Morning arrives slowly in Srinagar, as it always does—through the rattle of shutters, the hiss of stoves, the creak of prayer mats unfolding in corners. But this morning, something is different. Something dangles over the water, and it is not a bird, nor a prayer flag, nor a corpse. It is a robe, still starched, still stitched, but stripped of its spine—and it swings with a grace that mocks the very authority it once commanded.

The Uniform That Learned to Dance

The sun had barely cleared the ridge when the first ferryman spotted it—midway through his lazy push from the southern bank, his oar trailing ribbons through the water like ink bleeding across old paper. He squinted, adjusted the tilt of his wool cap, and shaded his eyes with a weather-beaten palm.

It did not take him long to understand what he was looking at.

The trousers flapped against the river breeze with theatrical rhythm, as though mocking the wind itself. The coat, still firm in its folds, swayed gently back and forth like a suspended verdict. It was not the robe of a man. It was the idea of a man, undone by thread and air.

He chuckled—once, dryly—and spat overboard.

By the time he reached the other side, three boys had already gathered near the ghat, pointing, whispering, throwing pebbles that never quite reached the garment. One of them, perhaps thirteen, laughed so hard he nearly lost his slipper in the river.

“Inspector Saab forgot to fly!” he shouted, and the others shrieked with laughter.

At the nearby tea stall, the old chaiwala turned his head to the laughter, looked toward the bridge, and when he saw the swinging coat, he paused mid-pour. The stream of steaming tea splashed onto the clay cup’s rim and sizzled on the counter. He did not move to clean it. He simply whispered:

“Bisht.”

The name spread not as scandal, but as an omen.

By breakfast, twenty had gathered.

By midmorning, it was fifty.

And by noon, the constables arrived—two in a hurry, one already breathless from the climb up the embankment. When they reached the bridge and saw what hung from the rope, they froze. Not because it was a crime, but because it was a mirror.

One of them, the youngest, dropped his baton with a hollow thud on the stone steps.

The other took a step forward, reached for the rope—but then stopped. The parchment was still pinned to the breast pocket, held firm with a thorn. He read it. He blinked.

He read it again.

Then, without speaking, he pulled the robe down, bundled it in his arms like something diseased, and walked away with his head low and his hands shaking.

The thorn remained on the rope.

No one touched it.

By afternoon, someone had hung a second note in its place.

Written in charcoal, smudged and wet from melting snow, it read:

“If you wear their robe, wear their shame.”

The inspector himself did not come.

He remained locked in his quarters, curtains drawn, refusing visitors, even as the city buzzed with laughter quiet as prayer.

Not loud. Not riotous.

But undeniable.

Because the uniform had learned to hang, not as a symbol of order, but as a reminder that the people were watching now—and they had finally begun to laugh without asking permission.

The robe has been removed, but its shadow now clings to every corner of the Collector’s mind. Inspector Ramdas, once feared for his rigidity and appetite for punishment, now finds himself the subject of murmured jokes and invisible eyes. For a man who once ruled through silence, it is this silence—laced with laughter—that begins to unmake him. And in the far end of the old city, Madhav, dressed like any man in a market, begins preparing his next blow. This time, not through fire. Through history.

The Inspector Who Couldn’t Wash It Off

The robe lay in the wash basin, sodden and steaming. Soap scum floated on the water’s surface like the ghost of its former pride. A scrub brush, stiff with bristles, leaned beside it, unused. It had been an hour since Inspector Ramdas dropped the uniform into the basin, but he had yet to touch it again.

He sat in the adjoining room, shirtless, his skin blotched with heat from too many chullu splashes. His eyes, usually sharp beneath a pressed turban, stared ahead at nothing, unfocused, as though the walls themselves accused him of weakness.

A servant tiptoed in with a towel. Ramdas waved him away.

“I said no one enters.”

“But, sahib…”

He turned.

“I will wash it myself.”

The door closed.

He stood slowly, joints creaking under the weight of a humiliation no one had named aloud—but which, by now, had spread across the rooftops of Srinagar like smoke from a funeral pyre.

He plunged his hands into the water and began to scrub. Not with anger. Not with determination. But with the quiet panic of a man who knows that some stains cannot be lifted, only pursued.

Each stroke of the brush grew harder, more frantic. He muttered under his breath.

“Low-caste thief… temple desecrator… insolent worm…”

But with each accusation, the laughter returned—unseen but present, like a child giggling behind a wall.

He scrubbed until the buttons came loose, until the fabric frayed, until his knuckles bled into the basin.

When he finally stopped, the robe was still there.

Still damp.

Still swinging, but now only in his mind.

At the other end of the city, Madhav walked the copper market in broad daylight, wrapped in a weaver’s shawl and humming a folk song no one remembered the lyrics to anymore. He stopped at a vendor’s cart and lifted a handful of dried walnut shells.

“Where do you get these from?” he asked.

The vendor shrugged. “Rainawari. Or Sopore. They come through old roads.”

Madhav smiled and nodded. “Old roads. Yes. That’s what we need.”

He handed the man two coins, tucked the shells into his pouch, and walked on.

His next destination was not a palace or a record room. It was a classroom.

Not of children, but of walls.

A school that had been closed since the last earthquake. Its windows were shattered, its floors moss-ridden, but its walls remained tall, and empty—and Madhav had always known that empty walls were just books waiting to be written.

He entered the building through a crack in the western wing.

Alone.

He laid the walnut shells in a line on the old teacher’s desk.

He unrolled a length of coarse cloth.

And from its folds, he pulled a set of chalk pieces—each wrapped in notes taken from confessionals, stolen scrolls, whispers passed under shrine lamps.

Tomorrow, he would begin writing.

A timeline of pain.

A gallery of names.

An education the Dogras had never meant to give.

But this time, it would be public.

And this time, the walls would answer back.

Holding two cities at once: the one terrified by the tightening grip of the state, and the one slowly cracking that grip with chalk and story. Inspector Ramdas, stripped by ridicule, lashes out blindly at the poor, arresting shadows in an attempt to recover his reflection. But elsewhere, in a ruin of a classroom, Madhav’s new rebellion begins to bloom—not in fire this time, but in memory made visible.

Lessons the State Forgot to Erase

The round-ups began at dawn.

They arrived with the brittle cold, just as vendors were laying out oranges in wicker baskets, just as the call to prayer drifted down from the minarets and folded itself into the fog that still hugged the rooftops. Two jeeps, freshly painted in grey and black, crawled through Budshah Nagar like beasts searching for scent.

Ramdas did not speak much.

He did not need to.

His eyes, hollowed by sleepless nights, flicked from one face to another. Anyone standing too still was a suspect. Anyone who laughed too easily was guilty. The orders were simple—find those who wrote, those who whispered, those who knew.

In the first hour, they seized two students near the ghat—one of them barely fourteen, his fingers stained with charcoal from scrawling verses across a prayer wall. The other, a rickshaw boy, had done nothing but whistle a song once sung in the jail at Hari Parbat. That was enough.

By noon, they had taken eleven.

Not a single one knew where Madhav was.

Not a single one would confess.

In a city that had once betrayed itself to survive, the silence had grown stronger than the fear.

Ramdas paced the barracks like a man chasing his own shadow. He flipped ledgers. He interrogated with blunt threats. But none of it held. The people no longer flinched when he entered the lane. They no longer bowed as he passed. And he began to understand that humiliation, once public, does not retreat—it nests in the air like smoke that won’t leave a room.

Elsewhere, the abandoned school had begun to breathe.

The chalkboard had crumbled, but the walls were speaking. On the north side, Madhav had written out the name of a girl sold into brothel labor to cover shawl taxes. On the southern wall, the date of a mass eviction from Ganderbal. On the back door: a drawing of a noose labeled “debt.”

He did not sign his name.

He let the words stand alone, powerful in their starkness.

Each evening, new footprints appeared in the dust.

Sometimes just one.

Sometimes three, four.

They entered without sound. They read. They touched the words like scripture. Some left messages in reply—drawings, initials, broken lines of verse.

Zooni came one afternoon, stood for an hour before the line that read:

“You stole her name. I’m giving it back.”

And without saying a word, she took out a piece of ochre chalk and wrote beneath it:

“In clay. In sky. In shawl thread. We remember.”

The space became more than a room.

It became a ritual.

Men with weary eyes brought their daughters.

Mothers brought bundles of rags wrapped around the shoes of sons taken years ago.

The ruin had turned into a classroom of the vanished.

And each line written by Madhav became a lesson not in revenge—

—but in dignity reclaimed.

The Inspector finally arrives at the ruin Madhav has transformed into a sanctuary. But he does not walk into a classroom. He walks into a mirror—a place where the very walls seem to breathe the memory of his sins. No guards. No locks. And yet, he feels more naked than in his dreams of disgrace. The chalk has written what no decree can overwrite: truth without permission.

The Day He Faced the Wall

The horse cart clattered to a halt outside the ruin just after sundown. Inspector Ramdas stepped down in silence. No escort. No rifle. Only his walking stick and a pistol holstered beneath the folds of his woollen coat—a gesture more for theatre than for safety. He had read the report earlier that morning, folded inside the sleeve of a constable who dared not speak his own observations aloud.

“South quarter—abandoned school. Graffiti seen. Names listed. Gatherings noticed.”

That was all.

But in that brevity, he felt the tremor of something larger. Not a crowd. Not a riot. Something more dangerous.

Memory, made public.

He stepped through the creaking gates and into the school’s broken courtyard. Grass had reclaimed the corners. One shutter flapped lazily in the breeze, its hinges worn with rust and neglect. Birds scattered from the rafters as he entered.

He crossed the threshold into the classroom.

And stopped.

The air was warm, despite the cold outside, as if breath still lingered in the room. No lamps. No guards. No waiting rebels. Just the walls.

And what they carried.

Names.

Dates.

Moments.

Written in chalk that had not yet faded. Some drawn boldly, some with hesitation, but all with precision. All deliberate. All unafraid.

He stepped forward.

On the left wall:

“Name: Haleema. Taxed for a cow she did not own.”

On the right:

“Debt paid in child flesh, 1932.”

Above the cracked windowpane:

“Burn the scrolls. The skin remembers.”

Each line struck him not as a threat—but as an indictment.

He scanned the room for his own reflection, and though no mirror hung on the wall, he saw it nonetheless. In a name half-erased. In a word scrawled too hastily. In the corner where someone had written:

“Ramdas took my father’s field. I planted his name instead.”

He felt the weight of his pistol pressing against his hip like a stone.

He did not draw it.

What would be the point?

Bullets cannot erase what has already taken root in dust and chalk and breath. He could scrape the words away, order the walls painted, punish anyone who came again—but the room would still carry the shape of its memory. Like scars beneath makeup.

He walked to the desk at the front of the room—splintered, sun-bleached, and scrawled with yet more names.

Someone had drawn a face there. Not a likeness, just a circle with two hollow eyes and no mouth.

He stood before it and whispered:

“Is this what I’ve become?”

No one answered.

Only the wind.

And a piece of chalk that rolled off the sill and struck the floor with a soft tick.

He turned.

Left the room.

Did not speak to the guards waiting beyond the gate.

Did not record what he had seen.

Because what he had seen did not belong to his report.

It belonged to a truth he could not contain.

And the city, he knew now, would no longer stay quiet for his sake.

The classroom at dawn, after the storm has passed—not one made of wind, but of presence. The room is untouched. The chalk still where it was left. But something new enters the space: a voice that has never before been allowed to say a name aloud. A girl, perhaps no older than ten, steps into the morning’s hush with trembling lips—and speaks.

Her Father Had a Name Again

The first light crawled slowly through the shattered windowpanes, casting amber shadows across the chalk-covered walls. The frost still clung to the weeds in the courtyard outside, but inside, the room had kept its breath. A warmth lingered—not from fire or coal, but from words etched into plaster. They held the night’s memory the way wool holds scent: quietly, deeply, without surrender.

Madhav stood just inside the doorway.

He had arrived before sunrise, curious, cautious. Expecting damage. Expecting words scraped away, the floor swept bare, the defiance punished by silence. But the room remained as he had left it—only something had shifted. Not erased. Not desecrated. Just… acknowledged.

On the front desk, the circle with hollow eyes still stared upward. Only now, someone had added a single line where the mouth should have been.

It smiled.

He stepped inside, ran a hand over the wall, trailing his fingers across the names. They were dry now. Firm. Settled into the limewash as if they had always belonged there.

He bent to retrieve the fallen chalk.

It was then that he heard the footstep.

Not heavy. Not hurried.

Soft.

Deliberate.

He turned.

She stood in the doorway.

A girl in a saffron scarf, too large for her, falling over her shoulders like the wings of something not yet taught to fly. Her eyes were wide, but not afraid. She held a folded square of paper in her left hand and a clay bangle in her right.

She didn’t speak at first.

Madhav waited.

She stepped forward, slowly, until she stood near the far wall—the one where names had begun to curl inward from moisture, the early ones. She looked at the line that read:

“Debt collected in bodies. 1933.”

And she knelt.

Not to pray.

But to place the bangle on the floor.

“I don’t know how to write,” she said.

Her voice was high, but steady.

“But I remember his name.”

Madhav did not interrupt.

She unfolded the paper. It was blank.

Just a scrap.

A nothing.

But she held it as if it were scripture.

“He was taken in the rain,” she said. “I was five. They told my mother he owed six rupees and four annas. They beat her when she screamed. They took him to the holding pen near the temple. He never came back. She stopped speaking after that. Now she only hums.”

She looked up.

“Can you write it?”

Madhav nodded.

He stepped to the wall. Chose a space not too high, not too low. A place where a name might sit in conversation with the others, without needing to shout.

He took the chalk.

“Tell me.”

She swallowed.

“Hashim. Son of Yaqoob. From the south lane near the saffron fields.”

Madhav wrote it, line by line.

When he was done, he stepped back.

She looked at the name.

Then walked to it.

She placed her palm against the letters.

And for a moment, the room grew still—not from reverence, not from pity, but from completion.

Madhav turned away.

Not out of politeness.

But because something in her silence made him feel like an intruder in a holy place.

The city has always spoken softly—through gestures, shadows, glances—but now it begins to murmur with clarity. A rumor moves like incense: there is a place where names live again. No proclamation follows. No flag is raised. But something draws people to the ruined school. Not to ask, not even to speak—only to place their skin against the wall and know it was not all forgotten.

The Room That Became a Destination

The morning after the girl’s visit, a shawl trader from Anantnag passed through the copper market. His hands were thick from years of spinning, and his fingers smelled faintly of indigo and goat milk. He stopped by a tea vendor near Zaldagar and asked, quietly, as he stirred a chipped porcelain cup:

“Where do they keep the wall of names?”

The vendor didn’t flinch. He didn’t ask who told him. He simply pointed toward the south slope, where a sliver of the ruined school still rose above the other rooftops like the tip of a sunken minaret.

The trader nodded.

Drank his tea in silence.

And walked on.

That evening, he entered the classroom just as the last light was retreating behind the poplars. He didn’t ask to be shown anything. He walked straight to the southern wall and paused in front of the name: Shabnam. Taken from Dooru, 1931.

He stood there for a long time.

He touched the name with his thumb.

Then, wordlessly, he unwrapped a small bundle tied to his waist. Inside was a handful of saffron threads bound in wax paper. He placed it beneath the name. Not as a gift. As a memory. As a vow.

By the next week, others began to arrive.

They came in pairs sometimes—an old man and his granddaughter, a widow and a neighbor, two silent brothers with soot still on their sleeves. Some brought clay cups filled with lake water. Others brought torn pages, dates written in charcoal, or fragments of shawl from women whose names had never been spoken again after marriage, or after loss.

The potters who had built the kiln in the cave came once, too.

They said nothing.

But they left behind a tablet etched with a spiral—their tribe’s oldest symbol for continuation—and placed it at the door of the room, just beside the crack in the threshold.

Zooni visited again, and this time, she didn’t write.

She just sat in the corner for hours, watching as people came and went. Their footsteps soft. Their silence full. The room no longer felt like a school. It felt like a wound that had learned how to carry itself without bleeding.

Madhav returned every few days—not to lead, not to perform—but to scrub the dust from the chalkwork, to replace broken pieces, to sweep the floor. He had become a caretaker of something sacred. Not a rebel. Not a writer.

A witness who made space for others to remember themselves.

The inspector, meanwhile, stayed away.

Some said he couldn’t bear the thought of standing before the name etched in a child’s hand across the north wall:

“He took our field. We planted this instead.”

Others said he still dreamt of the robe over the river.

Either way, he never came again.

And the city, without being told, had begun to carry the classroom in its breath.

After weeks hidden beneath shadow and pursuit, Usman returns—not with the roar of vengeance, but with the weight of his father’s half-burned body on his back. He enters the classroom not as a hero, but as a man uncertain whether to keep running or lay down the war. What he finds in the silence of the names is neither peace nor defeat—it is recognition.

The Name He Never Spoke Out Loud

Usman did not take the main road into the city.

He crossed through the marshes just before dawn, his boots soaked to the ankle, the morning mist clinging to his chest like an old curse. Beneath his shawl, the fabric that wrapped his shoulders was torn from the hem of a butcher’s apron—his father’s apron—one of the few things recovered after they hung him above the Jhelum and left his body for the birds.

He had not been back since the scrolls were burned.

Not since the grain raid.

Not since Layaq had fallen into the river and Madhav had disappeared into the cave with the potters and the girl with the ledger.

But something in the air had changed. It pulled at him—not loudly, not insistently, but the way a smell of bread pulls a child’s hunger into shape.

When he arrived at the ruined school, the sky was pale and veined with grey. Smoke drifted from distant chimneys. The world had not ended. The world had only turned.

He stepped into the classroom like a man entering a memory he never lived. The floorboards did not creak. The dust did not rise. The silence was not emptiness—it was arrangement, like candles placed for the dead.

There were names on the wall.

Dozens of them.

Some written in bold chalk. Others in crooked letters, one name pressed with a child’s thumbprint. A few etched into clay tiles and leaned in a careful line beneath the window.

He walked past them slowly.

Then stopped.

Halfway down the left wall, near a patch where the plaster had buckled, he saw it.

Not his father’s name.

But the description.

“He sold meat. They called it sin. They half-cooked his body in oil. Then let the crows finish the sermon.”

Usman stared at the words until the breath inside his chest felt thick.

He had not known anyone remembered.

He had not expected anyone would.

He lowered himself to the floor without thinking. His knees folded into the cold stone. His fingers reached forward and traced the edge of the writing, as if testing whether it was truly there.

He whispered the name:

“Rahim.”

The chalk did not reply.

It had already spoken.

From the shadows near the window, Madhav appeared. He said nothing, only nodded once as if to say: Yes. That name belongs here too.

They sat together in silence.

Not as rebels.

Not as fugitives.

Just as sons of men who had once fed a city that chose instead to feast on fear.

Usman took out a small scrap of cloth, the last piece of his father’s apron, and tied it to a cracked beam at the far end of the room. It fluttered slightly when the wind pushed through the window.

He did not say why he did it.

He did not need to.

The beam, the wall, the name—they knew.

The classroom shifts again. It does not transform into a monument, nor a mausoleum, but something more fragile—a listening ear. Beneath the chalk and dust, tucked into the jagged edge of a wall, a folded letter waits. It is not addressed to anyone in particular. Yet it is meant for a girl who was taken, and never returned. And tonight, in the breathless hush of the room, Zooni reads her back into the world.

The Letter the Wall Had Kept

The wind had quieted outside. Only the faint rustle of dry poplar leaves hinted at the season. Zooni sat on a low stone near the eastern wall, her legs crossed, her fingers resting in her lap as though still stained with wet clay, though she had not touched a tablet in days. She came to the classroom often now—not to write, but to tend. The way one might tend a grave that had become a garden.

It was Madhav who found the letter.

He had been brushing the loose chalk dust from beneath a broken shelf when his hand struck something folded between a cracked edge in the wall. He pulled it free, gently, as if retrieving an old feather from a book. The paper was soft with age, the creases worn thin and browned at the corners.

There was no name on the outside.

Only a pressed flower—long dead—flattened into the shape of a crooked star.

He handed it to Zooni without a word.

She understood.

Her fingers unfolded the letter slowly, as though the act of opening it might release its scent back into the air.

Then she read.

“My daughter,

If you ever return to the place they took you from,
and if you find only silence,
know this: I screamed.

I screamed until the sound cracked my ribs.
I clawed the door until my nails gave way.
I begged men with seals and paper and polished boots.

I gave them my bangles. I gave them my hair.
I gave them the last of your father’s tools.

They laughed.

When I understood you were gone,
I sat in the rice field and spoke your name into the soil
until the earth began to answer with weeds.

I lit a lamp every night, even after the neighbors stopped asking why.

I told the wind your bedtime stories,
in case it passed near your window.

I folded this letter into the wall of the school we once passed on your way to the river,
because someone told me:
paper lasts longer in dust than in hands.

If you read this—
I am gone.

But you are not.

So say your name.
Say it loud.

Say it for me.”

Zooni’s voice trembled only once.

After that, she held still.

She did not cry. The room had already done that for her. A few seated near the door had closed their eyes. Someone at the back leaned their forehead to the chalked wall, lips moving in silence.

When she folded the letter again, she placed it not back in the crevice, but inside the clay ledger beside her.

“This belongs in fire,” she whispered.

But she did not mean to burn it.

She meant to seal it.

To preserve it.

To let it become the kind of heat that warms, not consumes.

And outside, the last of the evening light touched the threshold.

Not like a visitor.

But like something returning.

The chalk has dried. The walls have stilled. And beneath the cracked rafters of that ruined schoolhouse, the three who had once walked alone—Zooni, Madhav, and Usman—find themselves together. No vows are exchanged. No plan is made. What joins them tonight is not rebellion or even memory. It is the quiet, grave, unspeakable kinship of those who carry names that once had no place to be said.

Beneath the Names, They Sat

The fire had gone out hours ago, leaving only the faint breath of its smoke curling through a hole in the roof. The night did not press in—it settled, as if the valley itself had exhaled and allowed the room to hold stillness as something sacred. Zooni sat with her back to the ledger, her knees drawn up, her arms resting on the low shelf where new tablets were drying. Her eyes weren’t closed, but they had stopped searching. There was nothing more to look for. Only things to hold.

Madhav was seated a few paces away, his fingers idly turning a piece of broken chalk over and over between thumb and forefinger. It was the smallest piece—too short to write with, too jagged to keep—but he held it like a prayer bead, as if the rhythm of his touch might grind it back into powder and begin again.

He had not spoken since the letter.

He didn’t need to.

There are stories too full to repeat aloud. Ones that can only be shared by being witnessed, not retold. Zooni had read the mother’s grief into the silence, and that silence now wove around them like a shawl.

And then, at the edge of the doorway, Usman appeared.

Not with a soldier’s tread. Not with the swagger of a man who had once carried a sheep under each arm while fleeing guards across rooftops. He came like a mourner might enter a tomb—not from fear, but from recognition.

He did not speak.

He saw them both.

And he sat.

No introductions.

No strategy.

No “what’s next?”

He sat just beside the firepit, where the embers were long cold, and reached into the folds of his shawl. From it, he drew a slip of rough cotton, folded four times. He opened it slowly, revealing a button—large, copper, with a jagged chip along one edge. The last thing his father wore. The rest of the tunic had burned away, but this had survived. A small piece of brass too stubborn to vanish.

He placed it on the ground between them.

Then looked to Madhav.

Then to Zooni.

No words were exchanged.

But something settled in the room. Not an agreement. Not alliance. Something older.

A recognition of belonging, born not from blood, but from loss.

Zooni leaned forward and placed beside the button the ribbon of the girl from Rainawari. Madhav followed with the chalk fragment. Three objects. Three stories. Three witnesses.

None of them said, “We are together now.”

But they were.

And in that ruined classroom, under rafters that threatened always to fall but never did, they became the memory the city had once buried beneath fear.

Outside, the wind moved gently through the broken shutters.

It did not wail.

It hummed.

As if cradling the room in song.

Next Chapter: Chapter Ten: Threads of Temptation