where we finally step into her past—not as a memory, but as a lived moment—and see the world through her mother’s eyes the day she was taken, and through Zooni’s, the day she was left behind with Dei’d?

She Was Carried Like Grain, Then Left Like Dust

The first sound she remembered was not her mother’s voice.

It was the squeal of cartwheels dragging across uneven stone, the kind of sound that stays in the back of the jaw, not the ear. The wheels were bound in iron bands, and each time they hit a patch of loose gravel or a nail in the plank road, they screamed like something being asked to go where it didn’t want to.

Zooni had been five then. Maybe six. Years did not stack properly in her memory. They floated, tethered more to smell than season, to the texture of clothes worn thin by movement. That day, her mother wore a red dupatta that no longer held its dye. The cloth had been washed so many times it had turned into something else—something between brick and rust, with a pale corner torn near the edge.

They had come from the edge of Rainawari. Not from a house, but a corner room behind a copper workshop where the men rarely looked up when women passed. Her mother had worked two streets over—sorting pashmina fibers in a narrow lane that always smelled of damp wool and chicken feed. That morning, her hands had smelled of both when she lifted Zooni into the cart.

"Sit still," she had whispered. Not as command. As survival.

Zooni hadn’t asked where they were going. Children learn quickly when not to ask. Her mother’s mouth had gone flat, her eyes swollen from the kind of weeping that leaves no water, only salt.

They sat beside two other women and a girl barely older than Zooni, who kept pulling at a fraying shawl stitched with yellow thread. No one spoke. The cart moved through alleys in early light, through streets where dogs sniffed the ashes of last night’s cooking fires and men stood outside masjids pretending to stretch but watching every cart that passed.

It wasn’t until they reached the checkpoint near the canal that one of the guards—Dogra, from his accent and the red scarf at his belt—smirked, lifted the tarp slightly, and muttered something Zooni could never forget.

“Kalīyāṅ le jā rahe ho? Bāzār ke liye?”

Taking the black flowers to market?

The men on the roadside laughed.

Zooni didn’t know what it meant, not exactly. But the tone clung to her skin like the fine soot that settles on rooftops after distant fires.

They were not going to the market.

They were not going to prayer.

They were going where girls disappeared into basements and came back with new names, or didn’t come back at all.

Her mother held her tight, tighter than ever before. Zooni had thought it was fear. But later, she would understand—it was goodbye.

At a bend in the road where the river curved too close to the road, and the cart tilted slightly, the driver slowed. The man walking beside them, the same one who’d offered the guard a tin of jaggery in exchange for a quick pass, turned back to adjust something in the load.

Her mother saw the gap.

She looked at Zooni once—not as a mother. As a decision.

Then she whispered, “Roll.”

Zooni blinked.

“Roll,” she repeated. “Now.”

She shoved.

Not hard. But enough.

Zooni fell sideways, off the edge of the cart, into a patch of dry grass littered with tobacco husks. The world spun once. Her elbow scraped on something. Her lip bled. She stayed down.

The cart did not stop.

No one shouted.

No one noticed.

Or if they did, they let it happen.

She lay still until she could no longer hear the wheels. Only then did she look up—and in that brief, final glimpse, she saw her mother’s arm still hanging over the edge of the cart. Her hand, open. Not waving. Not reaching.

Just open.

As if still waiting to touch something that would never return.

Zooni did not cry.

Not that day.

Not for many days after.

Because the moment the cart vanished, she no longer belonged to someone. She belonged to the silence the cart left behind.

And it would be hours before someone found her.

And it would be days before the woman she would call Dei’d would speak her name as if it had always been hers.

The hands that lifted her were not hurried. They smelled of burnt wheat, and they trembled, not from fear or weakness, but from something older—like the memory of carrying too many broken things that had once breathed.

She had been lying near the banks for hours, dirt caked in the lines of her knees, lip split and sticky, hair tangled with small burs and husk. When the footsteps stopped beside her and the shadow fell across her face, she did not open her eyes. She waited for shouting, or the sting of a reprimand. But what came instead was the sound of someone lowering themselves to the ground with care. Cloth rustled. A sigh was exhaled—not out of exasperation, but from the weight of recognition.

A palm hovered above her back before touching it gently. And then came the words.

“Your name?”

No command. No sweetness. Just a request offered in the tone one might use when asking the earth if it’s ready to be planted.

Zooni did not answer.

She didn’t remember answering even later.

But her body turned slightly into the touch, and something loosened behind her eyes, and before she could decide to trust or run, the woman had already wrapped her in a woolen shawl that smelled of turmeric and clay, and lifted her from the grass as if she were not a stranger, but a bundle that had always been meant for her arms.

She was carried—not cradled, not hoisted. Carried.

Like firewood.

Like a promise.

The room they entered later that day was not warm, but it did not carry the cold of punishment. It held a kind of heat that didn’t come from fire—the kind that settles into old clay walls and never quite leaves. The woman placed her on a woven mat, not in the center of the room, but in the corner, beneath the only shelf where no pots were kept. A kettle hissed from somewhere behind a curtain. A small dish of crushed dates sat near the threshold, untouched.

The woman knelt beside her and dipped a clean cloth in warm water. She wiped the blood from her lip. She poured a stream of water into Zooni’s palm and waited until the girl brought it to her mouth herself.

When Zooni finally looked into her eyes, she saw no question there. No demand for thanks. Only patience—as though the woman had been waiting for years to find a child who wouldn’t speak until spoken to gently.

After night fell, after the candles were lowered and the clay stove filled the room with breathy warmth, the woman placed a bundle of shawls beneath Zooni’s head and said, not like a statement, but like a passing wind:

“I’ll call you Zooni.”

Zooni.

She had never heard it before.

She didn’t know what it meant.

But she held it behind her teeth for hours afterward, rolling the sound against the roof of her mouth the way one might roll a cherry pit found on a long walk.

The name did not sting.

It did not bind.

It filled her mouth like water.

And for the first time since the cart, she fell asleep not from exhaustion—but because someone had given her a name with no price attached to it.

The voice belongs only to the world of the novel now, where silence teaches, spoons speak, and belonging comes not through words, but through repetition and warmth.

The first morning in the clay house was not marked by rooster’s cry or temple bell. It was marked by a rhythm—three taps against the copper pot, pause, two more, and a gentle scrape of wood on metal. The kind of rhythm that has no name but feels familiar to those who have grown up near women who rise before light. Zooni opened her eyes slowly. The air was still cool, the mat beneath her rough but comforting. The fire hadn’t been lit yet. Only embers hummed in the stove’s belly, their glow flickering against the ceiling in muted bursts of gold.

The woman sat near the hearth, grinding soaked lentils in a stone mill. Her back was straight, her arms moving in a steady motion, not mechanical but ritual. She did not hum. She did not sigh. She simply worked, as if the act itself was a kind of prayer older than language.

Zooni watched from beneath the shawl she had curled into during the night. The fabric still carried the scent of that first embrace—sweat, turmeric, dried pomegranate peel. It was the smell of walls that kept secrets and never asked for explanations.

The woman did not turn. But she knew she was being watched.

Without looking up, she said softly, “There’s milk on the brick outside. Warmed by the sun. You’ll find it sweeter if you don’t ask for sugar.”

Zooni sat up slowly, unsure if she was expected to obey or decline. But the woman had already returned to her grinding, the millstone singing quietly with every full circle.

Zooni wrapped the shawl around her shoulders and stepped out into the light. The doorway was low, framed by twigs and smoke-darkened plaster. Outside, the courtyard was narrow, hemmed in by three walls and the back of an abandoned chicken coop. In the center, on a square of flat stone, stood a tin cup half full of milk. A few bees floated above it lazily, uninterested.

She crouched beside the cup and brought it to her lips. It was warm, as promised. Not hot. Not cold. Just the right temperature to remind her of things she hadn’t had in weeks: taste, calm, presence.

She drank slowly, each sip loosening something in her chest.

When she stepped back inside, the woman was pressing the ground lentil paste into small cakes, her palms wet to keep the dough from clinging. She placed them one by one on a clay slab, arranging them like little moons.

Zooni did not speak.

The woman did not ask.

But the girl moved forward and crouched beside her, reached into the bowl, and began to roll a cake of her own. The shape was wrong. The edges split. It looked like a stone someone had kicked into a corner.

But the woman did not correct her.

She only took it, gently reshaped it in one practiced movement, and placed it with the others.

Then she looked at her and smiled—not with her mouth, but with her eyes, the kind of smile that said: I will teach you, but only when you ask.

Zooni looked down at her hands, now sticky with lentil and flour.

She said nothing.

But the woman said, without lifting her gaze:

“Zooni. You make the seventh.”

Zooni blinked.

“The seventh what?”

The woman shrugged, wiping her hands.

“The seventh girl this house has held.”

She stood, went to the shelf, and brought down a wooden ladle, blackened with age.

“Two ran. One returned. Three were taken back.”

She handed the ladle to Zooni and said only this:

“You will stay.”

The rhythm of daily life as it reclaims a girl not through proclamations or promises, but through small repetitions—the kind that say: you are wanted, without ever needing to be said aloud.

She stayed.

Not because someone locked a door. Not because she was told she could. But because each morning arrived as if it expected her. As if the bricks had adjusted themselves slightly in the night to make room for her breath. There was no ceremony to the staying. No naming of the act. But it became clear, by the third day, that she was not a guest.

The woman—Khatun, though Zooni would not learn that name for months—never asked questions. Not about the cart, not about the road, not about the mother whose hand had once hung limp over a wooden edge. She did not press Zooni to speak of anything she wasn’t ready to say. What she did instead was offer tasks.

Tiny ones at first. Fill the basin. Grind the dried chilies. Stir the lentils but only clockwise—“anti-clockwise brings quarrels,” she had said, her eyes glinting, though her face did not smile. Thread the needle but don’t knot it yet. Lay the shawls out to air but bring them in before the third crow call.

There was no praise when Zooni did these things right.

There was no scolding when she did them wrong.

There was only the continuation of doing.

And in that rhythm, Zooni began to stretch inside her skin again.

In the evenings, when the air thinned and the smell of dried apricot pits curling on the stove replaced the scent of cumin, Khatun would light a clay lamp and sit near the hearth with a basket of torn fabrics. She stitched slowly, not to repair anything, but to remember. Each piece was from another girl. A sleeve. A corner hem. A patch of shawl too frayed to salvage, too sacred to discard.

She never explained what they were.

Zooni learned by watching.

On the seventh evening, Khatun handed her a square of cloth—not from the basket, but freshly torn from an old tunic. The edges were clean, the weave still tight. She handed her a thread, already looped through a needle, and said simply:

“Add your thread to the others. No pattern needed.”

Zooni held the needle for a long time. Her fingers were unsure. The thread slipped once, twice. She poked her own thumb. A tiny bead of blood welled, and Khatun handed her a piece of crushed neem leaf to press against it. The pain was small. The ritual was larger.

She stitched that square with jagged lines, not knowing where they should go, only that they must begin somewhere. When she was done, she placed it beside the others. Khatun didn’t look. She didn’t need to. She simply took a long breath and began stitching again.

Later, when Zooni lay beneath a quilt that still carried the scent of camphor and warm stone, she whispered the word to herself in the dark: “Stay.”

The room didn’t answer.

It didn’t have to.

It had already made room for her breath.

There is no summary, no framing, no break in voice. Only the continuous unfolding of Zooni’s experience as she takes her first steps outside the home where she has been quietly restored into personhood.

The market road was still damp from the morning washings. Vendors had splashed water onto the cobblestones with wide palm sweeps, brushing away yesterday’s dust, blood from butcher stalls, and the smell of crushed onions. The early hour had drawn out the quieter shoppers—widows with threadbare baskets, bakers’ apprentices carrying sacks slung over one shoulder, and the shawl-sellers who moved slowly, not because they were old, but because they had learned long ago that haste attracts attention.

Khatun moved with the same rhythm she carried inside her home—measured, deliberate, as if her feet remembered every crack in the stone before it rose to meet her. She did not carry a list. She did not ask for prices. She moved from stall to stall with the certainty of someone who had long ago stopped needing to explain herself.

Zooni walked two steps behind.

Not because she was told to, but because it felt correct. The way shadows follow in morning light—not ahead, not beside, but near enough to still belong.

She wore a plain shawl that Khatun had adjusted for her that morning, cutting the edge diagonally so it wouldn’t slip from her shoulder. The cloth was too large, but it smelled of soap and firewood and something faintly bitter—dried lime, maybe. It comforted her, that bitter scent.

As they passed the fruit stall, the vendor—an old man with one clouded eye and a prayer bead coiled tightly around his wrist—nodded to Khatun.

“You’ve brought the little one,” he said, voice rasping like crushed almonds.

Khatun didn’t pause. She picked up two quinces, weighed them in her hands.

“She walks now,” she replied.

Zooni’s face flushed.

The old man turned his gaze to her.

“What’s your name, child?”

She opened her mouth.

Then closed it.

But the answer came anyway—from the side, from behind fruit-scent and spice:

“She is Zooni,” Khatun said, without emphasis.

Zooni didn’t flinch.

She didn’t step forward or retreat.

She let it be said.

And the way the old man nodded, as if the name explained her presence entirely, settled something in her chest.

They moved on.

Near the spice vendor, a boy barely older than her slipped a pinch of turmeric into her hand without asking. She looked to Khatun. Khatun didn’t correct him. The boy smiled and said, “For the new one.”

At the grain stall, the woman weighing rice in copper pans muttered under her breath, “This one won’t vanish like the others.”

Not cruelly.

Not accusingly.

Just as fact.

Zooni understood then: her name had gone ahead of her. Not like a rumor. Like a boundary. It shielded her now, softened the way strangers looked, made them nod instead of leer.

When they reached the end of the market, where the road opened near the bakery that still sold cracked barley loaves, Khatun turned to her and held out a warm one, broken in half.

“For the walk back.”

Zooni took it.

They walked in silence.

But every step back home felt different than the walk out.

Not because the road had changed.

Because now, with each stride, she no longer followed behind her name.

She walked within it.

Every line lives inside Zooni’s world, where silence has texture, memory is sewn by hand, and to belong is to be slowly woven into the breath of a place.

The gate creaked once as they entered, the iron latch scraping softly against stone. The scent of cumin had faded from the kitchen wall. The air now carried the richer warmth of clove and roasted salt, heat rising gently from the back oven even though no flame had been seen since noon. The house was neither grand nor sparse. It was a skin. A wrap. A room that fit whoever needed shelter, adjusting itself like an old shawl with every new weight added.

Zooni stepped into the courtyard and kicked her slippers aside without thinking. Her feet were dusted with road silt and broken grain husk. Her left heel ached slightly from the tightness of her sandal strap, but she didn’t mind. The walk had softened something stiff in her ankles. She felt older, though the distance from market to home was less than a mile.

Khatun had already seated herself on the lower step by the hearth wall, her knees raised, her elbows resting comfortably atop them. Before her lay the cloth box—narrow, wooden, its hinges rusted, its interior lined with pieces of every girl who had once slept within the house’s breath. The basket of patches was full again.

Zooni did not speak.

She moved toward the bucket by the stove, dipped her hands into lukewarm water, and rubbed the city dust from her palms. The turmeric boy’s pinch had stained her skin a pale gold. It remained there like an accidental blessing.

She dried her hands on the old towel hanging near the door and crossed to Khatun’s side.

The woman was separating pieces.

Each patch of cloth was carefully unfolded, refolded, then laid in one of three stacks.

One stack was faded to near-white. Old. The kind of cloth that had belonged to girls taken so long ago their names had stopped being spoken, and now were only remembered through their thread count.

The second stack held color. Some frayed. Some fresh. These were pieces Khatun had not yet decided what to do with. The in-between ones.

And the third—there were only two in the third. But Zooni knew one of them was hers.

She sat beside her, cross-legged.

Khatun did not look up.

But she reached for the edge of a scrap—a thin blue muslin triangle with a tear shaped like a dog’s tooth—and she began to stitch it to the hem of Zooni’s patch.

No explanation. No instruction.

Zooni watched the thread move.

In. Out. Pull. In. Out. Tie. Bite the edge with her teeth. Knot.

“What was hers?” Zooni asked softly, pointing to the blue triangle.

Khatun didn’t answer immediately. She placed the joined patches down and picked up the next.

“She was sold to a trader near Qazigund. He told her he’d bring her back in a week.”

She pulled the needle through the next piece, a torn paisley print.

“He came back. She didn’t.”

Zooni looked at the blue patch again.

“She was… the fifth?”

“No. The second.”

Zooni placed her hand gently on the stitched fabric.

“She’s part of mine now.”

“She always was,” Khatun said.

And they continued stitching, two pairs of hands binding thread to cloth, not to fix, not to complete—but to remind the house who it had carried, and who it still held.

The courtyard held stillness like a bowl holds water. And as dusk thickened around them, even the birds in the rafters seemed to hush, as if the sewing needle’s rhythm was not to be interrupted.

Nothing breaks its spell. No summaries. No frames. Just the quiet unfolding of night, thread by thread, memory by memory, as Zooni dares to ask what no one has ever spoken—not about the lost, but about the woman who kept them.

The oil lamp burned low that night, its flame curling into itself like a sleeping child. The shadows on the walls had begun to settle. Earlier they had danced across clay and fabric, animated by the motions of Khatun’s hands, but now they simply stretched—long, still, as if listening. Outside the window, the wind had stilled. Even the neighbor’s rooster had gone quiet, as though it knew better than to crow during nights that remembered too much.

Zooni lay curled beneath a quilt stitched with old cloth: sleeves that no longer had shoulders to rest on, scarf ends that had once carried scent, squares of a tunic hemmed with faint traces of henna. Her fingers traced the seams in the dark. She had memorized their texture. Some were coarse. Some still had knots in them. Others were smooth, as though touched too many times by hands reaching for names in sleep.

Khatun sat nearby, not on her mat, but near the door, spine against the wall, knees drawn up, hands folded. She hadn’t moved for some time. Her eyes were open, though unblinking. She looked at nothing. Or rather, everything. The kind of gaze that had grown beyond the room, beyond the valley, beyond the stitched names that the world refused to carry.

Zooni turned to her, her voice small, not out of fear, but from the weight of the question.

“What was your name before?”

The words hovered in the air, delicate as lamp smoke.

Khatun didn’t answer right away. She blinked once, as if the question had been asked in another language, one her ears hadn’t heard in years. Her fingers unfolded slowly, one atop the other, and rested on her lap.

Zooni did not repeat herself.

She knew that kind of silence. It was not refusal.

It was the silence of unburying.

Khatun shifted her gaze, not to Zooni, but to the far corner of the room, where a cracked pot held dry marigolds—petals curled inward like tiny fists.

“They called me Khatun when I had nothing left,” she said finally, her voice like linen pulled from an old chest—creased, soft, slightly frayed.

Zooni sat up slowly.

Khatun continued, her tone even, but far away.

“My name was Halima.”

She said it simply, as if pronouncing the name of someone else.

Zooni repeated it in her mouth, but did not speak it aloud.

Halima.

She imagined the name once sewn onto a blouse. Written in charcoal on the inside of a window. Whispered into someone’s hair.

“I was seventeen,” Khatun said. “The night the soldiers came. I hid in the pantry beneath the rice sacks. They didn’t find me. But they took my sister. Sana.”

She paused.

“They thought she was me.”

Her voice did not break.

That moment had long since solidified.

“She screamed my name until the cart turned the corner.”

She looked down at her hands, pale against the dark of her shawl.

“I never used it again. I stitched her into it. Let it go with her.”

Zooni did not ask more.

She moved across the room on quiet feet, her quilt trailing behind her like mist. She sat beside Khatun and leaned her head against her shoulder.

Khatun did not flinch.

She placed her arm around the girl and said nothing.

They sat like that for a long time, the lamp burning lower, the room darkening until even the walls seemed to hold their breath.

Zooni did not sleep quickly.

But when she did, it was not from exhaustion.

It was from the knowledge that names, once buried, sometimes return—not in full, not unchanged—but in the shape of someone reaching across the dark to say:

I hear you.

This is Zooni’s morning, her clay, her quiet defiance of forgetting.

Dawn arrived with the hush of snowfall, though no snow had fallen. The sky held its light close, pale and silvery, as if the sun were still deciding whether to rise or retreat. The courtyard, swept the evening before, bore the faint imprint of the night wind—little ridges in the dust where the air had curled around the corners of bricks, leaving behind soft signatures of silence.

Zooni stepped outside barefoot.

The earth was cold, but it did not bite. It greeted her the way old stone greets palms—familiar, indifferent, grounding. Her shawl hung loose from her shoulders. Her breath left faint traces in the air as she walked toward the shelf by the northern wall, where the potter’s girl had left the slab of unfired clay wrapped in damp linen. It had been untouched for days, reserved for something they had not yet named.

She peeled back the cloth.

The clay glistened in patches, soft but stable, ready.

She touched it lightly with her fingertips.

It did not flinch.

Inside the kitchen, she could hear the sound of Khatun’s spoon against the copper pot—steady, measured, unchanged. The same rhythm from her first morning here, as though time circled inward instead of forward in this house.

Zooni dipped her fingers into a bowl of water drawn from the well the night before. It was cool enough to sharpen her breath, but not enough to sting. She reached for the small reed stylus, the same one she had used weeks earlier to press her own name into clay.

She paused.

The clay was blank.

Smooth as the pause before a secret.

Then, without hesitation, she began to write.

Not her name.

Not the name of a lost girl carried off in a cart.

Not a ledger entry.

Just one word.

One name.

Halima

The letters were soft at first, the ‘H’ a little crooked, the ‘a’ pressed too deep, the loop of the ‘l’ curled like the tail of a sparrow resting. She leaned closer, her breath warming the surface. She smoothed the edges with her thumb, not to erase, but to calm.

When it was done, she did not decorate it.

She did not frame it.

She simply placed the reed down beside the bowl, covered the slab again with damp cloth, and let the name sink back into stillness.

She did not show it to Khatun.

She would never speak of it aloud.

But she knew, when the day came for that slab to enter the kiln, and the fire licked its edges, and the name hardened into permanence, the house would carry it.

Not as a revelation.

Not as an exposure.

But as a quiet restoration.

Zooni turned back toward the kitchen.

She did not hurry.

The sound of the spoon had stopped.

She stepped inside to find Khatun sitting on the low stool, her back to the window, her hands folded in her lap, eyes closed. The lentils still bubbled faintly behind her, the steam curling like calligraphy above the pot.

Zooni did not speak.

She poured a small cup of tea and placed it beside the older woman.

Then sat at her side.

Neither reached for the cup.

It did not matter.

The name had been written.

And somewhere beneath the shawl of this house, the girl who had once been stolen, who had once hidden beneath rice sacks, had found her way back into clay.

The shrine sat low into the hillside, almost hidden beneath an arch of willow branches that had grown wild over its stone gate. It bore no dome. No tiled façade. Just a single lintel carved with the outline of a hand and a verse too faded to read. The walls were made of earth-stained stone, cool to the touch and greened with age, as if they had never sought the attention of kings or priests—only of those who remembered how to kneel without needing an audience.

Zooni walked beside Khatun, their shadows falling unevenly over the broken flagstones. The sky was a soft shade of brass, the kind that made everything below it look older, gentler. Khatun carried no offering, no cloth bundle. Only her breath, which moved slower these days. Her left hand gripped the edge of her shawl the way a sailor grips a rope—not out of fear, but because she knew the sea sometimes changed mid-sentence.

They passed the outer threshold where pilgrims once left coins and broken bangles. Now, there were only marigold petals and an old ink bottle someone had placed upright beside a crack in the wall. Someone, Zooni thought, who believed that ink and prayer belonged to the same family.

Inside the shrine, the light was dim. One oil lamp still flickered near the mihrab, its wick half-sunken into olive wax. A woman sat in the corner, forehead pressed to her knees, lips moving without sound. An old man traced prayer beads in the dark with hands that looked more like bark than skin.

Khatun moved slowly, but with certainty, to the side wall. She did not bow. She did not murmur.

She simply sat.

Zooni joined her, folding her legs beneath her, the floor cool through the thin cloth of her salwar. The stone smelled of dust and dried turmeric, like the walls of their kitchen after a long winter.

For a long time, neither spoke.

The silence did not stretch between them. It pooled. It thickened. It held.

Zooni reached into her satchel and pulled out the smallest of the tablets—a narrow piece no bigger than a man’s palm. She had carried it without knowing why. The name on it was already etched. Not one of the others. Her own.

She placed it on the floor between them.

Khatun looked at it, then at her. Her face did not change. But her hands moved—one palm sliding slowly until it rested over Zooni’s wrist.

It was the first time she had ever touched her like that—deliberately, gently, without the rhythm of labor or instruction. Just presence.

Zooni lowered her gaze.

Khatun’s thumb moved slightly, brushing the inside of her wrist.

Then, in a voice softer than Zooni had ever heard from her, Khatun said, “This is where I remembered who I wasn’t.”

Zooni looked up, uncertain.

Khatun continued, her eyes fixed on the far wall.

“After Sana was taken, I came here. I thought I would die inside the silence. But the stones here… they didn’t ask me to explain. They let me forget. And only when I forgot what I was called, could I begin to remember who I still was.”

Zooni’s throat tightened.

Khatun turned to her and said, “You brought my name back. But you didn’t demand it.”

“I needed to know,” Zooni whispered.

Khatun nodded.

“And now you do.”

They sat until the oil lamp dimmed completely, the wick curling in on itself like a secret closing. Outside, the wind had shifted. Sparrows gathered at the edge of the wall, picking at the marigold petals as if searching for something beneath them.

As they stood to leave, Zooni tucked the tablet back into her satchel. Not to hide it. But to keep it warm.

Khatun took her hand once more as they stepped back into the wind.

They walked slowly down the hill.

Two women.

Neither rescued.

Neither saved.

Only carried forward by the quiet power of having once been forgotten—and having returned not as ghosts, but as keepers of each other’s breath.

No explanations. No framing. Only the unbroken breath of the narrative, as memory returns not through pain but through touch—through warmth, soot, and the stubborn quiet of a name repeated only to oneself.

The fire had burned low, leaving a red bed of embers curled into themselves like old stories that no longer needed telling. The wind outside scraped gently against the shutters, testing them as it often did in the late weeks of autumn. It was not the wind that howled tonight, but the stove’s low moan—soft, steady, the sigh of stone and flame remembering their age.

Zooni sat near the hearth with her legs folded to one side, a wool shawl wrapped over both shoulders, her bare feet pressed against the brick for warmth. The light from the fire painted her skin in a soft hue of copper, flickering slightly every time the coals cracked. She held no paper, no stylus, no thread. Only her finger, dipped in water, and the soft soot that had settled across the hearthstone like a veil.

With her finger she began to draw.

Not shapes.

Not symbols.

Names.

The first she traced was not her own. It was one she had never spoken aloud but had memorized from the tablet shelf—Sana, the sister Khatun had lost, the name whispered in a single breath when the oil lamp flickered. She traced it slowly, letting her fingertip press gently through the soot, dark against the wetness.

It disappeared within seconds, the water lifting it into a blur.

She wrote it again.

And again.

Each time letting it fade, not in grief, but in reverence.

After the fifth repetition, she paused.

Wiped her hand.

Let the ash settle again.

She turned slightly, glancing toward the inner room. Khatun had long since gone to rest, her breathing soft and even. The quilt over her rose and fell gently, as if even in sleep she stitched the air into something whole.

Zooni turned back to the fire.

She reached out again, this time using her nail to carve lightly into the softest part of the ash. A new name. Her own. Not bold. Not large. Just centered. Balanced.

She stared at it for a long time.

No one had ever told her the meaning of “Zooni.” She had never asked.

But tonight, she understood that it was not the meaning that mattered.

It was that it had been given with no cost. No trade. No hunger. Just placed into her lap like warm bread, like clean water, like a shawl that smelled of lentil and sun.

She leaned forward and pressed her palm softly into the ash, letting the warmth seep up into the lines of her hand. When she pulled away, her print remained—blurry at the edges, the ridges indistinct.

Still, it was hers.

She stared at the print until the glow of the coals dimmed, and the last crackle broke into silence.

She whispered, not to the fire, not to the name, but to the space between them:

“I stayed.”

And in that whisper, for the first time, she heard her voice not as a memory, not as an echo of something taken, but as a presence—a vow not to vanish.

She stood, dusted her fingers off on her shawl, and walked to the basin to wash.

The ash on her skin faded.

But inside her, the warmth stayed.

Next Chapter: Chapter Twelve: The Potter’s Refuge