Dei’d, the mysterious Sufi matriarch who is neither named in scripture nor feared by soldiers—but to the wounded, she is the last place the earth exhales gently.

The Woman with No History

There were many who claimed they knew where she came from. A few said she had once been a dancer in Raja Pratap Singh’s court, others whispered she had escaped from a caravan of slaves bound for Rawalpindi. One widow swore Dei’d had walked barefoot from Badakhshan, carrying nothing but a baby’s shawl and a half-burnt rosary.

But Dei’d herself never answered.

She sat in the inner courtyard of the old shrine at Gawkadal, where pigeons gathered in the hollows and prayers clung to the stone like moss. Her spine, though curved, never slouched. Her hands were always folded around a cup of salt tea—lukewarm, untouched. And her eyes, clouded yet lit, held the same patience that trees do in winter: not dead, just deeply remembering.

No one dared ask her name.

It wasn’t needed.

To the children of the street, she was Dei’d—grandmother not by blood, but by presence. To the hawkers, she was the one who muttered blessings under her breath when grain sacks passed her door. To the orphans, she was a lap that didn’t ask for lineage. And to the police, she was harmless—too old to matter, too quiet to register.

They were wrong.

Her silence was not frailty.

It was containment.

She never touched coin. Never wrote. But every Friday, the poor women of the quarter gathered at her door—some barefoot, some veiled in shame—and she would hand them handkerchiefs soaked in clove water, or roasted seeds tied in the corner of cotton scraps. She whispered nothing profound, but what she gave smelled like memory and stayed longer than hunger.

And then, there was Zooni.

A girl she never called her daughter.

But whom she guarded like a shrine guards a flame.

Zooni was perhaps thirteen. Or fifteen. No one knew. She had come to Dei’d’s doorstep one snow-slurred morning, her clothes wet, her eyes dry. Some said she was the daughter of a woman taken to Lahore’s Kali Gali, others claimed she had escaped from a brothel house disguised as a boy. But Dei’d had opened her shawl and wrapped the girl in silence.

And from that day, they were two shadows under the same sky—one who remembered too much, and one who tried not to.

Zooni spoke rarely.

But she wrote.

Tiny notebooks filled with words she would never speak aloud. Names of women who had disappeared. Bits of songs remembered halfway. Street names where screams were once heard but never answered. She wrote them on scraps, on leaves, on stone with charcoal, and tucked them into a wooden box beneath the prayer mat.

“If I write them,” she once whispered, “they don’t vanish.”

Dei’d had only nodded.

If Layaq wove pain into shawls, and Madahv blew justice through bamboo pipes, Zooni collected the pieces—the names the city tried to forget, the girls turned into currency, the women reduced to footnotes of tax and lust.

And Dei’d watched her do it all.

Without a word.

Without interruption.

As though this, too, was prayer.

Dei’d’s buried past, not through words she speaks, but through the rituals of forgetting she performs daily—and the quiet tremor that still passes through her at night.

What She Doesn’t Say

Every morning, before the city stirred, Dei’d would sweep the stone floor of the shrine courtyard with a broom made from date-palm fronds. Not hurriedly. Not dutifully. But deliberately, as though brushing away each layer of yesterday. She would pause at the corner near the rain-drain, where moss grew thickest, and gently whisper, not prayers—but names. Not full names. Just syllables. Just breaths.

It was never clear whom she was addressing.
Sometimes she seemed to be naming ghosts.
Sometimes, absences.

Once, Zooni had asked her what she was saying.

Dei’d did not stop sweeping.
She only said,

“I’m returning their sound to the ground.”

She never spoke of her own childhood. Never told Zooni who her mother was, or what language her lullabies had been sung in. But there were clues in the folds of her silence—burned calluses on her left shoulder, as if she’d once carried iron pots for someone else’s comfort. A faded scar across her collarbone, long and almost elegant, like a necklace made from flame. And the way her fingers would tremble whenever someone in the courtyard laughed too loudly.

The nights were worse.

She never cried aloud. But her body convulsed softly, as if memory passed through it like a slow fever. Once, in the cold of late November, Zooni had woken to the sound of whispering. Not a prayer. Not a curse.

But a single line, repeated like a wound:

“I told her I’d be back by dawn.”

Zooni did not ask who she meant.

She only placed her palm on Dei’d’s chest until the shaking stopped.

Dei’d never allowed mirrors in the room.
Not because of vanity.
But because she no longer needed to see the face she had carried through fire.

Yet she washed her hands five times a day. Not for prayer. Not even for cleanliness. But with the exactitude of someone who had once been forced to touch too much, and now sought to wash memory from her skin.

In the silence that defined her, she kept no relics of her past—no letters, no tokens, no heirloom objects. But folded inside the lining of her sleeping mat was a cloth bundle she never opened. Once, when she fell asleep beside the hearth, Zooni gently slipped it open.

Inside was a braid.
Jet black.
Tied with a crimson thread.
Still faintly smelling of sandalwood and burnt ghee.

Zooni folded it back and never mentioned it.

Dei’d was not a holy woman. She lit no incense, preached no verses, and had never memorized a single ayah with pride. But for the girls who came to her with broken fingernails, milkless breasts, and too many nights inside candlelit cages, she was the only place in the city that did not ask for explanation.

She made space.

Not with permission, but with presence.

And in a time when most women were known by what had been taken from them, Dei’d remained known by only what she had never surrendered—stillness.

A girl arrives at the shrine, fresh from the wounds of sale, and Zooni, still not fully healed herself, steps into the quiet role Dei’d once played for her. This is not a moment of drama. It is a moment of transference—where silence hands over its lamp.

The Second Girl

She arrived just after the muezzin’s voice had vanished into the folds of fog. A thin girl, no more than eleven or twelve, wrapped in a shawl two sizes too large, her feet bare, her breath fogging only slightly. Her ankles were bruised. One earring was missing. Her hair, once oiled, now matted in places, carried the bitter perfume of turmeric, iron, and fear.

Zooni saw her first.

She had been sweeping the steps with the same care Dei’d had taught her—start from the edges, end at the threshold, never step back onto what you’ve just cleared. The girl stood in the archway, not crying, not trembling, simply waiting—like someone who had no other direction left in her body.

Zooni didn’t ask questions.

She led her in with a glance.

Inside, the clay hearth was still warm. A pot of lentils had been left from the morning, and a little cumin smoke still hung in the air. Zooni placed a woolen wrap around the girl’s shoulders and poured water into a chipped copper bowl. The girl flinched when Zooni touched her hand, but didn’t pull away.

“What’s your name?” Zooni asked softly.

The girl stared at the flame.
Then whispered,

“Amira. I don’t know the rest.”

Zooni nodded, not with pity, but with recognition. The kind of nod only one vanished girl can give another. She placed the bowl into Amira’s lap, tore a roti into small pieces, and placed them beside her like folded letters.

In the far corner, Dei’d remained seated, shawl drawn over her head, eyes half-closed, rocking slightly—not asleep, not awake. Her silence was not inaction. It was approval without interference.

Zooni knew.

Because years ago, Dei’d had done the same for her.

Amira didn’t eat quickly. She tore the bread as if testing its texture, as if verifying that this wasn’t part of some scripted dream. She drank the water with both hands, spilling half of it, but made no apology.

Zooni sat across from her, knees tucked under her chin, quiet.

She didn’t ask what had happened.

The bruises had already spoken.

But after a long while, she said,

“You’ll sleep here. I’ll show you the corner where the cold doesn’t reach.”

Amira’s eyes fluttered toward Dei’d, who hadn’t moved.

“Is she… your mother?”

Zooni shook her head slowly.

“No. She’s the place my mother couldn’t reach.”

That night, as the three lay under different quilts in the same room, Amira cried—softly, into her shawl. Not the wailing of despair. Just the slow release of something tightened too long, like breath held underwater.

Zooni did not turn to comfort her.

She only whispered, facing the wall:

“They didn’t take your name. They only covered it in silence. We’ll wash it clean.”

And from the shadows, Dei’d murmured something—her voice thin as thread, but sharp as scripture:

“Every girl they sell,
they teach the wrong alphabet.
You will learn yours again,
from your own mouth.”

Dei’d meets Usman Chash under the quiet veil of evening. What passes between them is not strategy or plan—but something older than rebellion: the recognition between a woman who has carried broken souls and a man who has become one.

Salt in the Ashes

It was not uncommon for strangers to stop by the shrine after sundown, especially on Thursdays. Men brought bags of flour and old coins knotted in kerchiefs, muttering oaths to saints whose names they barely remembered. Women came too, with copper bangles or figs from the market, hoping that even the smallest offering would be remembered by God when men had forgotten them.

But this one didn’t knock.

He didn’t need to.

Dei’d had been expecting him.

Usman entered the courtyard as if the stone had known his weight before his footsteps arrived. He wore no disguise, though the red scarf around his wrist was pulled higher under his sleeve. His eyes, though soft, were frayed around the edges—like linen that had been scrubbed too many times in too cold a river.

He did not bow. He did not greet.

He sat on the threshold across from her, the space between them filled with the kind of silence that does not separate—it listens.

The oil lamp flickered. Somewhere, a dog barked from behind the spice wall. Inside, Zooni stirred from her mat and lay still, ears tuned to a conversation not meant for her, but aching with relevance.

Dei’d didn’t look at him at first. She continued grinding dried ginger in a stone bowl, slow and steady.

“How many did you feed last week?” she asked, voice low.

“Seventy-three,” Usman replied. “Not counting the child in Sopore who took extra grain in his pockets for his goats.”

She smiled, almost.

“They say you burned the collector’s coat.”

“I hung it over the river first. So it could feel shame before fire.”

Dei’d finally looked at him, her gaze steady but not heavy.

“And what did you feel?”

Usman didn’t answer immediately. His hand drifted to the red thread on his wrist. He untied it, slowly, then retied it again, tighter this time.

“I felt,” he said, “that revenge roars loudest right before it starves.”

Dei’d set the bowl aside and leaned forward slightly. Her shawl slipped from one shoulder, revealing the curved scar that ran like a faded crescent across her clavicle.

“And what feeds it again?” she asked.

Usman looked up. His face, once hard as frost, softened.

“Names,” he said. “Real ones. Not what the tax rolls call them. Not what the brothel guards whisper.”

Dei’d nodded once.

“Then start learning them. Zooni writes them down. The ones who disappeared. The ones who were priced instead of prayed for.”

“I’ll remember them,” Usman said.

“Don’t,” she replied. “Remembering is for the safe. Speak them aloud. Even if you’re hunted mid-sentence.”

They sat in silence again. But this time, it was less a hush and more a binding.

The lamp between them burned low. The wind pushed against the door. Neither flinched.

And inside the room, Zooni placed her hand against her heart—without realizing it—her thumb resting on the name she’d written last: Amira.

Zooni watches Usman Chash depart after his quiet exchange with Dei’d. The silence he leaves behind lingers—not empty, but charged with questions, ache, and the quiet certainty that those who carry grief as armour don’t just vanish. They seed revolutions in the dark.

After He Left

He left without saying goodbye.

Not to Dei’d. Not to Zooni. Not to the night that had quietly held his confession between its ribs.

Zooni heard the scrape of his boots across the threshold, the soft thud as he stepped into the damp courtyard. She didn’t move. From her mat, she lay still, her eyes half-closed, pretending sleep the way only those who’ve been startled awake by silence can. But her body listened. Listened the way a room does when someone it cares about has just exited.

She knew the rhythm of men who carried guilt—they never walked like victors, never like martyrs, but with a strange mix of retreat and defiance, as if each step asked forgiveness from the very ground it touched.

Usman walked like that.

He didn’t glance back.

She waited for him to.

Even once.

He didn’t.

Instead, she heard Dei’d rise slowly. A clay cup was lifted from the hearth. A sip taken. Then a long exhale—the kind that didn’t simply release breath, but carried something much older. Something stored too long in the lungs.

Zooni finally sat up.

“That was him,” she said.

Not a question.

Dei’d nodded.

“Yes.”

“He didn’t speak to me.”

“He wouldn’t know how.”

Zooni drew her knees up under her chin, her braid falling across one shoulder. Her voice barely reached the edge of the hearth.

“Why do men like him walk like the ground might break beneath them?”

Dei’d refilled the cup with water and added two leaves of dried basil. She stirred slowly, not to mix, but to remember.

“Because they’ve seen it break. And they’re still not sure if it forgave them.”

Zooni ran her fingers along the threads of her shawl, tugging at a loose stitch. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t even hurt. But something had been left unfinished between her and the man with the red thread.

“Will he come back?”

Dei’d smiled, a rare thing that came like sunrise in winter—unexpected, brief, and golden.

“He won’t come back to see us. But he’ll return for what he left behind.”

“What did he leave?”

“A part of himself he didn’t want to carry into fire.”

Zooni stood and walked toward the doorway. Outside, the last mist of the night was beginning to lift. She looked down at the footprints he had left in the slush—half-filled already, dissolving back into the earth.

She whispered his name—not aloud, but to herself—like someone testing the shape of it for the first time.

“Usman.”

It fit differently in her mouth.

Not like a hero. Not like a thief.

But like someone whose story had begun long before he chose to tell it.

Zooni in the quiet hours after Usman’s departure, as she begins to stitch not just names of the lost, but names of those who remember—keepers of sorrow, like her, who walk with their wounds lit from within.

A Name Not Written for Mourning

Zooni sat cross-legged beneath the low window, the one that faced the shrine courtyard where morning light came slow and diffused, as if hesitant to touch the stones where so many feet had once knelt and never risen again. A breeze pushed through the broken lattice. It smelled of wet bark, burnt milk, and river dust—Kashmir’s native incense.

In her lap lay the notebook. Its cover had darkened over time, worn soft along the corners. Pages inside curled with the weight of memory, the ink smudged from nights spent clutching it in sleep.

Most of the names inside were of women.

Names she had picked from alley whispers, from the mouths of weeping sisters, from the crumpled scrolls that had once belonged to tax collectors. Each name was written with care, not as inventory, but as invocation—a counterspell against forgetting.

Sabra.
Parveena.
Lali.
Maimoona.
Girls. Mothers. Ghosts.

Names carved from silence and folded into paper.

But this time, she hesitated.

The pen trembled just slightly as she brought it to the page.

This name wasn’t like the others.

It wasn’t a scream buried in lime.
It wasn’t someone stolen and never found.
It wasn’t even a name meant to be mourned.

It was a name that returned.

One that arrived carrying wheat. One that refused to laugh or to pray, but instead—stood still, like a tree that refuses to fall for either storm or sun.

She uncapped the ink.

On a blank page, beneath the column that once read “Taken,” she began a new one.

Returned.

And under it, in small but precise script, she wrote:

Usman Chash
brought grain, burned paper, said nothing, stayed just long enough.

She paused.

Then, in brackets below it, added another line.

(Still carrying fire under his ribs.)

She closed the notebook.

Not abruptly. But gently.

As though the name itself needed rest.

Dei’d was watching from the far corner, the way only old women can—without blinking, without turning her head, yet missing nothing.

She sipped from her cup and said, half to herself:

“When a girl begins writing men’s names without bitterness, something has shifted.”

Zooni smiled faintly.

But said nothing.

Her hands folded over the notebook.

Not to guard it.

To protect what had been placed inside.

A quiet unrest begins to stir in the city. As whispers of a raid drift in through torn windows and tea stalls, Zooni listens—not to the words, but to what grows behind them: the steady, inevitable echo of something once called impossible.

The Walls Begin to Lean

It started with the baker.

He arrived before Fajr prayer, his apron damp with flour and steam still rising from the tin in his hand. He carried nothing unusual—just a bag of stale bread and a muttered request for a blessing from the grandmother.

But when he leaned down to place the bread near the shrine door, he whispered through the woodgrain:

“They emptied the south granary last night.”

Dei’d, seated just beyond the threshold with her shawl drawn high, gave no response. Her fingers continued working through the beads of her tasbih, slow, practiced, almost indifferent.

The baker placed the bread down as if it were nothing more than ritual.

He left as he came—unspectacular, unseen.

Zooni, crouched by the hearth, absorbed the words.

Not through their content, but their weight.

The granaries were where famine slept on government floors, its belly swollen with grain that belonged to the streets. To empty them was not theft—it was redistribution of breath.

By noon, the shrine courtyard was humming.

A spice vendor arrived with a limp and dropped off clove water “for the old one’s knees.” Behind him, a widow placed three potatoes in a torn shawl scrap and murmured a verse of thanks. Neither looked at Zooni. Neither lingered.

But both left the same way: with a glance over their shoulder, as if checking for walls that might lean forward and start to listen.

By the third visitor, Zooni no longer needed to be told.

Something had shifted.

Not loudly.

Not yet with banners or slogans.

But in the way the pigeons flew differently now—faster, closer to the rooftops. In the way the constables no longer met eyes with merchants. In the way that, suddenly, the poor had begun walking straighter—not because their stomachs were full, but because they had seen someone else take what could not be begged for.

They had seen fear moved aside, like a curtain finally drawn open.

Inside, Dei’d heated milk with ginger and fennel.

She didn’t comment on the visitors.

But she added more water to the pot.

As if expecting someone.

Or many.

Zooni finished sweeping the floor, then went to her wooden box.

She added a new page.

Not a name this time.

But a phrase.

“The shawls no longer hide the grain.
The city has started weaving in reverse.”

She underlined it once.

Then folded the page into four equal parts and tucked it beneath her mat.

Outside, a child sang an old harvest tune in the wrong season.

And across the river, a soldier shouted at a crowd that wasn’t there.

A fugitive arrives, body worn and breath wild, and Zooni offers more than shelter—she offers recognition. Not of identity, but of wound and purpose—the kind that lingers beneath every act of defiance.

The Breath That Ran Too Far

The call to Maghrib had just begun to rise when he stumbled into the side courtyard—his right foot bleeding through the torn edge of a sandal, his shoulders heaving as if each rib had held its own storm. He didn’t knock. He didn’t speak. He leaned against the shrine’s stone arch and let the wall bear his weight the way a friend might.

Zooni had been grinding dried mint into powder, the pestle rising and falling like a heartbeat. She looked up before he collapsed, before the groan escaped his throat, before the floor caught him.

She moved without calling Dei’d. Without asking his name. Without fear.

There was something in the way he breathed—not panicked, but raw. Like someone who had outrun both dogs and memories. His eyes, when they flickered open, were wide and unseeing, as if the body had arrived but the soul was still trailing behind.

Zooni brought water in a copper bowl. She didn’t speak.

He drank it in one long pull, as if quenching days rather than thirst. His hand trembled as he returned the bowl—not from weakness, but from the aftershock of survival.

“You’re not safe,” she said, softly.

He gave a half-smile, crooked and cracked.

“I was nowhere safe before this.”

She dipped a cloth in rosewater and began to clean the blood from his ankle. He flinched, but didn’t pull away.

There was no bandage, only a scrap of muslin she tore from the lining of her own shawl. She wrapped it gently, as one might wrap a word never meant to be spoken again.

“Were you part of it?” she asked, not needing to say what “it” was.

He exhaled through his nose.

“I was the one holding the ledger when it burned.”

She looked at him carefully now. Not like a savior. Not like a stranger.

Like a stanza looking at its next line.

From within, Dei’d’s voice drifted without urgency.

“If he’s still bleeding by midnight, grind black seeds and pack the wound. If he’s still running, let him sleep near the stove. That way the warmth knows him.”

Zooni nodded.

The man—she still didn’t know his name—laid his head against the wall and closed his eyes. Not fully, not trustfully. Just enough to signal a truce with the moment.

She folded his bloodied shawl and placed it near the hearth.

Then sat beside him, not touching, not asking, but simply mirroring his breath.

The shrine had taken in many women.

But now, it had begun to accept the men the empire had spit out.

Those who carried fire in their pockets and ash on their tongues.

Zooni keeps vigil beside the wounded man as sleep overcomes him. But sleep does not quiet him. Instead, it unlocks the vault of names he carries—names not written in her notebook, but etched in blood, salt, and memory.

Names Carried in Sleep

The man didn’t sleep like the others.

He didn’t collapse into rest as the worn and wounded often do. Instead, his body seemed to fight it at first, twitching with the resistance of someone who had grown accustomed to sleeping only in places with exits visible, routes memorized. But exhaustion, eventually, won the argument.

He lay curled on the mat near the hearth, a rolled-up shawl beneath his head, his back turned not from rudeness, but instinct.

Zooni didn’t return to her cot.

She stayed beside him, not as caretaker, but as witness. Her knees drawn beneath her, her chin resting on one hand, her other fingers quietly working the corner of her shawl.

The fire hummed low.

And then, in that shifting space between sleep and forgetting, the man began to murmur.

Not words at first.

Just fragments.

Gravel. Wind. Ash.

But then came names.

Clear, carved, unhidden.

“Jamal…”

A pause.

“Gul Amina… she… she was only…”

His fingers clenched around the hem of the shawl.

“Noor Din… they hung him… he didn’t even speak…”

Zooni sat up straighter.

These weren’t random.

They weren’t hallucinations.

They were remnants.

Names pulled from the flame, from the dungeons of the mind, surfacing now like dead fish rising from the depths.

“Lal Begum… bled from the ears… four days… they still… they still didn’t stop…”

His face was calm, but his voice trembled.

This was not confession.

It was leakage.

The kind of sorrow that could not find a listener during daylight. The kind that waited for silence and one warm fire to open its long-shut mouth.

Zooni’s eyes filled, not from pity—but from recognition.

These names didn’t appear in newspapers.

They weren’t on posters. They were not heroes. They were not martyrs.

They were the forgotten dead. Those crushed between tax ledgers and salt duty, between floors and fists, between official silence and sanctioned cruelty.

She reached for her notebook.

Opened it with care.

And under the heading that once read only “Vanished,” she wrote each name she could remember from his mouth.

Jamal.
Gul Amina.
Noor Din.
Lal Begum.

She paused at the last.

Then wrote:

“Spoken in sleep. Heard by a girl who once forgot her own name.”

The man turned in his sleep, his hand falling across his chest.

Zooni placed the book down and gently pulled the woolen edge of his wrap higher over his shoulder.

Not out of softness.

But as a quiet reply.

A girl, once broken by forgetting, now remembering for others.

A quiet conversation between Dei’d and Zooni at the break of dawn—not about plans, nor fugitives—but about the heavy burden of remembering, and whether holding too many names is a form of rebellion… or a wound that never seals.

When the Light Finds the Names

The call to Fajr had not yet been made, but the sky above the old city had begun to bleed pale. The rooftops, still dusted with the memory of frost, shivered beneath the cautious hush that always preceded prayer. In the courtyard of the shrine, a sparrow fluttered once, then tucked itself back into the hollow of a stone wall, unwilling to be the first to believe in morning.

Zooni sat at the threshold, knees to chest, her notebook tucked beneath one arm, a warm cup of salt tea cooling between her palms.

She had not slept.

Not because she was afraid.

But because she had heard too much. And when names arrive in the dark, they refuse to let your body forget them by sunrise.

Behind her, soft footsteps. Not rushed, not hesitant. Just the familiar rhythm of Dei’d’s shawl brushing against the stone floor.

The older woman settled beside her without a word. Together, they watched the sky begin to shift.

It was Dei’d who broke the silence.

“He dreamed with his mouth open.”

Zooni didn’t reply. She took a small sip of tea. It had cooled too much, but she drank it anyway. Not for comfort. But for habit.

“And you wrote them down,” Dei’d continued, her voice low, more ash than air.

Zooni nodded.

“The names won’t survive otherwise.”

Dei’d ran her hand across the edge of the threshold, where a crack had begun to widen in recent months.

“Some names are meant to fade.”

“Then why did I remember them without trying?”

Dei’d looked up at the softening clouds, as if expecting them to answer on her behalf.

“Because you were marked,” she said. “Not by them. By silence. And those marked by silence are cursed with memory.”

Zooni clenched her fingers around the cup, the porcelain warm again from her hands alone.

“If I keep writing them… if I keep remembering everyone who screamed into the stone and was answered with nothing… what will I become?”

Dei’d turned then, not suddenly, but fully, her clouded eyes sharpened with morning’s truth.

“You’ll become the book they’ll one day burn.”

“And before they burn it?”

“You’ll teach someone else to carry the ashes.”

From within, the man stirred. A cough, a groan, the shifting of limbs unaccustomed to stillness. He was waking, and with him, perhaps, another plan, another flight, another fire.

But in that quiet pause before sound returned to the world, Zooni whispered one last question into the morning.

“And when I run out of pages?”

Dei’d placed her weathered hand over Zooni’s wrist.

Not tight.

Just present.

“Then you write on the air.”

The light finally slipped into the courtyard.

Not bold. Not blinding.

But enough to see that what sat between them was not just a notebook.

It was a witness.

And that sometimes, the work of the living is to listen for the dead long enough that their names reappear in breath, not stone.

Next Chapter: Chapter Six: Pilgrims After Midnight