things that are actually real, because the alternative is a silence he cannot survive.
[I want to tell you something, here, that he does not yet know and will not learn for years: that this constructed scene — this small impossible kindness his mind invents to survive a night it cannot otherwise carry — becomes, eventually, load-bearing. It is the first thing he builds to hold himself up. It will not be the last. By the time this story reaches its end, he will have built so many of these small invented mercies that an entire interior architecture exists made of nothing but things that never happened, propping up a man who needed somewhere to stand.]
The training camp does not ask if he is ready. The training camp assumes readiness is a switch, not a process, and proceeds accordingly.
The firing range is the first cruelty, though nobody designs it as one. He learns the calibrations of a particular rifle — its recoil, its drift, the specific weight of its trigger pull — and every single time he sights down the barrel, every single time, his mind supplies the same image: a throat, a wound, a hand going still in his.
He fires anyway.
He fires because the alternative is failing the only thing he has left to be good at, and he has already lost too much to also lose this.
Nobody at the camp ever learns why his groupings are tightest in the early morning sessions, when his eyes are still red from a night he will not discuss. Nobody asks why he is the only recruit who never flinches at the sound of the shot itself, only — very occasionally, very briefly — at the silence directly after it.
The water training is worse, in a way he never expects.
They are made to hold their breath underwater, an endurance drill, the instructor timing them with the flat indifference of a man who has seen hundreds of bodies discover their own limits in this exact pool. The other recruits surface gasping, defeated by their own lungs at ninety seconds, a hundred and ten, occasionally — for the genuinely gifted — two minutes.
He stays under for nearly three.
He is not holding his breath through discipline, not really, not at first. Somewhere in the blue-green silence under the surface, with his lungs screaming and his vision beginning its slow tunnel towards black, he finds her — finds her eyes, finds her face, finds the specific quality of her laugh from across a courtyard — and for one frightening second the grief is so total that the idea of simply staying under, of letting the silence keep her company a while longer, does not feel like an ending so much as a relief.
It is his sister's voice that pulls him back. Not literally — Jasleen is a hundred miles away, asleep, unaware — but the memory of her, chained in that room, alive because he came for her, and the plain unbearable fact that she still needs a brother standing upright in the world. He surfaces gasping, furious at himself for how close he let it get, and he does not let it get that close again.
What he does keep, session after session, is the trick of finding her there in the stillness — not as an invitation to stop, but as a kind of company, proof that holding on to someone you've lost doesn't have to mean following them. He becomes, without ever explaining why, the recruit with the best lung capacity in his cohort. The instructor marks it down as discipline.
It was never only discipline. But it was never, after that first frightened second, a wish to drown either — and the difference matters more than either of them will ever know to ask about.
[Here. We are back where we started, in the warehouse, on the floor, with Major Iqbal already dead behind him and the chain already still and the night already, in every practical sense, over. I told you we would come back. We are back.]
He is sitting against the overturned table when the first wave of the rest of it arrives — not the fight, the fight is finished, Iqbal's body already cooling four feet away in a position that will require explanation he does not yet have the energy to construct — but the wave that always follows a fight in him now, the accounting, the names presenting themselves one after another for a tally he never asked to keep.
Lyari's men, the first week, pinning him to a warehouse floor much like this one — different chain, same intention, the specific violation of being made small and held down and made to understand, in his body before his mind caught up, exactly how little control he actually had over what happened to him in this country.
He had thought, in that moment, eleven years ago: this is what she must have felt. Not the precise mechanics — he will never know the precise mechanics, has spent twelve years deliberately refusing to imagine them in detail because some things, examined too closely, become unbearable rather than instructive — but the shape of it. The powerlessness. The specific terror of a body being used by other bodies as though consent were a concept invented for people more fortunate than you.
He had thought of Jasleen, too. Thought of her in that room, in that house, for however many hours or days it had actually been before he arrived — thought of his sister enduring what he was, in that moment, only beginning to taste a fraction of, and had felt something in him go from fear to a colder, more useful thing.
He thinks of Pinda now, here, against the overturned table, with the same coldness arriving in reverse.
He thinks: did I make the right decision.
Pinda, who drove through the night without asking a single question. Pinda, who promised — across a courtroom grille, the only promise either of them ever needed to make explicit — to look after Jasleen, and who kept that promise for over a decade, long enough that Jasleen no longer needed looking after, long enough that the promise itself became, eventually, something closer to family.
Pinda, who recognised his oldest friend's face at a party in a foreign city and reacted the way any human being would react to discovering the dead are not actually dead — with disbelief curdling fast into betrayal, with drugs and grief and twenty years of friendship colliding inside one skull until the only available response was violence.
Pinda is dead because Jaskirat's hands made him dead.
He thinks of King Midas — an old story, one he half-remembers from some English lesson Simran gave him decades ago in a summer that no longer feels real — a man who wanted gold so badly that everything he touched became gold, including, eventually, the people he loved, until he had built himself a kingdom made entirely of beautiful, lifeless things.
Everything I touch turns to death, he thinks. Not gold. Death. He has inverted the myth entirely, has built the opposite kingdom, gleaming and silent and entirely his own making.
[The tarot card again. I promised you it would return, and here it is: he thinks, sitting against that overturned table, about every name he has ever loved, and understands — with the specific clarity that arrives only after violence, when the body has gone quiet enough to let the mind finally speak — that the card has never once flipped back. He has been reversed since the night in Sukhwinder's house. Every good thing he has built since then has been built reversed, upside down, the meaning of companionship twisted permanently into something that costs the companion their life.]
He looks out, from the broken warehouse window, at the Lyari skyline — the particular jagged silhouette of a city that took him in as a stranger and made him, slowly, into something that could pass as one of its own sons.
He thinks of Aalam.
Aalam, who took a frightened, freshly-made boy named Hamza and taught him, patiently, over years, how to be a person rather than simply a cover story — how to laugh at the right moments, how to argue about cricket with conviction, how to make doodh patti the way Lyari liked it rather than the way Punjab had taught him. Aalam, who took the blame for Pinda's death without being asked twice, who said I'll take it, go with the simple finality of a man who had already decided, long before that moment arrived, exactly what he was willing to spend for the boy he had raised into Hamza.
Aalam, who died by his hands too — not as punishment, not as betrayal, but as the single most terrible kindness Jaskirat has ever performed: a clean death instead of whatever Major Iqbal would have constructed from a slower one. Aalam's eyes, in the half-second before, had said yes. Had said I understand. Do it now, before you lose the nerve.
Another humsafar. Another companion who was supposed to walk beside him and instead walked ahead, into whatever comes after, leaving him once again the one left standing in the road.
He thinks: justice abandoned me when I needed it the most. The court that sentenced him without once asking who Sukhwinder Singh had been, or what he had done, or why a boy with no criminal history had walked into a house with a rifle.
The system that decided punishing the response was simpler than addressing the provocation. He had been failed first, and made into something the country could use only after the failing was already complete, and there is a version of him — sitting here, now, against this table, in this warehouse, with another dead man behind him — that wonders whether all of this, every single piece of it, was simply punishment continuing under new management. Whether leaving Pathankot for his own small selfish dream of being an officer was the original sin the universe has spent twenty years extracting payment for.
He thinks of 26/11. Of the warning he sent that arrived a day late, a date changed by Iqbal's own careful hand, of the bodies in Mumbai he will never be able to separate, in his own private accounting, from his own failure to get the timing right.
He puts his face in his hands and he cries.
Not the controlled, edited grief of a man performing sorrow for an audience. The other kind — the kind that arrives in heaving, ugly, undignified waves, the kind that does not care that he is meant to be a professional, that does not care that Iqbal's body is four feet away and someone will eventually come looking, the kind that has been owed to him by his own body for over a decade and has finally, in this ruined warehouse, found a moment unguarded enough to collect.
He is still crying, has been crying for some unmeasured stretch of minutes that feels both instant and endless, when the phone in his pocket buzzes.
Yalina.
He looks at the screen for a long moment before answering, and in that moment — this is the part he will never be able to fully explain to anyone, including himself — the deepest guilt of the entire night arrives, deeper even than Pinda, deeper than Aalam, deeper than the twelve names in Sukhwinder's house.
Because he married Yalina, in part, for a reason he has never said aloud to a single living person.
She reminded him of Simran.
Not in any feature he could point to and name. Not the eyes, not the voice, not the particular cadence of her laugh — none of it matched in any way an outside observer could have identified. But something in the quality of her attention, the way she looked at him as though genuinely curious what was happening behind his face rather than simply accepting the face at value — something in that had reached back across twelve years and touched the exact place inside him that had gone numb the moment Simran's hand stilled in his.
He remembers the first time he saw her — a political gathering in Lyari, Jameel Jamali's daughter standing slightly apart from the men clustered around her father, dressed in something pale, her hands folded, her eyes — and here, even now, even alone in a warehouse with a dead man and a decade of grief finally surfacing, he cannot finish the thought honestly without the old name arriving where the new one should be. He had thought, watching her that evening: her eyes are round, dark, the kind a man could—
And the name that completed the sentence in his head, that night and every night since, had never once been Yalina's.
He thinks now, with the specific cruelty of total honesty arriving too late to be useful to anyone: I let myself have her because I had already lost everything. I told myself I was permitted this one selfishness, because what else was left to take from me.
And he asks himself, in the quiet after the crying has mostly spent itself, the question he has never once let himself ask directly: did I love Yalina? Or did Hamza love her, the way Hamza loves everything — as cover, as function, as the necessary architecture of a mission — and did I simply borrow the feeling, the way a man without a coat borrows someone else's against the cold, never quite certain if the warmth is real or only proximity?
He does not know.
He picks up the phone before the question can answer itself, because some questions are kinder left exactly where they are.
"I'm alive," he says. Two words. It is all he has the strength to give her, and even those two words cost him more than she will ever know.
The briefing room in Delhi smells of cold tea and recycled air, the specific institutional staleness of a place where men discuss the cost of other men's lives in clean administrative language.
Ajay Sanyal sits across from him with the same unreadable composure he has carried through every meeting of their twelve-year acquaintance, a man who has spent a career learning to fill every room he occupies without ever once raising his voice to do it.
"You're home," Sanyal says. Not a question.
"I am."
"Sushant will want the full debrief by Thursday."
Jaskirat does not answer immediately. He is looking past Sanyal, at nothing in particular, at the specific middle distance a man finds when he is doing arithmetic he would rather not be doing out loud.
He has spent twelve years believing himself the abandoned one.
Abandoned by the justice system that failed his family. Abandoned by a country that asked everything of him and offered, in exchange, a name that was not his own and a life that would never again belong fully to him. Abandoned by fate, by chance, by whatever force decided that a boy who only ever wanted to protect the people he loved should instead become the single most efficient instrument of loss any of them would ever encounter.
But sitting here, in this cold room, with Sanyal watching him in the particular patient way of a man who has learned to read silences as fluently as speech, a different accounting arrives.
He has not only been abandoned. He has abandoned.
He has abandoned Yalina — left her in Lyari with a truth she did not ask for and cannot undo, married to a name that no longer exists, mother to a child whose father has vanished into a country she has never seen. He has abandoned Zayan, who will grow up — is, even now, growing up — without him, with only a photograph in someone else's pocket as evidence that a father once existed at all.
He has abandoned Rizwan, who has no extraction plan of his own, no Sanyal waiting to pull him out, because Rizwan was always built as support rather than centre, and support, in this particular profession, is rarely owed the same mercy as the men it supports.
And now — this is the part that finally breaks something loose in his chest, sitting in this cold room with cold tea going colder on the table between them — he understands that he is about to do it again. He is going to choose, in the next several minutes, in the next conversation he has not yet had the courage to start, to abandon his mother and his sister one more time. Not because he wants to.
Because some calculus he has never fully agreed to but has somehow always obeyed insists that his presence in their lives would endanger them more than his absence ever has, that the man who walks back through that gate brings with him every enemy he has made in twelve years of bringing death to men who deserved it, that loving them from a distance is the only love he is still permitted to offer.
Sanyal, watching something move across his face that twelve years of training has not fully managed to suppress, says, unprompted, in the particular quiet voice he reserves for moments he has decided matter:
"The men who go to war," Sanyal continues, "are not the ones who feel nothing. They are the ones who feel everything, and go anyway, because someone decided, somewhere, that the going mattered more than the feeling. I am not telling you this to comfort you. I do not think you want comfort, and I do not think comfort is owed to you in any case that would actually help."
A pause, longer this time.
"I am telling you because I think you have spent twelve years believing the going erased the feeling. It did not."
He stands outside the gate in the last light of a November afternoon, and he does not go in.
He can see his mother through the window — older than the photograph he carries, moving more slowly through the kitchen than the kitchen of his memory allows for, but unmistakably, devastatingly alive. He can see Jasleen in the courtyard, a child on each hip in the way only a mother of two learns to manage, laughing at something one of them has said, her laugh almost — almost — Harleen's laugh, inherited the way certain things skip a generation and land somewhere unexpected.
He stands there for what feels like a long time.
[This is where I have to tell you something, and I am sorry, because I know what you have been hoping for since the very first line of this story. You have been hoping the gate opens. You have been hoping his mother looks up. You have been hoping that whatever this story has cost you so far, it pays you back here, at the end, with a homecoming you can hold onto.
It does not open. She does not look up. He stands outside the gate of the house he grew up in, watching the only people he has left in the world move through an ordinary evening that does not include him, and somewhere in the watching, he understands the final shape of what this has all cost him: not just the people he has lost, but his own right to be present among the people he hasn't.
Balidaan parmo dharam, he tells himself, in the street, the old phrase arriving the way old phrases do, worn smooth from years of use, no longer quite able to mean what it once meant and no longer quite able to stop meaning it either. Sacrifice is the highest duty.
He has said it so many times now that it has stopped sounding like conviction and started sounding like the only sentence left that he still knows how to finish.]
He turns and walks away before anyone sees him.
He thinks, walking, of every companion this story has ever given him and taken back. Simran, in a doorway, her hand going still in his. Pinda, on a floor in Karachi, recognising his oldest friend's face one half-second before losing him to it permanently. Aalam, in the same city, choosing a clean death over a slow one and asking, with his eyes, to be granted it by the only hand he trusted to do it kindly.
Yalina, somewhere across a border he is no longer permitted to cross, raising a son who will grow up knowing his father only as an absence with a photograph attached to it.
Humsafar, he thinks. Companion of the road. He has had so many. He has lost every single one.
fin.
A/N: yes, i am STILL on hiatus before any of you start pointing at me like "🤨"
this fic was scheduled. i am not here. i am a ghost. a figment of your imagination. a government conspiracy.
SYNOPSIS: Uzair Baloch has run protection rackets, settled border disputes, and once made a man cry without saying a word. He cannot, it turns out, successfully pretend to court the wrong woman in front of the right one.
Akhlaq's idea. Akhlaq's terrible, terrible idea.
word count: 3.8k
A/N: kya matlab kal mera exam hain ? i actually had FUN writing which feels illegal. no angst. i tried to put angst in twice and physically deleted it both times. growth.
There is a category of decisions Uzair Baloch makes that he later understands, with total clarity and no possibility of appeal, to have been made by a stupider man wearing his face.
This is one of those decisions.
He is aware of this even as he is making it. That is the specific humiliation of it — it is not a decision he stumbles into. He walks into it with his eyes open.
It starts with Akhlaq, which to be honest most bad ideas do.
"Aap use dekhte hain," Akhlaq says, "aur phir kuch nahi karte. Yeh teen mahine se chal raha hai."
"Mein dekhta nahi hun."
Akhlaq has exprienced this first hand, and would like for it to be known that—he is very annoyed.
"Bhai." Akhlaq says this with the patience of a man addressing someone who has just claimed the sky is not blue. "Aap Aiza ki dukaan ke saamne se teen baar gol gol ghoom ke nikalte hai jab kuch lena tak nahi hota."
This is, unfortunately, true.
Aiza Sheikh runs a small stationery and embroidery-thread shop two streets from the Haveli, inherited from an aunt who had no children of her own and decided, with the brisk efficiency of a woman tired of waiting for the world to organise itself, that Aiza would do.
She is twenty-four. She has opinions about thread quality that she will share whether you have asked or not. She does the books for the shop in a hand so neat it looks typed, and she has never once, in the eight months Uzair has been finding excuses to walk past her shop, given any indication that she has noticed him noticing her.
This last part is the problem.
"Toh baat karien usse," Akhlaq says.
"Tujhe pata hai itna simple nahi hai."
"Kyun nahi hai bhai?"
Uzair does not have a clean answer for this, which is itself unusual, because Uzair Baloch generally has a clean answer for everything, filed and ready, the way other men keep correct change.
The honest answer is something closer to: because she has a way of looking at a person that makes him feel as though he is being assessed for structural integrity, and he is not entirely confident he would pass.
He does not say this to Akhlaq.
"Bohot kaam hai," he says instead.
Akhlaq looks at him the way you look at a man who has just told you the moon is made of roti.
The actual plan — and Uzair wants this on record, for whoever is keeping the record, that the plan was never his — arrives three weeks later, after a Friday in which Uzair walks past Aiza's shop, finds her in conversation with a man he does not recognise, and experiences a reaction so immediate and so physically uncomfortable that he has to stop on the corner and pretend to check his phone for several seconds before his face is safe for public viewing.
The man, it turns out, is her cousin from Hyderabad, visiting for a wedding.
Uzair learns this later, from Akhlaq, who finds the entire episode the single most entertaining thing that has happened to him in calendar memory.
"Aap wahan khade thein," Akhlaq says, wheezing slightly, "phone dekh rahe the jaise usme Pakistan ka future likha ho."
"Bas kar."
"Uska cousin tha!"
"Mujhe pata hai ab."
"Aapko nahi pata tha!" Akhlaq wipes his eyes. He is enjoying this in a manner Uzair finds personally offensive. "Yaar, agar tujhe itna farak padta hai jab koi aadmi uske saath khada ho, toh —" He stops.
Something crosses his face. The specific, dangerous something that means Akhlaq has had an idea, and Akhlaq's ideas, historically, have a success rate that does not encourage further ideas.
"Kya?" Uzair says, already suspicious.
"Aap kisi aur ke saath dikh jao."
Uzair stares at him.
"Sochiye," Akhlaq says, warming to it now, sitting forward, hands moving the way they do when he believes he is being brilliant. "Abhi tak aap sirf chakkar laga rahe hai. Woh aapko sirf grahak ki tarah dekhti hai. Lekin agar usne aapko kisi aur larki ke saath dekha — agar usne socha ki aap kisi aur mein interested hai —"
"Toh kya hoga?"
"Toh use farak padega!" Akhlaq spreads his hands as though he has just solved something in physics. "Bhai. Sabse purana tareeka hai."
He says no for four full days, with conviction, the kind of conviction he applies to refusing bad business deals and worse alliances, and on the fifth day he is standing across the road from Aiza's shop watching her laugh at something her shop-neighbour's son has said — actually laugh, head back, the full unguarded version of it that she has never once produced in Uzair's direction in eight months of strategic loitering — and something in his chest does an undignified, expensive thing, and he goes and finds Akhlaq and says, with the air of a man surrendering a city: "Theek hai. Bata."
[The plan, as constructed by Akhlaq, has exactly one design flaw, which is that it requires a second woman, and the only woman Akhlaq can produce on short notice who is willing to participate in an elaborate scheme to manufacture romantic jealousy is his own younger sister, Saba, who agrees on the condition that Uzair owe her a favour of her choosing, unspecified, to be redeemed at any point in the future, no questions asked.
Uzair should have recognised this term as a warning.
He does not.]
The first attempt happens outside the mosque after Friday prayers, which is, in retrospect, not the ideal venue for a man to be seen romantically pursuing anyone, but Akhlaq's logic was that "sab log wahan hote hain, sabko pata chal jayega," which has the unfortunate virtue of being correct.
Saba is supposed to walk past, see Uzair, stop, and engage him in friendly, visible conversation. Uzair is supposed to receive this conversation with the warm, slightly besotted energy of a man being courted.
Aiza, who walks this route home from the shop every Friday at this approximate time, is supposed to see this, register it, and experience some galvanising jealousy that will rearrange eight months of indifference into something workable.
What actually happens is this:
Saba walks up, says, "Salaam, Uzair bhai," with a completely straight face, and Uzair — who has had four days to prepare for this moment and has used none of them productively — says, "Salaam," in a voice so stiff it could have been notarised.
"Tujhe muskuraana tha," Saba mutters, still smiling for the benefit of any audience. "Itna khush dikh jaise tujhe maine nahi Aiza ne bulaaya ho"
"Mein khush hun."
"Tu aise khush hai jaise koi tera vehicle impound kar raha ho."
He attempts a smile. It does not go well. He can feel it not going well — can feel his own face failing to cooperate, the muscles arranging themselves into something closer to a man bracing for impact than a man enjoying a conversation — and Saba, watching this unfold with visible horror, says, under her breath, "Khuda ke liye, Uzair bhai, mein teri behen jaisi hun, tujhe itna ajeeb hone ki zaroorat nahi —"
"Mujhe pata hai."
"Toh aisa kyun kar raha hai —"
"Pata nahi!"
They are still arguing, in fierce undertones, both smiling with the desperate brightness of two people performing a play neither of them rehearsed, when Uzair looks past Saba's shoulder and sees Aiza.
She is standing outside her shop, locking up for the afternoon, and she has clearly seen the entire exchange — has seen Uzair Baloch standing in front of the mosque with a young woman, smiling the specific smile of a man trying too hard, and her expression is not jealousy.
Her expression is concern.
Genuine, uncomplicated concern, the look you give a man who appears to be having a difficult conversation, possibly a breakup, possibly a family dispute, possibly some private trouble that is none of her business but is nonetheless visible from across a street.
She does not look jealous.
She looks like she is wondering if he is okay.
This is worse. This is so much worse than indifference that Uzair spends the walk home recalculating the entire architecture of the plan, because somewhere in his chest a new and specific fear has installed itself: that Aiza Sheikh does not see him as a man who could plausibly be desired by anyone, only as a man who is, apparently, going through something.
"Pehli koshish thi bhai," Akhlaq says, unbothered, when Uzair reports the failure. "Aise nahi hota pehli baar mein."
"Mein iska part nahi banna chahta tha."
"Aapne hi kaha tha mujhse."
"Tune kaha tha 'soch'!"
"Aur aapne socha aur maan gaye," Akhlaq says, with the serene logic of a man who feels entirely vindicated. "Toh ab dosra try karte hain."
The second attempt is worse.
It is worse because Saba, having decided that subtlety was clearly not Uzair's strength, takes matters into her own hands and arrives at the small chai dhaba near Aiza's shop on a Tuesday evening, sits across from Uzair with the deliberate, theatrical fondness of someone performing courtship for an audience of one, and says, loudly enough to carry: "Uzair bhai, aapne mere liye yeh laaya?" — referring to a box of mithai that Uzair did, in a moment of poor planning, actually bring, on Akhlaq's insistence, as a "prop."
"Haan," Uzair says, because the lie has already been constructed and he is merely operating it.
"Kitna sweet hain aap," Saba says, opening the box with great ceremony, and then, lower, through her teeth, without moving her smiling mouth: "Yeh kaafi achi hain, waise. Tu khareed sakta hai mere liye aur bhi."
"Yeh ek baar ke liye tha."
"Tune kaha tha jo mein maangun."
He has, in fact, said this. He regrets it specifically and completely.
The performance proceeds. Saba laughs at things Uzair has not said anything funny about. Uzair attempts to look fond, which on his face resembles a man squinting into difficult sunlight. And Aiza — Aiza, who is sweeping the front step of her shop with the brisk efficiency she brings to everything — looks over exactly once.
She looks at the mithai box.
She looks at Saba, laughing.
She looks at Uzair, squinting.
And then she goes back inside and Uzair hears, with the specific clarity that only humiliation provides, the bell above her shop door ring as she shuts it slightly harder than necessary.
"Dekha," Akhlaq says later, when Uzair recounts this with the flat despair of a man describing a structural collapse. "Reaction mil gayi!"
"Woh gussa thi."
"Gussa bhi reaction hai!"
"Mujhpe nahi! Mithai pe thi shayad — "
"Bhai." Akhlaq leans forward, deeply serious, deeply wrong. "Gussa tab aata hai jab kisi cheez ki parwaah ho. Agar use farak nahi padta toh woh darwaza zor se band nahi karti."
Uzair wants to believe this. This is, he understands later, the precise mechanism by which he allows the plan to continue for a third, catastrophic attempt: he wants to believe it so badly that he stops applying to Akhlaq's theories the scrutiny he applies to literally everything else in his life.
[The archive — because there is always an archive, because Uzair Baloch is constitutionally incapable of not keeping one — does not begin with the mosque or the mithai. It begins four months earlier, with a torn shirt sleeve and a question of thread colour, and Uzair revisits it now with the specific masochism of a man checking old wounds to see if they still hurt.
He had gone in for thread. Black thread, specifically, for Ulfat bhabi, who had sent him with a swatch and very precise instructions he had already forgotten by the time he reached the shop.
Aiza had taken one look at the swatch and said, without looking up from her ledger, "Yeh kaala nahi hai. Yeh charcoal hai."
"Kya farak hai?"
She had looked up then. The look. The structural-integrity look. "Roshni mein farak padta hai." She had pulled three spools from the shelf without checking the labels, set them in a row, and said, "Yeh teeno mein se ek hoga jo bhabi ne maanga hai. Bata do unhe agli baar khud aayein, ya phone pe sahi rang bata dein — aap mardon ko rang nahi pehchaante."
He had bought all three spools, out of some instinct he did not examine at the time, and had walked home faintly amused by being scolded with such complete confidence by a woman half his size, and it had taken him almost three weeks to admit to himself that the amusement was the early architecture of something much larger.
He has been faintly amused, in this specific and expensive way, ever since.]
The third attempt is meant to be the conclusive one. Akhlaq, having exhausted subtlety and theatre, has decided the missing ingredient is stakes — a scenario in which Aiza is forced not merely to witness affection but to confront the possibility of losing access to Uzair entirely, which Akhlaq describes, with the confidence of a man who has clearly been reading something, as "scarcity."
"Scarcity?"
"Log cheezein zyada chahte hain jab unhe lagta hai ki woh chali jayengi."
"Mein cheez nahi hun."
"Aap samajhiye baat ko."
The plan, such as it is: Saba will arrive at the shop directly, under the pretext of buying thread, and will mention — casually, conversationally, the way you mention weather — that she and Uzair are discussing families meeting soon.
Marriage-adjacent language.
The nuclear option.
Akhlaq's theory is that this will collapse whatever wall of indifference Aiza has built and produce, finally, the jealousy the entire operation has been constructed to extract.
Uzair has serious reservations.When does he not?
But will he agree? Yes.
He voices none of them, because by this point he has entered the specific psychological state of a man so deep into a bad plan that turning back feels more humiliating than continuing, which is its own kind of stupidity, possibly the most dangerous kind, the kind that has historically ended empires.
He is standing across the road when it happens — close enough to see, far enough to maintain what he is still, against all evidence, calling deniability.
Saba goes in. He watches through the shop's open doorway as she picks up a spool of thread, says something he cannot hear, and watches Aiza's face do something complicated and fast that he also cannot read from this distance.
Then Aiza puts down her ledger.
Then Aiza walks to the doorway of her own shop, looks directly across the road at Uzair Baloch standing there with his hands in his pockets and his face arranged into what he believes is casual indifference, and says, in a voice that carries the entire length of the street with no particular effort:
"Uzair bhai. Idhar aao."
It is not a request. It has the same quality Aiza's voice always has, the brisk, structural, no-nonsense quality of a woman correcting thread colour, except now it is aimed directly at him, and every person within earshot — the paan shop owner, two boys on a single bicycle, an elderly man who has been pretending to read a newspaper outside the shop for the last twenty minutes for reasons of his own — turns to watch him cross the road.
He crosses the road.
Inside the shop, Saba has gone very still, the stillness of a co-conspirator recognising, late, that the operation has been compromised.
Aiza looks at Uzair. She looks at Saba. She looks back at Uzair.
"Aap dono shaadi kar rahe hain?" she says. Plainly. The same tone she uses for thread.
"Nahi," Uzair says, too fast.
"Saba ne abhi bataya."
"Woh —" He looks at Saba. Saba looks at the ceiling, which has, apparently, become extremely interesting. "Galat samjha aapne."
"Mujhe theek se samajh aaya," Aiza says. "Maine khud suna." She crosses her arms"Toh batao. Shaadi ho rahi hai, ya nahi ho rahi?"
"Nahi ho rahi," Saba says quickly, finding her voice, clearly deciding that self-preservation outranks loyalty to a plan she never fully believed in. "Maine — galti se — "
"Saba," Aiza says, without looking at her, "tum bahar jaake mera intezaar karo. Mein tumhe thread de dungi do minute mein."
Saba goes. Fast. Uzair has rarely seen a person leave a room with such efficiency.
This leaves Uzair Baloch alone in a thread shop with Aiza Sheikh, who is looking at him the way she looks at fabric she suspects has been mislabelled.
"Ab," she says. "Mujhe sach bolo."
He considers, briefly, the architecture of a lie. He has several available. He discards all of them, which surprises him, because lying has historically been a skill he is quite good at, and he finds that in this specific room, in front of this specific woman, the skill has simply stopped functioning, the way a key stops fitting a lock that has been changed.
"Saba meri kuch nahi hai," he says. "Akhlaq ki behen hai."
"Yeh mujhe pata hai. Poore mohalle ko pata hai."
"Toh —"
"Toh mujhe yeh samajh nahi aa raha,"Aiza says, "ki tum log pichle teen haftay se mere dukaan ke aas paas natak kyun kar rahe ho. Mithai, mosque, ab shaadi ki baatein.Uzair bhai. Mujhe dikhta hai jab koi cheez asli nahi hoti."
He has no response prepared for this, because no version of the plan accounted for the possibility that Aiza would simply identify the plan as a plan, correctly, on sight, the way she identifies charcoal pretending to be black.
"Toh kya tha yeh?" she says. Not angry. Worse than angry. Genuinely, simply curious, with the specific patience of someone willing to wait as long as necessary for an honest answer.
He could still lie. There is a version of this conversation where he produces some explanation about Saba, about a misunderstanding, about nothing at all, and walks out with his dignity slightly dented but intact, and never has to say the thing he has been not-saying for eight months.
He looks at her. At the ledger behind her with its perfect handwriting. At the three spools of thread, still on the shelf, still in the row she had arranged them in months ago, because apparently she had simply left them there, because apparently some small part of that day had also stayed with her, which he had not allowed himself to consider until exactly this moment.
"Mein chahta tha tumhe farak pade," he says. "Mujhse."
Silence.
"Isliye yeh sab kiya," he continues, because he has started now and there is no clean place to stop, the way there is no clean place to stop a wall once it has begun coming down. "Socha agar tum mujhe kisi aur ke saath dekhogi, tumhe — " He stops. Reorganises. "Akhlaq ka idea tha. Bahut bura idea tha."
"Bahut bura idea tha," Aiza agrees, immediately, with no hesitation whatsoever, which under different circumstances might have stung and right now simply feels like relief, like a window opening in a room that has been shut too long.
"Haan."
"Tumhe pata bhi hai shaadi ka jhoot kitna risky tha? Iss mohalle mein? Kal tak sabko pata chal jata ki Uzair Baloch ne Akhlaq ki behen se shaadi todi."
"Mujhe pata hai. Ab pata hai."
She looks at him for a long moment. The look has changed slightly — still the structural-integrity assessment, but with something underneath it now that he cannot immediately name, something that makes him feel less like fabric under inspection and more like a person standing in a room that has gotten suddenly very small.
"Tum seedha bata sakte the," she says.
"Haan."
"Toh kyun nahi bataya?"
This is the actual question. The one Akhlaq's entire elaborate, humiliating, multi-week plan had been constructed to avoid asking honestly even once, and here it is anyway, delivered plainly, by the one person whose plain delivery he has apparently spent eight months unable to stop thinking about.
"Kyunki," he says, "agar mein seedha bolta aur tum mana kar deti, toh kam se kam mujhe pata chal jata sach mein. Iss tarah —" He stops. Finds the rest of it. "Iss tarah mein bewakoof reh sakta tha thoda aur."
Something in her face moves. Not quite a smile.
"Aur ab?" she says.
"Ab tumne pakad liya. Toh ab koi rasta nahi bacha bewakoof rehne ka."
"Toh seedha pucho."
He looks at her. She is standing with her arms crossed, in a shop that smells like new thread and old paper, having just dismantled three weeks of strategy in under two minutes with nothing but plain observation, and he understands, with the specific clarity of a man finally arriving somewhere he has been circling for a long time, that this — exactly this, the bluntness, the refusal to let anything go unexamined, the complete absence of patience for his nonsense — is the precise quality that made him stupid about her in the first place.
"Aiza," he says. "Mujhe tumse pyar hain."
"Yeh behtar tha," she says. "Dekha, kitna asaan tha."
"Teen haftay lage."
"Tumhari galti hai. Maine pehle din se intezaar kiya tha ki tum seedha pucho."
He stares at her.
"Mujhe teen din mein pata chal gaya tha. Tum bahut subtle nahi ho, Uzair bhai."
"Akhlaq ne kaha tha mein achi acting kar raha hun."
"Akhlaq," Aiza says, with the flat, final judgement of a woman delivering a verdict, "ko thread aur logon dono ki samajh nahi hai."
[Outside, Saba is waiting exactly where she was told to wait, and when Uzair finally emerges — considerably later than two minutes, considerably more undone than when he went in — she takes one look at his face and says, "Theek hai. Ab tu mujhe woh favour de raha hai jo maine maanga tha, aur woh favour hai: kabhi mujhe dobara apne natak mein mat ghaseet."
"Manzoor hai."
"Aur Akhlaq ko batana mat ki uska plan kaam kar gaya."
"Kaam nahi kiya uska plan."
"Toh kya kaam kiya?"
Uzair considers this. The mosque, the mithai, the shaadi ki jhooti baat — none of it had worked, not in the way Akhlaq intended. What had worked was simpler and stupider and entirely outside Akhlaq's design: three weeks of bad theatre finally exhausting Uzair's capacity to keep not-saying the thing, in front of a woman patient enough, and unimpressed enough, to wait him out.
"Mein," he says, eventually. "Mein kaam kar gaya."
Akhlaq will, when he hears the full story two days later, claim total credit regardless, and will spend the better part of a year bringing it up at any opportunity, and Uzair will let him, mostly, because correcting him would require explaining the actual ending, which belongs — he has decided — to exactly two people, and a shop full of thread that has, since that Tuesday, started keeping slightly later hours than the rest of the street.]
one final author's note: AHHHHHHHHHH (cheee ye kya likh diya)
Note: this is a work of fiction. It has no connection with real life. It does not promote any violence or support the real life actions of the people mentioned. All characters rightly belong to Aditya Dhar except my oc. Plagiarism is strictly prohibited. All the islamic rituals are taken from google, their is no intention of spreading hate against any religion.
The amazing plot is by @obsessedwidskincare
Pairing: Uzair Baloch x Alizeh Sheikh
Alizeh had loved Uzair for as long as she can remember. She had been living with her cousin, Yalina since childhood. Her parents were rich business owners, who had no time for her. Hence, she jumped on the opportunity to live with her cousin. Since she had been 14, her feelings for Uzair were known to everyone around them.
And since than Uzair, had been strict on his stance that he had no feelings for Alizeh what so ever.
And now, after being rejected again by Uzair, Alizeh sat in her shared bedroom with Yalina bawling her eyes out. Her mascara had run down her cheeks, giving her panda eyes. Yalina winced at her friend's appearance and passed her another box of tissues.
"Usne mujhe burger bachi kaha yalina!" Alizeh cried, throwing a pillow across the room. "Itna hi nahi usne yeh bhi kaha ki Lyari itni ruthless hai ki meine yaha zinda nahi reh paungi! Jesse itne saal se to meri rooh yaha ghoom rahi haina"
Yalina squinted her eyes at Alizeh and asked nervously "Uzair bhai ko ruthless word pata hai?"
Alizeh threw Yalina a glare and slapped her arm "Esse mat bol! Woh anparh nahi hain" she defended.
“Unhein angrezi nahi aati.” Yalina defended her claim earning another glare from Alizeh, just as she raised her hand, probably to smack Yalina again, Yalina caught it and gave her a nervous smile
“Par masla woh nahi hai, masla to yeh hai ke unhein tujh se mohabbat hai, magar itne ziddi hain ke kahenge nahi.”
Alizeh sobbed loudly, successfully distracted making Yalina sigh in relief.
“To ab main kya karoon? Devdas ban kar rahoon? Dubai mein Ammi Abbu ne mere liye larkon ka Amazon khol rakha hai. Mujhe kisi burger bachay se nikah nahi karna.”
Yalina fell silent, the gears in her mind running. She gave Alizeh a smirk that made it clear that they were up to no good.
"Kidnap karle" Yalina suggests, her eyes shining brightly.
"KYA BAKWAS KAR RAHI HAI?"
"Abe, Uzair bhai ko tujh se mohabbat hai, bas izhar nahi kar rahe is darr se ke unke dushman un tak pohanchne ke liye tujhe nuqsan na pohanchayein. Magar agar hum unhein kidnap karke nikah karwa dein, to unhein apni mohabbat maan ni padegi." Yalina explains. Alizeh blushed at Yalina's declaration of Uzair's love for her. But then she frowned as the reality sinked in on her.
“Pagal hai kya? Usse mujh se mohabbat nahi hai. Hoti to—”
It was Yalina's turn to smack Alizeh's arm making her yelp. "Chup kar! Dikhate nahi hain, magar tujh se bura haal Uzair bhai ka hai. Roz college ke baad bahar khare hote hain. Teri kaunsi class kab hai, kaunsa professor hai, class mein kitne bache hain, woh bache kiske hai, sab pata hai unhein. Jab tu roti hai to tujhe ice cream khilane le jate hain. Jab tu meri aur Hamza ki date mein third wheeling karti hai to tujhe company dene aa jatay hain. Ab tu convince ho gayi ya main aur boloon?”
Alizeh hugged wiping her mascara stanned cheeks, her chest puffed in new found confidence.
"Chal Uzair Baloch ko utha lein" Alizeh announced, her voice filled with confidence.
"Hume kidnap karenge?" Yalina asks sarcastically. It was impossible for two girls to kidnap Uzair Baloch in broad day light.
Alizeh smiled sheepishly at her "Hamza bhai ko phone laga na"
Hamza had taken Uzair's jeep to accompany Ulfat to the market. When he received the call from Yalina, he had not noticed his phone being connected to the blue tooth of the car.
"Hello?" Hamza answered nervously hoping Yalina does not sprout something in front of Ulfat.
"Jaan tum jaha bhi ho, woh sab kaam chord kar abhi ke abhi mujhe Dolmen Mall mein milo, humein Uzair bhai ko kidnap karna hai"
Hamza nearly drove the jeep into a fruit stall earning a string of curses from the vendor. He parked the car to the side and grabbed his phone.
"yeh kya bakwas kar rahi ho?" Hamza tried his best to turn off the blue tooth but he couldn't due to his shaking fingers.
Ulfat grabbed the phone from Hamza "Ab kya fayda, sun to liya meine sab kuch"
Yalina and Alizeh froze on the other side.
"Ulfat bhabhi ke aage unke hi devar ko kidnap kar ne ka plan bana rahe hain" alizeh spoke in horror. Yalina hit her forehead with her palm, feeling a head ache coming her way.
Hamza stood frozen while Ulfat had a mischievous glint in her eye "Plan kya hai?"
Hamza's head snapped to Ulfat who was sitting in the passenger seat and he gaped at her "bhabhi inhe hawa na dein"
Ulfat shushed Hamza while the girls squealed on the other side "Aree hamza, uzair to pagal hai, kabhi manega nahi apni mohabbat, agar esse izhar karva dein to kya burai hai, dono khush rahenge saath"
Hamza nodded reluctantly as Yalina spoke again "Aap dono Dolmen Mall aa jayiye, wahi plan karenge"
---
Dolmen Mall food court looked far too normal for a criminal conspiracy.
The four of them sat around a table littered with fries, burgers and three different cold drinks while discussing the kidnapping of Uzair Baloch.
"Bohot galat idea hai" Hamza grumbled for probably the 8th time. Yalina who was sitting beside him smacked his bicep.
"Aur tumse kisne raaye mangi?" Yalina asks.
Ulfat leaned forward excitedly "Theek hai, pehle yeh decide karte hain ke uthayenge kaise."
"Bhabhi aap itni excited kyu hai?" Hamza asks appalled.
Ulfat shrugged "Kyunki Uzair gadha hai aur kabhi apni mohabbat ka izhar nahi karega. Phir baad mein Devdas banke ghumta rahega"
Yalina pressed her lips to prevent herself from bursting into laughter.
"Anyways, koi ideas hai?" Yalina asked
Alizeh raised her hand making the other three stared at her.
"Mujhe lagta hai main unhein seedha bol doon ke please gaari mein baith jaiye."
Ulfat face palmed, Hamza rubbed his face with his hands while Yalina threw a french fry at Alizeh. Alizeh grumbled in protest as everyone ignored her.
"Esse karenge banda kidnap" hamza teases. He had nothing against Alizeh and Uzair's relationship. Infact he had been the one who would drive the suitors away because they were just not good enough for his honorary sister.
"Ek kaam karo, Uzair ko Jameel Sahab ki doodh ki factory mein bula lete hai, yeh bolke ki Alizeh aur Yalina ka peecha kuch ladke kar rahe hai." Ulfat proposes.
The table fell silent with everyone comprehending the plan and then all three girls slowly turned to Hamza who was caught off gaurd.
"Mujhe kyu dekh rahe ho?" Hamza asks suspicious.
Yalina gave him a sweet smile and wrapped her arm around his bicep, keeping her head on the same arm "Kyunki Uzair bhai ko waha tum leke aaoge. Alizeh unhe call karegi aur tum dhyan rakhoge ki unhe shak na ho aur woh factory aa jayein"
“Aur is sab mein Rehman bhai ka khayal kaun rakhe ga? Kyun ke agar un ka bhai agwa ho jaye to woh thori chup chaap baithen ge.” Hamza asks mirroring the smile Yalina gave him
Ulfat tsks and waves her hand dismissably "Rehman ko mein dekh lungi"
Alizeh clapped her hands together in delight "Chalo Uzair Baloch ko uthaye"
---
Uzair's knuckles turned white due to the force he applied on the steering wheel. Hamza glanced at him from the corner of his eye and gulped.
'Bohot gussa karega yeh' Hamza thinks internally shrudding.
"Aa gaye bhai, pohoch gaye" He says patting his hand on Uzair's arm as the latter stops the car.
Uzair did not even close the car door behind him as he rushed in the Milk Factory that belonged to Jameel.
He rushed in to see Alizeh sitting on the couch while Yalina paced behind the couch. Seeing him, Alizeh got up. Uzair held her shoulders inspecting her for any injuries.
"Lagi to nahi na tumhe? kaha hai woh ladke? Un madarchodo ko to-" Uzair rambled running a hand through his hair feelings extremely angry.
"Uzair........Uzair" Alizeh cupped his cheeks forcing him to look at her. She gulped as she saw his red eyes rimmed with anger and maybe fear.
"Uzair mujhse nikah karoge?" Alizeh asks, her voice genuine.
Uzair dropped her hands from her cheeks and looked at him with confusion "Hein? Kya bol rahi ho? Woh ladke kaha hai jo tumhara aur Yalina ka peecha kar rahe the?"
"Uzair koi ladke nahi hai, ab mein tumse ek akhri baar puch rahi hu, tum mujhse nikah karoge?"
"Tum pagal ho! Mein yaha itna pareshan tha aur tumne jhooth bola, nahi karunga tumse nikah. Lyari itni khatarnak hai, yaha nahi reh paogi tum"
Alizeh exhaled and bit the inside of her cheek. She looked at Hamza and gave him a nod.
Before Uzair could register, Hamza pressed a cloth with chloroform on it to Uzair's noise. He flung his arms around for a few seconds and grabbed hold of Hamza's beard tugging it to get himself released. Alizeh and Yalina were quick to act and grabbed each of his arms.
"Uzair kya khata hai sale?" Hamza grumbles. Uzair did not give any reply as he went limp in Hamza's arms.
Hamza's arms gave out and he ended up dropping Uzair on the ground with a loud thud.
"Are hamza bhai! Lag jati to?" Alizeh scolds taking hold of Uzair's head and inspecting him for any injury.
Hamza rolled his arms trying to get rid of the pain while Alizeh kept scolding him "Kesse gunde hai aap? Seekh lijiye kidnapping verna Rehman bhai ka to business mein loss hoga"
---
Uzair woke up to the sound of ceiling fan and the smell of Biryani. He was tied to a chair, his hands behind his back and his legs tied together preventing any movement. His vision was blurry and his head throbbed in protest.
The door opened and Ulfat bhabhi walked in carrying a tray of chai and biscuits, looking entirely too composed for a woman who had helped kidnap her own devar. Uzair looked at her as she set the tray on the table and untied his hands. His legs were still tied not allowing him to move.
"Bhabhi aap bhi?" he muttered in desblief.
"Haan mein bhi, koi aur rasta chorda tha tumne humare liye" she asks sarcastically pouring tea for him.
“Bhabhi, yeh ghair qanooni kaam hote hain.” Uzair tried to reason with her hoping she might let him go.
Ulfat looked at him with a deadpanned impression on her face "Yeh sab tum to na hi seekhao mujhe to behtar hoga"
She passed the tea cup to him and than Yalina entered the room with a golden sherwani.
"Uzair bhai chai pee lijiye, phir yeh pehen lijiyega. Qazi sahab aate honge" Yalina chirped excitedly as if she had just not kidnapped a man and was trying to get him married.
"Bhabhi, aap bhai ka sochiye. Unhe kitna bura lagega agar unhe pata chala woh mera nikah nahi dekh paye" Uzair tried his last card, hoping the mention of Rehman would met Ulfat.
"Camera wala bulaya hai, sab record kar lega. Rehman ka jab maan chahe woh CD chala ke dekh lein"
---
Uzair stood on the other side of the curtain his, tied to a chair. Hamza had to face a bunch of curses from him when he dragged him to the hall and the string of them were still continuing as the man was now seated in front of the curtain.
"Alizeh Sheikh kya aapko Uzair Baloch se nikah qubool hai?" the qazi asked.
"Qubool hai" uzair heard Alizeh's soft voice say from the other side. For a minute his mind faltered. He could almost imagine her in the beautiful bridal dress, it must be golden since Alizeh always loved twinning.
Uzair had not realised that she had been asked the question thrice and a nudge from Hamza made him realise it was his turn.
"Uzair Baloch, kya aap Alizeh Sheikh se nikah qubool hai?"
"nahi, bilkul bhi nahi-" uzair violently shook his head. Hamza slapped his forhead, as if he had already predicted this while Ulfat and Yalina tensed up, not because of Qazi but because alizeh might cry ugly again.
"Hein?" the Qazi looked confused as his neck shifted between the tied groom and the bride whose mouth was now hung in shock.
"Yeh nikah zabardasti se ho raha hai?' The Qazi asked standing up.
"Aap ko yeh abhi pata chal raha hai?" Uzair exclaimed. How could he not figure out seeing the groom all tied up?
Alizeh slumped in her seat as the Qazi walked away muttering god knows what.
"Koi baat nahi naya Qazi le aayeinge"
---
The next day, Hamza had managed to find a new Qazi. However, problems had still not ended, Jameel wanted to get the factory records.
"Aap yaha kya kar rahe hai Qazi Sahab?" Jameel asks the Qazi who was waiting outside the gates for someone to come and get him.
"Yaha ka pata diya tha kisi ne nikah ke liye, par yaha to bas yeh factory hai"
Jameel looks confused "nikah? yaha par? kisi ne bewakoof bana diya aapko. Chaliye mein aapko wapis sheher chord aata hu. Iss election mein madarsa ke bache-"
Being distracted by the opportunity to get more votes, Jameel forgot about the files he had to collect, he could always ask someone to get them.
Ulfat who was watching for the window glared at Hamza.
"Qazi sahab ko bas pata bataya? Andar kon layega Hamza?" Ulfat asks sarcastically.
Alizeh slapped Hamza's bicep continuously, tears already flowing down her cheeks.
"Kya aap nahi chahte mera nikah ho?" she cried out.
---
The next day, Alizeh had choosen a different approach-Seduction. If he admits he loves her, he would obviously marry her.
So she found herself outside the room wearing a chikankari white kurti, with a wide neck and jeans. Her hair were left open and she had paired her outfit with heavy jhumkas. The factory was silent except the sound of heavy rain.
Taking a deep breath, she entered the room and leaned against the closed door.
"Hi Uzair" Alizeh whispered huskily walking towards him. Uzai gulped as he noticed the glint in her eyes.
Alizeh took the seat on the stool in front of Uzair and grabbed his head, lacing their fingers together, she pulled them in the middle of them.
Uzair let out a gasp as Alizeh shifted forward and got closer to him.
"Uzair kar lo na nikah, ek sachi baat batao, nahi karte mujhse mohabat?" she asks her lips brushing against his earlobe.
Uzair gulped, shifting in his seat uncomfortably, his restrain faltered and just as he parted his lips
Alizeh grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet forgetting about the ropes on his leg. Uzair tripped and felt face on the floor with a loud thud.
Hearing the loud thud, others rushed upstairs.
"Uzair kahi sach mein to seduce nahi ho gaya?" Hamza asks rushing upstairs.
"Kahi nikah se pehle bache na ho jaye inke" Yalina muttered rushing after Hamza.
"Agar sach mein kuch ho gaya to mein rehman ko kya jawab dungi" Ulfat looked in horror, running after Yalina.
The trio reached upstairs and Hamza pushed Yalina forward "Tum gate kholo, Alizeh meri behen jessi hai"
Yalina frowned and pushed Hamza back forward "Iss hisab se to Uzair bhi mere bhai jesse hai"
Ulfat groaned and pushed them aside, opening the doors with a loud thud. The sight in front of her made her burst into laughter.
"Uzair yeh kya kar rahe ho?" Ulfat asked wheezing.
Uzair was rolling on the ground, trying to get up. He had refused help from Alizeh who stood aside looking guilty.
"bhabhi...hamza...yalina uthao mujhe"
Yalina gave alizeh a dirty look "Tujhe seduce karne bheja tha, yeh kya kar diya"
In response, Alizeh could only cry.
---
On the fourth day, Uzair and Alizeh were left alone in the factory. Uzair had not seen her the whole day, and the absence left him restless. For the first time since his kidnapping, he had even been left untied.
Unable to sit still, he wandered out of the room and searched through the deserted factory. After checking several rooms, he finally found her in one of the back rooms, curled up on a worn sofa with a thin blanket draped over her.
"Kya hua tumhe?" Uzair asked, his voice heavy with concern.
"Uzair, tum jao yahan se. Tum bhi bimar ho jaoge," Alizeh tried to reason with him, turning her face away.
He stepped closer and placed the back of his hand against her forehead. His expression immediately darkened.
"Alizeh, tumhe toh bohat tez bukhar hai."
"Theek ho jaungi," she whispered weakly.
"Theek ho jaungi?" Uzair repeated incredulously.
"Jitna dimag mujhe kidnap karne mein lagaya utna apna dhyan rakhne mein laga leti"
Alizeh tried to sit up but winced. Before she could lose her balance, Uzair caught her shoulders.
"Aram se."
A faint smile appeared on her lips. "Dekho fikar to tum karte ho meri" Alizeh raised a finger at him accusingly.
Uzair fought a blush and rolled his eyes, he laid her down and grabbed her phone.
"Yalina tumhe yaha kyu chord gayi, yeh jante hue ki tum bimar ho?"
Alizeh squinted nervously "usko pata nahi hai mein bimar hu"
Uzair let out an annoyed sigh and opened her phone which surprisingly had no password.
Alizeh grabbed his arm weakly "Mat karna Yalina ko call vesse hi pareshan ho jayegi"
Uzair was surprised at her "Mein nahi chahti usse pareshan karna"
Uzair glanced at her from the corner of his eye. Her cheeks were flushed from the fever, and every few minutes she shivered despite the blanket wrapped around her.
"Tumne dawa li?" he finally asked.
Alizeh avoided his gaze making Uzair sigh again.
"Alizeh."
The guilty look on her face was answer enough for him, he shot her a look and pointed at her accusingly, just like she did a few time ago.
"Tumne dawa nahi li."
"Mujhe dawa pasand nahi hai."
Uzair stared at her and rolled her eyes "Mujhe kidnap hona bhi pasand nahi hai. Phir bhi ho gaya."
A weak laugh escaped her which turned into a cough making her groan "ab gala bhi kharab ho gaya"
Alizeh leaned against his shoulders making Uzair freeze, she buried her face in his bicep. Hesitantly, Uzair wrapped his arm around her waist and covers her with the blanket that had fallen.
Within minutes she had fallen asleep.
Uzair remained sitting beside her, listening to the rain hitting the factory roof.
---
On Day 5, Uzair woke up with a purpose in his mind. He would pretend to be the bichara and get married to her.
Uzair had spent ten minutes practicing his bichara face in the cracked mirror of the factory bathroom. Sad eyes, slightly trembling lip, the works. He walked out ready to declare his undying love and finally end this madness.
The hall was empty.
"Hamza?" he called. No answer. "Yalina? Bhabhi?"
He found them in the kitchen, and the second he saw their faces, his rehearsed bichara expression dropped on its own.
"Kya hua?" Uzair asked, his stomach already sinking.
Ulfat was the one who spoke, her voice unusually quiet. "Alizeh chali gayi, Uzair."
"Chali gayi? Kaha?"
"Airport," Yalina said, not looking up from her phone, refreshing a flight tracker with shaking fingers. "Uske Ammi Abbu ne flight book kar di thi pehle se hi. Subah jab hum aaye to woh yaha nahi thi. Sirf yeh chiti chordi thi."
She held out a crumpled piece of paper. Uzair's hands trembled as he took it.
Mujhe maaf kar dena. Maine bohat zabardasti ki. Tumhe waqai mein nahi karna tha nikah aur meine tumhe bohot pareshan kara. Bhabhi, Yalina aur Hamza ka bhi waqt faltu mein zaya kara. Mein wapis jaa rahi hu, tum khush rahna Uzair.
- Alizeh
No "I love you." No accusation. Just quiet surrender, and that scared Uzair more than anything she'd said in the last five days.
"Flight kab hai?" Uzair asked, already moving.
"Do ghante mein," Hamza said, grabbing the car keys before Uzair could even ask. "Chalo."
The drive to the airport was the loudest silence Uzair had ever sat through.
Hamza drove like a maniac, weaving through Karachi traffic, while Ulfat sat in the front seat with her phone pressed to her ear, trying every contact she had who might know which terminal, which gate, which flight number. Yalina on the other hand kept glaring at Uzair while praying that they reach on time.
Uzair sat in the back, the crumpled letter still in his fist, his mind looping the same five days over and over. Her hand in his hair. Her laugh turning into a cough. The weight of her against his shoulder while the rain hit the roof.
Khush rehna. As if she could just write two words and undo years of him watching her from a distance, memorizing her schedule, scaring off every burger baccha who dared show up at her college gates.
"Teji se chalao," Uzair said, his voice rough.
"Itni teji se chalaonga to hum bhi kisi aur flight mein chadh jayenge, jannat wali," Hamza muttered, but he pressed the accelerator anyway.
They burst through the departure gates like a small stampede. Uzair shoved past a trolley, ignored a security guard's shout, and scanned the screens -gate 14, boarding in twenty minutes.
He didn't have a ticket. He didn't have a plan. He had a letter and a chest full of things he should have said years ago.
He spotted her near the gate, sitting alone with her suitcase between her feet, her eyes red and swollen, scrolling through nothing on her phone just to look occupied.
"ALIZEH!"
Her head snapped up. For one second, hope flickered across her face and then she caught herself, schooled it back into something flat and tired.
"Tum yaha kya kar rahe ho?" she asked, standing up. "Wapis jao Uzair. Meine samjh li hai apni galti, ab nahi karungi-"
"MOHABBAT KARTA HU TUMSE!" Uzair shouted ignoring the glances of the people around them.
"Mujhe woh chiti nahi chahiye." He was breathing hard, half from running, half from years of holding his breath. "Mujhe tum chahiye."
A few passengers nearby slowed down to stare. Alizeh's cheeks went red, but she shook her head stubbornly.
"Ab mat bolo. Bohat der ho gayi. Tumne pehle kabhi nahi bola, ab jab maine jaane ka faisla kar liya hai, ab bol rahe ho?"
"Haan, kyunki main dar gaya tha," Uzair said, his voice cracking on the admission he'd buried for years.
"Dar tha ke agar maine tumse mohabbat ka izhaar kiya, to mere dushman tumhe nuqsan pohanchayenge. Dar tha ke Lyari tumhe nigal jayegi, jesse usne aur logon ko nigla hai, Jesse mere Ammi, Abbu ko. Magar pichle paanch din mein samajh aaya kidnap karne ka dimaag rakhne wali ladki, Lyari se nahi darti. Lyari ko tumse darna chahiye."
A wet laugh escaped Alizeh despite herself, tears spilling over.
"Mujhse nikah karogi?" he asked, and this time there was no chair, no ropes, no chloroform. Just him, standing in front of her, asking with his own voice.
Alizeh nodded and hugged him. Uzair immediately pulled her up in his arms and kissed her cheek while she sobbed in his neck.
"Karungi...Bas tumse hi nikah-"
"NIKAH? KAUNSA NIKAH?"
Both of them froze. Uzair turned slowly, already knowing the voice, already feeling his stomach drop somewhere near his shoes.
Rehman stood there, Yalina and Hamza a careful three steps behind him, both suddenly very interested in the floor tiles. Ulfat looked panicked, realising her lie of Uzair being in Balochistan was busted.
"Bhai, mein—" Uzair started.
"Mujhe Qazi sahab ne sab bata diya hai" Rehman said dangerously referring to the Qazi from Day 1 of kidnapping
"Rehman, woh—" Ulfat tried.
"Tum baad mein," Rehman said, not even turning to look at her, his eyes locked on Uzair. "Pehle iski pitai, phir iska nikah"
Alizeh's eyes went wide in horror "Bhai , please zinda chord de. Badi mushkil se mana hai"
"Tum," Rehman pointed at her, his expression finally softening by a fraction, "tumne paanch din mein woh kar dia jo paanch saal mein koi nahi kar saka. Tumhari pitayi nahi hogi."
He turned back to Uzair, who had visibly paled.
"Bhag beta"
Uzair didn't need to be told twice and ran out of the boarding gate, rehman hot on his tail.
hello🙂 kuch angst milega kya (doesn't even have to be a fic, just tell me something angsty)
In this house we always have angst, anon
I intended to write this fic but it might take a while and i didnt want to keep you waiting so... for a while now I've been thinking about how Naieem looks like Rehman, but Faizal doesn't look like either of his parents although he does share some facial similarities with Ulfat. So that made me headcanon that he looks like her brother Bilal.
And that got me thinking of situations where he might be mistaken for Bilal...
Now imagine, some twenty or thirty years after D1 when Ulfat is in her 70s, and she is starting to show symptoms of dementia (why? Why not, tis angst) she keeps forgetting that Naieem and Rehman are dead. And every time she is told/she has a period of lucidity, it's a fresh blow. Eventually because she's thinking of an era when they're alive, she doesn't recognize the man visiting her as her son Faizal, instead she calls him Bilal. Faizal is still a child after all, isn't he?
And at first Faizal keeps trying to push back on this because he wants her to remember him (she's his mother, after all... everyone else is gone. If he loses her then there's no one left of his old family). He's had to live with a fake name for a while after everything that happened. He wants to be known by his own name. His real name. He doesn't want to be Bilal. He hates Bilal.
But eventually he gives in because it's not working at all. He answers to Bilal but there's still some resentment in there. He lies to keep her calm, but he is angry (why is he always left behind? As a child when abbu and chachu would take naieem with them to do grown up things, he wouldn't be taken... then naieem left, and so did abbu, and then chachu. He's always left behind and forgotten). There's nothing he can do, though. He lies, he calls himself her brother, he says baby Faizal is out with Rehman and Naieem to play in the park. That usually makes her happy. (Yes ammi- sorry, aapi, they took guards with them. They're safe. No one can ever hurt them).
Time passes and she's starting to forget them- sometimes she doesn't even remember any of them except Rehman, and she talks about sneaking out to meet him. She makes 'Bilal' promise not to tell because otherwise their abbu will be very angry, and she doesn't want to upset him. For the first time, Faizal realizes how much she must have left behind to be with his father.
He's still angry about being called Bilal, though. She doesn't remember her son, who she has had for forty plus years, but she remembers her brother who she hasn't talked to in nearly fifty?
Then one day he goes to meet her again. She doesn't even know who 'Faizal' is at this point. Or Rehman. Or Naieem. So he says he is Bilal, as usual. But then she asks, "Bilal who?" And that is a blow to his chest. Because one, she's gotten so much worse. And for another, now she doesn't know him at all. Last time, he was at least her brother, her friend, if not her son. Now he's no one. Just a stranger. He begs her to remember him. To just call him Bilal once more.
She just turns away from him and tells him he must have made a mistake. She knows no one by that name. Eventually the orderlies or nurses or whatever take him away because he's distressing her. As she's going away he calls out first for his ammi, and then for aapi.
He never thought he would miss being Bilal so much.
Hope that satisfied you, anon. To everyone else who reads this... I'm sorry. I can't believe this started from an idle observation about Faizal's appearance.
Tagging people in my taglist because why the hell not: @shippingtheshippers @geometric-circle @gloomilyblazingvoyage @strawbxx-blog @sonakshiss @isthisonetaken12321 @rini4everdreaming @tanipartner @constantlytimelessparallaxe @mehfil-e-random @ib-gremlin @rehmanhatesdosa @niyadarealart @vakalatnelagadiye @desigurlie @meraki-ii @mischiefmanaged666 @eternityuniversemaybee @maystella @chunkychocosblog @mcdreamyshepherd @inkaarnakarein
Summary: pregnancy is not easy, especially when you're surrounded by a husband and family like yours!
A/n: it's been a long long time!! This was in our drafts since may end- please thank @obsessedwidskincare because this fic was 80% her and 20% me and then a whole lot her again! Proff read three times atleast by both of us because we kept adding and adding to it. Also big bog thanks to @twinblueflamee because I don't think y'all know how much she contributed to fleshing out the personalities of the kids and even their future partners; hence this chapter is dedicated to her!! Anyways enjoy this 5.5k hot mess because idk how y'all are gonna feel about it! Much lovee💖
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. IT IN NO WAY OR FORM ROMANTICIZES, PROPOGATES OR JUSTIFIES THE ACTS OF CHARACTERS OR ANY REAL LIFE PERSONALITY. IT IS SOLELY WRITTEN IN CONTEXT OF THE CHARACTERS OF THE MOVIE.
Uzair's surprise for you had ended up surprising him more. Once the initial shock ebbed, making way for the warm fuzzy happiness to settle in, you and Uzair decided that the first two people to know about this should be your kids. For the better part of the night, you both discussed how to break this news to the two of them, especially to Bahaar as her five year old mind might not comprehend it completely.
The next morning Uzair and you took Ayaan and Bahaar to the beach. To make it more special you had Bahaar and Ayaan's favorite food spread out while Uzair fetched kulfi for the four of you. Just as you were feeding Bahaar her kulfi, Uzair cleared his voice, signaling Bahaar to come to him. She sat on his lap while Ayaan leaned against him.
“Ayaan, Bahaar- Ammi Abbu ko aapse ek khaas baat karni hai.”
Uzair looked at you for assistance.
“Tum dono ko pata hai na ki Yalina mami ke ghar ek baby aaya hai? Toh agar waise ek chota baby humare paas ho toh?”
“Baby?”
Bahaar asks confused.They both look at you and Uzair and then turn to each other. Uzair clears his throat.
“Bahaar jaise Zayan ke ghar chota baby Saahil aaya hai humare paas bhi ek chotta baby aane wala hai.”
You look towards Ayaan and say
“Tum logo ka chota bhai ya behen aane wala hai.”
Ayaan looks at you with trepidation in his eyes while Bahaar's small brain is processing the information overload.
Bahaar's eyes crinkled with excitement. Uzair groaned at Zayan’s name but answered reluctantly
“Haan Jaan, Zayan ki tarah tumhara bhi ek bhai ya behen aayega.”
Suddenly Bahaar's excitement vanished, a frown replacing the wonder that graced her face a few minutes ago.
She looks at you seriously and asks,
“Baby mere saath ghar ghar and tic tac toe khelega?”
You smile at her innocence, pulling her in your lap.
“Haan meri jaan, pehle woh bohot chota hoga par jaisi hi baby toda bada ho jayega toh woh apni Bahaar aapi ke saath khelega”
Still not satisfied, Bahaar asked in a low unsure voice
“Abbu aur aap roz story time karenge na, school chodne aayenge na?”
Your heart aches at her words- your sunshine feeling unsure of her place owing to the new dynamics. Before you could reply, Uzair turned Bahaar to him. Holding Ayaan's hand, he finds simple words to explain their young minds on how much they are loved and cherished.
“Tum dono humari Jaan ho. Tum dono ki wajah se hum Ammi Abbu bane hai. Aur sabse badi baat, tumhari Ammi aur main lucky hai ke tum dono ne hume apne Ammi Abbu banne ke liye chuna. Yeh baby bhi tum dono se bohot pyar karega, jaise tum humse aur hum dono tumse karte hai.”
Ayaan hugged Uzair, squeezing Bahaar in between. You couldn't help but tear up at the sight in front of you.
Bahaar looks at you and jumps into your arms.
“Ammi! Baby aur main cycling karenge and main uski cute choti bhi banungi”
You engulf her in a tight hug while Uzair moves forward to hold her back.
“Aaraam se meri jaan! Abhi baby chotta hai aur Ammi ke pet mein bada ho raha hai. Toh usse chot na lage isilye hume Ammi ka khayal rakhna hai. Bolo rakhogi na Ammi ka khayal?”
he asks her in a gentle voice.
Bahaar's ears perk up at this, noting Uzair's words with utmost seriousness.
“Baby ko no boo boo. Ammi Tummy Baby safe!”
She responds, responsibly. You gesture Ayaan to come to you and he reluctantly settles on your lap and places his tiny hand on your stomach.
“Ayaan khush ho na?”
You ask but subconsciously you are already aware of the doubts clouding his mind.
“Ji Ammi”
Ayaan responds in a rehearsed relaxed tone, attempting to mask his anxiety. You decide to give him some time to process.
“Par ek baat. Yeh baby wali baat hum charon ka secret hai. Abhi hum kisiko nahi batayenge. Okay?”
You try your best to convince the kids to keep the news under wraps as Uzair and you were still unsure of how to break this news to the family.
“Secret? Game khel rahe hai?”
Bahaar asked excitedly.
“Ha jaan”
Replied Uzair.
Ayaan looks at you and whispers
“Ammi yeh ek din ke liye bhi secret nahi rakh payegi.”
You nod at him, hugging him tighter and praying almighty to give Bahaar self control to keep playing the secret game.
And God did smile upon you, as Bahaar kept holding on to the secret for nearly a week, albeit small slips that were masterfully covered up by Ayaan and Uzair. Although you suspected that the secret will be out in the open soon, as you started experiencing one of the most common yet dreadful symptoms of pregnancy- morning sickness. Uzair was by your side, holding your hair back, helping you clean up and fetching you ginger biscuits to help with the sickness. He started chaperoning you to work and back, puzzling Donga on why he was suddenly relieved from his duty.
Ulfat too noticed the change in your dietary habits and insisted on making your favourite dishes, hoping to indulge you in eating a full meal. Hence on a lazy Sunday morning, as the entire family was seated for a late breakfast, Ulfat commented how you have been avoiding breakfast, forgetting lunch and skipping dinner every alternate day.
This caught Uzair’s attention and he was about to reprimand you but was beaten to it by Bahaar who nonchalantly said,
“Ammi ko boo boo hua hai toh Ammi no milk, no eggs, no gosht.”
Ayaan quickly stuffed half boiled egg in Bahaar's open mouth.
Just when Ulfat started reprimanding you for being careless with your health, Ayaan, bless his soul, asks you to pass him juice. You were about to fetch the jug, when your leg got caught at the edge of the chair and you almost fell on your face but Uzair was quick to react, his arms tight around you, holding you still. “Khayal rakho. Bacchi nahi ho tum, thoda sambhalo warna tumhe bed rest pe daal dunga.”
Ulfat and Rehman looked at each other and back at you two, trying to figure out what was going on.
“Abbu haath hatao, baby ko lag jayegi”
Screeches Bahaar as she sees red when Uzair's hands wound tight around your waist.
Cutlery clatters, conversations stop and all turn to look at you and Uzair. Oblivious to the growing tension, Bahaar continues.
“Ammi ki Tummy mein baby Safe, hai na Abbu!?”
Uzair and you looked like deers caught in the headlights while Ayaan put his head down on the table.
“Chachu, yeh sab-”
Naieem is interrupted by Ulfat who walks over to you and eyes landing on Uzair's hand on your lower abdomen.
“Bhabhi…. SURPRISE!”
You say in mock excitement, laughing awkwardly. Ayaan and Naieem look so done with your feeble attempt to placate the situation while Faisal, just like Uzair laughs awkwardly with you, joining your attempt to diffuse the tension.
“Woh Uzair aur main aap sab ko…” Your voice trails off.
Rehman, who has been quiet all this while, folds his newspaper and sits back, relaxed in his chair.
“Ulfat, inse puchne ki koi zaroorat nahi”
He says as a matter of fact.
He turns to Bahaar.
“Bade abbu ki jaan, idhar mere pass baitho.”
Bahaar gives him a toothy smile, making her way to sit in her Bade Abbu's lap. Rehman feeds her a piece of apple and asks,
“Beta yeh baby wali kya baat hai?”
“Secret hai bade abbu”
Bahaar speaks with her mouth full.
“Haan par bade abbu toh aapke best friend hai na? Aur doston mein to no secret! Aap toh bade abbu se sab baat karti hain!”
That did the trick and the Ammi Tummy Baby secret was out.
The reactions ranged from anger to jubilation, confusing you even further.
Ulfat, upset at not being the first one to know, decided that since you were pregnant, you were spared from her wrath.
But the same courtesy wasn’t extended to Uzair as he was now in charge of not only chaperoning the kids but dressing them up for school, packing their lunches and getting groceries for the house.
On day 4 Faisal decided to go on a hunger strike as Uzair again handed him Rs 50 for lunch.
Naieem was indifferent but secretly was excited to see Faisal getting tortured by young cousins.
Faisal on the other hand was as excited as Bahaar as he now had a fifth gang member joining his Faisal Bhai Football Club.
You thought Rehman was happy but then he brought home a baby swaddle chair, beaming with excitement.
The most surprising reaction came from Hamza as his first reaction was to get mad at Yalina for not telling him. But when Uzair came back the next day with Saahil’s infant clothes and his cot adorned with the dreamcatcher you had so lovingly attached when you had gotten the cot for Saahil yourself, you knew that your co-wife was excited to be Mama again and already in love with the baby.
___________________
Somehow you made it through the awful first trimester, thanks to your husband and family and ‘get well soon kissies’ from Bahaar. Well, Bahaar believed that since she spoke to the baby in tummy to not boo boo Ammi, your morning sickness ceased as the baby always listens to its Bahaar aapi.
Your second trimester was going smoothly with a few hiccups. However, the only bummer was that you were insatiable for your husband who was busy with the upcoming election campaign. He tried his best to be there for you, your appointments, spend time with kids but sometimes it became impossible for him to juggle all at once. By the 20th week you had taken an early maternity leave because you felt extremely exhausted after a minor six hour shift too.
Hence today Ulfat and Yalina decided to accompany you for your checkup.
After a very stressful day, one filled with political meetings and brain-storming for the election campaign, the men returned tired to a house bustling with unusual energy.
Ulfat stood right in the centre of the living area, shooting orders. The new cook was asked to make sheer kurma and halwa, while another helper was asked to fetch chocolates and Rasgullas, your favorite.
Ulfat then requested Vahida khala to make iced lemonade for her as she was feeling hot and tired. She turned around, eyes sparkling with excitement as she saw the men approach, followed by Naieem and Faisal.
Rehman is taken aback for a moment, while Hamza and Uzair look at him, unable to believe what they just heard.
“Kya hua? Aap khush nahi hain kya? Ek nahi par do nanhi jaan aane wale hai”
Ulfat says excitedly.
Rehman quickly composes himself, happiness breaking out on his face.
“Main bohot khush hoon Jaan! Par aise aab ke saamne? Akele mein pehle batati toh behtar hota”
He says, his voice still straining with confusion.
Uzair smirks while Hamza mumbles mubarakbad to Rehman and Ulfat. Naieem looks embarrassed and flustered while Faisal is at his wit's end.
Rehman whispers to Ulfat,
“Bohot khush hu main par achanak kaise? Matlab pata hai kaise....”
Horrified, Uzair and Naieem wanted to throw up. Faisal elbows Naieem
“Bhai, ek aur batvara property mein!”
Ulfat replies, “Achanak kaha, aapko toh pata hai na? Sabko pata toh hai yeh hua hai bas aaj dugni khushi mili hai”
Hamza turns back at Uzair while Naieem covers Faisal's ears. Flustered, Rehman gestures to Ulfat to sit down.
“Ulfat pehle baith jao pehle, thakk gayi hogi. Aisi haalat aur iss umar mein bohot khayal rakhna hoga tumhe’’
Offended, Ulfat asks, ‘‘Umar? Main abhi bhi 30 ke upar nahi dikhti.... Hai na?’’
She looks at Naieem and Faisal for approval.
‘’Ji Ammi par aap baith jaiye warna bacche pe asar padega’’
Replies Naieem.
“Bacchon pe’’ corrects Ulfat. ‘‘Aur mere kaam karne se Y/n Uzair ke bacchon pe kyu asar padega?’’
‘‘KYA!!??’’
Uzair and Naieem ask in unison.
‘’Haan toh?! Aap log kya samjhe?’’
The men and boys looked embarrassed. Rehman looked a little disappointed but slightly relieved.
Ulfat looks at their faces as realization dawns on her.
‘’Ya Allah!!... Kaise itna badi gang and party chalate hai, sabka IQ milke toh Bahaar jitna bhi nahi hai. Aaj Y/n, Yalina aur main hospital gaye the check-up ke liye aur aaj hi sonography mein pata chala ke Uzair aur Y/n ko judwaa bacche hone wale hai’’
To say that Uzair was shocked would be an understatement. Uzair looked like a man who had just been told that Unicorns were real and that the earth was flat. He took 4 business days (5 minutes) to finally react.
Hamza literally facepalms at this while Rehman starts laughing.
‘’Uzair mujhe nahi pata tha ki tum meri bacche paida karne wale baat Hamza aur tum kuch zyada hi sanjeedgi se le loge!’’
Uzair would have blushed but he was still reeling from the shock of the double surprise.
‘‘Uzair, upar tumhare kamre mein reports aur tumhari biwi dono hai. Jaake khud check kar lo. Aur haan thoda pyar se baat karna, woh pehle se hi thodi emotional hai’’ Ulfat warns Uzair.
Uzair makes his way to your room, preparing himself for your hormonal outburst. Though he was patient and kind, your incessant crying post a nasty bolt of morning sickness often made him feel helpless. Bracing himself, he opened the door to see you lying on the bed with an arm on your head.
‘‘Y/n?”
You open your eyes to look at him, anger seething beneath your calm exterior. Uzair takes a step back, sensing danger but it's too late for him.
‘’Kaha jaa rahe ho, ruko!! Main soch soch ke pagal ho gayi ke itni buri morning sickness kyu hai. Kyunki ek nahi par do bacche hai! DO BACCHE!’’ you screech at him, getting up to throw a pillow at him.
The first pillow hits him right in the face. ‘‘Pagal ho gayi ho kya?’’
Your eyes widen, as if he just called you by a slur. You pick up another pillow to hit him.
‘‘Pagal? Main pagal?! Ha main hi pagal hoon!! Par tum bhi kuch kum nahi. Ek kaam theek se nahi hota tumse. Pata nahi konse waqt mein maine tumse Nikkah kar liya!”
He dodges the pillow just in time “Ek minute!! Bacchi thi kya tum? Uss din mujhpe chadh gayi thi tab yaad nahi aaya kisse Nikkah kiya hai?! Kya gaa rahi thi uss din- Inko aata hi nahi hai, Inko pata hi nahi hai, Inse hota hi nahi hai. Toh dekho- pata bhi hai, aata bhi hai aur hota toh bohot acche se hai. Isiliye ek ki jagah do hue hain!” he finishes with a teasing glint.
As a doctor, you knew this was not an anomaly. But the woman in you just wanted to be angry rather than feeling scared.
Tears pool your eyes just as the adrenaline leaves your system making you slump on the bed.
Uzair moves close to you, taking you in his arms.
“Uzair, 4 bacche under 10, matlab 3 bacche under 6….Kaise hoga humse?”
“Mujhe bhi nahi pata jaan par tum saath ho toh sab ho jayega. Aur ghar wale bhi toh hai”
“Pata hai Ulfat bhabhi ne mujhse kya kaha? ‘Y/n ek playgroup idhar haveli mein khol dete hai, aadhe se zyada bacche tumhare hi honge’!”
Uzair laughs at this.
‘Haso mat! Uzair, main itni choti aur pyari. Konse angle se char-char bacchon ki Amma lagti hoon? Matlab tumhara toh theek hai, tum lagte ho Abba jaise par main toh Ayaan ki badi behen lagti hoon”
Uzair rolls his eyes at this, taking offence to the comment made on him while ignoring everything else.
“Tumhe main kya school college jane wale 4-7 bacchon ka Abba lagta hoon?”
You laugh at this, knowing what would tick him off too easily.
“Nahi nahi par mujhe daddy zaroor lagte ho-”
“Bas inhi baaton ki wajah se aaj hum yaha hain” He says in mock anger but completely turned on.
“Khush ho tum?’” you ask him a bit hesitant.
“Bohot khush hu. Har din apni kismat ko shukriyadaa kata hoon ke accha hua uss din tumhara phone utha liya” He murmurs, looking down at your lips.
What started as an innocent kiss, turned into much more, hands wandering under clothes and before it could get any further, you heard small footsteps running towards your door. You quickly push Uzair away while adjusting your clothes, just as Bahaar makes her way into the room.
“Abbu aaj badi Ammi ne mujhe chocolates di aur rasgulla bhi diya. Woh bhi two-two”
She grins at you two, holding her arms out for Uzair to lift her.
Surprised at the fact that her strict badi ammi gave her sweets made you feel warm and fuzzy as this meant that she was very happy about the twins.
“Pata hai badi ammi ne bola ke 2-2 new babies aayenge. Bade abbu ne kaha ek mera baby hoga aur ek Ayaan bhai ka.”
“Ha meri jaan, aap dono ke babies hai yeh” Uzair murmurs, kissing Bahaar's hair. Giggling, Bahaar opens her drawing book.
“Dekho maine drawing banayi hai. Bade Abbu ne colouring mein help ki!”
She presents to you the most beautiful drawing you have ever seen. Your 5 year old had made a stick drawing of the four of you, outside a small house with the sun shining between two blue clouds.
“Bohot pyara hai meri jaan but Ammi ke baal chote kyu hai?”
You ask her teasingly, eager to know how her 5 year old mind worked.
She laughs at this, smacking her head imitating the ‘silly you’ gesture often made by Ulfat bhabhi.
“Ammi yeh aap nahi, Yeh main hoon! Yeh two chotte babies hai aur yeh Ayaan bhai hai. Jab babies thode bade ho jayenge tab main aur bhai inko school, beach aur park le jayenge jaise aap, Abbu, Naie bhai aur Faizi bhai mujhe aur Bhai ko le jaate hain. Aur main apni lollipop aur ice cream bhi share karungi!”
Bahaar adds proudly.
Was it possible for a heart filled with love to love even deeper. Yes! Just like Bahaar who loved her family. Her already full heart expanded a bit more, bursting with love for her future siblings.
You look at Uzair who looks at you with the same wonder and awe. How did you two get so lucky?
Without a word you two smother Bahaar with kisses and hugs, making her giggle in joy.
At night, Uzair pins the drawing above the study desk in your bedroom. Bahaar had Ayaan help her name the drawing- A & B & babies. But here as she clarified- A & B didn't mean Ayaan and Bahaar, it meant Aapi & Bhai & Babies❤️
—--------
Ayaan sat alone in his room, sorting his books out to pack his bag for tomorrow. Usually you helped him with it and if you had a night shift then Ulfat would. Today despite you being at home, he did not ask you for help because you had just laid down on the bed to relax and he didn't want to ruin it.
Naieem, like his everyday routine, would wish all of his siblings a good night before going to bed. Bahaar did not have a designated sleeping place. She would sleep in Rehman and Ulfat's room, or sometimes in your and Uzair's, usually however she slept in the room her and Ayaan shared. Today she had chosen to sleep with bade abbu and badi ammi. Naieem was just walking back from his parents’ room towards Ayaan's. Watching the little boy, barely just starting third grade- alone in his room, packing his bag, being responsible.
Naieem had seen the longing look in Ayaan's eyes when his mother had rather unconventionally announced the twins. He wasn't blind, or naive. He saw the same longing there was when Ayaan first came at the haveli. The longing for acceptance and love- he had seen it fade away as well and completely vanish after he heard Ayaan call y/n Ammi. It was as if a switch flipped- he was laughing more, talking more, it was as if he started acting like a kid again.
“Ayaan?”
Naieem called him out as he entered the room.
“Kya hua naie bhai?”
Ayaan who was just zipping his bag, turned towards Naieem.
“Main madad kare doon?”
“Nahi Bhai maine kar liya! Dekhein.”
He lifted up his bag as if to show how well he did.
“Haan! Ab toh teen teen chote bhai behen ke bade bhai ho!”
“Haan…”
Naieem sat beside him on the bed, he caressed Ayaan’s head.
“Pata hai jab ammi abbu ne bataya ki Faizal ammi ke pet mein hai tab main bohot hi khush tha ki mera bhai aane wala hai. Maine sabko bata diya tha- poori school ko pata chal gaya tha ki Naieem Baloch ka bhai aane wala hai. Abbu ne bohot daanta tha! Lekin jab woh aa gaya na tab mujhe bilkul accha nahi laga tha.”
“Kyun? Aap toh Faizal bhai se bohot pyaare karte hain na?”
Naieem pulls him closer in a semi-hug.
“Karta toh hoon lekin kyunki woh chota tha toh ammi abbu bas ussi par tavajjo dete the. Mere saath nahi khelte the. Mujhe laga woh mujhse ab mohobbat nahi karte. Main naraaz rehne laga, akele rehne laga, sab khud se karne laga. Lekin phir mujhe kya pata chala jaante ho?”
“Kya?”
“Ye ki chotte bacche bilkul buddhu hote hain! Unhe kuch nahi aata! Khud hi cheekte hain aur khud hi darr jate hain. Unko thodi zyada tavajjo chahiye hoti hai. Ammi bhi thak jaati thi iss liye shayad mere saath nahi khel paati thi. Lekin jaise hi Faizal thoda sa bada hua- mujhe maza aane laga! Har cheez mein woh meri nakal karta- main school jaata toh rota, mere jaise khaana khane ki koshish karta lekin uske daant bhi nahi the”
Ayaan giggles.
“Faizal bhai bilkul buddhu the!”
“Haina! Wohi toh main kehta hoon hamesha se! Lekin Faizal ke aane ka matlab ye nahi ki ammi abbu ya chachu mujhse kam mohobbat karne lage. Woh mujhse itni hi mohobbat karte hain. Bilkul waise jaise Chachi aur Chachu tumhare chote bhai behen aane ke baad karenge.”
Ayaan did not say anything for a while. He fiddled with his fingers.
“Lekin aap toh adopted nahi ho na.”
He said in a voice so small that Naieem almost felt his heart break.
“Usse koi fark nahi padta. Jaise Allah ne mujhe mere ammi abbu ke liye chuna, waise unhone tumhe unke liye chuna- tabhi toh itne saare bacchon mein tum unse mile! Chachi kitni khush thi ki tum unhe mile phir tumhare saath Bahaar mili. Unko itna khush maine unke nikaah ke din dekha tha.”
Ayaan's eyes filled to the brim with a thin sheen of tears.
“Sacchi?”
“Main jooth bolta hoon kabhi?”
Ayaan shook his head and hugged Naieem, which Naieem reciprocated.
“Aisa kabhi mat samajna ki woh tumse mohabbat nahi karte- waise bhi tumhe nahi lagta ki inn sab mein hum dono hi samajdar hain. Thode se sabke screw dheele hain.”
Ayaan giggles again.
“Accha waise ek aur baat- woh khaa lein na, uske baad thoda door hi rehna kyunki ya toh woh tum pe ulti kar denge ya toh potty.”
“Kya?!”
“Haan, phir tumhe phir se nahana padega.”
“Ye toh acchi baat nahi hai. Main woh potti kar lein uske baad hi khelunga.”
—---------------------------------
The next few days were interesting to say the least. If your first trimester was testing, your second trimester was proving to be a whirlwind of emotions. Your current mood board oscillated between being tired and hungry or being horny and hungry. Some days you craved weird food combos like Jalebi with kheema parathas, anda curry with hazelnut milkshake. The result of the junk food binge often had you throwing up. During these times Bahaar and Ayaan kept you company with Bahaar kissing her babies (your tummy) while Ayaan patted your hair to soothe your pain. Faisal often joined them, making you laugh with updates on his antics at school.
Ulfat and Uzair had sort of formed a mutiny against your junk food escapades. Whatever you desired was being made at home but it wasn't what satiated your craving. In times like these Hamza and Naieem came to the rescue with the former getting the food while the latter smuggled it in the house, safe from the everlooming presence of Ulfat. Yalina admitted feeling sort of FOMO but little Saahil demanded her full attention and rightly so.
There was one craving your husband gladly looked forward to- You craving for him!
Whether it was hormones or monsoon or the fact your husband was oh so sexy, you just couldn't seem to keep your hands off him. He was a willing participant though. One afternoon when Naieem, Faisal and Ayaan were at football practice and Bahaar was out on a drive with her Bade Abbu and Badi Ammi, Uzair faked a headache only to come home to drive you crazy with his body. Were you complaining? No. Were you secretly glad you were already pregnant so you could be reckless? Yes.
But today you craved kulfi falooda more than anything. It was past 11 pm, too late to call Hamza or Naieem and too risky to step outside alone. Uzair was getting ready for the bed when he saw you restless. He immediately understood and he honestly felt he was being too strict. You are pregnant, that too with twins and with the doctor already levying restrictions on you due to your petite frame and complications on carrying twins, a late night craving should not be the cause of sadness for you.
“Kya khana hai batao, main le aaunga”
Your face immediately lights up
“Hakim chacha ke yaha ka Kulfi Falooda with extra malai, please!”
Uzair chuckles at your excitement, shaking his head in disbelief. Just a few seconds ago you looked like a woman whose puppy got lost and now you were practically bursting with excitement. Suddenly you stopped Uzair as your mood became serious.
“Suno! Ayaan ko saath leke jaana please?”
“Are abhi uske sone ka wakt hai”
“Pata hai par jabse pregnancy ki baat pata chali hai, mera beta thoda zyada samjahdar ho gaya hai. Tum pe gaya hai. Harr cheez andar rakhta hai. Mujhe darr hai ke kahin uska dil na tod de hum. Usse wakt kam naa dene lagein.”
“Sahi keh rahi ho. Woh bolta nahi par hum sab samajhte toh hai. Usse apne saath le jaata hoon aur raaste mein jaane ki koshish karunga ke uske mann mein kya chal raha hai”
Saying so, Uzair kisses your head and walks to Ayaan and Bahaar's room only to find Ayaan, trying to climb a chair.
“Ayaan yeh kya kar rahe ho?”
“Abbu mujhe meri yeh bag chahiye. Aap utaar denge, please?”
Uzair nods and fetches the small suitcase. The same suitcase Ayaan and Bahaar carried from the orphanage, along with their belongings and clothes. Ayaan refused to let anyone help with it so you and Uzair figured it must be something important to him and hence never pushed him to unpack it.
“Abbu, Ammi so gayi hain?”
“Nahi toh. Tum aur main bahar jaa rahi Ammi aur sabke liye kulfi falooda laane.”
“Kya pehle hum Ammi ke paas jaa sakte hai?”
“Haan kyu nahi!”
_______________________
You were about to doze off again when the bedroom door opened with Ayaan holding his blue superhero solid suitcase. Uzair helps him up on the bed, the suitcase lying between the three of you.
Ayaan opens the suitcase, fetching a photo and handing it to you. You look at the photo and your heart breaks for your little boy. It was a picture of little Ayaan, with his Ammi Abbu and 1 year old Bahaar on what looked like her first birthday. The woman in the photo had this calm aura and kind eyes, eyes that looked exactly like Ayaan's. The man held Bahaar in a tight embrace, his short curly hair matching Bahaar's prominent curls. But most importantly, Ayaan looked happy. Comfortable in his mother's lap, he looked radiant, naughty and up for a mischief. Just as a 4 year old child should be. He looked so happy and content.
“Yeh mere Ammi Abbu the. Mujhe ab inki shakal bas thodi thodi yaad hai. Aur yeh mera blanket tha jo Bahaar ko maine diya tha jab usko lene hospital gaya tha Abbu ke saath.”
You look up to see Uzair's eyes misting up. Your baby had grown up quickly and if anyone deserved any kind of happiness, it was your Ayaan.
He pulls you out from your thoughts as he fetches a soft worn green blanket with sunshine and rainbows on it, along with an elephant soft toy.
“Yeh elephant Bahaar ne mujhe gift diya tha jab woh iss ghar aayi thi. Mujhe pata hai yeh Abbu leke aaye the, lekin..” he chuckles.
“Toh yeh meri aur Bahaar ki taraf se babies ke liye. Jab bhi mujhe aur Bahaar ko darr lagta tha, ya bimaar hote ya ghar ki yaad aati, hum inn ke saath so jaate the. Main hoon babies ke liye par phir bhi…” he lets the sentence go unfinished.
This was truly the greatest act of love. Little Ayaan was giving away the only things that were truly his so that his unborn siblings could feel the same love and security he felt with these. This gesture spoke louder than any words could- Ayaan trusted you and Uzair and truly loved the babies. Tears roll down your face, causing Ayaan's forehead to frown in worry.
“Aapko accha nahi laga? Main wapas rakh deta hoon” he said in a small voice.
“Nahi” you and Uzair speak at the same time.
“Ayaan meri baat dhyan se suno. Yeh babies ke liye sabse best gift hai. Aisa pyara gift koi bhi nahi de sakta. Aur jab tak Ayaan and Bahaar saath hai, inn babies ko darr aur udaasi choo bhi nahi sakte”
You pull him in your arms while Uzair strokes his back.
“Ayaan tumhare Ammi Abbu ko hum kabhi nahi bhulenge. Ab hum saath mein unhein yaad karenge aur sunke liye har roz dua karenge.” Uzair assures him.
You three stay like this, cuddled and close, for a long time.
“Naieem bhai ne mujhe kuch kaha.”
Ayaan said, looking up at you.
“Naieem ne tumhe daanta?”
Uzair asked, surprised.
“Nahi nahi! acchi batein kahin unhone.”
“Phir?”
You ask, caressing his hair.
“Woh unhone kaha ki aap dono mujhse bohot pyaar karte hain aur aapke babies aane ke baad aap phir bhi mujhse mohobbat karenge.”
You looked at Uzair in concern. Was he thinking that you both will not love him anymore after the birth of twins? Had you failed in reassuring him that?
“Sahi kaha Naieem ne. Hum dono tumse bohot mohobbat karte hain aur aage aur mohobbat karenge. Lekin beta sirf ye bachhe hi humare nahi hai- tum aur Bahaar bhi humare hi bacche ho. Main jaanta hoon ki tum apne waalidon ko yaad karte hoge. Mujhe bhi apne waalidon ki yaad aati hai, lekin iska matlab ye toh nahi ki bade abbu aur badi ammi mujhse mohobbat nahi karte? Humari mohobbat kabhi kam nahi hogi. Lekin agar tumhe kabhi aisa lage, toh bas aise hi humare paas aa jana. Hum bhi abhi seekh rahe hain ki ammi abbu kaise banna hai.”
Uzair said, caressing his hair.
“Ammi promise karti hai beta ki woh kabhi tumse kam mohobbat nahi karegi. Magar humse koi galti ho toh haq se batana, hum kuch nahi kahenge.”
Uzair held Ayaan's hands in his and wiped his tears, Ayaan was sniffing.
Uzair clears his throat to change the mood.
“Maa bete ka pyaar phirse shuru ho gaya! Oh, ammi ke chamche- Abbu ko kuch nahi? Ayaan ko ammi aur Bahaar ko bade abbu hi pasand hai- main kisi ka azeez hoon hi nahi.”
You pull Uzair's cheek at the dramatics.
“Ho na! Faizal ke! Bilkul tumhari xerox copy!”
Ayaan covers his mouth in shock.
“Haw ammi! Aapne abbu ko buddhu kaha!?”
“Aisa maine kab kaha?!”
“Naieem bhai keh rahe the ki Faizal bhai thode se buddhu hain!”
“Tum dono ko toh main- rehne do! Ab mujh bechare ko akela hi Hamid bhai ke yaha jaana padega.”
“Nahi nahi Abbu, main aaunga na aapke saath! Sacchi- aap hi best ho!”
Saying this, Ayaan jumps out of bed to find his shoes. Uzair looks at you lovingly while you carefully place the blanket and toy on bed and look at the photo again.
“Hum acche Ammi Abbu bane ya na banein par hume sabse acche bacche mile hain.” He says.
“Aur ab inn bacchon ke liye hum sabse acche Ammi Abbu aur yeh babies sabse acche bhai-behen bannenge”
You say softly, making a silent promise to the two people in the photo.
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Author's Note: This fanfiction is based on this particular request (even though the request is mine only)-but since I wanted to try writing it, here we go peps.
Synopsis: To the Intelligence Bureau, she was the perfect ghost—a death-row inmate erased from the state registry and re-engineered from the remnants of a highway horror story. To him, she was the only line that never went dark in a world built on intercepted frequencies and compromised coordinates. But when the cold calculation of war forces her into a lethal, deep-cover deployment in Karachi, their hidden sanctuary fractures. As the lines blow open and the ghosts of their pasts collide, a rogue handler must cross every forbidden border to pull his asset out of the abyss—proving that even in a jungle of crossfire, her love is the only basera he has left.
Disclaimer: This fanfiction is written solely for entertainment purposes and contains a healthy amount of angst (pls forgive me beforehand only)
<Previous Chapter
Chapter Two: The Highway and the Ghost
The mention of the training camp didn't just bring back memories; it pulled open wounds that had never truly healed. Oindrila sat in the passenger seat of Sushant’s unmarked vehicle as they drove toward the safehouse on the outskirts of Delhi, the city lights blurring through her tears.
To the world, she was an elite intelligence operative. But five years ago, she had just been a regular girl with a university degree, a library card, and a best friend named Aditi.
“Oin, chal na, late ho raha hai,” Aditi’s voice echoed from a memory so vivid it felt like a haunting.
It had been a rainy Tuesday night in Haryana. Their scooty had broken down on a dark patch of the state highway while returning from a concert. Then came the headlights—a black Scorpio pulling up, cutting off the wind. Four men. Then six. Then more.
Thirty days. For thirty days, the world had shrunk to a windowless concrete basement smelling of damp earth, country liquor, and pure terror. They were held hostage, brutalized, stripped of every shred of human dignity. Like clockwork-the men used to come one by one, sometimes more than one, put the gags on their mouths and raped them and all they could do was watch and scream. Eventually, the screaming also stopped-their voices raspy and quiet-as if their throat gave up on them. It got worse day by day with no way out.
The only thing that kept Oindrila breathing was the feeling of Aditi’s small, trembling fingers holding onto hers in the absolute dark of that cellar. “Hum ghar jayenge, Oin. Pakka jayenge,” Aditi had whispered every single night, when the men opened their restraints and allowed them little bit peace at night, only to continue the nightmare the next morning.
Until the thirty-first morning. (or was it thirty-second?-she didn't even remember-she lost counting after 12 days or so)
Oindrila had crawled across the cold floor to wake her, only to find Aditi’s skin completely ice-cold. Her best friend’s eyes were open, staring blankly at the ceiling. The light was gone.
Something inside Oindrila didn't just break; it died completely, and in its place, something monstrous was born. The anger wasn't hot—it was a freezing, calculated storm.
When another man came with his daily ritual of putting the restraints on them, she didn't scream. She took the rusted iron pipe propped against the water basin and drove it through his throat.
Seventeen men lived in that compound. By the time the local police arrived after a tip-off from a passing truck driver, Oindrila was sitting on the front porch in the pouring rain, her clothes soaked in dark grease and blood, staring at her raw hands. She had killed every single one of them.
The courts didn't care about the nearly thirty days of rape and the dead body of her best friend. They didn't care about the basement. They saw seventeen bodies ruthlessly killed and a girl who hadn't shed a single tear during the entire trial. The sentence was swift: Sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead.
Her parents came to the last trial once, and once they heard that their daughter was going to be hanged, they never showed their faces again—as if they could not bear to see her near death, or maybe they were ashamed of her. Oindrila never got the chance to ask them that. She wasn't even allowed to go to Aditi's last rites. Aditi's parents had cried in her arms one final time before she was sent off to Tihar Jail. Oindrila begged them to forgive her—to forgive her for not saving their daughter, to forgive her for surviving alone, to forgive her for being the one left alive while their daughter was dead. Maybe they forgave her eventually, but she never got the answer to that either.
Two weeks before her execution date in Tihar jail, the heavy iron door of her cell had groaned open at 3:00 AM. Director Ajay Sanyal and Deputy Director Sushant Bansal had walked in.
Sanyal had flipped through her case file, looking at her with a strange, clinical respect. "Seventeen men, Oindrila. No military background. No training. Just pure, lethal survival instinct. The state wants to hang you to make an example. We want to erase your name from the government registry and give you targets that actually deserve your fury."
Sushant had stepped forward then, setting down a duffel bag of clean clothes. He didn't look at her with the disgust of the guards or the pity of the lawyers. His gaze was intensely grounded.
"Agar yahan rahogi, toh ek din criminal ban kar marogi," Sushant had said, his voice calm, cutting through the damp chill of the cell. "If you come with us, you become a ghost. A ghost who ensures no other girl ends up in a basement like that. No other girl ends up like your friend Aditi. Pick up the bag, Oindrila. Choose."
She had picked up the bag.
The Haryana training compound was a dry, dusty hellhole where the sun baked the earth until it cracked like glass. It was here that the Bureau broke down the remnants of their broken pasts and reassembled them into weapons.
"Khade ho jao, Oin! Stand up!"
Jaskirat Singh Rangi—not yet the legendary Hamza Ali Mazari, just the raw, furious Jassi—shouted as he wiped sweat from his forehead. He extended a calloused hand and hauled Oindrila out of the dirt with a force that nearly dislocated her shoulder. She had been knocked flat on her back during their hand-to-hand combat drill.
"The ISI won't wait for you to catch your breath," Jassi grunted, pointing a blunt finger toward the firing range. "Look at Rizwan. His gun disassembling timing is already down to four seconds-and you are at 8 seconds. Tum piche reh jaogi."
A few yards away, Vikram-soon to be Rizwan Shah- sat silently on an upturned wooden crate, meticulously cleaning the firing pin of a disassembled pistol. His face was a mask of absolute, detached concentration. Like her, and like Jassi, Vikram was a death-row recruit. They were a trio of ghosts being forged in the same fire. The others were also there but they were the closest to each other.
Later that night, long after Jassi and Vikram had passed out from physical exhaustion in the barracks, Oindrila had sneaked out to the brick well in the courtyard to draw cold water for her bruised ribs. The night air was freezing, making her breath visible in short, sharp puffs.
"You’re anticipating the strike too much during the counter-turn," a voice remarked from the shadows.
She turned sharply, pulling her jacket tight. Sushant stood near the veranda, his formal tie loosened, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He walked over, gently taking the heavy iron bucket from her hands.
"Sir," she said, trying to straighten her posture despite the sharp, stabbing pain in her side.
"Don't do that," Sushant said softly, setting the bucket down. His fingers brushed against hers—a brief, accidental contact that felt incredibly warm against the freezing night air. "Sanyal wants to deploy all three of you to Pakistan by next winter. It’s a complete meat grinder, Oin. Vikram has a death wish; he thrives in that chaos. Jassi has nothing left to lose. But you..."
He looked at her then, really looked at her, his eyes mapping the sharp, defensive lines of her face.
"...you still have too much life left in you," he murmured, his voice losing every ounce of its professional authority. "I don't want to see you become a casualty report."
That was the night the shift happened. The handler began to see the asset as a woman, and the asset found a reason to want to survive the war.
Fourteen months later, when Jassi and Rizwan crossed the border under deep-cover identities to infiltrate the Lyari underworld, Oindrila’s name was quietly erased from the manifest. Sushant had pulled every administrative string he owned to keep her back in Delhi, reassigning her to domestic analysis. He had kept her safe. He had kept her close.
Until now.
Sooooo-what do you guys think of this?? This is legit my first time writing on tumblr to pehle se hu maafi mang rahi hu if something goes wrong or anyone gets offended. Plsss do vote and comment if you like it. The next part will be up soon. Thank you for reading XOXO
Did I stayed up the entire night with 2 cups of coffee to finish this because of my brain can't stop?-Yes
Have I written the next chapters?-Also yes (overall draft only I have to add details)
(once again idk who else to tag-so I'm just going to tag the people whom I have known to write and read dhurandhar fanfics and also the people who liked my first chapter)
So many pages are leaving and it's genuinely heartbreaking. I seriously start yearning for them to come back and it—IT HURTS YOU GUYS IT HURTS ☹️☹️ but anyway, it isn't like I can blame anyone for it tho. It's totally alright for them to lose interest in dhurandhar after it's been like 6 months and we are not even gonna get any more official content about it.
But like @y0uneversawmehere said, we have like plenty of movies with equally hot characters that we can write about!
Then again, I do understand the appeal for dhurandhar characters more than any other character in bollywood because each character had amazing depth and were incredibly intriguing. Even the most minor of characters sparked curiousity and resulted in many writing their own interpretations about them.
It is going to be incredibly hard for bollywood to make another movie like dhurandhar but I'm sure that when they do, all these beautiful writers will emerge once again along with many other.
I have nothing against anyone who has made their exit from the fandom. It would be unfair for them to force themselves to write about characters they're not into anymore.
I'm making this post to mark my attendance as someone who will still be here for quite some time !!! Yayayayyayayayyyy (though I will post inconsistently. Very, very , inconsistently.)
Main reason for me to make this post is so the writers/readers who are going to still be reading and writing them fics can reblog it and mark their own attendance.
All the beautiful writers who have left, i wish you guys all the best for whatever is next in your life and I hope you had the best time here. If you ever decide to come back, will welcome you with open arms 🤍 thank you for making this a safe space.
A/N: Hello my lovely readers! I hope you are having a great day, so..I am back with another fic, this one is from an ask. Specifically, SB ji's ask. I know, I know, the next one was supposed to be another installment of the Ulfat series, but this has been pinging around in my head like those tiny rubber balls, so I had to. The Ulfat one will come somewhere along the week, idk when, and well, Imma update The Second Chance, because it looks like a lot of my new readers are discovering it and are hyped af for it, also, the misacarriage drabble is coming carmen ji, thoda time chahiye kyunki woh full on emotional hai and needs sensitivity so that it doesn't turn into angst-p*rn. Also, I am coming to realise, that this semi hiatus thing might become my normal, cus things are picking up speed, and idk if I will ever go back to a 'posting schedule' of sorts. IKK, I am one of the few handful authors posting for this tag, but please bear with me guys, your girl is fighting this capitalist economy and its shit job market.
Anyway, aapko tag toh nahi kar sakti, SB ji, I hope fate and your fyp bring this to you! (Its time-travel, I don't have any idea what I am doing and this was supposed to be an under 3k drabble)
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Yalina boarded the train carrying the peculiar exhaustion that had become a permanent companion since motherhood arrived in her life, an exhaustion that settled deep beneath her skin and lingered stubbornly within her bones while somehow existing alongside a constant current of joy that never seemed to diminish no matter how little sleep she managed to get. She slipped into a seat beside the window, adjusted the dupatta threatening to slide from her shoulder, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and immediately reached for her phone because there were very few things in the world capable of capturing her attention more effectively than photographs of her son. The destination printed on her ticket barely occupied a corner of her thoughts because she had spent the entire day away from Zayan and already missed him with a ridiculous intensity that she would have mocked mercilessly in anyone else before becoming a mother herself.
A smile appeared before she consciously realised she was smiling as the gallery opened to a photograph taken only two nights earlier, showing Zayan sitting in the middle of their bed with his tiny arms folded dramatically across his chest while wearing an expression of such deep offense that it looked rather grown up on his little face. Hamza appeared in the corner of the frame looking exhausted and bewildered, seemingly attempting to negotiate with a toddler who had clearly decided that compromise was beneath him, and the memory of the entire situation made her snort softly beneath her breath.
"Drama kings," she muttered affectionately while shaking her head at the screen.
The train lurched into motion with a metallic groan that vibrated through the carriage, and only then did she become aware of the elderly man seated directly across from her. At first glance he appeared simply old, but the longer she looked the more she realised that age alone was not what drew her attention toward him. There was still strength lingering in the broad structure of his shoulders and something dignified in the way he sat upright despite the walking stick resting between his knees, yet time had carved deep lines into his face and hollowed him in ways that had nothing to do with physical decline. His beard was entirely white, his hands remained motionless upon the handle of his cane, and his gaze stayed fixed beyond the train window with such unwavering stillness that he seemed detached from everything happening around him.
What struck her most, however, was the sadness resting upon him with the familiarity of an old companion. Yalina found herself watching him longer than politeness probably allowed because there was something painfully lonely about the sight of him sitting there surrounded by people yet somehow appearing entirely alone.
The man did not acknowledge her attention, though she could not tell whether he genuinely failed to notice or simply lacked the energy to care. His eyes remained fixed outside while the scenery blurred past, and something about that distant expression tightened unexpectedly inside her chest. She had always possessed an unfortunate weakness for lonely elderly people, a weakness that frequently resulted in conversations with strangers and occasional lectures from Hamza about talking to everyone she met.
"Uncle?" she called gently after several moments.
The old man blinked as though surfacing from somewhere very far away, then slowly turned his head toward her. The instant his eyes landed upon her face something changed in his expression, and for several seconds he simply stared without speaking. It was not an uncomfortable stare nor a rude one, yet there was something strangely intense about it, as though he had encountered something entirely unexpected and needed a moment to understand what he was seeing.
Yalina offered an awkward smile and shifted slightly in her seat.
"Ji... uncle?"
The old man seemed to return abruptly to the present.
"Haan beta."
His voice emerged rough and worn, carrying the unmistakable texture of someone who spent long stretches of time without speaking.
"You looked uncomfortable," she said while holding out her water bottle. "Would you like some water?"
His gaze dropped to the bottle before returning to her face, and for a brief moment an unreadable emotion crossed his features so quickly that she could not identify it.
"Thank you."
His fingers trembled faintly as he accepted the bottle, and Yalina immediately felt vindicated in her assessment of the situation. The poor man looked exactly like someone who had not enjoyed a proper conversation in far too long, and she felt a surge of sympathy.
For several minutes silence settled comfortably between them while the train continued rattling along its route, but eventually the old man's attention drifted toward the phone resting in her hands. The lockscreen displayed a photograph of Zayan attempting to eat a crayon with complete confidence in his decision, and the corner of the old man's mouth twitched upward.
"Your son?"
That simple question was all the encouragement Yalina required because discussing Zayan ranked among her favourite activities and she rarely needed much invitation.
"Ji, my son," she replied immediately while turning the screen toward him. "His name is Zayan, and this photograph was taken last week. He is rather mischievous. Probably got it from his father, he certainly didn't get it from me! ."
The old man looked at the picture carefully rather than offering the brief polite glance most strangers gave when shown photographs of children. His gaze lingered upon the image while his fingers tightened subtly around the water bottle.
"He looks sweet, and very clever too."
The words emerged quietly, carrying a sincerity that made her smile widen instantly.
"I know. And he is far too clever for his own good. Or my husband's and mine!"
The old man laughed unexpectedly, and the sound seemed to surprise him almost as much as it surprised her. It was a genuine laugh, small but warm, and something about hearing it encouraged her further.
"Oh, wait until you see this one," she said while scrolling enthusiastically through her gallery. "This was three months ago when he discovered puddles and immediately decided that he must try and drink from every single one he sees. Aur majaal ho ki koi usse roke! I am the villain if I try to stop him from getting his way. Do you know why he cried day before yesterday? It was because I wouldn't let him put his finger in a socket! But he is sweet. My husband says he has the personality of a fungus. He grows on you and before you know it, you will lose the ability to say no to him"
The old man's eyes softened noticeably.
"Sounds familiar."
"You have children?"
The question escaped naturally before she considered whether it might be too personal. And honestly, it felt dumb too, someone this old would not just have children, but grandchildren too.
His smile faltered almost imperceptibly.
"Had."
The answer felt strange in a way she could not explain, and she felt that pang of strange devastation return to her chest. She knew that it was not her place to ask of his story, but she did not wish to end a conversation on such a sad note, so she ploughed on, hoping that her motherly babbling will pull the man out of his melancholy for some brief time.
"Will you see more pictures? He is in his teething phase, and honestly, uncle, Allah ki qasam, he nearly drives me insane. He bites absolutely everything within reach, including furniture, blankets, my hands, and his father too. And he cries ceaselessly, and with how difficult it is to calm him, I cry with him too, and so does Hamza, my husband."
The old man's eyes crinkled with amusement.
"Clove oil."
"Hain?"
"A little clove oil on the gums helps considerably."
The certainty with which he offered the advice made her blink before immediately opening her notes application.
"Why did nobody tell me this before?"
The old man chuckled softly, and this time the sound lingered longer.
"He'll grow out of it eventually."
"And isn't that the bittersweet constant of motherhood, every phase is a menace until they grow out of it. Did I tell you about how he peed on my mother the first time she held him? That was the day I knew I would be proud of my son no matter what he did— "
She continued scrolling through photographs while speaking almost continuously because restraint had never been one of her strengths whenever the topic involved her child. Every image carried a story attached to it, and every story seemed worth sharing.
"Abhi chalna seekha hai," she said while opening a video.
The screen filled with footage of Zayan wobbling determinedly across the living room in pursuit of Hamza.
"He follows his father everywhere," she explained fondly while watching the video herself. "If Hamza stands up then Zayan stands up immediately, and if Hamza leaves the room then he starts crying as though all hell has broken lose. Sometimes I genuinely wonder whether I am necessary at all."
The old man's attention fixed completely upon the screen. His expression changed subtly, and she noticed a suspicious brightness gathering within his eyes.
"Uncle?"
He blinked rapidly and cleared his throat.
"No, no. Continue."
So she did, because she assumed perhaps the video had simply reminded him of his own children.
"This one is my favourite."
She opened another photograph showing Zayan asleep across Hamza's chest while both father and son drooled with equal enthusiasm.
The old man's lips parted slightly before closing again.
For a brief moment he looked overwhelmed by something she could not identify.
"His father loves him very much."
The words sounded less like observation and more like a statement, but she understood his implication, for all her father's love, her father had been a rather uninvolved parent, watching Hamza hover over their son every moment he could had changed her perspective on fatherhood. Perhaps he came from the age where fatherhood had merely demanded money and a roof over the head.
"Of course he does," she replied with a proud smile. "Hamza spoils him completely."
The old man lowered his gaze, and something about his expression made her chest ache unexpectedly. It looked as though she had unknowingly brushed against an old wound hidden beneath years of silence. Yet whenever she continued speaking he listened with such focused attention that stopping felt impossible.
"He talks nonstop now."
"Oh?"
"Well, talks might be an exaggeration because most of it remains incomprehensible." She rolled her eyes dramatically. "He knows maybe ten actual words."
The old man smiled. "That's a start. Before you know it, these kids will be talking your ear off"
"Do you know his favourite word?"
The smile deepened slightly. "What?"
Yalina pointed accusingly toward a photograph.
"No."
The old man blinked before laughing loudly enough to startle both of them.
"Exactly," she said triumphantly. "Everything is no. Eat your food? No. Take a bath? No. Stop putting dirt into your mouth? No."
The old man laughed harder, and genuine tears appeared in his eyes.
For reasons she could not explain, the sight unsettled her slightly because the laughter seemed entirely real yet the tears seemed real as well. It was only then that she became aware of the unusual intensity with which he listened whenever she spoke about Zayan. He was not watching her so much as absorbing every story she told, treating each insignificant anecdote with a seriousness that made them feel strangely important. It was almost as though he were trying to memorise every detail she offered, storing away each description and each memory with desperate care.
The train continued its journey while station announcements echoed intermittently through the carriage and passengers gradually began collecting bags in preparation for upcoming stops. Neither of them paid much attention because Yalina had already reached photograph number eighty-seven and the old man had listened patiently to every single story attached to every single image.
Eventually the train slowed, and she glanced outside only to realise her station had arrived.
"Oh."
Reluctantly she began gathering her belongings while feeling oddly disappointed that the conversation was ending. Rarely did she find such attentive listeners to her cuteness aggression towards her own child. Her father's eyes would become glassy with faraway looks of 'no longer listening' and her mother would cut in about it being nothing special. Her friends had encouraging expressions but would whip out their own phones with their kids too, and she had to be polite and look at them while internally feeling like a judgmental aunty because she did not find any of them as cute as her Zayan. It was usually just Hamza humoring her. So the old man had felt strangely like a friend, during the course of the conversation
The old man nodded slowly. Almost sadly.
"It was nice meeting you, uncle."
"It was nice meeting you too."
She smiled before hesitating briefly.
"Your children must be very lucky."
The old man looked at her for a long moment, and the noise of the station seemed strangely distant during the silence that followed. Then he smiled, and the sadness contained within that smile was so profound that years later she would still remember it without understanding why.
"I hope they think so"
Something tightened unexpectedly inside her chest. Why did his grief feel so personal?
Before she could examine the feeling further the train had stopped completely and passengers were already moving toward the exits. She rose from her seat and stepped onto the platform while the old man followed behind her. For a brief moment they stood side by side amid the crowd, then a porter passed between them followed by a family carrying luggage and several other passengers moving in different directions.
Only a few seconds passed before she turned back intending to wave goodbye.
The old man was gone.
Not walking away through the crowd and not disappearing into the distance. Simply gone.
She remained standing there for several moments while scanning the platform in confusion because she could not understand how someone so noticeable had vanished so quickly. Strange, she thought. Very strange.
Her phone buzzed in her hand with an incoming message from Hamza.
Where are you, jaan? Zayan is throwing a tantrum and refuses to nap. If you love your dear husband's luscious locks, please come home fast, otherwise I will go bald with frustration.
A laugh escaped her immediately. She shook her head. Hamza was a dramatic ass.
The strange old man slipped to the back of her mind as quickly as he had appeared, and she hurried away through the station with a smile already forming at the thought of seeing her family again.
On a different platform, in a different station, an old man stood with tears in his eyes, but a faint smile on his face. For a few stolen hours he had not been mourning what he had lost.
Yalina had boarded the train with every intention of never looking back.
It sounded dramatic when phrased like that, and perhaps if someone had told her a month ago that she would one day sit alone in a train compartment with her son while contemplating leaving her husband, she would have laughed in their face and called them mad. Yet here she was, staring through the dusty window while the city blurred past outside, feeling as though someone had reached into her chest and rearranged everything she thought she knew about her life.
Her husband was a liar, and the thought returned with exhausting persistence no matter how fiercely she tried to push it away. She would focus on the passing buildings, on the vendors moving through the train, on Zayan's endless questions, and somehow her mind always circled back to the same terrible truth.
The worst part was not even the lie itself. The worst part was that despite everything she had learned, despite the anger burning inside her, a stubborn part of her still loved him.
That realization disgusted her almost as much as it hurt.
If she hated Hamza completely, then leaving would have been simple. She could have packed her bags, taken her son, and walked away carrying nothing except righteous anger. Instead she carried memories that refused to die, and every memory seemed determined to argue against her decision.
She remembered rainy evenings spent entangled in each other's arms. She remembered laughing so hard at one of his terrible jokes that she had snorted her badam doodh out of her nose. She remembered waking up in the middle of the night and finding him asleep with one arm wrapped protectively around Zayan after the child had crawled into their bed.
Those memories felt real. They were real. That was what made everything so unbearable.
Hatred would have given her certainty, but love poisoned by betrayal left her trapped between two versions of the same man. One version was the husband she knew, the father who adored their son and remembered exactly how she liked her tea. The other version was an Indian spy who had hidden his identity from her for years.
Both versions existed simultaneously, and she no longer knew which one was the truth.
Hamza was a liar. Hamza was not even truly Hamza.
Hamza was a spy.
Even now the words felt absurd inside her head. Whenever she repeated them silently, she expected reality to correct itself somehow. Instead the truth remained stubbornly unchanged, forcing her to question every chapter of their life together.
Every memory now carried an uncomfortable shadow. Every smile seemed suspicious. Every promise demanded reexamination. Every "jaan" carried uncertainty. Every "trust me" echoed with painful irony.
She lowered her gaze toward Zayan and felt her chest tighten again. Her son was not asleep as she had initially hoped he would be. He had spent the fifteen minutes they had spent waiting for the train alternating between asking questions about everything he saw and inventing elaborate stories about strangers on the platform.
At that moment he was kneeling on the seat beside her, his chin resting against the window frame while he watched the passing scenery with endless fascination.
How was she supposed to explain any of this to him when she barely understood it herself? How could she look into those trusting eyes and tell him that the father he adored had hidden an entire identity from them?
The questions twisted inside her stomach until she felt physically sick.
She pressed her lips together and forced herself to breathe slowly because panic would solve nothing. Right now she needed enough strength simply to survive the next hour without falling apart in front of her son.
The rhythmic clatter of the train wheels at the platform of the stationary train filled the compartment while passengers drifted in and out of conversations around her. For several minutes she sat silently, trapped between thinking too much and trying desperately not to think at all.
She failed at both.
Eventually she became aware that someone was speaking to Zayan, and what caught her attention was not the stranger's voice but the fact that her son was already deeply engaged in conversation. Zayan had inherited many qualities from her, and unfortunately his willingness to befriend complete strangers within minutes was one of them.
Yalina looked up.
A young man sat across from them, though calling him a man felt slightly inaccurate because he looked barely older than seventeen or eighteen. He was tall for his age, broad-shouldered, and carried himself with the effortless confidence that belonged only to teenagers who still believed the world was a little oyster they could conquer in a fortnight.
His hair was cropped short, almost in the style of the military, his expressions animated, and his eyes sparkled while he described some disaster involving a cricket match, a shattered window, and an enraged mathematics teacher.
There was an openness about him that immediately drew attention. He spoke with his hands, laughed easily, and seemed completely unconcerned with how loudly he occupied the space around him.
Zayan listened with complete fascination, his small body leaning forward so far that Yalina worried he might tumble right off the seat if the train jolted unexpectedly. The boy had somehow earned her son's trust within minutes, and watching them together stirred an unexpected ache inside her because it reminded her painfully of Hamza.
Hamza had always encouraged every ridiculous story Zayan invented. He too would come up with neigh improbable stories that held an always restless Zayan captive.
"Phir kya hua?" Zayan demanded eagerly, his eyes shining with the same curiosity that always appeared whenever someone told him a story.
The boy grinned with obvious satisfaction at having such an attentive audience.
"Phir kya hona tha? Mujhe punishment diya gaya."
"Kya punishment?"
"Poore 50 sit-ups karne pade, woh bhi assembly mein, sabke saamne!." Zayan gasped dramatically and clutched the edge of the seat.
"No!"
"Bilkul."
"Aap jhoot bol rahe ho. Koi itna bura kaise ho sakta hai? Sabke saamne sit ups karwaya?"
The boy pressed a hand against his chest as though deeply wounded by the accusation, though the amusement dancing in his eyes ruined the performance completely.
"Dekha? aap ko bhi yeh heavy punishment lagi na? Maine bhi apne papa se shikayat kar di, main bola, main ek fauji ka beta hoon, main kyun aise logon se maafi maangu, mere desh ki fauj ko bhala bura toh uss student ne bola tha!"
Zayan nodded with absolute seriousness, completely moved by the theatrical outrage.
"Aise bacchon ko dus ande khaane ki saza milni chahiye", he replied sagely, like a juror passing a verdict.
The boy laughed, and the sound struck Yalina like a physical blow she had not been prepared for.
Something inside her went completely still, while everything around her seemed to continue moving normally. The train rattled onward, passengers talked among themselves, vendors passed through the aisle, yet she felt trapped inside a single suspended moment.
She stared at him properly for the first time.
Until now she had only paid half attention to him because her mind had been drowning beneath anger, confusion, and exhaustion. Now she noticed details she wished she had never noticed at all.
The shape of his eyes caught her attention first, the colour hidden within them was that impossible blue-green shade she knew better than her own reflection, because she had spent countless evenings watching those eyes soften with affection, narrow with amusement, and occasionally darken with worries he never fully shared.
The curve of the boy's smile, even the way his eyebrows lifted whenever he laughed felt painfully familiar, as though someone had taken a younger version of her husband and placed him casually in front of her.
Her heartbeat stumbled painfully against her ribs as realization slowly settled over her.
Those blue-green eyes were not merely similar to Hamza's eyes, nor were they vaguely familiar in the way strangers sometimes resembled people from one's past. What if?
Then reason returned and she forced herself to breathe slowly, reminding herself that grief, anger, and confusion could make the mind see connections where none existed. Ever since discovering the truth about Hamza, she had begun doubting her own instincts almost as much as she doubted him. That loss of certainty hurt more than she liked admitting, because she had always trusted her ability to understand people. Now she looked back at years of marriage and wondered how many signs she had missed, how many questions she had never thought to ask, and whether love had made her blind or simply willing to believe what made her happy.
Hamza was thirty-two years old, while the teenager sitting across from her could not have been older than seventeen.
Yet the resemblance remained undeniable, and what disturbed her most was the strange certainty growing inside her that this encounter meant something. She hated that feeling because it sounded irrational, and she had always considered herself a practical woman who trusted facts more than intuition. Still, every instinct inside her refused to dismiss what she was seeing, and that stubborn feeling lingered like a hand resting lightly against her shoulder.
A memory surfaced suddenly. She remembered the old Sikh man she had met on the train, the one with the same attentive way of listening. She remembered how patiently he had listened while she talked about Zayan, as though every story mattered and every detail deserved to be treasured. He had blue-green eyes. Just like her husband. Just like this boy. Just like her son.
Her throat went dry as she watched the boy continue talking animatedly with Zayan, completely unaware of the storm gathering inside her mind. He laughed easily and gestured with his hands while telling another ridiculous story, and Yalina felt as though the ground beneath her understanding of reality had shifted slightly out of place.
Before she could stop herself, she spoke because she needed something concrete to hold onto.
"Which station are you going to?"
The question interrupted both of them, and the boy blinked before looking at her with mild surprise, as though only now realizing that Zayan's mother had been sitting there all along.
"Huh?"
"Which station?" she repeated, trying to keep her voice steady.
He frowned briefly, then shrugged with complete casualness.
"Chakkiwara."
Immediately he turned back toward Zayan.
"So phir maine usko bola—"
The rest disappeared into background noise because Yalina's mind had locked onto a single word.
Chakkiwara.
There was no railway station called Chakkiwara, not on this route atleast. This train went to her Nanihal, a place Hamza wouldn't even think to look, and she had travelled on this train every summer since she had been 10. She knew its route like the back of her hand.
A cold sensation travelled slowly down her spine as several disconnected memories suddenly began pressing against one another. The old man, the impossible disappearance, the blue-green eyes, the resemblance, and now this strange answer all seemed to belong to the same puzzle.
One by one the pieces aligned inside her mind until she felt almost dizzy from the effort of trying to make sense of them. Logic told her that none of this proved anything meaningful because coincidences happened every day and strangers often resembled one another. Unfortunately, logic had been losing arguments inside her head ever since she discovered that her husband had been living a double life.
The same slope of the nose. The same sharp cheekbones. The same shape of the jaw beneath youthful fat.
Even the way he smiled carried an infuriating familiarity that made her chest tighten painfully. Looking at him was like looking at a younger version of Hamza before adulthood had hardened the edges of his face and before the beard had hidden so much of it. For one disorienting moment she could almost imagine her husband sitting there seventeen years young, laughing with Zayan.
Her gaze lingered on the boy, and then her thoughts drifted unwillingly toward the old Sikh man she had met on the train.
The came the realisation. The train. The inexplicable feeling of familiarity. The strange comfort she had felt around him despite never having met him before.
The way he had disappeared.
A knot formed in her throat as a frightening possibility took shape inside her mind. What if she had not merely met two strangers who resembled one another. What if she had somehow met two versions of the same man. Looking at the teenager now, she found herself remembering the old man's face with startling clarity, and for the first time she could see the bridge connecting them.
The boy sitting before her. The old man from the train. And between them, her husband.
The thought should have sounded absurd, yet it settled inside her with an unsettling sense of certainty.
She remembered the old man's shoulders. How tired they had seemed. How they had slumped beneath an invisible weight that years had never allowed him to put down. She remembered the loneliness surrounding him like a second skin, the quiet sadness in his eyes whenever he spoke about his children, and the aching tenderness with which he had listened to her talk about Zayan.
Was that the future waiting for Hamza? Would he one day become a man who carried entire lifetimes of grief behind his eyes? Would he spend his old age haunted by memories and sacrifices nobody else could understand? Would he sit alone on trains listening to strangers talk about their families because it reminded him of his own?
The thought hurt far more than she wanted it to.
Because despite everything, despite the lies and the deception and the betrayal that still felt raw enough to bleed, she loved him.
The admission came reluctantly. She loved him.
That love had been wounded, shaken, and buried beneath layers of anger, yet it had not disappeared. She wished it had because life would have been infinitely simpler if she could hate him without reservation. Instead she found herself staring at a boy who looked like her husband and remembering an old man who might become him, and all she felt was sorrow.
For the first time since learning the truth, she tried to imagine things from Hamza's perspective.
Not as the man who had lied to her. Not as the spy.
Simply as Hamza.
How had life brought him here. She had fallen for his carefully crafted stories in the beginning, and she could admit that now without embarrassment. Yet she had never been blind. There had always been moments when something ancient and melancholic surfaced in him without warning. Certain days of the year transformed him into a quieter version of himself, and she would catch him staring into nothing with an expression of longing so profound that it unsettled her.
Whenever she asked, he always smiled and changed the subject. She had never pushed. Partly because she respected boundaries, and partly because she genuinely believed that people deserved the right to leave painful histories buried. She had chosen to love the man standing before her rather than interrogate the ghosts standing behind him.
Now she wondered what those ghosts looked like. How much loss had he already endured before entering her life? How many people had he buried? How many impossible choices had he been forced to make?
Her thoughts drifted to Aalam Chacha.
The memory made her stomach twist.
Hamza had killed him after he had been accused of being an Indian spy. Now she knew enough to understand the horrifying complexity hidden beneath that event. The affection Hamza held for the old juice shop owner had been real. She knew that with absolute certainty. She had seen it in countless small interactions that could not be faked.
How much had that decision hurt him? How much of himself had he sacrificed in that moment? How many other impossible decisions had he already made throughout his life? How many times had duty demanded something from him that his heart desperately wanted to refuse?
How many pieces of his soul had he surrendered one by one until only the man she knew remained?
The questions disturbed her because they transformed him from a villain into something far more simple being.
A human being. A flawed one. But still human.
She felt horrible for sympathising with him.
Part of her wanted to reject every compassionate thought the moment it appeared. He had lied to her face for years. He had manipulated her trust. He had built their marriage upon secrets she never would have accepted had she known the truth from the beginning.
She had every right to be angry. Every right to feel betrayed. Every right to walk away.
Yet none of those truths erased another truth she knew deep inside herself.
Hamza was a good man. Not a perfect man. Not an innocent man.
But a good man.
The certainty of that belief frustrated her more than anything else because it refused to disappear no matter how hard she tried. She had seen too much kindness from him to dismiss it as an act. She had watched him comfort strangers, protect friends, care for neighbours, and love their son with a devotion so genuine that it could never have been fabricated.
The lies were real. The betrayal was real. But so was the love.
And sitting there between the memory of an old man and the sight of a teenage boy who looked uncannily like her husband, Yalina found herself wondering what tragedy had brought him to Rehman Bhai's gang in the first place.
Perhaps the greater tragedy was everything that had happened to him long before he ever met her.
Meanwhile the boy and Zayan had moved on to counting train compartments. The debate made absolutely no sense, yet both participants defended their positions with remarkable conviction and complete seriousness.
Despite everything weighing on her mind, Yalina found herself watching them with reluctant fascination.
The boy listened carefully, encouraged every ridiculous theory, and treated each absurd statement as though it deserved thoughtful consideration. Most adults would have dismissed Zayan's nonsense within seconds, but this boy seemed genuinely entertained by it and genuinely interested in what he had to say.
It was exactly how Hamza spoke to their son. Some of her happiest memories involved watching those two together while pretending not to watch at all. She remembered evenings when she would stand in the kitchen doorway listening to their laughter and feeling quietly grateful for the life they had built together.
The old Sikh man had listened to stories about Zayan with that same attentiveness, as though every detail mattered and every memory was precious. A strange ache spread through her as she watched the boy laugh at something Zayan said.
Different ages, different faces, and different versions of what felt like the same person somehow stood before her memory. Yet she sensed the same constant thread running through all of them, and that thread felt impossible to ignore.
It was simply the deep human capacity to care about another person with complete sincerity. That quality had always been one of the reasons she loved Hamza, and realizing that made her look away for a moment because the admission hurt.
The train began slowing as the next station approached, and Yalina felt a decision forming inside her before she consciously understood it. Without fully realizing why, she stood because something inside her had already chosen a direction. She was just one station away from home. Yes, home. Where Hamza was, probably sitting alone in that palatial monstrosity of a mansion, alone to the ghost sounds of memories. Home.
The decision felt sudden, yet deep inside she knew it had been building ever since she heard that familiar laugh. She was not ready to forgive Hamza, and she was nowhere near ready to trust him again.
She was not prepared to hear explanations or excuses, and part of her still wanted to scream at him until her throat gave out. But she was no longer certain she wanted to run away either.
Not after seeing the old man, not after meeting this boy, and not after feeling as though life itself kept placing fragments of the same mystery before her like it was trying to tell her something.
"Come on, Zayan."
The child blinked in confusion.
"Huh?"
"We're getting off."
"But—"
"Now."
She gathered their belongings while Zayan reluctantly obeyed, shooting disappointed looks toward his new friend. The boy looked surprised for a moment before smiling warmly.
The expression was so much like Hamza's that it hurt in a way she could not adequately describe. It was the kind of smile that had once made her feel safe, and now it only reminded her how complicated love could become. She hated that her heart still reacted to traces of him even when her mind remained furious.
Yalina stepped onto the platform with Zayan following behind her, then immediately turned around because she refused to let the same thing happen twice. This time she would get answers, and this time she would not lose sight of him.
The compartment was full of strangers going about their ordinary lives without concern for the questions consuming her. Families sat together, students checked their phones, vendors moved through the aisle, and office workers stared out windows with tired expressions.
The boy was gone.
Her heart sank heavily as she searched every face, scanning desperately for blue-green eyes or a familiar smile. She found nothing.
The train whistle sounded while passengers brushed past her, and still she stood there trying to understand how someone could disappear so completely. Was it all a trick of her mind? A part of her wondered whether grief and exhaustion were finally affecting her judgment, because the alternative explanation seemed impossible. That her mind had deemed her current reality so bleak, her hopelessly in love heart was so desperate to find normalcy that it was making up scenarios to give Hamza a second chance.
Another part knew exactly what she had seen and refused to dismiss it. That stubborn certainty frightened her almost as much as the mystery itself. She felt caught between two realities, one demanding rational explanations and the other whispering that some experiences could not be measured by logic alone.
Her attention remained fixed on the train.
"AMMI!"
She jumped. "What?"
Zayan pointed proudly at himself with complete confidence.
"I'm going to join the Indian Army." What?
A nearby woman nearly choked, an elderly man stared openly, and several passengers turned around at once.
Completely oblivious to the reactions around him, Zayan continued enthusiastically. "And then I'll make my motherland proud, just like that bhaiyya on the train. Did you know, he is gonna join the NDA? I want to grow up and go there to! I will be a fauji too, just like bhaiyya!"
Yalina slapped a hand over his mouth so quickly that she nearly knocked him sideways. "Chup!"
The child blinked in confusion.
"But—" "No." "But Mama—" "No."
She glanced around nervously and discovered that the suspicious looks had only intensified.
Wonderful.
Exactly what she needed today when her emotions were already stretched beyond endurance.
Her husband was secretly an Indian spy, some weird phenomenon had his younger and older versions coming to her, and now her son had chosen a crowded railway platform to announce his future military ambitions in favour of a nation the Pakistanis considered as their mortal enemies. If someone had described this day to her a month ago, she would have assumed they were telling a badly written joke. The absurdity of it all was so overwhelming that she almost wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.
With a groan she pulled out her phone and called Khaleel.
The call connected almost immediately.
"Khaleel bhai?"
"Yalina Bibi?"
"Please come pick us up. I will send you the location. I know Hamza sent you to follow us."
There was a brief pause.
"How do you— should I tell Hamz—"
"Just come pick us up." Another pause followed before understanding entered his voice.
"Ji."
The call ended.
Yalina looked down at her son and then back toward the departing train carrying questions she still could not answer. Somewhere between frustration, confusion, grief, and reluctant amusement, she suddenly realized something that made her laugh despite herself.
After everything she had witnessed and everything she desperately wanted to understand, she had forgotten to ask the boy the simplest question of all. An answer she had demanded from Hamza, but she had only received silence. She would have had better luck with his younger version, she reckons, but she had lost the chance.
The thought had lingered heavily at the back of her mind for weeks now, stubborn and impossible to ignore no matter how many distractions life threw at her. Her mother was occupied, as always, with her father's political ambitions, campaign appearances, charity galas, and the endless parade of people who seemed convinced that Jameel Jamali's attention was the solution to all of Pakistan's problems. Yalina had neither the patience nor the temperament for any of it, and when she heard that her nani's health had taken a turn for the worse, she had packed a small bag almost immediately and announced that she would be staying with her grandmother for a few days.
Her nani had always been a balm to her soul, a respite amidst all of the shine and spotlight of her father's showmanship, the one place in the world where nobody expected her to be anybody except Waheeda ji's poti. She had always loved her grandmother's house too. It was strangely tranquil, the sprawling estate of a wealthy woman possessing the peace and quiet of a hermit's abode, tucked away from the bustle and recognition of the city, where conversations happened slowly, afternoons stretched lazily, and nobody cared about headlines, appearances, or carefully maintained reputations.
Life had become a tiring mummer's play.
She pretended and pretended and pretended until she feared that one day she would begin believing her own lies.
She pretended with her parents that her marriage was just as happy and well-to-do as it had been in the beginning. She pretended with her son that everything was fine. She pretended with her husband's men that the name they served was not a mask. She pretended with her husband that living with him, his lies, and his growing mountain of facades did not feel like a burden threatening to break her.
And her greatest facade was the one she maintained for herself. The one that pretended she was not still just as desperately in love with a man who had lied about everything.
Some days she felt disgust for herself.
Have you no spine? A younger, simpler, less complicated version of herself, she thinks, would question her. And Yalina would answer honestly that perhaps she did not. Or perhaps she had enough spine to carry her secrets and her husband's too.
She simply did not possess the strength necessary to destroy the fragile thing they had built together, half by Hamza on his own and half with her help.
Because she still craved him in ways that made her feel weak, foolish, and painfully human whenever she tried to examine her own heart honestly. She still craved his presence beside her at night, his voice filling the quiet spaces of their home, his touch finding hers without thought, his affection in small moments that nobody else noticed, and his love in all the complicated forms it chose to take.
But his lies came bundled with everything else he was, and she had leant to embrace the thorns for the rose, because she no longer knew how to separate the man she loved from the secrets he carried.
Now everything felt like a ticking bomb hidden beneath the ordinary rhythm of their lives. Now that she knew the truth, every time he stepped outside the house she felt fear settle heavily inside her stomach and remain there until he returned. Before, she had worried about rival gangs, political enemies, police raids, and the countless dangers that naturally followed a man like Hamza, but those fears seemed almost simple compared to what she knew now.
Now she knew that every day he walked into a battlefield she could not even see, a battlefield that stretched far beyond Karachi, beyond Pakistan, beyond anything she had ever imagined. It was not merely petty gangsters that could hurt him or criminals seeking revenge for old grudges. It was the army too, intelligence agencies, borders, governments, and entire nations whose interests could crush ordinary people without hesitation. Once she had finally seen the truth, the threat hanging over his head became impossible to ignore, and every goodbye felt heavier than the one before it.
Some days she felt like a widow whose widowhood had not yet been acknowledged by the world. The feeling frightened her. How much time did she actually have left with the man she had sworn to spend a lifetime with, and was there any way of knowing before that time suddenly ran out?
Would that time end with him in the ground, buried beneath soil while she stood beside a grave trying to remember the sound of his laughter? Or would it end with him across a border she could never cross, alive but forever beyond her reach? Was there any reality where she got to grow old beside him instead of losing him to one cause or another?
Sometimes she would imagine his shoulders bowing beneath age instead of responsibility, and the image felt so precious that it almost hurt. She imagined her own hair becoming white like her Nani's, imagined evenings spent together in comfortable silence, her head resting against his shoulder while his hand remained settled upon her knee. They were such ordinary dreams, embarrassingly ordinary compared to the lives they actually lived, yet they felt more impossible than anything else.
Would she ever watch Hamza become an old man, or would she only ever know this guilty, broken, battered man? Would she ever see him become the old Sikh she had met all those years ago?
She had never spoken about them to Hamza or to anyone else, partly because she did not know how to explain them and partly because half the time she was not even certain they had truly happened. They felt real when she remembered them, yet impossible whenever she tried to examine them logically.
Zayan no longer remembered the stranger from the train, though even now he still insisted that one day he would join the army. Hamza usually looked stricken whenever their son said it, a strange expression crossing his face before disappearing almost immediately. Yet the one time Zayan had proudly declared that it was the Indian Army he wanted to join, her husband had not corrected him or laughed it away.
He had only looked at him, and there had been pride in his eyes.
Then she remembered something else. The train.
Both encounters had happened on trains, specifically on journeys to her nanihaal. The realization had lingered in the back of her mind for months now, never fully forming until this moment. The last few visits had been family affairs, her father's extravagance insisting upon a fully equipped RV instead of the much cheaper train ride, and perhaps because of that she had stopped thinking about it.
Until now.
Now curiosity stirred again despite herself. Would she see him again if she took the train? Would she meet another version of him? Would the world grant her another impossible glimpse of the man who owned her heart while guarding so many secrets within his own?
Her answer arrived sooner than expected.
The first thing she noticed was the uniform. Khaki, but not Pakistani police. Those uniforms were different in colour, cut, and insignia, and recognition came almost immediately once she looked closely.
Punjab Police.
Not exactly the same as what she had seen in photographs, yet close enough that she knew what she was looking at.
Three officers entered her compartment, and between them walked a young man.
For one brief moment her heart forgot how to beat.
This time she recognized him instantly. There was no confusion, no uncertainty, and no gradual realization creeping into place. She knew him the moment she saw him.
Though his demeanor had changed completely, his face remained unmistakable. The same sharp features, the same eyes, and the same impossible familiarity remained untouched by time. Yet everything else was different in ways that made her chest ache.
His eyes looked like flint instead of sunlight. His jaw remained clenched so tightly that she wondered if he was grinding his teeth. The expression reminded her painfully of Hamza whenever he was furious and trying not to show it. There was that familiar curl of contempt resting at the edge of his mouth and that same furrow between his brows she used to smooth away with her thumb while teasing him.
He could not have been much older than twenty or twenty-one, yet he looked infinitely older than the laughing teenager she had met before. Whatever life had done to him, it had carved itself deeply into his face.
The officers noticed her immediately, and one gave a polite nod before they pushed the young prisoner down into the seat opposite her.
Finally his eyes lifted and recognition struck.
His eyes widened with shock, recognition, and disbelief before something else followed close behind. Before she could even process it, shame swept across his face so visibly that it startled her. His gaze dropped immediately and refused to rise again.
Yalina stared at him.
Something inside her twisted painfully at the sight. She remembered the bright-eyed boy eager to become a soldier, the boy who laughed too loudly and happily entertained Zayan's nonsense without a trace of impatience. That boy had seemed so alive, so hopeful, and so certain of the future waiting for him.
And now here sat a prisoner.
Handcuffed, silent, and looking as though the weight of the world rested upon his shoulders. She had been certain that her husband had been an army officer undercover, that is all. But clearly, that was not the case. She knew enough of such things that the boy in this prisoner's uniform would never wear a soldier's garb even if he completed his sentence. He had worn the striped clothes of prison and forever lost the honour to don a soldier's uniform.
What had happened to him?
From eager teenager to a convict, from excited schoolboy to a young man escorted by armed police, the transformation felt too severe to comprehend. She found herself searching his face for answers and finding only exhaustion, anger, and something that looked suspiciously like grief.
The silence stretched between them because he clearly had no intention of speaking or even acknowledging her presence. Yet habits were difficult things to abandon, and Yalina was unfortunately accustomed to trying to soothe that familiar frown, that tension, and that stubborn silence whenever she encountered it.
So she asked quietly,
"Kya maine aapko pehle kahin dekha hai?"
The boy stiffened immediately. His shoulders tightened, and for a moment she thought he might actually answer. Yet he remained silent, and if anything he turned away from her even further while the shame settled heavier upon him.
One of the officers snorted.
"Haan, dekha dekha sa lagta hoga. Abhi kuch mahinon pehle Punjab ke har news mein iski photo thi. Baarah aadmiyon ko akele maar daala hai isne. Aur ek boond afsos nahi hai iss qaatil ko."
Something changed instantly. The boy was no longer turning away in shame. The shame did not disappear completely, but it retreated beneath something harder. In its place came defiance. His shoulders straightened. His jaw tightened further. His eyes lifted just enough to fix themselves upon the officer.
There was nothing fearful in that look and nothing apologetic either. There was only anger, mutiny, and a fury so controlled that it seemed to vibrate beneath his skin. Yet he remained silent, and somehow that silence felt louder than any argument he could have made.
Yalina felt another pang in her chest.
The earlier version would never have remained quiet. That boy had talked endlessly, argued enthusiastically, and laughed freely whenever the opportunity presented itself. But her husband had mastered silence over the years. He had learned to lock entire wars behind his eyes without speaking a word, and looking at this young prisoner she realized she was witnessing the beginning of that transformation.
The making of that silence.
She wanted to ask more because she wanted to understand. She wanted to know what could possibly drive someone so young toward twelve deaths and leave him looking like this afterward.
The contradiction disturbed her deeply because she could not reconcile the boy she remembered with the young man sitting before her.
Before she could ask another question, a tea vendor appeared beside her window. "Chai, baji?"
Distracted, she turned. "Haan, do dena."
The exchange took perhaps twenty seconds, thirty at most. She handed over the money, collected the cups, and turned back toward her seat.
The seat opposite her was empty. The officers were gone. The boy was gone. All of them had vanished as though they had never been there at all.
The second cup of tea suddenly felt ridiculous in her hands.
Yalina stared at the empty seat for several moments before letting out a slow sigh. Missed again. And somehow this encounter had left her with even more questions than answers.
The cooling tea became an anchor between her palms while her thoughts churned relentlessly. The twelve deaths did not frighten her because her husband had killed more, and Lyari itself had consumed more lives than she could count.
No.
What disturbed her was the journey.
How had the bright, excitable boy become this young man? What had happened between those versions of him? What pain, loss, betrayal, or sacrifice had carved away the softness she remembered?
And sitting there with a cup of cooling tea, Yalina found herself wondering whether every version of Hamza she encountered was simply showing her a different scar.
The old man had shown her loss. The teenager had shown her hope. This young prisoner had shown her rage.
And somehow all three felt heartbreakingly familiar because all three still felt like him. Like the universe was showing her every layer of the person her husband already was, giving her time to weigh and listen to every one of them because it found her lacking for not seeing the amalgamation of them all in the shadows that already haunted her husband.
The questions continued swirling through her head long after the train resumed moving. Eventually she stopped fighting them because she knew she would never find complete answers. She could not change anything, and she could not understand everything.
By now she had resigned herself to learning only whatever fragments these strange encounters chose to reveal. The rest would remain hidden, just like Hamza, just like the truth, and just like all the things she loved about him but would perhaps never fully understand.
She still did not think she would tell her husband about any of this. This felt like a secret between her and the man beneath the mask of Hamza. And she wanted it to stay that way.
By forty-five, Yalina had learned that grief was not the thing people promised it would be.
It did not stay sharp forever. It dulled. It settled. It became reaching for a second cup while making tea before remembering there was nobody to drink it. It became hearing a joke and thinking Hamza would have laughed before the thought disappeared as quickly as it arrived. The worst part was not the pain.
The worst part was discovering you could survive it.
Nearly ten years had passed since he left. Ten years of raising Zayan alone. Ten years of birthdays, report cards, football matches, university applications, broken bones, heartbreaks, and ordinary Tuesdays that arrived whether her heart was broken or not.
For a long time she had been angry.
She had rehearsed arguments while washing dishes. Imagined confrontations while lying awake at night. Built entire conversations inside her head where Hamza finally understood what he had done to her, where his guilt become something that soothed her hurts instead of a reminder that nothing would change.
But real life was never as cooperative as fantasy. Then life happened, as it always did.
Zayan grew up before she was ready for him to.
One day he was small enough to fit against her chest when he fell asleep, and the next he was taller than she was and speaking about a future that no longer required her permission. University applications appeared on the kitchen table. School matches needed attending. Broken bones needed worrying over. Teenage heartbreaks needed surviving.
And somewhere between all those ordinary milestones, between parent-teacher meetings and late-night conversations and watching her son become his own person, she realized that entire weeks had passed without thinking about Hamza. The realization should have felt like a victory, but instead it felt strangely sad. She had spent so many years carrying her anger that she no longer knew who she was without it. Yet life kept moving anyway, pulling her forward one day at a time until eventually she found herself standing in a future she had once been certain she would never have to be alone in.
Her father passed. It had nearly taken her down, his loss. In her youth, he had not been the best father. Watching Hamza with their son, for whatever amount of time he had with them, had taught her that. But he became her rock later. When Hamza left, her father had been the one to catch her when she fell. He insisted on hovering over her, dragging her out of bed, speaking to her even when she had no words to respond, embracing her more in a week than he had in a lifetime. Holding her hand, being her crutch until she could finally stand again, find the will to live again. He had been the only one who had known that Hamza was alive. He had pulled many connections to get him out, and then had kneeled at her feet and apologized that while he had saved him, he could not let her leave with him. It would be a death sentence for them, he had said, and she had accepted it, and her father had looked at her with such guilt, that he spent the next 8 years making up for it. And then he was lost to her too.
Her mother softened with age too, becoming gentler in ways Yalina had once believed were impossible. The sharp edges that had defined so much of her childhood seemed to wear down year by year, and there were moments when Yalina looked at her and wondered where this version of her mother had been all along. It felt unfair sometimes. She had spent decades wishing for this woman and received her only after she no longer needed her in quite the same way.
The world continued spinning whether she was ready for it or not, and every year seemed to pull her a little farther away from the woman she had been when Hamza left.
And somewhere along the way, her anger became exhausted.
That was why when she saw him sitting across from her, she did not feel rage.
She felt sadness.
The man could not have been older than thirty-five. Yet she knew immediately which version of him this was. This was after the truth. After the arguments. After the distance began creeping between them.
She remembered him from those months.
She remembered watching him move through their home as though he no longer knew where he belonged there. It had been painful to witness because the house had once fit him so naturally. He used to fill every room without effort, used to make even ordinary evenings feel warm and familiar. Then something changed, and suddenly he seemed uncertain inside his own life. He lingered in doorways as though he wasn't sure he was welcome. He hesitated before speaking, as though every sentence needed careful consideration. He looked at her when he thought she wasn't paying attention, and there had been something heartbreaking about those looks because they always felt like a goodbye he wasn't ready to say.
At the time, she had been too angry to fully understand what she was seeing. He had not seen him then, and now all she could do was see the things she had missed the last time. It was so apparent now. Her words spat in anger felt blind now. How could she accuse him of not loving her, when he sat here, looking like a man aged twenty years by the despondence of his circumstances? She could see it in the stubborn set of his jaw.
He was trying.
That was the tragedy.
He was trying, and she already knew it wouldn't be enough.
Ten years had passed since he left. Entire chapters of her life had unfolded without him. She had learned how to make decisions without asking what he thought. She had learned how to celebrate milestones without expecting him beside her. She had learned how to survive the absence he left behind, even when surviving it felt unfair. Yet some part of her still knew him instinctively. She knew the tension in his shoulders meant he was carrying too much. She knew the set of his jaw meant he was trying not to say something. She knew the sadness in his eyes because she had spent years loving the man who wore it.
An emotion bloomed in her chest, that she had not quite expected.
It wasn't anger, although she had carried enough of that for years to fill entire seasons of her life. It wasn't resentment either, despite all the nights she had spent replaying old conversations and imagining different endings. It wasn't even grief, because grief had long ago settled into something quieter and more familiar.
It was pity.
Not for herself.
For him.
The feeling surprised her because she had spent so many years believing that if she ever saw him again, she would want answers. She thought she would want explanations, apologies, some acknowledgment of everything that had been broken between them. Instead, sitting across from him now, all she could think was how young he looked. Not young in age, but young in certainty. Young in the way of hopefulness. His final days with them had had none of this hope. His very soul had seemed resigned to fate.
Age had given her something youth never could. Perspective.
Because she knew how the story ended and he didn't. She knew that one day he would leave. She knew that one day he would lose everything.
She knew that one day he would become an old man listening to stories about his son because stories were all he had left.
And she knew that the young man sitting across from her was still hoping love would save him. It wouldn't.
Looking at him now, she felt an ache she hadn't expected. There was something unbearably sad about watching someone stand at the beginning of a heartbreak you already knew by heart. He was still fighting for a future she knew would slip through his fingers. He was still carrying hope she knew would eventually exhaust itself. She wondered, if the old Sikh man had felt the same pity for her when he had seen the exuberance of her youth, or had he envied her carefree naivete. Well, nobody would accuse her husband of naivete, that was for sure. The tensing of his shoulders told her that she had been seen. She felt at ease with this version of her husband. She had loved this version of him, had given herself- mind, body and soul to this man. She knew him, perhaps even better than he knew himself.
"Hello", she decided to start the conversation, hoping her voice sounded steadier than it felt.
He looked stunned. Like he did not expect that she would look at him with kindness. Ah, then this was right after the reveal.
"She still loves you, you know. Your version of Yalina. I still love you, and I have had far more to hate you for than she does."
His face seemed to crumple. Like hearing her voice had been the thing that broke the last tether that held him. He hid his face in his hands and began to sob, like Zaayan did when he was younger. Even now, she couldn't help but marvel at how similar the two were. She had never thought she would hear that noise from her 'always tough as brass nails' husband. His shoulders shook, his hands trembling as he knelt at Yalina's feet. He joined his hands, as if in supplication, tears still streaming down his face. "I am sorry. I am so sorry, meri jaan. I have destroyed your life. I am sorry, I was selfish. I-I was a fool. Mujhe maaf kar do, Leena. Muhe maaf kardo."
How long had she imagined this? Him asking for forgiveness? And in all those fantasies, she would push him away in righteous anger. He would be left in the dust, feeling the same abandonment as she had. But now that her broken heart looked at this broken man, all she could do was raise her own trembling hand to cup his wet cheek. She knew that she was crying too, and she did not care much for it. She encouraged him to tilt his chin, his teary eyes meeting her own, teary too, no doubt. Before she could do much else, her husband, now ten years younger than her, laid his head upon her lap, sobbing like a heartbroken child, she could feel the hot,wet gasps that he tried to hide in the cloth of her suit, the desperation in the way he clutched at her hands, and she couldn't help superimpose Zayan, so much like his father, over this lost man.
Her hands rose automatically to gently run through his hair, like she had done that night after he had returned from killing Rehman bhai. Caressing and patting with one hand, as the other clutched at the shoulder of his thick coat like she was afraid to let go, pretending that he was the only one being comforted. It took them a few minutes, of this moment of vulnerability, before he calmed, and she felt a strange tranquility wash over her. She was a fool to think she could stop loving him. That just because the anger had faded, so too had the love. She had threatened to burn him if he betrayed her, but the truth was that she had always been too enthralled by him, she had burned for him long before being burned by him. He was, for better or worse, the flame of her soul.
"Do you want to know what Zayan is upto these days? He plays for football for his university now." They both knew the unspoken rule of this little gift from the powers that be. Nothing would change. Nothing could be changed. This rested on the unspoken understanding that the one from the future would divulge nothing to the one from the past, that could change the outcome of things. So chose neutral ground.
"Accha?", he murmured, muffled by her kameez.
"Hmm. And likes to keep his hair long, even though it has none of your hair's lusciousness and he looks a little homeless. But its alright. He likes it."
"Mmhm?"
"He also plays a bunch of instruments you know. But his favourite is the keyboard. He likes to remix old bollywood songs."
"Does he still make a fuss about eating meat and eggs"
"Hmm. These days there is this trend of eating only foods that don't come from animals. He claims he is following that, and is saving the animals. But we all know its because he doesn't like meat"
He snorted in laughter. "What else does he do?"
"Oh he draws now. That's his degree. You have to see his pieces, dear, they look like photographs! Its amazing."
"He wants to be an artist? It doesn't pay very well, does it?"
"Well, with the amount of inheritance he is set to get, woh toh kya, uske do pushte aaram se baith ke kha sakte hain. He too, is a burger baccha", she chuckled at that thought.
If someone had told her even half an hour ago, that the next time she came face to face with her husband, it would be the most cathartic thing, with the both of them talking about Zayan and nothing else, she would have laughed them out of the room. She had imagined that talking to Ham—no, Jaskirat—would be awkward. That there would be too much history between them. But talking to him felt as easy as it had been all those years ago. It had felt like coming home. But she had a feeling, that her time with her husband was nearly up.
"Ab mera station aa gya hai Hamza, mujhe utarna hoga. And you too, have some place to be, don't you?"
He raised his head from her lap, his eyes so despondent, that she almost gave in and pulled him back, perhaps, a little because of her own reluctance to let him go after she had him so close to her. But their lives were at different paths and this was just a stolen moment. He had a life to live and so did she. These few moments they had shared made it easy to forget what waited for them outside this compartment, that this version of her husband belonged to her younger self. But for just a moment, she could almost forget everything else.
When she met his gaze again, the vulnerability in his eyes almost brought her to a halt. For years she had imagined that when Hamza left, he chose something else over them. His duty, his mission. But sitting here now, looking at the devastation hidden behind his eyes, she finally understood that choosing one thing did not always mean wanting it more.
Sometimes it just meant losing. Losing one thing to keep another. Losing anyway. Her epiphany did not change a thing. It would not excuse his role in the droll tragedy her life had become. But he wasn't the villain in it anymore. Seeing his eyes reminded her of why she had never held him responsible of abandonment in the first few years before the exhaustion of lonely life had turned her bitter. He was just a man. A man who loved his wife and son. A man who would, one day, lose both. And for the first time in nearly ten years, Yalina found that she did not want to punish him for it anymore.
As she stood, meeting his gaze for the last time, she spoke," Agar mann kabhi bhar aye, toh apni biwi ko apna asli naam bata dijiye. Taaki jab uska mann bhar aye, toh woh aapko aapke asli naam se yaad kar sake, Jaskirat ji."
She did not wait to see his reaction. It did not matter.
She stepped onto the platform, knowing that if she turned back, the train would no longer be the one she had travelled in and that her co-passenger would be gone.
She did not blame him anymore. She just wished things had been different and she wouldn't be stuck telling anecdotes of a son to his father, when he should have been in those anecdotes all along.
She wished her husband had been given a chance to be a father to their son.
By the time Yalina turned seventy, she no longer came to the railway station because she had somewhere to go.
The destination had stopped mattering years ago.
The station had become a habit first, then a ritual, and finally something far more intimate than either. It had become a place where possibility still existed, where the world occasionally loosened its grip on logic and allowed impossible things to happen. She had spent nearly twenty-five years returning to these platforms, sometimes hopeful, sometimes foolish, sometimes angry at herself for believing, and sometimes simply tired enough to sit on a bench and listen to the trains come and go while pretending she was waiting for nothing in particular.
Life had continued in the meantime.
Life always did.
Zayan had a life of his own now. He had married a Punjabi woman whose laughter reminded Yalina vaguely of springtime, and together they had given her two grandchildren, Jasleen and Jasmine, whose photographs occupied every available surface in her home. He lived in the United Kingdom now, a decision she understood even if she did not entirely like it. He called often, visited whenever he could, and carried his love for her with the same stubborn devotion he had inherited from both his parents, but his life was elsewhere now. His children spoke with strange accents. His worries belonged to another country. His future was no longer tied to Karachi.
Yalina did not begrudge him that. Children were supposed to leave. That was the entire point. But she was old enough now to admit that understanding something and liking it were two entirely different things.
Zayan had begged her to move. He had shown her photographs of houses, neighbourhoods, parks where his daughters played, hospitals with excellent facilities, and entire communities of people who would welcome her. He worried about her living alone. He worried about her age. He worried because he was a good son.
But Yalina always found an excuse.
The weather would not suit her. The food would be different. She was too old to start over. The truth was simpler than all of those reasons.
She was not sure she would find her husband at a railway station in the United Kingdom.
And if there remained even the smallest possibility that she might find him here, then she could not bring herself to leave.
So she stayed. She was a frequent visitor here.
Enough that the station staff recognized her face. Enough that the tea vendor stopped asking what she wanted and simply handed her the same cup every time. Enough that she could admit, at least to herself, that she was no longer waiting for a train.
She was waiting for him.
That morning she moved slower than she once had. Her knees protested every staircase. Her fingers ached when the weather changed. The age spots on her hands reminded her painfully of her advancing age, and every mirror she encountered seemed determined to introduce her to another unfamiliar wrinkle.
The last time she had truly seen Hamza had been nearly twenty-five years ago.
A part of her wondered whether he would recognize her at all, because the woman boarding this train bore little resemblance to any version of herself he had previously known. She no longer looked like the young bride he had married, nor the furious wife who had demanded explanations from a world determined to deny them both. She no longer resembled the grieving woman who had spent years waiting for a husband who never returned, measuring entire seasons through absence and unanswered longing. Age had settled upon her thoroughly now.
Still, she climbed aboard the train.
A ticket to her nanihaal—her estate now, a fact that remained faintly unreal despite years of ownership—rested between her fingers as she moved carefully through the compartment. She was not expecting anything, because expectation had long ago taught her the cost of demanding miracles from indifferent circumstances. That was the lesson she had learned through decades of returning here: the station offered nothing to those who arrived insisting upon answers.
Then she looked up.
And there he was.
For a moment she simply stood motionless in the aisle, after years of missed chances, unfinished conversations, and impossible reunions, she had finally received the one thing she had secretly wanted all along.
Her old man. Her Hamza. Her Jaskirat.
His beard had turned completely white beneath a neatly tied pink turban. Spectacles rested upon his nose, while time had settled visibly into the lines around his eyes and softened the sharp certainty of his younger features. He looked older, undeniably tired, and more profoundly real than any version she had encountered before.
Then his eyes lifted to meet hers.
Recognition appeared instantly within them, immediate and unquestionable, carrying the effortless certainty that only decades of loving the same person could produce. A smile touched his face, neither the reckless grin of the gangster she had met nor the guarded expression of the soldier she had mourned. It was not the devastated face of the man who had once been losing her in slow motion. It was simply a smile, quiet and certain, carrying the unmistakable feeling of home.
"You look dignified now," she said, like she was simply continuing a conversation rather than seeing her dearest wish brought to life, because after fifty years of loving him she could not imagine beginning any other way. "Those spectacles suit you."
His smile widened immediately.
"And your radiance grows each day, my dear."
The answer arrived so naturally that she laughed aloud, producing a sound she had not expected from herself, her husband had always been a shameless rake. It was what had made her fall head over heels for him in the first place. The sparkle in his eyes looked familiar . It felt like home. It felt as though no time had passed between them. It felt as though every lonely year had folded inward and quietly disappeared.
Yalina wasted no time.
She no longer trusted whatever strange force governed these encounters, because every previous meeting had taught her how quickly impossible gifts could vanish. Conversations ended abruptly. Entire lives slipped through her fingers before she fully understood what she had been shown.
So she crossed the compartment immediately.
She sat beside him and reached for him without hesitation, her fingers wrapping around his blazer-covered elbow with embarrassing desperation. The gesture carried the irrational fear that loosening her grip even slightly might cause him to vanish like every other impossible version before him.
He did not vanish.
Instead he reached for her free hand and enclosed it within his own. His grip felt firm, warm, and reassuringly certain. Then he settled her hand upon his knee and covered it gently, transforming an ordinary gesture into something that nearly overwhelmed her.
It was such a small thing. Such an ordinary thing. Yet tears burned unexpectedly behind her eyes because after nearly four decades she finally had somewhere to rest again.
Carefully, almost reverently, she lowered her head onto his shoulder.
The shoulder beneath her cheek felt exactly as she remembered despite the years that had passed between them. It was older perhaps, slightly narrower and more fragile than before, yet unmistakably his. It remained familiar enough that something deep inside her immediately relaxed.
They remained like that for a long time. Minutes perhaps. Hours perhaps. Time had always behaved strangely whenever he appeared.
Neither of them spoke because neither of them needed to. They had already spent lifetimes speaking, arguing, loving, and missing one another across distances that should have been impossible to survive. What remained to be said after all that?
Eventually her gaze drifted across the compartment.
A newlywed couple sat opposite them, the young woman resting her head upon her husband's shoulder while he absent-mindedly played with her fingers. The sight filled her chest with unexpected warmth because it felt strangely familiar.
She felt Jaskirat shift slightly beside her. Then his head came gently to rest against hers. The tenderness of the gesture nearly undid her.
Yalina closed her eyes.
She was tired, like someone who had not allowed herself to feel tired for years finally tasting the privilege of being allowed to feel tired. It was the kind of tiredness that transformed rest into a gift rather than an interruption.
A strange certainty settled over her. She did not think she would wake if she allowed herself to fall asleep.
If this was a dream, then it was an unusually kind one. If this was a wish turned memory, then it was a generous one. If this was magic, then it had finally chosen mercy after decades of cruelty. And if this was merely the wishful imagining of an old woman sitting alone upon a train, she discovered she did not particularly care.
His hand remained wrapped around hers. His shoulder remained beneath her cheek. For the first time in decades she no longer felt adrift.
The train continued moving steadily onward while stations arrived and disappeared beyond the windows. Announcements echoed faintly through the compartment, and somewhere nearby people laughed, talked, and planned ordinary futures for themselves. Yalina paid none of it any attention.
She simply remained where she was. Beside her husband. Finally.
Whether she was falling asleep, dreaming, remembering, or borrowing one final impossible moment from a universe that had taken so much from both of them, she found she no longer required an explanation. Peace, she realized at the very end, did not always arrive through certainty or understanding. Sometimes it arrived as a familiar shoulder beneath your cheek, a warm hand wrapped around your own, and the quiet knowledge that after a lifetime spent searching for home, you had finally found it again.
And so she rested. And the train carried them onward. To where, neither of them seemed particularly concerned with knowing.
A/N: I hope you liked it, you guys, I have no idea what I was writing, this is a very new genre to me. I had a few more pitstops, but I felt this had gone on long enough, so here you go! This was an absolute joy to write and such a unique concept too! Anyway, have a great day you guys, this is a scheduled post and so will the next two posts be, I think.
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SYNOPSIS: The boy who tended a garden that was never his, in a language he had buried, for a man who got to go home.
word count: 6.5k words
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[I want to tell you about a prince.
Not Hamza. Not Jaskirat. We'll come back to them. Later.
I want to tell you about Malik Khorsheed — the Sun Prince — who is the hero of a folktale that has been told across Afghanistan and Persia for centuries, passed through courtyards and caravanserais and grandmother-voices and fire-lit rooms, the way stories survive: by being true enough to keep being needed.
Malik Khorsheed lost his mother young. His father gave him a black foal to fill the silence. For years, the foal was his only real companion — the one who knew his name before anyone else spoke it, the one who warned him when the world was becoming dangerous, the one whose knowing required no performance in return.
When his stepmother finally moved to destroy the foal, the prince did what survivors do: he ran. He crossed into a foreign kingdom. He put down his name and his history and his face and became a gardener. A nobody. He let the foreign soil cover him and he waited and he did the work that was asked of him and he did not say what he was.
In the end, the king of the foreign kingdom learned the truth. Wept. Placed his turban on Malik Khorsheed's head. Forty days of feasting. A bride. A flying horse home. The father, exultant in the palace gardens, ordering celebration.
The prince got his name back. That is how the folktale ends.
I'm telling you about Malik Khorsheed because I need you to hold the shape of the story — the real shape, what it costs, what it promises — before I tell you about the version where the prince does not get the feast.
The version where the forty days don't come.
The version where the boy who wore a borrowed name stays borrowed.
But here is the part the folktale never tells you. Here is the part I need you to sit with before we begin.
Malik Khorsheed's foreign kingdom did not hate what he was underneath the disguise. The king wept when he learned the truth. The wound was concealment, not contradiction.
What if the thing he was hiding was the thing the foreign kingdom despised?
What if the prince was not simply unnamed — but unwelcome. Not as a stranger. As a Pathan. As the one whose mother tongue was the wrong tongue, whose blood the foreign kingdom's men joked about at dinner tables while he sat very still and smiled and passed the chai.
That is a different story.
That is the one I want to tell you.]
Somewhere in the northwest. Before all of it.
There is a house that faces the mountains. This is the first true thing. The mountains are always in the frame — not dramatically, not the way foreigners write about them, all metaphor and scale. Just present. The way walls are present. The way the sky is present. He grew up with the mountains as a fact of the world, absorbing them the way children absorb the permanent things, below the level of language.
His mother spoke Pashto to him until he had it in his blood. Not a figure of speech. This is how language acquisition works in the body — not as information stored but as reflex installed, below the level of thought, in the architecture of the self before the self knew it was being built. She spoke Pashto.
She said his name — the real one, the Pashto one, the one that carries in its syllables the specific geography of where she was from and who her people were — and he grew up knowing himself in that sound.
He has not spoken Pashto in years.
This is the cost that does not appear in the contract. The contract says: cover name, cover city, cover history.
The contract does not say: cover language. Cover the mother tongue. Cover the part of you that thinks in Pashto at 3am when the guard is down and the cover name has gone quiet and the real self surfaces briefly in the dark like something coming up for air.
The cover name is Rizwan Shah.
He answers to it. He has answered to it so long that it has worn grooves in him, settled into the posture of his shoulders, become the name his body recognizes in a crowd. At a certain point answering to a name stops being performance and becomes reflex, and the reflex is now the name, functionally, practically, in every room that matters.
This is not a tragedy. He agreed to it. He understood the contract. He signed the papers with both hands and he stood in the training room in Delhi and he said Rizwan Shah, Rizwan Shah, until the Pashto cadence was gone from the back of his throat and only the Urdu remained — smooth, cityless, belonging to no one in particular.
He was very good at the smoothing.
This is the thing that made him useful and the thing that cost him most. Both facts equally true. Both equally beside the point.
[Malik Khorsheed's black foal appears after his mother dies. The folktale is precise about the sequence. First the loss. Then the gift. A dervish brings the animal to the palace, and the scholars argue about what it means, but the foal goes directly to the boy and stands beside him without being led, and this is the answer: it means the boy needed something that would not leave, and so the story provided it.
The foal knows everything. It warns him about the pit dug in the path. It warns him about the poisoned food. It tells him when the tournament is happening and instructs him, three times, to ride out in armor so no one can see his face, and win, and return before anyone learns who he is.
The foal is the keeper of the real name while the boy is being someone else.
Every version of this story has an equivalent. Someone or something that holds the original while the disguise is being worn. The black foal. The red and yellow threads in a breast pocket. The diary handed over in a hallway in Lyari, the words go compressed to a single syllable, and then a man walking in the other direction.
What happens when the keeper is gone?
What does the prince do when there is no foal left — no witness to the original, nothing between him and the cover name but years — and on top of that, the foreign kingdom is specifically, historically, at war with the thing he actually is underneath?
This is where the folktale runs out.
This is where Rizwan begins.]
Delhi. The training room. The before.
He remembers the smell first. Damp concrete and something electrical and the particular staleness of a room that processes many bodies and does not open its windows. The fluorescent lights flattened everyone's faces to the same grey-white, which was either accidental or designed and he had decided by the second week it was designed — the lighting was itself a kind of cover, making it hard to read anyone, which meant reading people anyway became the first and most important skill.
He became very good at reading. He had always been good at reading. He had grown up Pathan in rooms that were not Pathan rooms, had learned by the time he was twelve that certain things about you are information and information in the wrong hands is danger, had developed the specific competence of a person who has always had to know the room before the room knew him.
Jaskirat Singh Rangi arrived on the third day.
Punjabi. You could see it immediately — the way his body took up space with the confidence of someone who had grown up knowing the space was theirs. He had a face that had been angry about something for a long time and had organized itself around the anger without letting it show, which is a different thing from hiding it, more structural than that. He tracked the door every time he entered a room. He had already agreed to something before he walked in, which was visible to anyone paying the right kind of attention, and he was the kind of person who assumed nobody was paying the right kind of attention and was therefore briefly readable before he realized he was being read.
He sat two chairs away and said nothing for the first hour.
He said nothing the way a man says nothing when he is listening more carefully than the people who are speaking.
By the end of the first week they were running drills together. Not because they had been assigned to each other. Because they had identified each other as the two people in the room operating at the same specific frequency — the frequency of people who have been careful for long enough that the careful has become something structural, something installed below the level of decision.
By the end of the second week they had established the wordless grammar that develops between people who are very good at reading and therefore spend energy reading each other. Not competing. Not performing. Just noting. Continuously, precisely, noting.
He noted: Jaskirat's Punjabi surfaced when he was tired. The specific music of it, the cadence. He did not file this as a vulnerability — it was a tell only if someone in the room was looking for it, and the only person looking for it was himself. He filed it as information about what Jaskirat was like when his guard was down. This was useful information. It was the kind you could not fabricate.
Jaskirat noted: he was careful in a specific way. Not the training-room careful, the careful you learn in the first week. The older kind. The kind that comes from having learned early that certain things about you are information, and information is always also risk. He had been careful in this way his whole life and it showed in the way nothing showed — which is its own kind of showing, to the right pair of eyes.
There was a night, late, in the kind of hour the training left them with — both of them sitting outside on concrete because neither could sleep, which was a pattern they had both noticed without naming — when Jaskirat said: "Where are you actually from."
He had given the city all week. Just the city, just the cover. He looked at Jaskirat in the specific half-dark of a Delhi night and understood that the question was not an interrogation. It was a parallel disclosure. I am from somewhere too. I am carrying something too. I am asking because I want to be asked back, because the weight of performing nowhere gets heavy by the end of a training day and even careful men occasionally need to set something down.
He said the city. He did not say what the city was built on top of. What language its hills spoke at night. What the mountains looked like from the window of his childhood home. What his mother's voice sounded like when it was not performing any language except her own.
Jaskirat nodded. He did not ask further.
He understood the shape of a door that stays closed and he respected it the way men who have their own closed doors respect each other's. This was the beginning of the thing between them — not friendship, which is the wrong word, too soft for what develops between two people who have both agreed to something enormous and are now circling each other in a training room, both precise, both carrying things they have been told to put down and haven't quite managed. Something more structural than friendship. The recognition of a parallel weight.
They trained for months.
He learned Jaskirat's tells the way you learn a landscape you might someday need to navigate in the dark: exhaustively, without sentiment, with total retention. The jaw tension that meant Jaskirat was containing something he would not say. The particular stillness that meant he had made a decision and was done renegotiating it. The way he reached for his left wrist when he was afraid, not consciously, just the gesture of a man touching the only thing he hadn't agreed to put down.
Jaskirat learned his tells.
There was an exercise — the fourth month, when the training shifted to close-quarters — where they were paired against each other, full resistance, no holds. He was good at this. He had always been good at this. But Jaskirat was also good at it, and Jaskirat had the specific advantage of a man who fights like he is not afraid of losing, which is the most dangerous kind of opponent, because caution in a fight is always also a vulnerability.
They went fifteen minutes. Full resistance. Neither one conceding.
At the end Jaskirat was on the floor and he had two fingers pressed into his own bleeding lip and they were both breathing like they had been underwater and the instructor had stopped counting rounds because it had stopped being useful to count rounds, and after a long moment Jaskirat looked up at him from the floor and said: "You fight like you're angry about something you're not going to tell me."
He thought about the mountains. He thought about Pashto at 3am. He thought about the smooth Urdu he had installed in the back of his throat where the other language used to live.
He said: "So do you."
Jaskirat's mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The thing adjacent to a smile in men who have forgotten how to do the easy version.
They got up. They ran the next drill.
This is what he carries from the training months: not the techniques, not the protocol — those are installed, those are simply there now, below decision. He carries the specific texture of being known sideways, incompletely, accurately. Jaskirat never knew his real name. Jaskirat never knew the language. But Jaskirat knew the shape of the closed door and knew not to push it and knew how to sit beside a person in a difficult hour without making the difficulty worse, and this — this is the thing that did not have a name but was real, and was the closest thing to keeping he had in those months, and he did not understand its weight until it was very far away.
[There is a concept in Pashtunwali — the code that has governed Pathan life for centuries, older than the borders that divided the land it came from — called nang. Honour. Not in the diluted sense the word has acquired in translation, not the performance of honour for external observers. The real thing. The internal accounting. The question you answer only to yourself, in the language your mother spoke, in the quiet that is not available in any other register.
Nang demands: you protect your own. You stand with your people. You do not walk into the enemy's house and call it service.
He made a different calculation.
He has been making it every year in Lyari. Every morning, waking up in a city at war with itself in at least four directions, in a neighbourhood that had buried over 3,500 of its own people between 2000 and 2010 — 3,500 people which is a number that appears in every report and means nothing and means everything, which is not a statistic but a city inside a city gone — waking up in this place, in this name, in this language, and making the calculation again.
The mission against the nang. The hundred and sixty-six who did not get out of November 2008 against the voice in the back of his throat that sometimes surfaced at 3am and said: what are you doing in this man's house. What have you made of yourself.
He answered the voice in Pashto.
He was the only person in Karachi who could.
The Pashtun who chose the mission over nang is not a traitor in the simple sense. He is something more complicated. He is a man who looked at the code his mothers' mothers lived by and said: I understand this, and I am going to do the other thing, and I am going to carry the weight of that in the language the code was written in, which is a language nobody around me speaks, which means I am carrying it entirely alone.
Alone is the operative word.
It is always the operative word with him.]
Lyari. The years.
He arrived without ceremony, one more body in a city that had stopped asking where bodies came from. He made himself small and steady and unremarkable. He learned the neighbourhood the way he had learned everything since the training: with his whole body, not just his mind. The acoustics of the lanes — narrow enough that sound bounced differently than in open streets, which meant you could sometimes hear a conversation three turnings away if you knew where to stand. The specific light at different hours: mornings gold over the rooftops, evenings purple-grey, nights orange-lit because the city never fully turned itself off. The weight of the air in the wet season versus the dry, the salt in it, the sea underneath everything.
He learned Lyari in the language Lyari spoke — Balochi-inflected Urdu, its own rhythms, its own music — and he absorbed it the way he had absorbed everything he needed to survive in a space that was not built for him: completely, below the level of decision, until it felt natural, until Rizwan Shah's voice came out of his mouth with the cadences of a man who had always spoken this way.
He did not think about Pashto during the days.
He thought about it at 3 in the morning, which was when the cover name went quiet.
There was a man in the outer circles of Rehman Dakait's network named Gulbaz. He had come from Khyber in the late nineties when moving to the city was survival. He had a voice that carried the mountains in it — the register that comes from growing up in altitude, in space, in the acoustic landscape of a place where sounds travel far. He spoke Urdu in a way that said: this is not my first language, and he was careful about it, and the careful cost him something visible to anyone who knew the specific texture of that kind of careful.
He watched Gulbaz smooth the Pashto from the back of his throat in meetings. Watched him absorb the jokes — the particular jokes, the ones that establish hierarchy while maintaining deniability — with the expression of a man who has decided that absorbing is cheaper than responding, and has made this decision so many times it has become a reflex. Watched him make himself smaller in rooms that would have been easier if he had been something else.
He did not say a word.
He could have spoken to Gulbaz in Pashto. Three minutes, maybe less. The specific relief of it — the language your mother gave you, your real name's language, the one that lives in the back of the throat and hasn't been let out in years. He could have given Gulbaz that. Given himself that.
He did not. The mission was the mission.
He is still not sure whether not speaking was the right thing or simply the necessary thing. He has given up trying to locate the difference because the difference has nowhere to go, and some questions you stop asking not because you've found the answer but because the asking costs more than you have left to spend.
[The black foal speaks. In the folktale this is not magical — it is simply the foal's nature. It sees clearly. It speaks plainly. It does not soften the warnings or dress them in comfort.
"Be careful," the foal says. "She is plotting against you."
"I know," the prince says.
"You should leave."
"Not yet."
The foal and the prince have this conversation in different forms across different dangers. The foal warns. The prince acknowledges. The prince stays, because the time is not right, because leaving before the right moment means the waiting was for nothing.
There is a word in Dari — saburi — close to the Arabic sabr but with something additional in it, something that comes from being embedded in a specific landscape of endurance, a specific cultural memory of waiting out larger forces than yourself.
Saburi is the patience of a people who have been invaded and occupied and starved and bombed and who are still here, still telling the same stories in the same courtyards.
He learned this word and then learned what it cost to live it.
Rizwan was Hamza's foal.Not in the sense of being lesser — in the sense of being the keeper. The one who called the cover name knowing it was a cover name. The one who could read the face behind the face, who knew there was a language beneath the Urdu that never came out, a name beneath the name that was never spoken.
Hamza knew.
This is the sentence with the most weight. Hamza knew, and the knowing made the years possible in a way that no operational review can account for. The knowing was structural. It was the difference between wearing a disguise and becoming the disguise.
Between the prince in the garden who is still a prince and the gardener who looks in the mirror one day and cannot find the prince anymore.
Hamza gave him the diary and said leave.
And the keeping stopped.
Some things do not require elaboration. Some things are their own elaboration.]
Lyari. The operations.
There is a chapter of the years that he keeps in a specific place — not sealed, not forgotten, just stored at a remove, the way you store things that are both necessary to keep and costly to access. The chapter called: what they did together.
He and Hamza worked through a list that had no official name, in a file that officially did not exist, of men who were in Karachi and should not be. Zahoor Mistry. The Khanani brothers. Men whose names appeared in briefings about attacks on trains and markets and all the ordinary places where people are when they become targets without knowing it. Each one documented. Each one removed.
He was beside Hamza for all of it — the logistics, the intelligence, the specific precision that the training had installed in both of them, the shared body count that accumulated across the years like sediment.
He filed all of it. Sent to Aalam, through Aalam to Sanyal in Delhi, each transmission a thread in the net they were building.
He did not grieve any of the men they removed.
He is not certain this is a healthy thing.
He is also not certain that healthy is the right metric for what they were doing in those lanes at those hours, and some distinctions you stop pursuing because pursuing them is a luxury the work did not allow and now, in the after, there is a habit of not pursuing that has outlasted the necessity.
Then: the Uzair Baloch framing.
He wants to be precise about this because the imprecise version is comfortable and the precise version is the true one and he has been in a line of work that requires him to know the difference. What happened: Hamza engineered the fall of Arshad Pappu. Uzair Baloch was positioned as the instrument. The evidence was real — Uzair had done it, the football scene, that specific and extreme violence — but the positioning of the evidence, the way it surfaced, the record that brought the police and the gangs simultaneously to bear: that was constructed.
His testimony was part of the construction.
His statement — Rizwan Shah, loyal aide, credible witness — was one of the load-bearing pieces that made Uzair's guilt legible to the people who needed to believe it. He gave the statement accurately. He said what had happened. He selected which part of what had happened to say, which is not lying, which is the specific discipline that the work requires, which is also, on reflection, a form of violence with a clean face.
He is precise about this. He was part of the mechanism that destroyed a man's position in the world. The man had done what he was said to have done. He had also been selected for destruction for reasons that had nothing to do with Arshad Pappu and everything to do with what Hamza needed next. Both of these things are simultaneously true. He was the instrument of both.
He moved on. He has been very good at moving on.
He is less certain, in the after, that moving on and accounting for are the same thing.
He is less certain, in the after, that he has done the accounting.
Lyari. The night of the ammunition.
This is the one he returns to. Not the operations, not the kills, not the testimony or the years. This one. The specific and complete texture of this one night.
He had known something was wrong before they arrived. He had known the way you know things after years in Lyari — not with the mind first, with the body.
The way the men at the perimeter were positioned. He had read it and he had not said anything because saying it would have required explaining how he knew, and explaining how he knew required a kind of precision about his own perception that he had learned to keep internal.
They delivered the ammunition.
Major Iqbal took Hamza.
He sensed it the moment the room changed — not saw, sensed, the way you sense a door closing before you hear it — and he moved and the door was already locked and he was on the outside of it and Hamza was on the inside and there was a wall between them and the wall was not going to move.
He wants to be precise about what those minutes were like. He has been precise about most things for most of his life and he is going to be precise about this too, because imprecision is a way of protecting yourself from what something actually was and he has decided, in the after, that he is done protecting himself from this particular thing.
The minutes were this: he was outside a locked door with Hamza on the other side and he did not know what was happening on the other side and he could not get through and he had a choice. He could make noise — draw attention, attempt a breach, do the thing that felt like action. Or he could wait. He could trust the plan that Hamza had built, the explosives planted in the ammunition with Shirani's help, the sequence that required only the right moment and someone with the nerve to detonate it and accept whatever the detonation cost.
He waited.
He stood outside a locked door in Lyari and he held the detonator and he waited and he did not know whether Hamza was alive and he had to hold that not-knowing in the same body he was using to calculate the timing and he held it with the specific discipline of a man who has been trained to hold incompatible things simultaneously, which is what the work had made him, which he was grateful for in that moment in the way you are grateful for things that cost you.
He detonated at the right moment.
Hamza survived.
The mission continued.
He has told this story to himself many times since. He has accessed every part of it: the locked door, the not-knowing, the waiting, the detonation. He has been precise about all of it. He has not been able to access the part where he finds out Hamza is alive — the specific physical fact of that relief, what it did to his body, whether it was grief or something adjacent to grief or simply the release of a tension that had been held at a specific pitch for a specific duration and was now permitted to come down.
He is not certain he has words for that part.He is not certain words are the right tool for it.
He moves on. He is very good at moving on.
[The foreign kingdom in the folktale is not a punishment. The prince arrives in disguise because the world that was supposed to hold him became hostile, and the disguise was survival. Disguise in the service of survival is not deception. It is the oldest form of intelligence work.
But the folktale's foreign kingdom is neutral about what the prince is underneath the disguise. The king weeps when he learns the truth. The wound was only concealment.
Lyari was not neutral.
Lyari had opinions. Lyari had men who made those opinions legible at tables and in rooms, in the specific kind of joke that establishes hierarchy while maintaining deniability. He sat at those tables. He heard every joke. He filed every joke. He smiled the particular smile that covers nothing while appearing to cover everything, and he passed the chai, and he was grateful — this is the word, grateful — that Hamza was in the room, because Hamza knowing was the thing that kept the prince from disappearing entirely into the gardener.
He sat in the house of men who would have put him out of it if they had known what language he thought in at 3am.
Malik Khorsheed hid his name.
He hid his name and his origin and his blood and his mother tongue and the mountains in the frame of a childhood window and the specific and irreducible fact of being Pathan in a room full of people who had decided, historically, specifically, what Pathans were.
The folktale was not built to contain this.
The folktale gives you concealment. It does not give you the particular violence of concealing the thing that makes you who you are in a room that would hate you for it. It does not give you Gulbaz smoothing the Pashto from his throat three tables away while you sit with your cover name and your filed observations and your mouth closed around the language you share.
This is the thing no briefing prepares you for and no commendation acknowledges: the cost of being underground in an enemy's city is not the danger. Danger has procedures. The cost is this.
The moving on.
The accumulated weight of all the filing and moving on over all the years.]
The city continued. The generators ran. The chai stalls were open. A child was kicking something down a lane too narrow for the sound to go anywhere except straight up. The city was having a morning the way it always had mornings — without ceremony, without registering that something had just ended inside it, without any awareness of what it had housed for years in its lanes.
He had been invisible so long that the invisibility had started to feel like the truth about him rather than a technique. This is the specific damage of years of cover work and it is not the damage the briefings address. The briefings address the obvious damage. The other kind — the slow replacement of the self with the cover, the gradual installation of the cover's reflexes where the self's used to be — this is the damage that does not surface in any assessment because the assessment cannot reach it, because by the time it is extensive enough to measure the person being assessed has become too skilled at covering to let the assessment find it.
He had Rizwan's reflexes now. Rizwan's read of a room. Rizwan's smooth cityless Urdu belonging to no one in particular.
His mother's language was still there. He checked. Below all of it. Still accessible. He visited it at 3am and found it and said his real name in it and put it away again.
He did not know how long this would be true.
He carried the diary six weeks before opening it. The interval is precise information about how a person manages something they cannot put down and cannot look at simultaneously. Six weeks is how long it took to find the internal stillness — not silence, Lyari has never had silence, but the internal kind you construct with effort inside the noise.
He opened it on a Tuesday.
The handwriting was small and pressed hard. He read three pages. He read about Punjab. About a family that had been held in trust while Jaskirat became Hamza, about a before that still existed, waiting, however painfully, however imperfectly.
He closed it.
He sat until the room changed quality around him.
He thought about his own before. The house facing the mountains. His mother's voice. Her hands — the shape of them visible, the details beginning to thin at the edges, the specifics being replaced by the impression of specifics. He is losing her in increments he did not consent to. This is what the years do. Nobody puts it in the contract because the contract cannot hold everything the work actually takes.
He thought about Jaskirat. He thought about Punjab waiting. He thought: even his grief has an address.
He thought: mine has a language nobody in this city speaks.
He thought: I have been keeping it alone for years.
[The black foal, in the end, gets to carry the prince home. It has held the real identity through the whole disguise. It has been the one witness. And when the truth is spoken and the recognition is complete, it carries the prince back to where he came from.
Not every foal gets to make that journey.
Hamza went home.
I keep saying this because it is the precise shape of the wound. Hamza went home in the direction of his real name, toward the people who know it, into the life that was held in trust. He has the problem of return, which is a real problem, which will break him in specific ways and remake him in others. But there is a door. The door exists.
Rizwan has the problem of remaining.
This is the distinction that does not appear in any briefing or assessment or commendation file. The distinction between the person who goes home and has to navigate the re-entry, and the person who does not go home yet, who keeps being the cover in the in-between, whose in-between has no clear end date, whose cover name is doing more and more of the work that used to be shared with the real one.
Malik Khorsheed got forty days of feasting and a flying horse and a father weeping in the palace gardens.
He gets Tuesdays. The diary. The hands that know a city he is leaving in the specific way that you know something you will not return to — completely, with the knowledge sitting in the body permanently, unreturnable. The real name, in the language nobody here speaks, in a room inside himself that he visits deliberately, carefully, because the passage has grown unfamiliar and he knows what it means when familiar things become unfamiliar and he is not ready to know that about this.
He is a Pathan who spent years in a Baloch city, in the house of men who would have put him out of it for the language in the back of his throat, doing work that required him to bury the first true thing about himself.
He has no other option and he has not run out of the patience for it, and this is the only ending this version of the story has: not the feast, not the father, not the flying horse home.
He is the foal.
Just the foal in the garden of a city that was never his, hands in the wrong soil, still knowing — with complete precision, with the certainty of a man who has lost almost everything except this one thing — exactly what he is underneath the dirt.]
Sometimes at the wink of night he thinks to himself —
Am I the foal or simply the prince refusing to leave because of the timing?
Do what you will with this.
fin.
author note: This one was strange to write.
Rizwan is a relatively minor character compared to Jaskirat , which meant I had far less material to work with than I usually do. But the moment I came across the story of Malik Khorsheed, the parallel lodged itself in my brain and refused to leave.
The more I thought about it, the more interested I became in the person who doesn't get the ending the folktale promises. So this ended up becoming less of a character study and more of a literary analysis disguised as one.
If you choose to read it that way, you're probably not wrong.
I could have pointed out my favourite lines, but everything was so emotional! Especially Jaskirat and his friendship- no, their recognition of parallel weights! And I did not miss the references from Jaskirat's Rakhi headcannon/fic.
Rizwan remains a severely unsung hero!
Kudos to @writrsblu for paralleling such folk tales so amazingly!
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