Chapter weave together the stirring rebellion in Kashmir, Ameena’s questions about home, and the Robin Hoods’ memory awakening in songs, protests, and the burning of a ledger in Lal Chowk? This chapter carries the return of memory to the streets, the spirit of Dei’d and her children into the mouths of protesters, and the fire of forgotten names back to the very soil that once denied them.

Smoke Above Lal Chowk

It began—not with slogans or speeches—but with smoke.

At first, it rose in a thin, uncertain line above the rooftops of Maisuma. Then another, broader, heavier, drifted above the Zaina Kadal quarter, curling against the dull grey of a late-winter sky. By the time the third plume thickened over Habba Kadal bridge, the people knew. This was not the smoke of hearths. It was not a bakery fire or a cloth dyer’s kiln. It was record smoke—the burning of names, ledgers, debt scrolls.

And at the center of it all was Lal Chowk.

The clocktower stood as it always had—chipped at the base, its wood swollen from decades of snow and speech and bullet holes half-filled with cement. Around it gathered the crowd. Silent at first. Then moving. Then building.

It was not like the marches of the past.

There were no loudspeakers. No permits.

Only breath, names, and ash.

At the edge of the crowd, a man with a single eye and a mangled left hand stood holding a shawl in both arms—not like a garment, but like a child. On that shawl, stitched in uneven thread, were names:

Usman Chash.
Madhav Bisht.
Layaq Singh.
Zooni.
Ameena.
Dei’d.
Khatun.

People gathered slowly around him. They did not ask who he was. They asked who had written the names. He said: “They wrote themselves. In the places where silence once ruled.”

And then, without command, the shawl was passed.

From hand to hand.

Across the square.

Until it reached the base of the clocktower.

Where a boy—barely fifteen—took it, climbed the lower railings, and tied it between the iron beams like a banner.

The names fluttered.

And someone began to sing.

Not a revolutionary anthem.

A lullaby.

A song once sung by shawl weavers in the alleys of Fateh Kadal:

“Vuchh yaar myon kath kyah,
Doud aasmanas wath kyah…”
(Did you hear, beloved—
They ran up the sky to silence us…)

By the second verse, others joined.

Not in harmony.

But in memory.

Old men wept openly.

Women hummed through their chadors.

Children repeated what they did not yet understand—but would never forget.

And then, from the southern corner of the square, came a figure no one recognized but everyone seemed to know.

A woman.

Elderly.

Draped in a pashmina that bore the same red border as the scarf now folded on Ameena’s chest in Punjab.

She stood in front of the fire where ledgers were being fed page by page.

Someone handed her a book.

She didn’t read it.

She kissed it.

Then placed it into the flames.

It curled.

Blackened.

Collapsed.

And with it, a thousand debts died without apology.

In that moment, the crowd did not erupt.

They bowed.

All of them.

Bowed.

And the wind carried the smoke north—toward the mountains, the rivers, the cave where Dei’d had once pressed her hand into the clay and whispered, “I will not vanish.”

where in Punjab, Ameena dreams of the red clay handprint, and asks Zooni in the morning, “Is my name safe now?” — and Zooni walks with her into the field, answering, “It’s not just safe. It’s loud.”?

Ameena awoke just before dawn, her eyes wide open, her body still beneath the faded quilt. The wooden horse had fallen beside her pillow. Her fist was clenched—not in fear, but from holding something invisible all night. She turned her head and whispered softly, “Zooni?”

Zooni was already awake, seated at the low ledge beside the window. She had been listening to the rhythm of Ameena’s breath, which shifted sometime in the night—not shallow, not restless, but curious. She turned.

Ameena sat up slowly, the blanket falling into her lap.

“I saw it again,” she said.

Zooni rose and walked to her.

“The clay?”

Ameena nodded.

“But it wasn’t a dream.”

Zooni knelt beside her, brushing a strand of hair from the child’s cheek.

“Tell me.”

Ameena looked straight into her eyes.

“It was a wall… in the cave. I was alone. But not afraid. I touched the handprint—Khatun’s handprint. And then I saw mine appear beside it. Same size. Same shape. But then something strange happened.”

Zooni waited.

“The handprints… they started to sing.”

Zooni tilted her head.

“Sing?”

“Yes,” Ameena whispered. “Not a song we hear with ears. But something deeper. Like the earth was humming them back into being.”

Zooni let her words settle.

She did not ask for proof.

She did not question.

She stood slowly and held out her hand.

“Come,” she said. “Let’s see what the morning wants to show us.”

They stepped into the courtyard barefoot. The soil was still cold, damp with dew. The mustard leaves were silvered along their edges, and the first light of day was breaking gently through the haze. Birds had just begun their low chorus—crows, sparrows, a koel too early to sing.

Zooni led her to the center of the field.

The planting marker still stood.

“To be named when it blooms,” carved into the wood, now damp and darkened at the edges.

Zooni knelt first.

Pressed her fingers into the earth around the shoot that had broken through two nights before.

It was taller now.

Healthier.

Stronger.

She looked up at Ameena.

“Do you remember what this seed was?”

Ameena shook her head.

“We didn’t name it,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because we didn’t know what it would become.”

Zooni smiled.

“And now?”

Ameena looked down at the plant.

It was small.

But unmistakably alive.

Reaching.

“Now,” she said slowly, “it’s mine.”

Zooni placed a small piece of clay into her hand.

Soft.

Fresh.

Still warm from the kitchen stove.

“Then name it,” she said.

Ameena bent.

Pressed her finger into the clay.

Wrote, with trembling letters:

AMEENA.

Just her name.

Nothing more.

She looked up.

Zooni asked, “Is it safe now?”

Ameena looked toward the far ridge, where the fields rolled outward like a green ocean.

Then she said—not loudly, but firmly:

“It’s not just safe.”

She pressed the clay into the dirt like a tag, like a truth.

“It’s loud.”

where in Kashmir, protest songs begin to carry new verses—“Madhav stole the badge of the state. Layaq wept and the granaries fell. Usman danced with sheep on his shoulders.”—and their stories are now legend, echoing through alley walls and the lungs of marchers?

It began, as most sacred things do in Kashmir—not with proclamations, but with murmurs.

A boy in Chattabal whistled a tune while selling lotus stems from a wicker basket. A woman in Kulgam sang while rinsing rice for her evening meal. And in a schoolyard outside Sopore, three girls clapped out rhythms between their palms, giggling between verses of a chant that none of them remembered being taught.

But the words spread.

Old words.

Rewritten.

Reborn.

“Madhav stole the badge of the state,
Hung it on the rope like fate.
The uniform swung, the river sang—
‘Catch me, catch me, if you can.’”

In Srinagar’s narrow alleys, vendors began chalking stanzas onto their shutters:

“Layaq wept and the granaries fell,
Not with fire, but with the smell
Of hunger gone and hands made full—
The taxman’s scroll, now just wool.”

Children drew sheep in chalk on the side of the clocktower.

But these weren’t ordinary sheep.

Each one wore a crown of thorns.

One had wings.

One had a flute.

One held in its mouth a scroll half-burned and half-folded, with the words: Usman was here.

In Fateh Kadal, an old man who had once been jailed for hiding bread under his shirt during a food raid lit a candle at his doorstep—not for the dead, but for those who had taught him not to die quietly.

He told his grandson, “They stole from the rich—but never for themselves. And the girl? She grew a garden of names. That is why we still know our own.”

The grandson asked, “Were they real?”

The old man nodded.

“They were too real. That’s why they had to disappear.”

A woman named Feroza in Bandipora, who ran a one-room library with four books and an altar of newspaper clippings, posted a new page by the entrance. No title. No byline. Just verses.

“They came not as saints,
But as thieves of injustice.
They did not wait for laws to change.
They buried laws that chained the living.”

Soon, these verses found their way onto flyers.

And then into slogans.

And then, inevitably, into lungs.

At one protest in the southern bazaar, a crowd broke into chant when a government officer announced increased fines for landless squatters.

One man raised his fist.

And the others followed:

“Madhav stole your law.
Usman rode your horse.
Layaq gave our mothers grain.
Zooni wrote our names in flame!”

The officer paled.

And said nothing.

Not because he feared the crowd.

But because he recognized the story.

It was the same one his grandmother whispered before sleep when he was five years old and asked why she always placed salt beneath the threshold.

“They stole from men who buried our names,” she had said. “So we wouldn’t forget to say them.”

Now, those names moved again.

Not in shadows.

But in procession.

In chalk.

In shawl threads.

In school rhymes and smoke trails and in the way the people now stood in streets: unbent, unmasked, and louder than the sirens.

where in Punjab, Zooni receives a hand-sewn pouch of saffron—sent with no name, no address, only a message stitched inside: “Layaq did not drown. He bloomed. Tell Usman to ride again.”?

The envelope came with the noon grains.

Ranjit Singh had been to the town center, where farmers gathered with burlap sacks of wheat, lentils, mustard seed. He returned with his usual slow, limping walk—but his eyes held something unfamiliar. In his left hand, pressed between the folds of a grain receipt and an old newspaper, was a soft cloth pouch no larger than his palm. He didn’t say a word. He simply placed it in Zooni’s hand and returned to the shade, as if the delivery of the object had emptied something inside him.

The cloth was hand-stitched—loose, uneven, with the edges done in blue thread. The moment she touched it, Zooni froze.

The scent was unmistakable.

Saffron.

But not market saffron.

Not commercial.

This was the valley’s scent—deep, earthy, sweet like hay left to dry in high meadows, with that signature bite of sacredness that could not be imitated.

She opened the pouch slowly.

Inside were just three strands.

Threads of blood-orange silk from the crocus flower.

And beneath them, folded once, was a small piece of muslin.

She opened it carefully.

Inside, hand-stitched with thread the color of river stone, were just ten words:

Layaq did not drown. He bloomed.
Tell Usman to ride again.

Her heart stilled.

She read it twice.

Then again.

Then clutched it against her chest, her breath caught somewhere between disbelief and awakening.

She ran to the back fields where Usman was clearing stalks for spring tilling. He turned when he heard her steps—not surprised, but alert.

She didn’t speak.

She only held out the pouch.

He took it.

Opened.

Inhaled.

And something in his body—not just his face, but in his bones—seemed to shift. A memory straightened. A breath filled his chest like armor. A name—Layaq—returned, not as pain, but as promise.

“He’s alive,” she said.

Usman didn’t answer.

He just smiled.

A smile so rare, the birds in the neem tree above went quiet.

where Usman and Zooni prepare a satchel—not of weapons, but of things that matter: millet, thread, saffron, a carved nameplate. Because what returns to Kashmir now is not rebellion. It’s recognition.

The packing took no more than an hour.

They did not speak of going.

They simply began.

Zooni wrapped the saffron pouch in a silk handkerchief and placed it beside the clay tag that still bore Ameena’s name. Usman retrieved the wooden sickle he had carved into a hook, then removed it from the wall. He wrapped it in a wool scarf and tied it with rope. They added only what mattered—no documents, no gold, no letters of permission.

Only a carved nameplate.

Only breathables.

Only truths.

Ameena came to the door as they were closing the satchel.

She held the wooden horse against her hip like a companion.

“Are we going home?” she asked.

Zooni crouched beside her.

She did not lie.

She did not promise.

She only said: “We’re going where your name began.”

Ameena looked down at her bare feet.

“I want to write it there.”

Zooni took her hand.

“You already have. We’re just going to help the land remember it.”

Usman stepped forward, placed his palm on the child’s crown.

“We won’t return to fight,” he said softly. “We’ll return to grow.”

That night, they slept with boots by the door.

The satchel at the threshold.

The pouch of saffron under Zooni’s pillow.

The moon watched.

So did the mustard.

And somewhere beyond the fields, in a village not yet mapped, Layaq Singh watched too, a child asleep beside him, a song on his breath, and the shawl of Dei’d folded over both their shoulders.

What Is Not Buried

The train whistle screamed across the flatlands at dawn.

Not the sound of warning—but of waking.

Three figures boarded from a village station whose name had been scraped off the sign. A woman with a satchel, a man with a hooked walking stick, and a child who carried a carved horse and a pouch that smelled of earth and sky.

The train didn’t ask for tickets.

It asked for patience.

And offered direction.

As the wheels turned, so did the pages of a thousand unheard stories.

In Kashmir, someone carved the word Zooni into a frost-covered wall.

In Srinagar, a boy painted three sheep on a police checkpoint.

In Punjab, the mustard bloomed without waiting for permission.

And in a cave forgotten by cartographers but remembered by clay, a second handprint dried beside the first.

Pressed deep.

Unmoving.

Permanent.

The Robin Hoods had never left.

They had only waited for the world to be ready to remember.

Because nothing truly buried stays dead.

Not names.

Not daughters.

Not flame.

Only silence.

And this time—

The silence was burning.

Next Chapter: SYNOPSIS