Where Songs Drown the Living

“Let me begin with a night. Not just any night. A night gilded in silk, painted with wine, and rotten at its root.

For in Kashmir, the most beautiful nights are often the most brutal.”

Snow had not yet begun to fall, but the sky above Pari Mahal was already grey with foreboding. The wind smelled of wood smoke, musk, and a strange bitterness that clung to the skin. A line of horse-drawn carriages snaked up the stone path like a royal procession. But this was not wedding. No saint’s day. No temple rite.

It was a celebration of power.

Inside the palace, once the retreat of Dara Shikoh’s mystics, now echoed the laughter of landlords and lords who had never known prayer. Velvet carpets soaked in wine and sweat. Braziers glowed in the corners, filling the grand hall with a haze of sandalwood and opium. And in the center—a wooden stage, low and wide—twelve girls danced beneath a silver chandelier, its crystals trembling with every drumbeat.

The girls wore silk, but it was not their own. Their anklets chimed, but not in joy. Their eyes were hollow, the kind of hollow that tells you a body is present, but the soul is elsewhere.

Among them, one girl—no more than fourteen—held herself differently. She moved, yes, but her limbs defied the rhythm. Her shoulders shook with more than just the drumbeat. Her gaze never rose to meet the crowd’s. She danced because the cost of stillness was worse.

A landlord in the front row leaned forward, tossing a coin into her path. She flinched.

In the back of the hall, Vakil Mohan Lal Dhar, the city’s Dogra-appointed Inspector, watched without blinking. A Kashmiri Pandit by blood, but Dogra by loyalty, his lips curled in satisfaction. His ring, set with a stone from Jaipur, tapped softly against his silver goblet.

He turned to the man beside him and said with a smirk, “They dance better after fasting a day. Fear sharpens the rhythm.”

Both laughed.

No one noticed the girl stumble.

No one—except the soldier behind the curtain. His hand reached for the whip. Blood Beneath Brocade

The soldier’s whip did not hiss—it growled.

It was plaited yak leather, dyed black, and always hungry. It did not ask for guilt. It only demanded obedience.

The moment the girl’s foot missed its step and her body tilted—not enough for collapse, just enough to betray fear—the man behind the curtain pulled the whip from his belt. He waited, not for her fall, but for the beat to rise, so the lash would blend with the drum. Punishment as choreography.

The hall roared with music. Tablas thumped like the heartbeat of a hunted animal. Sitar strings bent with tension. The chandeliers shook. And then came the whip.

A single crack.

The sound silenced the room, though the music continued. The girl gasped. Her foot stuttered again. The whip cracked a second time—across her calf this time. A red welt swelled beneath the silk.

She did not scream.

In the kingdom of hunger, silence is taught before speech.

A few landlords chuckled, tossing more coins into the ring. One shouted, “Let her twirl on her pain!” Another, too drunk to stand, cried, “Reminds me of Lahore—those Kashmiri flowers bloom better when pressed.”

The girl spun.

Blood now trickled into her shoe. Her rhythm broken, her pride leaking from an open wound. But still she danced, because to stop would be to vanish. And those who vanished here did not return. Not to the rooms behind the curtains. Not to the brothels along the river. Not even to the graveyards.

The Dogras, in this valley, did not bury the broken.

They sold them.

In the corner of the hall, a man from Jammu, his fingers swollen with rings, turned to Vakil Mohan Lal Dhar.

“These girls,” he asked, “Where do you get them? Their eyes—so wild, so pure.”

The Inspector did not answer immediately. He sipped his wine—saffron soaked in almonds— and replied, “From tax ledgers. From debts unpaid. From villages that owe more than they can count. Every fifth family gives a girl, every seventh a goat. We let them choose which.”

“And if they have neither?”

Mohan Lal Dhar’s smile was slow.

“Then we take both.”

The Price of a Daughter

The chandeliers swayed above like crystal ghosts, rattling in their chains, as if protesting what the walls were forced to witness. The marble underfoot had once hosted Sufi recitations, whispered Qur’anic verses, and the footsteps of astronomers. Now, it soaked in wine and the tears of girls far too young to know why their wrists were bruised.

From the upper balcony, veiled behind a screen of embroidered gauze, the wives and concubines of the Dogra princes watched in silence. Not a word passed their lips. The younger ones covered their mouths; the older ones had seen worse.

One of them, a Rajasthani noblewoman, turned to her attendant and whispered in broken Kashmiri,

“How many this month?”

The maid, head bowed, murmured, “Thirty-seven, huzooraan. Four from Shopian. Two from Budgam. One… returned.”

The pause after “returned” was heavier than the chandelier itself.

Returned girls never spoke again. Their voices lived only in the nightmares of other daughters.

Down below, the girl on stage finally stumbled—not a falter, but a collapse.

Her knees buckled. Her body hit the floor like a dropped porcelain vase. The coins scattered around her. The hall fell silent for a moment, as if Kashmir herself had held her breath.

A Dogra officer rose. His boots echoed across the marble.

He approached her—slow, methodical. The girl tried to rise, but her arms gave out. Her lips moved. Perhaps a prayer. Perhaps the name of a mother.

He grabbed her by the hair.

“Enough dancing for today,” he said, voice cold. “You will now serve better behind the curtain.”

She screamed.

Not aloud, but with her eyes—those orbs of almond fire that once looked up at walnut trees now pleaded toward the vaulted ceiling.

But no god came.

No Allah. No Shiva. No justice.

Only the officer, dragging her away by the braid.

In a corner near the carved fireplace, a servant boy—no older than twelve—gritted his teeth. His hands trembled as he poured more wine into goblets. He had a sister once. She too had “danced.”

She never came home.

And in the mountains beyond, the snow began to fall.

Not the pretty snow of postcards.

But the kind that seals a grave.

When Silence Wears a Veil

Outside the arched windows of Pari Mahal, the storm had thickened. Flakes now fell sideways, driven by mountain winds that had grown angry overnight. The pine trees along the ridge stood stiff and silent, their branches heavy with white sorrow. Somewhere in the dark woods, a snow leopard roared. But none inside the palace heard it.

Because inside, only music had mattered. Only desire. Only the twisted joy of men who ruled a land they did not love.

By the time the last cup was drained and the final song silenced, the girls had been led away like cattle—some to carriages bound for Gupkar Road mansions, others to hidden courtyards behind the palace where no prayer reached. The musicians packed their instruments without

meeting one another’s gaze. Their hands moved automatically, like the turning of prayer beads by a man who no longer believes in forgiveness.

And so, the revelers disappeared into the folds of night. Some humming, some vomiting, some laughing with blood still drying on their sleeves. Their boots crunched the fresh snow. The world was white again. Clean, it seemed. But beneath that innocence lay bruises, welts, and a memory Kashmir would not forget.

Dawn.

The sun had not yet risen, but the sky behind Shankaracharya hill glowed a faint indigo. The Jhelum, winding like a sleeping serpent through Srinagar, stirred in the dim light.

A fisherwoman, veiled and barefoot, made her way to the banks. Her breath came in clouds. She dragged her small boat down with the help of her son—a boy of ten. They whispered nothing. In the valley, dawn was not a time for conversation. It was a time for survival.

She dipped her hand in the water. And froze.

A hand—small, blue-fingered—drifted past her wrist.

The body of a girl. Dressed in purple silk. Anklet missing. Her braid undone, mouth open, as though she died mid-verse.

Behind her, another floated. Younger. Eyes closed, lips curved faintly upward—as though still dancing in death.

The fisherwoman gasped.

“Ya Khuda…”

The boy began to cry.

Others gathered. Someone ran toward the masjid. Another to the Inspector’s office. Word spread not with shouts, but with whispers. The kind that passed between alley walls, through torn shawls and frozen breath.

“They’ve done it again…”

“This time from Baramulla… I heard they were only children…”

“And the rajas? Still sleeping in velvet.”

But not everyone in the city was asleep.

High above, on a rooftop near Saraf Kadal, a man watched the river.

He stood barefoot in the snow, broad-shouldered, with a scar across his left brow that looked like a half-moon. His eyes were not of this world—molten, smoldering, waiting.

A horse neighed softly behind him, tethered near a bundle of sacks.

He raised a hand to the wind. Closed his eyes.

And whispered:

“Tonight… I run.”

His name?

Usman Chash.

The butcher’s son. The scarred shadow. The phantom of the alleys. And the man who, before the next moonrise, would leap over a compound wall with two sheep under his arms—and steal not just meat, but meaning.

The Man on the Rooftop

The rooftops of Saraf Kadal were stitched together like patchwork shawls—flat, uneven, some with wooden lattices, others with broken tiles and rusted chimneys. Smoke curled from the chulhas below, and in the early light, the city looked like it was breathing—slow, tired, and wounded.

Usman Chash stood at the edge of one such rooftop, his feet bare against the cold brick, a woolen shawl slung over his left shoulder, soaked slightly with dew. His breath steamed before him, curling into the dawn like smoke from a sacred fire.

He looked down at the street below. It was quiet still—no carts, no chatter, just the occasional crack of snow collapsing off a tin roof.

But in his mind, a different street played.

A street crowded with boots.

A pole raised in the middle of the river.

A fire lit beneath a cauldron.

And a man screaming—no, roaring—not in fear, but in defiance.

Usman’s fists clenched. The scar above his left brow ached—it always did in the cold.

He had been thirteen when the Dogra soldiers stormed their butcher shop. The accusation was whispered first, shouted later—“beef!” A forbidden word under Dogra law, not just in taste, but in politics. His father, a tall man with forearms like tree trunks and eyes like embers, did not deny it. He had fed three orphan girls from the masjid school. It had been Eid.

The punishment was theatre.

In the middle of the market square, they built a stage of cruelty.

They poured oil into a copper vat. Lit it. Made the crowd watch.

“Half-fried,” said the officer, grinning. “Let him feel both worlds.”

Usman remembered the smell first—burning skin and smoke. Then the sound—his mother wailing like a beast, clutching her head. Then the silence—as birds fled, as onlookers turned their faces, and as the boy standing in the front row stopped blinking.

The soldiers strung the half-dead body to a pole in the Jhelum, for the birds to feast on. Three days he hung there.

And on the fourth, when his body was finally taken down, Usman Chash vanished. No one saw the boy again.

Only stories remained.

Now, eight years later, the stories had a name again.

“That was Usman Chash, they say.”

“The man who steals from the tax office and feeds the widows of Nawakadal.” “He tied the inspector’s boots together once, they say, and replaced his sword with a goat bone!”

But this morning, there were no pranks.

Only a plan.

A whisper passed through the cold air. A whisper that came not from lips but from hunger itself.

“Two sheep. Compound wall. Tonight.”

And Usman smiled.

Because he had already chosen them.

The Weight of Wool and Silence

The compound Usman had chosen lay beyond the winding alleys of Bohri Kadal, cloaked behind a moss-streaked Mughal archway and guarded by the tangled limbs of an ancient chinar tree. The home belonged to Maqbool Khan, a wealthy Muslim grain merchant and wool trader—once a poor shawl broker, now bloated with wealth stolen from his own kind.

They called him “the Lamb Merchant of Bohri Kadal.”

Maqbool Khan did not serve the Dogras out of loyalty. He served them out of greed. He was the one who measured debt when revenue collectors looked away. He whispered names to the Inspector when families resisted eviction. He lent silver to the desperate and took daughters when rupees failed. The only thing holier than God in Maqbool Khan’s house was profit.

Though not related by blood, he was close to Inspector Mohan Lal Dhar—not through kinship, but through the darker kinship of corruption. One enforced order with law, the other with ledgers.

And it was said, when the Inspector needed silence in the Muslim quarters, it was Maqbool Khan who provided the map.

Usman Chash had watched the compound for three days.

By dawn, he perched like a crow in the shadows of the neighbourhood bakery, nibbling walnuts, eyes never still. By noon, he leaned against the tannery wall, feigning sleep, but counting the rhythm of footsteps behind the house. By dusk, he crouched behind the outhouse pit, noting every movement in and out—the mule boy, the cook, the stable door’s sway.

The house was large, proud, and afraid. Its rear wall rose nearly seven feet at the lowest point, topped with a line of dull iron spikes painted black. A thin vine of dry ivy trailed across one side, the only softness in its scowl.

Two guards rotated in shifts—Dogra hirelings in ill-fitting uniforms. One old and toothless, fond of opium, often dozing behind the pigeon coops. The other, wiry and nervous, walked as though his musket was heavier than his courage.

But Usman wasn’t watching them.

He was watching the sheep.

Thirty in total, fat and idle, nibbling hay while children across the Jhelum chewed on snow soaked bark. Among them, two stood out.

One was black, with a golden hoop through its ear. The other white, marked with a red brushstroke along its spine. They were clean, fed, nearly regal in their demeanor. Bound for a banquet, perhaps. For someone’s wedding table in Jammu or Rawalpindi.

They stood close, always together.

Usman watched them longer than he watched the guards.

“They love each other,” he murmured once. “Even animals know more loyalty than men who rule us.”

Back in his rooftop hut near Saraf Kadal, Usman began to prepare.

A coil of rope, woven from discarded shawl fibers. A small pouch of dried chilies. A skin of goat milk—calming to animals, even in panic. And last, folded neatly, his red scarf. Not worn on the face like a thief, but on the wrist like a poet.

It was not for disguise.

It was a signature.

Tonight, two sheep would fly.

And the city would remember Usman Chash not for his strength, but for his message. The Leap That Shamed the City

The sky over Srinagar that night was a bowl of ink, unbroken, moonless. Only the stars bore witness, blinking nervously behind shreds of drifting cloud. The river Jhelum had quieted, as if anticipating something beyond ordinary thievery—something closer to theatre.

And in the quarter of Bohri Kadal, the world held its breath.

Inside Maqbool Khan’s courtyard, the sheep had fallen asleep in clusters, their breath steaming into the cold night like the exhale of tired ghosts. The guards, wrapped in wool, shuffled lazily near the stable gate. One rubbed his hands together and muttered a curse against the chill. The other lit a brittle twig and blew on it until it glowed.

Above them, unseen, Usman Chash crouched on a low awning, his shawl drawn close. He watched them with the stillness of a stone. His breath was slow. His muscles taut. His eyes didn’t blink.

He had arrived an hour before the guards rotated—slipping through the alleys like a forgotten verse of an old song. With the rope slung across his back and the milkskin strapped to his hip, he had climbed the outer wall using a broken gutter spout and a crumbling chinar branch.

Now, the two sheep stood before him, tethered near the hay bin. The black one snored faintly. The white one blinked at shadows.

He descended without a sound.

Two steps across the courtyard. One hand out. A soft bleat.

“Shhh, my brothers,” he whispered. “Tonight, you do not die. Tonight, you become poetry.”

He untied the ropes swiftly. Slipped one arm beneath the belly of the black sheep. The other beneath the white. They were heavier than he expected, but his body did not waver. He had lifted corpses heavier than this. Carried grief greater.

Just as he adjusted their weight, a shout rang out behind him.

“Kaun hai?!”

“Who’s there?!”

The old guard had turned.

The younger one raised his musket, squinting in the dark.

But by the time the barrel found aim, Usman had already turned toward the wall. And ran.

With a roar in his chest and a sheep under each arm, he bolted across the courtyard, his boots barely touching the cobblestones.

The guards stumbled in disbelief.

“Rok lo! Chor hai!”

“He’s got… sheep?!”

And then—he leapt.

Over the spiked wall, over the disbelief, over the rules of gravity and shame.

His feet struck the stone ledge like thunder. His body lifted. And like a falcon clutching lambs, Usman Chash flew.

The guards screamed. One fired his musket—it misfired with a crack and a cough. The other stood with his mouth open, watching as the thief landed on the other side and vanished into the alleyway’s shadows.

Only the red scarf remained, caught briefly on the topmost spike of the compound wall. It fluttered once—like a flag, like a dare, like a wound not yet healed.

And from somewhere deeper in the city, a voice rose with laughter.

“Tell Maqbool Khan—

Tonight, I stole not meat.

I stole his sleep.”

The Thief Who Carried Justice

By the time dawn scratched its fingernails against the frost-glazed windows of Srinagar, the entire downtown quarter was humming—not with prayers, not with azan, but with rumor.

In the alleys of Habba Kadal, a baker paused mid-knead to say,

“Two sheep, I swear. One under each arm. Like carrying water jugs!”

In Zaina Kadal, an old bookseller muttered while lighting his stove,

“He leapt over Maqbool’s wall like it was a roadside stone. The guards? Ha! Useless pigeons.”

By midday, the incident was no longer a whisper. It was a poem. Children at the madrasa added rhymes to it:

“Red scarf flew, sheep went too,

Chash bhai did what kings don’t do!”

And by the time the noon sun struck the frozen roofs of Rajouri Kadal, people began calling it a sign.

“Did you hear?”

“Usman Chash stole from Maqbool!”

“A thief with a message. A thief who feeds.”

“They say he gave one sheep to a widow with six children. The other to the shrine’s langar.”

No one knew for certain if that part was true. But it didn’t matter. In Kashmir, truth was a bird, and birds chose their own songs.

At Maqbool Khan’s residence, chaos bloomed like rot. Servants scrubbed the hoofprints from the courtyard. A silver platter was found upturned. Guards were beaten in the basement— boots, belts, curses in Dogri and Kashmiri alike. One was rumoured to have been stripped of his uniform and locked in the pantry.

Maqbool himself tore at his beard.

“This… this insult! I want heads, Mohan Lal! Heads!”

The Inspector, now wearing his full-dress coat and sharpening a paperknife, smiled thinly. “You want heads? You should’ve kept your sheep in your brain, not your courtyard.” But even as he said it, a knot had formed in his own chest.

This wasn’t just a theft.

It was a challenge.

A man had dared to leap over their wall. Over their law. Over their illusion of invincibility. And he had left behind a symbol—that fluttering red scarf, now pinned in the Inspector’s chamber like a war relic.

It smelled faintly of walnut oil and mountain wind.

In a dark shrine room near Rainawari, an old woman with white hair and clouded eyes smiled when she heard the news.

Her name was Dei’d.

Beside her, a girl with a faded scarf and ink-stained fingers looked up and whispered: “Was it him?”

The old woman touched her rosary and replied,

“Yes, Zooni. The boy with the fire has begun to burn.”

And she returned to her silence.

The scene now shifts to Inspector Mohan Lal Dhar, whose pride has been wounded. His office becomes a theatre of command and paranoia, while the myth of Usman Chash becomes unstoppable in the streets.

In the House of the Hunter

The office of Inspector Mohan Lal Dhar was not a chamber of law—it was a den of control. Nestled above the Shahr-e-Khaas Kotwali, the room overlooked the narrow veins of Srinagar’s old city. From its lattice window, one could see a thousand rooftops—each like a square of a worn game board, each suspected of sheltering treachery.

This morning, however, the Inspector didn’t look out the window. He looked instead at the red scarf—now tacked to the wall beside a map of the old city, its corners flapping slightly with the winter draft that snuck in through the glass.

He had not slept.

His eyes were red-veined, rimmed with salt. His hair, usually parted and oiled, curled at the sides like smoke. In his hands was a silver cup of kahwa that had long since gone cold. He did not sip it. He only stirred it, clockwise, then counter-clockwise, as though trying to unwind time.

Across the room, four officers stood like statues—Dogra jawans, clad in tan uniforms, boots muddied from alleywork. They awaited orders. Or wrath. Perhaps both.

“He is not just a thief,” Mohan Lal finally said, his voice soft and sharpened. “He is a message. That cannot be allowed.”

He rose from his seat, the wooden legs creaking under his weight. He walked to the wall and touched the scarf.

“This,” he muttered, “is not cloth. This is defiance.”

He turned, slow and measured, like a man circling prey.

“Announce a reward,” he commanded. “Five hundred rupees. I want his name nailed to every post from Nawakadal to Safa Kadal. If a child sees his shadow, I want the mother to scream. If a dog smells his bootprint, I want it caged. Is that understood?”

The officers nodded, but none met his eye.

“And raid the bakeries. The shrines. The soup kitchens. He feeds the poor? Then starve them. Let them know: a thief brings nothing but hunger.”

Outside, a constable scribbled furiously onto fresh broadsheets:

WANTED

USMAN CHASH – Known Criminal

For Theft, Subversion, and Disrespect of State

500 RUPEES REWARD FOR INFORMATION

DEAD OR ALIVE

Within the hour, these notices would be nailed to trees, pasted on mosque walls, and slipped under the doors of informants. The city, already aching, would soon know fear.

But in the streets, something else stirred.

The rickshaw pullers spoke of Usman with admiration. The widows of Rainawari left rice grains on their doorstep—just in case the red-scarfed thief passed by and was hungry. A group of children in Safa Kadal tied red ribbons to their wrists, giggling and pretending to carry sheep. In the late hours, old men at the tea stalls quoted poetry in his name:

“They rule with boots,

He flew with wool—

A thief more righteous

Than a king in court.”

And in a city drowning in sorrow, a strange kind of hope—faint, trembling, dangerous— began to rise.

Not hope in the state.

Not in law.

But in legend.

the scene shifts into a more intimate nocturne, where Usman Chash slips into the shadows of sanctuary to seek the only soul who knows his silence—Dei’d, the Sufi grandmother. And it is here that the reader glimpses Zooni, not as a victim, but as the silent heart of the valley.

The Door That Never Closed

The knock was not a knock. It was a breath on wood. A sound only the wind might have made, had the wind known reverence.

It came after midnight, long after the azaan of the last prayer had faded into frost. The city slept beneath its blanket of fear and snow, and even the dogs had curled into silence. But at the edge of Rainawari, nestled beside an abandoned well and a mulberry tree bent by age, stood a house that never locked its door.

It was the house of Dei’d.

The old woman sat before a clay lamp, whispering softly to herself. Not prayers. Not names. But the memory of both. Her fingers moved over a string of tasbih beads worn smooth by grief and repetition. She did not turn when the door opened.

She did not need to.

“You’ve done it again,” she said, her voice papery but amused.

The figure stepped in, closed the door gently behind him. He removed his shawl and boots. The cold clung to his skin like a second breath. His beard shimmered with melted frost.

“They feed the dogs,” Usman said, “but they starve the widows. I merely corrected the order of things.”

She smiled without looking.

“And the scarf?”

He unrolled his wrist, showing her the naked skin.

“Left it for him. Like a rose on a grave.”

Now she turned. Her eyes, though clouded with cataracts, still pierced like truth.

“You mock them too well, Usman. Pride is a fire. You may warm your hands by it once, but the second time—it burns.”

Usman knelt before her, not like a supplicant, but like a grandson resting at the feet of time. “It’s not pride, Dei’d. It’s rage. If I don’t let it out, it will eat me.”

From behind the curtain came the sound of paper pages shuffling and the light scrape of a pen.

Dei’d called softly, “Zooni?”

The curtain parted gently.

She stood in the doorway, a lamp in one hand, the other clutching a leather-bound notebook. She was wrapped in an old Kashmiri pheran stitched with sun motifs—faded, mended at the shoulder. Her hair was half-tied, and a smudge of ink graced her cheek like a silent birthmark.

She looked at Usman and blinked. Not in surprise. Not in admiration. But as if she had been waiting.

Usman looked away.

Dei’d caught the moment.

“Zooni, chai banav,” she said. “Make him tea. His throat sounds like it’s swallowed fire.”

Zooni didn’t reply, only nodded and disappeared behind the curtain, leaving a fragrance of saffron and ink in her wake.

Usman stared at the floor.

“She always knew.”

Dei’d tilted her head.

“Knew what?”

“That I would come back.”

The old woman sighed, her fingers still on the beads.

“We all come back, Usman. But not all of us come home.”

Outside, snow fell without sound.

Inside, a kettle hissed softly.

And somewhere in the folds of the night, legend sat on the floor, and history poured tea.

Next Chapter: Chapter Two: The Butcher’s Son