This chapter opens on the edge of hunger—not as metaphor, but as a daily ache stitched into the city’s skin. The raid that follows is not planned for glory. It is a prayer made of rice, shawl thread, and stolen breath.

Dogs, Frogs, and Dreams of Flour

The frost had returned to the lanes of Safakadal, brittle and thin as the skin on boiled milk. Beneath it, the stone steps wept silently. By early morning, puddles would harden. By noon, they would soften again—just long enough to trap the feet of beggars, and to remind the city that it had forgotten how to mourn the poor.

In a small courtyard behind the old silversmith’s lane, a woman knelt beside her son. He was nine. His eyes were open, but he had not spoken since the day before. His stomach, pulled tight as drum leather, had begun to swell—not from fullness, but from the mockery of emptiness.

They had eaten nothing for two days.

Nothing, unless you counted boiled grass and a rat the neighbor’s cat had left near the steps. She had roasted the meat carefully, adding salt only in gesture—there was none left. The child had chewed once, then wept into the corner of his pheran.

Two lanes down, a man known once as a schoolteacher had stooped to collect a frog near the irrigation ditch. He carried it home wrapped in a page of torn scripture. He cooked it slowly, using prayers as spice. When he tasted it, he cried not because of shame—but because he remembered the way his wife once made lentils, thick and slow and humming with mustard oil.

At the edge of the vegetable quarter, an old dog gnawed on a frozen bone. A girl, no older than seven, stared at him with hunger so focused it almost resembled love.

This was not famine declared by decree.

It was the kind of institutional starvation no regime claims and every ledger denies.

But hunger doesn’t wait for permission.

It creeps into shawl fringes.
It stains the hands of mothers.
It steals the dignity from the old and gives it to rodents.

That morning, in the southern granary behind the Collector’s quarters, a constable named Tufail unlocked the outer gate and was met not with sacks of grain—but with emptiness.

Shelves were bare.

Hessian sacks slit open. The floor dusted with the soft remains of rice like pale snow.

A shawl scrap hung from the rafter.

Green border. Gold thread.

And stitched into the corner, barely visible—

“This is not theft. This is return.”

There was no sign of entry.

No window broken.
No guard missing.
No door forced.

Just food—gone.

And silence—lingering.

That same day, outside Pir Dastgeer Sahib, hundreds gathered—not to protest, not to beg.

But to eat.

Wrapped in shawl cloth and delivered before dawn, rice packets had appeared at doorsteps and shrine corners, each tied with red thread and a small stone inside.

Not to weigh them down.

But as reminder.

That food can be lifted.
That stone can still speak.
That hunger, too, has sabre—but sabre eventually turns to spark.

we enter the granary raid through the senses of Usman Chash, whose hands, used to holding rope and knives, now touch only grain—not with greed, but reverence, as if returning it to the people was not just an act of rebellion, but a kind of sacred distribution.

Where the Grain Waited

The inner walls of the granary were thick with dust and the scent of old burlap. The air inside felt suspended, heavy with the stillness of forgotten plenty. Stacked against the walls were sacks—rows upon rows, their edges stitched and branded in faded ink: Punjab Co-op. 1937. State Food Reserve. For Distribution Only.

But no one had distributed.

These sacks had grown old in hiding, while outside, men boiled grass for broth and women bartered shawl threads for crusts.

Usman stood beneath the wooden rafters, his breath shallow but steady. He had entered just after the third azan, slipping through the side door behind the mosque when the watchman abandoned his post for ablution. The city’s hunger gave him cover. Its silence gave him time.

He moved swiftly, not like a thief, but like someone retrieving what was already his.

He unfastened the first sack slowly, running his fingers across the thick jute. The rope held firm—it hadn’t been touched in months. He sliced it open with the same blade he had once used to carve goat meat for his father. Rice spilled out—white, clean, glistening even in low light. It fell like tiny marbles, whispering across the stone floor.

Usman did not rush.

He opened each sack as if waking a sleeping body. There was no noise, no fumbling. Just motion refined by purpose.

Behind him, Layaq entered with two satchels sewn from old shawl backs. He did not speak. They had rehearsed this in breath and shadow. Now, the body simply obeyed.

Together, they began filling the satchels.

Not too much.

Just enough to stretch across the lanes they had marked.

One for the widow with five mouths. One for the girl in Budshah Nagar whose mother had died of dehydration during childbirth. One for the blind man in the carpenter’s alley who hadn’t tasted cooked rice in seventeen days.

Layaq handed Usman a bundle of twine dyed in red and green.

Usman tied each satchel with care.

Then placed inside each a single pebble—smooth, warm from his pocket.

Not for weight.

But to remind the bearer of earth, of place, of what could not be moved from them again.

At the door, Madhav appeared—his shoulders hunched with urgency. “Seven minutes,” he said. “The imam will finish by then. The courtyard will flood again with watchmen.”

Usman nodded. He fastened the last satchel, then ran his hand once across the nearest sack—like a man saying goodbye.

“This grain waited too long.”

“Not anymore,” said Layaq.

They lifted the satchels and disappeared, not as shadows fleeing—but as limbs returning to the body of a city that had nearly stopped believing it could feed itself again.

The act of rebellion behind and enters the lanes of the city, where rebellion arrives not as fire, but as food—and for the first time in a long time, mouths open not to beg or wail, but to taste.

The Knots That Held Miracles

Before sunrise, the satchels appeared like secret blessings across the old neighbourhoods of Srinagar.

No heralds came announcing their arrival. No footsteps were heard. No carts wheeled through the alleyways. But when the muezzin’s voice cracked across the minarets of Habba Kadal, the faithful stepped outside to find a hush waiting—not in the air, but in their courtyards. In baskets. On window ledges. Hung quietly on the worn nails of old doors.

Each bundle wrapped in cloth that once carried shawl borders. Each tied with red-and-green twine. Each warm from the closeness of someone’s hands just moments before.

The first to open one was a boy no taller than his mother’s knee.

He tugged the knot with the innocence of someone who expects nothing. The string loosened easily, like a sigh, and the cloth fell open in his lap. Rice spilled out—soft, white, whole. Not pebbles. Not husks. Real grain. Not yet cooked, but already feeding.

He looked up at his mother. She covered her mouth with both hands. Not because she was surprised.

But because she did not remember the last time she had witnessed abundance that did not come with shame.

She pressed her forehead to the boy’s hair and wept silently—not the tears of grief, but the kind that pour from a heart that suddenly realizes it is not forgotten.

Across the river, in a cramped lane near Zaldagar, an old man who had once taught algebra now fumbled to untie his own satchel. His fingers, swollen and slow from the cold, trembled around the knot. But when it finally gave way, he reached inside and let the grain run through his palms like water.

He lifted a handful to his nose and closed his eyes.

Then he laughed.

A cracked, crumbling sound—like a cartwheel long frozen creaking back into motion.

“They think the city is asleep,” he said aloud, to no one.

“But we are chewing again.”

In the quarter behind the shrine, Zooni moved from door to door.

Not delivering.

Watching.

A girl opened her door and gasped.

A man cursed, then fell to his knees and whispered shukr.

An old woman clutched the satchel to her chest and would not set it down, even to scoop from it.

Zooni smiled faintly and returned to the courtyard.

She wrote no names that morning.

She only sat in the rising light and listened.

To children laughing with rice stuck between their teeth.

To pots boiling again on old clay stoves.

To silence that, for once, did not ache.

The stolen grain is no longer the only thing circulating. Word travels faster than footsteps—first in murmurs, then in rising whispers. But it is not the food that unsettles the authorities. It is the laughter.

When the Grain Began to Speak

By midmorning, the silence that had cloaked the city began to fray.

Not with gunfire.

Not with sermons.

But with questions.

They moved like warm air under closed doors, like wind through broken lattices. At tea stalls and butchers’ counters, the questions floated gently from mouth to mouth, always half-smiled, always low enough not to reach the ear of a listening soldier.

“Did they come through the alleys, or over rooftops?”

“Was it one man or many?”

“How did they carry so much without a single dog barking?”

But none of those were the real questions.

The real question lay behind the others, deeper, unsaid.

“If they can take grain from a locked granary and give it to us—what else can they take?”

“And who, then, really owns this city?”

In the Collector’s Office, the heat had begun to rise—not from the brazier in the corner, but from the panic curling in the men’s throats.

The grain had vanished.

No locks broken. No guards missing. No keys lost.

Just gone.

And in its place, cloth. Thread. Stones.

Symbols that meant nothing to men who measured justice in rupees and jail terms—but everything to those who had spent their lives being told they owned nothing, not even their own hunger.

Inspector Ramdas, red-eyed from a sleepless night, slapped a satchel down onto the table before the Collector himself.

Grain spilled across the polished wood.

“So,” the Collector muttered, “they steal from the State to feed the streets.”

“No,” the Inspector said, voice tightening. “They didn’t just feed. They fed with intention. And they left no name.”

The Collector leaned back.

“But they left something worse.”

Ramdas nodded grimly.

“They left the idea that we can’t stop them.”

In the copper market, a merchant who once sold sacks of lentils for three times their worth now sat beside his empty scale, eyes shifting nervously from stall to stall. The poor were no longer haggling. They were smiling. They bought only what they could not yet find in a satchel. And when they did buy, they looked the merchants in the eye, as equals.

In the lanes near Bohri Kadal, three tailors drank salted tea without speaking. Each had heard a different version of the tale.

That the grain was blessed.

That a shrine had multiplied it.

That the Prophet himself had walked the alleys of Srinagar that night.

The truth didn’t matter.

Because the effect was already written into the dust: the poor had walked taller that morning.

And fear, which once travelled freely from rooftops to breadlines, now stumbled like a drunkard searching for its boots.

In the palace, the Maharaja’s advisors gathered under the flickering chandeliers of the northern hall, their turbans tight, their fingers busy with beads and tobacco.

“They think it’s food,” one said. “But it’s flame.”

“And how do you kill a story,” asked another, “when it feeds the stomach?”

There were no answers.

Only orders.

“Find them,” the Maharaja’s voice echoed across marble and velvet. “Find not just the ones who took. Find those who received. Shame them. Silence them. Make them fear their own hunger again.”

But the hunger had changed.

It was no longer desperate.

It was awakening.

The air in Srinagar grows heavier—not from snow or smoke, but from the knowing hush that comes before a purge. Zooni, warned by a boy whose family has already been questioned, returns to the shrine with dust on her hem and urgency in her breath. Dei’d, who has seen storms gather before, begins to prepare—not for escape, but for survival of something more fragile than flesh: memory.

The Girl with Too Many Names

By the time Zooni reached the shrine-house, her palms were scraped and her shawl torn at the edge. She had taken the back lanes, those narrow arteries of the old city where each turn felt like a choice between forgetting and being found. Twice she had ducked behind hemp carts. Once, near the cobbler’s lane, she had stood so still behind a stack of firewood that the dog sniffing beside her stopped and whimpered as if it too knew she carried something she should not.

It was not herself she feared losing.

It was the names.

Inside her satchel, beneath folded cloths and a scrap of dried apple, lay the small notebook. The cover bore a faint crescent stain from a drop of oil weeks ago. The pages inside smelled of ash and ink, of sweat, sometimes of the faint perfume she once wore before memory became her second skin. The names inside were not just those of the dead.

They were those who might still be alive, but only barely.

The ones whose stories hadn’t yet been extinguished by the official lie.

The girls sold to pay tax.

The men who had vanished after speaking aloud in the grain line.

The women who named their miscarried children and whispered those names into the wind before burning the rags they’d wrapped them in.

Zooni burst through the wooden gate and into the courtyard, nearly colliding with the small water pot Dei’d had set out to collect skywater from the low roof. Her breath came like broken cloth—heavy, frayed, unravelling.

Dei’d, seated on the stool beside the hearth, did not startle.

She looked up, eyes steady, hand resting on her walking stick.

Zooni clutched the notebook to her chest, her fingers trembling from more than just running.

“They’ve started,” she gasped.

Dei’d stood slowly, her joints releasing the quiet music of age. She reached for her outer shawl, the one lined with fox fur from decades ago, back when warmth had been gifted to her by a wandering merchant who owed her nothing but gave everything.

“Which lane?” she asked.

“Dabber Mohalla. They took a boy. Said his mother had eaten from a red-thread bag. They say they’re searching for the thread.”

Dei’d nodded.

“They will look for food. But what they fear,” she said, “is story.”

Zooni’s lips quivered.

“They’re tearing open satchels like they carry bombs.”

Dei’d moved with surprising steadiness to the far corner of the room. From beneath the broken cabinet, she pulled out a cloth-wrapped bundle. It was thick, shaped like a book, but heavier. She unwrapped it on the floor—layer after layer of cotton, stitched with black thread.

Inside was a second notebook. Older. More worn. Its pages darker, its ink faded. But the shape of it matched Zooni’s own.

“This was mine,” Dei’d said.

“I kept names once too.”

Zooni fell to her knees beside it, stunned.

Dei’d placed a hand on her shoulder.

“We will take them both. The names. Yours and mine. They belong in the caves now. Where no foot marches unless it is barefoot, and no whisper is followed unless the mountain grants permission.”

Zooni nodded, swallowing the knot in her throat.

“And if they come before we leave?”

Dei’d smiled.

Not the smile of peace.

The smile of a woman who had survived worse storms than kings could remember.

“Then let them find fire. Let them touch paper that bites back. Let them bleed on every name we wrote down in love.”

Zooni and Dei’d as they begin their quiet exodus toward the caves, carrying the notebooks of the dead and the nearly forgotten. Their walk through twilight is neither heroic nor desperate. It is something else entirely—the migration of memory itself, wrapped in shawl and silence.

Where the Dust Knew Their Names

They left just before dusk, when the rooftops were still rimmed with the copper breath of sun, but the alleys had already begun to dim. The city was at that in-between hour—the brief space between suspicion and surrender—when soldiers loosened their belts and mothers called their children in from the frost. It was the safest moment to disappear.

Zooni carried two bundles.

One pressed against her chest—her own notebook wrapped in oilcloth, warm from her body heat.

The other—Dei’d’s journal, older and heavier—tied against her back beneath her shawl, its spine already digging into the base of her neck with every step.

Dei’d walked slowly, her hand tight around the carved wooden cane, each tap of its base on the stone echoing like an old secret too stubborn to die. She wore a woolen cap stitched long ago by someone she no longer remembered. Her eyes, half-veiled in cataract, read the road not by sight but by familiarity—like a potter’s fingers returning to the shape of a beloved clay vessel.

They moved through inner alleys—those narrow veins where men’s boots rarely fit and women still whispered between windows. In the spice quarter, they passed a weaver boiling dye. He looked up, met Dei’d’s gaze, and did not speak. But he touched his chest—right hand over heart—then lowered his eyes. A gesture old as fire.

In Budshah Nagar, a boy playing with a metal wheel stepped aside without being asked. He reached into his pocket and handed Zooni a dried fig, then pointed toward the direction of Kumhar Gali—the potter’s lane that disappeared into the hills.

Zooni smiled and bowed her head.

She didn’t eat the fig.

She tucked it into her shawl as if saving a page in a book.

At the edge of the city, near the orchard where the Dogra cavalry once staged mock parades, they paused. The trees were bare now, their branches thin as ribs. Beneath them lay silence, soft as wool, but alert—watching.

Zooni turned to Dei’d.

“We’re close,” she whispered.

Dei’d exhaled through her nose, eyes narrowed toward the distant hills.

“I used to come here before the famine,” she murmured. “Before they made us pay tax with our daughters.”

Zooni looked down.

Then reached forward, took Dei’d’s hand—not to lead her, but to accompany her.

They moved onward, up the slope, past the last stone ruin where once a shepherd lived who kept a lion on a leash.

The cave mouth waited, hidden behind a curtain of reeds and old snow.

Inside, warmth.

Not of fire.

Of breath.

Of stories stored like jars of pickled memory—shut tight, buried deep, but never spoiled.

By nightfall, they would be gone.

Not vanished.

Only sheltered.

And with them, the names.

Every one.

Folded between pages, wrapped in ash, tethered with thread.

Waiting to be returned to a world ready to remember.

Zooni and Dei’d arrive at the hidden cave, nestled deep within the hills beyond the city. There, they are received not as fugitives, but as returning vessels of something sacred. The people who dwell there—the Kumhars, Kashmir’s ancient potter caste—do not speak much. Their welcome is not in words, but in earth, in breath, in silence shaped like shelter.

The Clay That Waited

The cave opened like a mouth that had waited too long to speak. Its arch was hidden beneath the overhang of brittle reeds and a patch of snow that had refused to melt despite the softening winter. The entrance was neither grand nor fearsome—only worn, like the palm lines of a laborer, smoothed by years of passage and return.

Zooni ducked first, letting her shoulders enter the dark. The air was cool, not bitter. It smelled of damp clay, faint smoke, and something older—perhaps buried ash, perhaps memory. Inside, her eyes adjusted quickly. Light filtered in through a slit in the ceiling above, catching the swirl of dust in golden threads.

Dei’d followed, leaning heavily on her cane. The sound of her steps shifted from gravel to earth, from city to silence.

And then they saw them.

A group of five stood along the curved wall. Men and women, faces shadowed by firelight from a hidden hearth deeper within. Their clothes bore the brown-gray stain of earth, and their hands—those hands—were as telling as any scripture.

Cracked.

Calloused.

Stained.

But steady.

One of the women stepped forward. She was tall, her braid thick and streaked with iron. She said nothing. She simply reached out and touched Zooni’s shoulder, then nodded once toward the inner chamber.

Another woman—her eyes pale as water—guided Dei’d to a flat stone wrapped in fur.

Not a bed.

But a throne, of sorts.

A place where the aged did not wait for death.

But watched over the living memory.

The others did not crowd them. There was no excitement. No clamor. Only quiet acknowledgement. The potters were not shocked by visitors. They had long known this day would come. Just as they had known their craft—shaping from earth, firing in flame—was never merely for cups and idols.

It was for preservation.

And now, they had been entrusted with names.

Zooni opened her satchel slowly.

She pulled out the first notebook.

Then the second.

Wrapped in shawl cloth, still warm from her back.

She handed them to the elder man at the edge of the fire—a man who had not moved until now. His beard was braided down the middle, and his feet were bare despite the cold.

He received the books like holy scripture.

Not with awe.

But with responsibility.

Zooni’s voice trembled only once as she spoke.

“These are names. Girls. Boys. The disappeared. The punished. Some still alive, but erased. Some known only by the way they were taken.”

The man bowed.

“We know clay,” he said, “but we do not write.”

Zooni shook her head.

“You do more than write. You store heat.”

The man looked at the others.

Then back at her.

“We will bake their names into earth.”

Zooni blinked.

“What do you mean?”

“We will not leave them in books,” he said. “We will shape them. Burn them. Seal them. So even if all the paper in the valley is turned to ash, someone will one day hold a shard and read the fire etched in it.”

From behind him, a girl no older than ten stepped forward with a lump of soft clay in her hands.

She began kneading it with her knuckles, her thumbs pressing a rhythm.

Zooni watched.

Dei’d smiled.

And the hearth crackled again—not just with warmth, but with an old vow relit.

Cave’s dim warmth, where firelight flickers like old memory, and Dei’d, after years of silence, begins to tell Zooni the story of her own stolen childhood—not for pity, but for continuity. The memory is not neat, not linear. It comes like bruised light, cracked open only because the names Zooni carries have now reached the clay where Dei’d once buried her own.

Her Name Wasn’t Always Dei’d

The fire had dimmed to a steady, amber breath. Around it, the potters worked in silence, kneading clay with palms darkened by years of shaping what others discarded. In a corner, the girl with the braid had already molded a dozen small tablets, flat and curved like the back of a hand, each one still damp and trembling. On one, she etched the word “Salma” using a sharpened reed. She didn’t ask who Salma was. The name spoke its own wound.

Zooni sat beside Dei’d on a thick wool mat layered with goat hide. Her knees were drawn up under her chin, her eyes not on the fire, but on the sway of shadows against the cave’s walls. Something about this place pressed gently on her chest—not like fear, but like the weight of a truth waiting to be opened.

Dei’d sat still for a long time.

Then she began to speak.

Not as one giving testimony.

But as someone remembering aloud, for the first time, without apology.

“I was twelve when they took me,” she said, her voice low and even, as though speaking through fog. “The soldiers came after my uncle failed to pay the levy on his walnut orchard. They took everything—tools, copper pans, even the flour sack. Then they asked if he had daughters.”

Zooni turned toward her. Dei’d’s eyes were locked on the fire, but her jaw had tightened slightly.

“My mother pushed me behind the wooden chest. But I coughed. The dust. That cough… I still hear it in my sleep.”

Her fingers, worn and bent, moved slowly over her knees.

“They told my family they were taking me to the palace for kitchen work. To ‘repay the crown.’ But when I reached the fortress gates, they shaved my head. Took my name. I never heard it again.”

Zooni whispered, “What was it?”

Dei’d didn’t answer.

Not yet.

She went on.

“They lined us up in a room with blue curtains. Six girls. One cried too loudly, so they took her first. We never saw her again. I stopped crying after that.”

The cave seemed to listen.

Even the fire gave no sound now.

“They made us dance,” Dei’d said. “They made us serve meat we never tasted. They made us watch the men drink. And when they were bored, they made us entertain them. Some nights we were animals. Other nights we were statues. But never girls. Never daughters.”

Zooni’s hand was shaking slightly. She folded it under the shawl.

“Did you escape?”

Dei’d gave a bitter smile.

“No. I was sold. To a merchant who trafficked girls to Lahore. But I broke his jaw with a copper ladle and fled one night in the grain cart. That’s how I reached the shrine.”

She fell quiet.

Then, after a long silence, she added:

“But I never forgot the others. Not the one who cried. Not the one who sang. Not the girl from Shopian who had gold hoops and never spoke. I began writing their names on stone, then burying them in clay jars under the shrine. One by one.”

Zooni turned, tears catching in her throat.

“That’s why you took me in?”

Dei’d met her gaze, clear now despite the clouding of age.

“I took you in because someone once should have done the same for me.”

Zooni nodded, slowly.

“And your name?” she asked again.

Dei’d looked into the fire.

Then whispered:

“My name was Khatun.”

The flames did not flicker.

They bowed.

As if the fire itself had waited decades to hear that name spoken again.

Inside the warmth of the clay cave, Zooni kneels before a slab of earth not as a student, but as a bearer of legacy. When she presses Dei’d’s true name—Khatun—into the clay, it becomes more than remembrance. It becomes testimony fired in soil, a vow whispered between generations.

The Clay Remembers What Fire Couldn’t

Zooni sat cross-legged on the floor of the cave, her back lit by firelight, her front dimly illuminated by the hearth’s amber reflection on the clay tablet before her. Her hands were stained to the wrists. The earth here was soft—kneaded and made ready by the potter girl with the braided hair. But no one else would inscribe this name. This name had waited too long to return to breath.

She dipped the tip of the reed in water and brushed it across her fingers. Then she steadied her hand, exhaled slowly, and carved.

K-H-A-T-U-N

The letters were uneven at first. The ‘K’ slanted left, the ‘T’ too tall. But she didn’t erase. She continued. And when the last curve was drawn, she laid the reed down gently, as if it, too, carried breath.

Behind her, Dei’d—no, Khatun—watched silently. Her fingers rested against her chest, feeling each beat not as a pulse but as confirmation. She had not spoken since telling her story. There was nothing left to say. The cave had heard. The clay had listened. Now it was Zooni’s hands that bore witness.

The potter elder stepped forward and lifted the tile from the ground. He examined it with quiet reverence.

“We’ll fire it at dawn,” he said. “She will last longer than the palace stones.”

Zooni looked at Khatun.

“Will it hold?” she asked. “Even if they come looking for her?”

Khatun smiled—not a smile of peace, but of clarity. A smile carved from survival.

“If they come,” she said, “let them hold what I became. Let them see that I did not vanish. I waited. I waited until a girl I never birthed would write my name back into the world.”

The potter girl brought another tablet. Blank. Damp. Waiting.

Zooni placed her hand on it—not to write, but to feel its weight.

Then she whispered, “We’re not done.”

Khatun closed her eyes.

“No. We’ve only just begun to speak.”

Not a crescendo of noise, but a steady rising of smoke and memory, as the tablets inscribed with names are placed into fire. What burns is not grief—but a prayer, shaped by the very soil that once bore the silence of the stolen.

Fire Without Flags

The sky above the hills had not yet taken full colour when the kiln was lit.

In the shadows of the cave mouth, the potters gathered with ancient rhythm—no shouting, no ceremony, only the careful movement of hands that understood what it meant to guard a thing fragile yet eternal. The clay tablets were laid into the belly of the oven; each one placed like a breath exhaled into stone.

Zooni watched from the side, wrapped in a shawl still damp with her own sweat from the climb. Her fingers remained stained with ink and soil. Beside her, Khatun leaned on her cane, silent but awake, as the kiln’s low growl began to rise.

There were no chants.

No slogans.

Only the scent of burning pine resin, and the heat that built slowly—steady and disciplined, like vengeance that had refused to rot into bitterness.

The potter elder stood watch over the fire, feeding it slowly, with wood cured in secret places, dried under moonlight and packed in salt. The fuel was not just for burning. It was for sanctifying.

Inside the kiln, the names began to harden.

Salma.
Gul Amina.
Khatun.
Unnamed Daughter of Sopore.
Child of Rainawari.
Girl Taken in the Orchard Debt.

Each one, etched in trembling lines, now anchored by flame.

“They thought fire would erase us,” Khatun murmured. “But they never imagined fire could remember too.”

Zooni turned toward her. “Is that why you never left this valley?”

Khatun didn’t answer right away. Her eyes remained fixed on the chimney’s thin column of smoke as it rose from the earth and into the wind, pale and unwavering.

“I stayed,” she finally said, “because someone had to hold the stories until the clay was ready.”

The chimney’s breath curled into the sky—visible from the orchards, from the rooftops of Budshah Nagar, from the broken minarets where birds now nested. No one would name it.

But those who saw it would know:

That something had been sealed.

Something had been saved.

And something, at last, was now too solid to be burned again.

Next Chapter: Chapter Eight: The Debt Scrolls