This chapter introduces Layaq Singh—a Kashmiri Sikh boy whose soul was woven on a loom of loss. His sisters, taken as revenue collateral by Dogra landlords, left behind not only grief but a fierce sense of conscience stitched in silence.

The House with No Curtains

The house sat on the edge of Habba Kadal, between a cracked well and a mulberry tree that had stopped fruiting the year Simran disappeared. It wasn’t really a house—more a lean-to built from brick dust, reed matting, and shawl scraps too flawed to sell. Inside lived Layaq Singh, his father, and a grief that knew how to fold itself into corners.

There were no curtains. Not because they couldn’t afford them, but because his mother had once stitched all the curtains herself, and after she died, no one dared touch the windows again. Instead, the light entered raw, and so did the cold. And in that light sat a loom, large and wooden, shaped like a prayer, old as memory.

It was the first thing Layaq saw each morning.

It was the last thing his sisters touched.

His father, Sardar Mahinder Singh, spoke little. A man of hard palms and cracked heels, he once wove shawls for Dogra princesses and even for the Maharaja’s seventh wife, who had praised his thread work but never learned his name. Every day, Mahinder rose before the sun and bowed before the loom—not with ritual, but with exhaustion. His only offering was labor.

And every evening, he stared out the windowless window, as if hoping someone would return who never had the chance to say goodbye.

Layaq never asked him what he waited for.

Because he knew.

His sisters, Simran and Kiran, were taken in January of 1930, two winters before Usman’s first theft and the year Madahv made the ants dance.

The shawl they had sold in summer had fetched too little. The tax on their land too high. The revenue officer had come on horseback, carrying the notice in a silk pouch and flanked by two guards.

“The debt,” he said, “must be cleared.”

“We have nothing,” Mahinder said, eyes hollow.

“Then we will collect what you do have.”

They looked at the girls.

Simran was seventeen. Kiran was fourteen.

One of them cried.

The other didn’t.

Mahinder screamed. Layaq tried to claw the officer’s leg. The guards laughed. The officer nodded. A document was signed. And the sisters were collateralized into absence.

The family was told they were sent to Rawalpindi to work in a “domestic setting.” But Layaq later heard whispers—brothels near Gujranwala, a corridor of glass rooms in Lahore called Kali Gali, where Kashmiri girls were renamed after flowers.

“Kashmir ki Kali,” they were called.

Not with affection.

With appetite.

That night, Mahinder smashed the loom to pieces.

The next day, he built it again.

Silence and shawls were the only way he knew how to grieve.

But Layaq did not weave.

He watched.

And he wrote.

Layaq Singh begins to find refuge in unwritten verses and unfinished threads, drawing memory into rhythm—grief into poetry.

Verses Without Addresses

The days passed, but time did not move in the Singh household. It sat still, like dust on a loom beam, heavy, unspoken. No laughter. No quarrels. No footsteps of girls returning from the spring with water sloshing over copper pots.

Just the click of shuttle and thread.

And the sound of paper.

Because Layaq had begun to write.

Not for applause.
Not for the city.
But for the two names that no longer echoed down their lane: Simran and Kiran.

He found old receipts in his father’s box, tore the backs into squares, and scribbled verses with charcoal or boot-polish ink. He wrote on old shawl tags, on torn edges of tax notices, even on a discarded ration slip that once bore his sister’s thumbprint.

At first, it was clumsy.

“Sister, where did they sell your smile?”
“Was it wrapped in silk, or bound in hunger?”

Then it became sharper.

“You were weighed in rupees I couldn’t count.
They called it duty.
I call it disappearance.”

By the time he was sixteen, Layaq had covered the attic wall in stanzas—none of them titled. None of them signed.

Because poetry, to him, was not identity.
It was rescue.

His favorite place to write was not the house.

It was the dyers’ pond, where wool was washed before coloring. There, the water ran milky and slow, and the edges were always stained with indigo, crimson, and turmeric—like God’s own blood had spilled.

Layaq would crouch there, paper balanced on his thigh, watching as a corner dipped into the colors, leaving behind smears like tears from cloth.

He called them “threads of lament.”

Once, he caught an older man watching him.

The man asked,

“Why do you write if no one will read it?”

Layaq answered,

“I write so it doesn’t die with me.”

The man said nothing more.

But two days later, he left a broken nib and a bottle of real ink on the pond’s edge.

Each week, Layaq would add a new line to a single unfinished poem:

“Simran, your anklet sings in my sleep.
Kiran, your braid still shadows the window.”
“I do not burn the memories.
I fold them.
Like shawls stitched for someone who will never come.”

He never read the full poem aloud.

He was saving it.

For the day the city heard what the shawls had hidden.

The bitter tension between Layaq Singh’s inherited skill and his inherited sorrow—when he is invited to weave luxury for those who trafficked his sisters, and his conscience becomes a loom more powerful than his hands.

The Pattern That Burned

The offer came folded in silk.

A servant arrived one morning, clean-shaven, smelling of rose water and saffron, carrying a letter tied with a green ribbon. Layaq’s father opened it slowly, the trembling of his fingers betraying a hope he had not dared to feel since the sisters disappeared.

The letter bore the seal of Malik & Sons, one of the largest shawl traders in Zaina Kadal, men who sold Kashmiri craftsmanship to Delhi aristocrats and Dogra courtiers alike. They wanted a weaver for a limited commission—four pashmina shawls, to be delivered within a month, each to carry the Chinar Leaf and Lotus motif of the royal family.

The pay was generous. Enough to repair their house. Enough to eat meat twice a week.

Enough to survive.

“You will go,” Mahinder said, voice brittle as dry reed. “You have the gift. I can’t climb the loom anymore.”

Layaq nodded once.

But that night, he didn’t sleep.

The next morning, he walked to the Malik haveli, a sprawling mansion with ivory pillars and a brass-plated nameboard polished daily by a boy younger than the shawls he dusted. Inside, the ceilings were carved walnut. The curtains were silk. The floors smelled of burnt sandalwood and money.

They led Layaq through the servant’s corridor.

The master of the house, Rajiv Malik, waited in a cushioned chamber, reclining with a shawl draped over his knees like a throne.

“So,” Malik said, adjusting his golden cufflink, “you’re Mahinder’s son. You have his hands?”

Layaq didn’t answer.

“Good. I need your hands. Not your tongue.”

He handed Layaq a sheet of parchment—a weaving pattern, elegant and intricate.

“This,” Malik said, “was first woven for Begum Sohra, Maharaja’s sixth consort. We’re recreating it for a patron in Lahore.”

Layaq studied it.

The pattern was familiar.

Because his sister had once stitched that border—the leaf-and-vine outline, soft as riverlight.

He remembered Simran’s voice, one dusk, as she outlined it on mulberry paper:

“They say this design was first drawn by a woman waiting for her lover during the famine.”

Layaq looked up at Malik.

“What is the name of the buyer?”

Malik smirked.

“Does it matter? A Dogra colonel, I think. Or some Punjabi silk baron. They all want something from Kashmir. Shawls. Daughters. Mountains.”

He laughed.

“Sometimes all three.”

Layaq said nothing.

He took the parchment, nodded curtly, and left.

But that night, as he set up the loom in their attic, he made a decision.

He would not weave that pattern.

He would weave a new one.

One that looked similar from afar.

But closer—hidden in the lines of lotus petals and vine curls—were tiny script letters, too delicate to see unless the viewer stared for long:

“Simran. Kiran. Killed in trade.”

A second line:

“Blood is soft, too. Softer than wool.”

He wove the first shawl in silence.

And when it was finished, he packed it in a cloth bag, walked alone to Malik’s store, and handed it over.

He never returned for the next commission.

He never collected the pay.

But the trader’s wife was later overheard saying:

“There’s something… strange in this embroidery. It stares at me when I wear it.”

Layaq Singh’s quiet rebellion begins—not through speeches or theft, but through the hidden language of thread, where he embeds grief into art and sends it into the hands of those who once priced his sisters.

Ink in the Thread

Layaq had never planned to become a poet in silk.

But once he began, he could not stop.

Each shawl he wove became a confession hidden in elegance, a kind of revenge wrapped in softness. The patterns he designed mirrored traditional Chinar vines and Mughal trellises, but within the curves, in microscopic script no eye would notice at first glance, he embedded fragments of verse—lines that read like whispers from beneath grave soil.

One shawl bore the line:

“She was sold before her first bleeding. They measured her smile, not her name.”

Another:

“Do not say Kashmir is silent. You’ve only gagged the loom.”

A third bore no poetry—just two initials, stitched in saffron thread at the very edge:
S. K.
Simran. Kiran.

He delivered these shawls through middlemen—dyers, tailors, and spice porters. Some went to the wives of Dogra administrators. Others to Lahore merchants who wore them to weddings, never realizing they draped themselves in elegies.

One ended up in the lap of a Dogra general’s daughter, who exclaimed,

“The work is flawless. It’s almost like it mourns for something.”

And it did.

The rumors began as murmur.

“There’s a new weaver in the old quarter.”
“He signs nothing. He takes no payment.”
“But his shawls sting.”

Some called him Pagal Bunkaar—the Mad Weaver.

Others whispered that the threads themselves were cursed.

A tale spread in Rainawari that one bride fell ill after wearing one of his shawls, haunted by dreams of two girls drowning in rosewater. In Nowhatta, a trader claimed the ink from a particular border smeared red after the shawl was washed—though it had never been dyed.

Layaq listened to these stories in silence.

He neither denied nor claimed them.

His only response was to keep weaving.

At night, he returned to the pond behind the dyer’s mill—the same place where he had once written verses with charcoal—and dipped his fingers into the black dye pot to test its thickness for thread staining.

Once, a fellow weaver asked him why he didn’t just write books.

Layaq replied:

“Because no one burns books anymore.
They wear us now.
Over their hearts.”

One day, he walked to the shrine of Rishi Noor Shah and left a folded shawl at the doorstep. Inside it, a note written in thread:

“You took her body. But her name walked back in this wool.”

He never saw who picked it up.

But the next week, someone left a fresh spool of handspun silk at his door.

No message.

Just respect.

Layaq Singh, already weaving grief into fabric, now hears of a different kind of rebellion—fire and grain, led by a red-scarved thief named Usman Chash—and a seed begins to stir: perhaps art and action must meet.

The Thread Smells of Smoke

The fire began in Lal Chowk, but its glow reached the dyer’s quarter by evening.

Not the flame itself—no, that had long been smothered—but the story. It arrived as a murmur through the smoke of boiling vats and travelled like dye through wool. By dusk, it had seeped into every stall, every spinning room, every whispering loom.

“They say he stole from the state godown in Zaldagar.”
“Distributed sacks of rice across the shrines.”
“Left a red scarf on each bag.”
“Burned a ledger of debts in the middle of the market.”

Layaq looked up from his loom, heart suddenly still.

“Who?” he asked.

An apprentice leaning against a wall smiled and said,

“Some ghost. Some thief. A man with a red wrist. They call him… Chash.”

The name meant nothing to Layaq.

But the gesture meant everything.

To steal from the empire was one thing.
To feed with it?
To burn paper like it was a disease?

That, to Layaq, felt holy.

That night, he could not sleep.

He stood before the wall of unfinished poems in his attic and stared at the line he’d stitched into his last shawl:

“You took her body. But her name walked back in this wool.”

And for the first time, it felt insufficient.

Beautiful, yes.
Precise, yes.
But not loud enough.

The fire in Lal Chowk had not recited verses.

It had shouted in flame-language.

Layaq wandered through the silent city after midnight, shawl wrapped tightly around him, as if even his bones needed hiding.

He passed beggars sleeping near spice sacks. A woman curled under the steps of a closed mosque. A boy carrying a pot with one potato in it.

The silence of the poor was not passive.
It was taught.
Beaten in.
Threaded in.
Stitched between fear and obedience.

And suddenly, Layaq understood something his loom had never taught him.

“Poetry that stays hidden,” he murmured, “is just guilt dressed in silk.”

As dawn crept over Habba Kadal, Layaq lit a lantern and stitched a final line into a shawl edge:

“The man who fed the poor with stolen grain—
may your hands never grow cold.”

He didn’t sign it.

He didn’t need to.

Instead, he wrapped the shawl in old newsprint, walked across the frozen bridge, and left it at the doorstep of a closed shrine.

Then he disappeared into the fog.

But that morning, someone else whispered:

“There’s a weaver… who’s begun to follow the flame.”

Layaq Singh as he sets out in search of something intangible—a whisper, a gesture, a face behind the red scarf—and finds, instead, a gathering of hunger and dignity.

Where the Grain Fell

It was a Thursday morning, grey and ash-pale, when Layaq crossed the footbridge at Ali Kadal, carrying nothing but a satchel of thread and a question. He had heard from a dyer’s son that sacks of stolen rice had appeared at the Pir Dastgeer Sahib shrine, laid quietly under the stone steps at dawn, each marked not with scripture—but with a folded red cloth.

He didn’t know why he went.

Not to confirm the tale. Not to meet the thief. Perhaps only to feel the warmth of something human and unowned.

The shrine lay in the heart of the old city, where faith clung to stone like ivy and prayers outlasted kings. By the time Layaq arrived, a quiet line had already formed—mostly women, some widows, a few barefoot children, and a bent man who had once been a schoolmaster before his tongue was taken by stroke.

No guards.

No priests.

Just hunger, and its opposite: dignity.

There were no announcements, no sermons. People took only what they needed. A measure of rice, a pinch of salt, a handful of cracked wheat. The sacks were nearly empty now, but no one fought. They whispered thanks not to saints, but to a man they had never seen.

Layaq stood at the edge of the line, not to take anything, but to witness.

A woman next to him held her veil with one hand and a tin bowl in the other. She looked no older than his sisters might’ve been.

“Who leaves it?” he asked softly.

She didn’t look at him.

“The wind, maybe,” she said. “Or a man the world failed to teach fear.”

Layaq nodded.

He stayed until the line thinned.

Then, slowly, he walked to the remaining sack and touched its hem. Coarse jute. Lightly damp with morning dew. And there, caught between the threads, he found it—a strand of red cotton, barely clinging.

He rolled it between his fingers like a prayer bead, held it to his lips, then tucked it into his satchel beside his ink.

This was no longer rumor.

The man was real.

That evening, back in his attic, Layaq unfolded a strip of blank parchment and dipped his pen in dye.

But he didn’t write poetry.

He wrote a map.

He marked the river.

The baker’s stall where a boy was said to have received bread.

The granary where a fire had danced with paper.

The alley where someone claimed to see a man leap a wall with a sheep under each arm.

And at the bottom, in smaller script, he wrote:

“If justice cannot be heard,
let it be worn,
or whispered,
or fed.”

Then he folded the parchment into thirds and placed it under his pillow.

Outside, the wind carried no anthem.

But in the loom of night, two threads had begun to edge toward each other—unseen, unannounced, but undeniable.

One of grain.
One of grief.
Both carried fire.

This page moves the story quietly, allowing fate to knock in the form of a child and a message embroidered not in ink—but in understanding. It marks the moment when Layaq Singh’s quiet mourning is noticed—and answered.

The Needle Knows

The snowfall had come without warning that week—first as a mist, then as a hush, then as a burden. The rooftops folded into silence. The bridge railings wore frost like silver armbands. Water in the canals slowed into glass.

Layaq had spent the morning hunched over his loom, shoulders stiff, fingers raw from pulling weft through the same pattern he’d been recreating for days: a vine that doubled back on itself, always growing but never escaping. He hated it. Not for its complexity—but because it resembled his own thoughts.

He stepped outside near noon, his bones craving the sting of air.

It was then that he saw the boy.

Thin, short, wrapped in a woolen scarf too long for his neck. He stood beside the broken steps that led to Layaq’s attic, looking up without blinking, as if rehearsing something not yet said.

Layaq paused.

“Are you lost?”

The boy shook his head, pulled a cloth packet from beneath his pheran, and held it out with both hands.

No words.

Just the offering.

Layaq hesitated, then stepped forward and took it. The cloth was pale blue, wrapped with twine made from shawl thread. When he untied it, inside was a square of handwoven cotton—no larger than a palm. It bore no name, no address.

Only a single stitched line, almost invisible to the eye unless one turned it toward the light:

“Some wounds can only be threaded in silence.”

Layaq’s breath caught.

Not at the words, but at the stitching style. It was his own. Not copied—understood. Echoed, like a mirrored sigh.

He looked back at the boy, heart suddenly quickened.

“Who gave this to you?”

The boy shrugged.

“Man in the alley. Said you’d know.”

“What did he look like?”

“Didn’t see his face. But his wrist was red.”

The thread.

The scarf.

The thief.

Usman.

The name hadn’t even reached his lips yet, but Layaq felt it coil in his chest like a known fire.

By the time he looked up again, the boy was gone.

Only a single wet footprint remained on the stone.

Layaq stepped back inside and sat in the quiet.

He unfolded the cotton square once more, smoothing it with his palm. The words were stitched in his own rhythm, yet carried another man’s wound. Someone who knew silence not as defeat, but as craft.

He pressed the cloth to his forehead.

Not in worship.

In recognition.

Outside, the snow thickened.

But within the attic, the cold had lost its voice.

Because now, Layaq understood:
He had been seen.
Not by the masters.
Not by the merchants.
But by a fellow wound.

Layaq Singh, moved by the silent message delivered through thread, crafts a reply not with ink or speech, but through an ancient language his hands knew better than his tongue—the language of the loom.

The Reply Woven in Absence

That evening, long after the last thread of daylight folded behind the spires of Zaina Kadal, Layaq lit his oil lamp and laid out a blank shawl base—handspun, undyed, its ivory threads taut with waiting. It was not meant for the market. No client had commissioned it. No merchant would stamp it. This shawl was not for wearing. It was for speaking.

He ran his fingers across the warp, eyes closed, palms resting in the grooves like a man reading scripture from memory. The rhythm of weaving was as old as breath, and in that moment, the loom became not just a tool, but a listener.

He chose a deep charcoal thread for the border—not black, for mourning had already spoken too long, but not grey, for compromise was never the message. Charcoal was the color of aftermaths. It held smoke and memory in equal measure.

With each pull of the shuttle, he began to carve shapes into silence. Not verses. Not stanzas. But signs. Symbols stitched without drawing, only feeling. A hand, open and pierced. A grain sack, gently torn. A ladle, half-submerged in a bowl. And between them, a single blooming Chinar leaf, its veins jagged, asymmetrical—as if wind or fire had touched it mid-flourish.

There were no words.

Only these images, formed in thread so fine one could miss them at first glance.

But someone—someone who had fed the hungry in secret and burned paper in daylight—would see them and understand.

He worked through the night.

No tea. No break. No breath wasted.

By dawn, the shawl was finished.

He wrapped it in brown paper, tied it with jute string, and tucked into the folds a sliver of mulberry bark, on which he had inked only two letters: L.S.

Not a name.

A mark.

A whisper.

He handed the parcel to an old wool dyer named Yaqoob, whose eyes were clouded by time but whose feet still knew every alley.

“No destination,” Layaq said. “But it must end up in the hands of someone with a red thread on his wrist.”

Yaqoob smiled, almost toothlessly.

“The one who steals food and sleeps on rooftops?”

Layaq didn’t answer.

He didn’t need to.

By noon, the shawl had vanished into the bloodstream of the city—folded under a sack of cumin, slipped between two crates of dried apricots, passed like contraband between men who spoke only in nods.

And somewhere, in the hour between asr and maghrib, a man with a scarf wrapped around his face would unroll it beneath a shrine alcove and run his hand across the thread—not for warmth, but for recognition.

Two men.

Two crafts.

Two griefs that refused to rot quietly.

Layaq Singh, the silent weaver, catches his first glimpse of the man whose name had become fire and folklore—Usman Chash. Not as legend, but as flesh—worn, watchful, and human.

Eyes Across the Queue

The shrine courtyard at Makhdoom Sahib had always smelled of soot and saffron. On Thursdays, it thickened with the aroma of mutton stew and barley cakes offered by grain merchants seeking forgiveness for their sins, and by widows seeking food for their children. Faith and famine stood side by side here—silent companions on ancient stone.

Layaq had come with no intention of receiving charity. His hunger was older, more private. But he came, nonetheless, drawn by a rumour passed through the wool dyers:

“He’ll be there at dusk. The one with the scarf.”

He stood near the end of the line, back straight, face calm, a stitched prayer hidden under his pheran. His eyes moved not toward the food, but across the bodies—the slow rhythm of need, the quiet calculations of survival. No one begged. No one questioned. They waited, as they had waited for generations, for something warm to arrive in their hands.

And then, he saw him.

Not at the head of the line.

Not behind a pot.

But seated against the far wall of the shrine courtyard, where the shadows from the hanging oil lamps braided themselves across the carved lattice.

He wasn’t dressed as a saviour.

A woolen shawl clung to his frame, patched at the shoulders. His beard was short, not for vanity but for necessity. His hands were tucked into his sleeves—not to hide, but to feel the beating of his own wrist. The red thread looped loosely there, worn, dulled by time and smoke.

But it was his eyes that held Layaq still.

Not proud.
Not afraid.
Not even suspicious.

They were the eyes of someone who had wept long ago and had since learned to hold the flood.

Usman.

There was no mistaking it.

For a moment, their gazes locked.

It wasn’t dramatic.

It wasn’t mythic.

It was recognition—quiet, cautious, unfinished.

Layaq gave the smallest nod, almost imperceptible.

Usman didn’t nod back. But he held the gaze a second longer than silence required.

Then, as though it had never happened, he looked away.

A boy next to Layaq asked for more soup.

A woman dropped her bowl.

Life resumed its ritual.

But Layaq’s pulse was no longer his own.

Later that night, alone under the flickering shadows of his attic lamp, Layaq didn’t write. He didn’t weave.

He simply took out the piece of cloth Usman had once returned, placed it across his lap, and whispered:

“We’ve seen each other now.
That’s enough.
For now.”

Layaq Singh is silently drawn into something greater than grief—a fellowship that speaks not through slogans, but through signals, shadows, and sacred risk.

The Rooftop Shawl

The message came with no words. It arrived in the form of a whisper from the chinar vendor near the dyeing tanks, passed from breath to breath like a stolen song. Layaq was told nothing directly. Only that if he still "watched the river from the attic window," he should "look once tonight—before the muezzin calls the last prayer."

That was all.

He waited till the city had dimmed into silhouettes.

The lanterns had been snuffed. The horses had been fed. The shawl merchants had locked their counting boxes and kissed their rings goodnight. The frost began to stitch silver across windowpanes.

And then, Layaq stepped onto the attic roof.

From there, the city was a dream of domes and shadows. The Jhelum lay flat and dark below, reflecting the bare arms of bridges. Smoke curled from distant ovens. Somewhere, a woman hummed to herself. Somewhere, a cough echoed from a chimney.

And then—he saw it.

Across the river, on the slanted roof of a crumbling hamam, a shawl had been laid out, pinned at the corners with stones.

It wasn’t just any cloth.

It was his own weave.

He recognized the tension in the threads, the lean of the Chinar leaf, the unfinished border left deliberately frayed. It had been opened like a flag, stretched into the night air where it could not be missed.

No name. No flame. No slogan.

Only signal.

A silent acknowledgement. A reply.

You were seen.
You are heard.
You are welcome.

Layaq stood still for a long while, the rooftop cold against his bare feet, the night pressing close like a secret. He didn’t wave. He didn’t light a candle. He simply placed his hand flat on his chest, just over the place where his sister’s names lived in memory.

Then, slowly, he stepped back into the attic, folded a scrap of wool into his satchel, and whispered a single line aloud—not from paper, not from prayer—but from breath:

“Let the shawls we weave now warm more than bodies.”

Below him, the city slept.

But on a few roofs, and in a few hearts, a fellowship was forming.

It had no name.

Only wounds that rhymed.

Next Chapter: Chapter Five: Grandmother of the Shrine