where Usman and Zooni finally cross the threshold of the borderland and begin a new chapter in exile—with the name Samiullah buried in a field of wheat, and Ameena asking what freedom really tastes like? This is not just the beginning of exile—it is a rebirth through dust, a crossing where memory must walk beside every step. Usman and Zooni carry not only a child, but ashes, a name, and the last breath of the valley they once called home.

The first wind of Punjab felt different.

It was warmer—not gentle, but forgiving. It did not carry frost in its teeth or whisper warnings from tree hollows. It smelled of tilled earth, burning cow dung, and the faint perfume of sugarcane carried over long distances. There was color here. Even in winter. The earth was not white and brittle, but brown, moist, clumped with promise. Trees did not weep sap into the snow—they stood in rows, proud, leaning slightly as if listening to the land’s own murmuring.

Usman stepped off the ox cart with slow, heavy legs. His boots cracked dry mud as he landed. The wheel behind him gave a groan, then settled into the soil. The cartman, a turbaned Sikh with arms lean from years of throwing hay, gave a curt nod and disappeared down the rutted lane without asking questions. He had been paid in silence. And in silence, he left.

Zooni followed next, her arms wrapped tightly around Ameena. The girl was asleep, her forehead resting against Zooni’s shoulder, her breathing shallow but steady, one fist still gripping the hem of Zooni’s dupatta as if even in dreams, she refused to let go.

Strapped to Zooni’s back, wrapped in a cloth of three faded colors—pale ochre, soft grey, and saffron—was a bundle. Inside: a brass urn filled with cooled ash, a wooden plaque with hand-carved letters, and a folded page with Madhav’s handwriting on it—his final note, written in ink that had smudged from Usman’s sweat as he carried it through fog and flight.

They had reached the border five days ago, smuggled through the shallows of Ravi River beneath a cart of mango wood, escorted in the final stretch by an old woman with no name, only a scar. There had been no checkpoint, no passport, no inked fingerprint. Just a nod from a man under a banyan tree and a whispered instruction: “Walk east until you smell smoke that doesn’t threaten.”

Now, they were standing in the courtyard of a brick house with no number on its gate, surrounded by sugarcane fields that rolled like green sea into the horizon.

The house belonged to a man named Ranjit Singh—a mason who had once worked in Baramulla and owed a meal and a memory to Dei’d. The promise had aged, but not expired. It was stored in the corner of his prayer book, and when he saw Zooni’s face, he did not need explanation. He simply stepped aside and said, “It’s not much, but it’s dry. And it’s ours.”

Now, on this morning of arrival, the journey behind them still clung to their bodies.

Usman stood under the neem tree in the courtyard, eyes lifted to the sky. He had not spoken since they stepped off the cart. His hand rested against the edge of the urn, the cloth taut beneath his palm.

Zooni approached quietly.

“He deserves ground,” she said.

Usman nodded.

“I saw a field,” he replied, “near the back. With mustard beginning to bloom.”

They didn’t need a ceremony.

They didn’t need a priest.

They only needed soil.

where Usman and Zooni walk to the mustard field to bury Samiullah’s plaque and ashes—and as Zooni presses the name into the earth, she remembers the day Dei’d first said to her, “We don’t bury the dead. We give the living a place to return.”?

The path to the mustard field was narrow, trampled into shape by bare feet and slow animals. It snaked behind the house, flanked by rows of pigeon pea and bitter gourd, the winter crop still stubborn in its last season. A thin trail of smoke curled from a chulha behind the neighboring house, mingling with the scent of damp hay and crushed fennel underfoot. Zooni walked ahead, the urn wrapped in cloth and held to her chest as if it were a child asleep. Usman followed with the wooden plaque tucked under his arm, his footsteps heavy but precise, as though he feared bruising the ground.

They reached the edge of the mustard field in silence.

Here, the earth had just begun to stir. Shoots of green stood like whispers on brown beds, trembling in the morning light. The sun had climbed higher now, its warmth reluctant but growing—just enough to loosen the breath, to melt the night from their bones.

Zooni knelt at the edge of the first row.

She ran her fingers through the soil—not quickly, not with urgency, but with the care of someone reacquainting herself with a forgotten friend. The earth was soft here. Not loose, not wet—just yielding.

“This will hold him,” she said quietly.

Usman crouched beside her.

They dug slowly.

No tools.

Just hands.

The kind of burial that left fingernails full of soil, wrists streaked with earth, grief pressed under every knuckle.

When the hole was wide enough, Zooni unwrapped the urn and placed it gently inside. The brass had grown cool from the travel, but inside, the ash was dry—fragments of a life reduced to memory’s dust. On top of the urn, she placed a small folded cloth—a corner of Madhav’s shirt, salvaged before the river had taken him. She smoothed it with her palm once. Then twice.

Usman handed her the plaque.

SAMIULLAH MOINUDDIN
Born to Love.
Buried by Order.

Zooni looked at it for a long time before lowering it beside the urn.

Not above it.

Beside it.

As though Samiullah’s name would not sit on top like a gravestone—but walk next to the memory it marked, even beneath the soil.

She pressed the first handful of earth.

It landed with a soft sound.

Not a thud.

Not a fall.

Just a return.

Usman added more.

Together, they covered the urn and the plaque, layer by layer, until the earth was smooth again.

Zooni took a breath.

Not deep.

Just enough.

Then, using the side of her finger, she traced a curve in the soil.

Not a name.

A crescent.

Simple.

Sacred.

Finished.

Behind them, Ameena had arrived.

She had followed without a word, holding the wooden horse against her chest like a prayer.

Zooni stood and turned.

The girl looked up.

“Will he stay here?” Ameena asked.

Zooni knelt again, resting her palms on the ground.

She remembered what Dei’d had once told her—under a banyan tree on a spring morning like this, long before she had ever held a name worth carrying.

“We don’t bury the dead,” Dei’d had said. “We give the living a place to return.”

Zooni repeated it now.

Aloud.

To the girl.

To the soil.

To herself.

Then she rose.

And walked back toward the house, her fingers still carrying traces of the name she had just returned to the land.

where that night, Usman lights a small clay lamp on the threshold, and he and Zooni speak for the first time about what life might look like now—not without war, but with a garden, and a girl, and breath that doesn’t flinch at every footstep?

The house was quiet that night.

Not the silence of fear, or flight, or absence—but the silence of soil. The kind that gathers in the rafters of old village homes, where no radio plays, where walls speak in whispers, and the only clock is the distant cry of an ox returning to the shed. Outside, the sugarcane stalks rustled with the breath of a tired wind, their dry leaves brushing against one another like pages of scripture being turned by a careful priest.

Usman sat by the threshold.

He had cleared the small earthen platform at the entrance, swept away the day’s dust with a reed broom left by the door. Now he crouched before a shallow clay dish, filling it with mustard oil. His movements were slow, reverent—not ceremonial, but instinctive. A flame in the dark was not just tradition. It was orientation. A way to tell the night, “We are still here.”

Zooni emerged with a matchbox wrapped in waxed paper.

She didn’t speak.

She handed him the box.

Usman struck the match against the brick.

The first flame flared too high and went out.

The second caught.

He dipped the wooden tip into the oil, and the dish came alive with light—a soft yellow flicker that seemed too fragile to stand against the night, and yet did.

They sat on the stone step, side by side.

Their shoulders didn’t touch.

But they leaned in the same direction.

Ameena had fallen asleep early, her small hands still curled around the wooden horse, her lips parted slightly, as if whispering to it in dreams.

“She doesn’t flinch in sleep anymore,” Usman said.

Zooni nodded, eyes fixed on the flame.

“She did for weeks,” he continued. “Even before the river. Every time I breathed too loud, she curled her fingers.”

Zooni closed her eyes for a moment.

“She didn’t ask about Dei’d today,” she said.

“She won’t forget her,” Usman replied. “But she’s started choosing who she tells her story to. That’s how we know she’s healing.”

A long pause followed.

Not uncomfortable.

Not hollow.

Just long enough to notice they hadn’t sat like this—side by side, unburdened by urgency—in what felt like lifetimes.

Zooni turned toward him.

“What now?” she asked.

Usman exhaled slowly, as if the answer were buried somewhere deep in the muscles of his chest.

“We build something,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow, unsure if he meant a house, a life, or something else.

“A garden,” he clarified.

“A garden,” she repeated, as if testing the word.

He nodded.

“There’s land behind this house. Not much. But it gets good sun.”

She allowed herself to smile.

Just a little.

“And what will we grow?” she asked.

He looked at the flame.

Then at her.

“Food,” he said. “And names. Names that aren’t afraid of being spoken aloud.”

She looked back toward the dark interior of the house.

Ameena was there.

So were the ashes of two men.

So was a future.

Usman shifted slightly, reached into his coat, and pulled out something wrapped in cloth.

He handed it to her.

She opened it slowly.

Inside: three seeds.

One saffron.

One millet.

One black cumin.

Zooni stared at them.

She looked at him again.

He didn’t explain.

He didn’t need to.

She closed the cloth gently.

And for the first time since snow had covered the shrine roof in Srinagar, she said words that didn’t carry warning, didn’t carry grief.

Only promise.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“We plant tomorrow.”

where the morning brings more than just sunlight—it brings a letter, carried by a barefoot boy, bearing news from Kashmir: “The lion has risen. Sheikh Sahib speaks. The streets are full again.”?

The morning began like any other in the fields of Malerkotla.

Muted sun, grey-gold light pushing slowly through the fog, and the smell of boiled milk thickening inside the kitchen walls. Zooni woke before the others. She moved quietly, pouring water from the brass lota to rinse her hands, then stepped into the courtyard barefoot. The earth was cold beneath her soles, and the dew had not yet lifted from the sugarcane fronds. In the distance, a cow lowed without demand, followed by the sharp crack of a stick striking the ground—just a herder reminding his animal that the day, like breath, must continue.

Ameena still slept.

She had curled toward the far wall of the room during the night, her wooden horse tucked tightly beneath her arm, her mouth slightly open, as if breathing a dream she could not yet name.

Usman was not in bed.

Zooni found him crouched near the edge of the mustard plot they had tilled the day before. He was inspecting the ground—pressing a finger lightly into the soil, then lifting it to the sun, testing moisture. It was an old farmer’s habit, passed through generations not by instruction, but by the way grandfathers watched the sky and touched the land.

She didn’t interrupt him.

Instead, she walked to the low parapet wall that lined the front of the house and began untying the cloth that held yesterday’s laundry to the rope. The wind had dried everything but the thickest shawl. She folded as she went—one shirt, two scarves, a pair of children’s socks.

It was then she saw the boy.

He was barefoot, no older than nine, dressed in a fraying kurta the color of dust. He stood near the gate, holding a folded envelope in his right hand, and chewing nervously on the frayed string around his neck with the other. His knees were covered in mud. His cheeks flushed from running.

Zooni approached slowly, not out of suspicion, but because boys like this often vanished if startled.

He didn’t run.

Instead, he extended the envelope.

“For the lady with the girl,” he said. “From the post near Tarn Taran. They said it was urgent. No one else would take it.”

Zooni took the envelope. It was thick, creased, sealed with a drop of hardened wax, not stamped—folded by hand, edges uneven, like someone had sealed it not at a desk, but on their knees.

“Who gave it to you?” she asked gently.

The boy shook his head. “Didn’t say.”

“What did he look like?”

“Didn’t see his face. He dropped it with the dhaba owner, said it had to reach before noon.”

Zooni reached into her pocket and handed him a piece of jaggery wrapped in paper.

He grinned, took it, and vanished before she could ask more.

She turned back to the house.

By now, Usman had returned to the courtyard. His eyes immediately fell on the envelope in her hand. He didn’t speak. Just waited.

Zooni sat slowly on the stone threshold, broke the wax with her thumbnail, and unfolded the contents.

There were only six lines.

Written in Kashmiri, the script clean, slanted, familiar.

She read them once in silence.

Then again.

She handed the letter to Usman.

He read aloud:

“The lion has risen.
The chains rattle in every courtyard.
Sheikh Sahib speaks from the pulpit.
Lal Chowk listens.
The wind carries his name to the rice fields.
The people are no longer quiet.”

He lowered the letter slowly.

Zooni looked at him.

“Is it real?”

He didn’t answer immediately.

He folded the letter once, carefully, and tucked it beneath the oil lamp that still sat cold on the step.

Then he looked back at her, eyes sharp.

“It’s beginning.”

She didn’t ask what.

Because she knew.

In the fields of Kashmir, where men had bent under taxes, where girls had been counted like grain sacks, where fathers had sold shawls to buy silence—something had broken open.

The silence had cracked.

The streets were waking.

And somewhere, Sheikh Abdullah, the boy from Soura with poems in his breath and fire in his bones, had spoken words that no bullet could chase down.

The valley was rising.

And in Punjab, beneath a neem tree, beside mustard just beginning to bloom, Zooni sat with a child and a letter—and for the first time in years, the wind did not carry fear.

It carried return.

where Usman begins carving a small wooden board for planting, and Ameena asks, “Will we go back when the roads remember our names?”—and Zooni answers not with a promise, but with a seed placed into her hand?

The day had stretched quietly after the letter.

There was no sudden movement, no hasty packing, no loud decisions shouted across rooms. Instead, a slow and deliberate energy settled into the house, as if each breath now carried something different—not anxiety, but anticipation, that soft cousin of courage.

Usman had brought out a block of wood from the back storage—a narrow, weatherworn plank once part of a broken cot. He set it on two bricks in the courtyard and began scraping it clean with a dull chisel. The wood creaked slightly under his blade. Tiny curls peeled away, falling like dry petals to the ground. With each stroke, he wasn’t just smoothing the board—he was preparing a place for something to begin.

Ameena sat nearby on a small upturned tin bucket, watching him.

Her hands were wrapped around a bowl of soaked chickpeas. She was supposed to be removing the skins, but most had gone untouched. Her gaze remained fixed on Usman’s hands—how they worked slowly, without anger, without rush.

“What are you making?” she finally asked.

“A planting marker,” he said, brushing the wood with his palm to clear the shavings.

“For which plant?”

He paused.

Then looked at her with a flicker of smile.

“For the one we haven’t named yet.”

She wrinkled her nose.

“That’s not helpful.”

Zooni stepped out of the kitchen then, carrying a cloth bundle.

Inside were seeds.

Small, dry, quiet things.

She untied the cloth and spread it open on the courtyard floor.

Saffron corms.

Millet.

Black cumin.

And three new seeds Ranjit Singh had gifted them the night before—round, brown, the size of lentils, wrapped in ash and cow dung. “They’ll take root anywhere,” he had said, “even in the shoes of a traveler.”

Zooni knelt, picked up one of the ash-covered seeds, and rolled it between her fingers.

She turned to Ameena.

“Do you want to plant this one?”

Ameena hesitated.

“Will it grow?”

Zooni didn’t answer with words.

Instead, she reached for Ameena’s hand, opened her small fingers, and placed the seed in the center of her palm.

Then gently closed the child’s fingers around it.

“The seed doesn’t need to know the answer,” she said. “It only needs the chance to try.”

Ameena sat still for a moment, looking down at her closed fist.

Then she stood.

Walked to the corner of the courtyard where the soil had been turned the day before.

And knelt.

She pressed her hand into the earth—not with flourish, but with quiet certainty.

Opened her fingers.

Placed the seed into the shallow pocket she had made.

Then covered it.

Patted it once.

Twice.

Zooni watched from behind.

The motion was simple.

But the meaning was layered, thick with things too large for words.

A girl who had once hidden behind sacks of millet, who had crossed rivers in silence, who had memorized the sound of a chain before knowing her alphabet—was now planting.

Not hope.

But something older.

The belief that if you touch the earth gently enough, it will remember you.

Behind them, Usman lifted the wooden board.

On it, carved with a nail and the steady pressure of his thumb, were the words:

“To be named when it blooms.”

He walked over and placed it into the soil beside the seed.

The wind picked up slightly then.

It didn’t sting.

It didn’t warn.

It simply moved around them—braiding hair, rustling leaves, and lifting a curl of dust into the morning light.

Zooni looked at Ameena.

The girl wiped her hands on her kurta and whispered, “Will we go back?”

Zooni didn’t rush to answer.

She sat beside her.

Ran her fingers through the soil.

And after a long breath, she said:

“When the roads remember our names—not as fugitives, but as roots—we will walk them again.”

where as dusk falls, a knock comes at Ranjit Singh’s door—a woman in a green shawl, mud on her hem, brings a folded scarf, saying, “From the orchard. She asked me to give you this. And to tell you: the garden remembers.”?

Dusk fell slowly.

The shadows stretched across the courtyard like arms lengthening after a deep sleep. The air changed, gaining that evening stillness known only to village homes where no engines ran, where no horns blared, and the only music was the chorus of crickets just beginning to wake.

Ameena had gone to bed early again. The day had tired her in a way that felt honest. Not the fatigue of fear or hunger, but the kind that comes after planting something into earth and sitting beside it until the light fades, wondering what will rise.

Zooni sat near the veranda’s threshold, legs tucked beneath her, grinding roasted cumin in a small stone mortar. She worked slowly, the pestle circling without rhythm, just enough to fill the space with scent. It was a scent from her childhood—one her mother used during winters, mixed with salt, rubbed into soft dough and fed to her with black tea.

Usman had stepped out to the back shed, where he kept the borrowed tools and sacks of millet they’d purchased at the market two days earlier. He hadn’t spoken much since the letter. Not out of worry—but because something in him had begun to rearrange. He now watched the sunrise the way old men do: calculating where the light touched first and how long it stayed. His silence was no longer shadow. It had turned into listening.

The knock came just after the azan from the village mosque had echoed and faded into the fields.

Not loud.

Not hesitant.

Three soft raps.

Then stillness.

Zooni stood, wiped her hands on the edge of her kurta, and walked to the gate. There was no lock—just a loop of wire hooked around a nail. She unhooked it and pulled the wooden frame open gently.

A woman stood there.

Wrapped in a green shawl that had once been deep emerald, now faded with dust and time. Her hem was stained with mud. Her sandals were cracked. Her face bore sun lines and wind scarring—but her eyes were steady, luminous, and utterly unafraid.

She did not step in.

She simply held something forward.

A folded scarf.

It was grey, with a red border.

Familiar.

Zooni reached for it slowly, unfolding it just enough to see the embroidered edge.

Khatun.

Her breath caught.

The woman spoke.

Only once.

“She asked me to give you this. And to tell you—‘The garden remembers.’”

Zooni couldn’t speak.

Not yet.

The woman gave a nod—respectful, not rushed.

Then turned.

And walked back down the path she had come, her feet making no sound against the mud.

By the time Zooni found words, the woman had already disappeared into the dusk.

She stood there a long time, holding the scarf to her chest, the embroidery warm from another woman’s body, another woman’s journey.

She closed the gate.

Walked back inside.

Laid the scarf gently over the sleeping child like a second blanket.

Then she sat beside her.

And whispered, not to the girl, but to the memory that had just arrived:

“I didn’t know you sent watchers.”

And in the silence that followed, the wind rustled through the half-open window.

And from the mustard field, a single shoot had broken the surface.

where that night Usman and Zooni stand at the edge of the field, looking out—not toward Kashmir, but into a future made of breath, grain, and the sacred work of naming things again. Would you like me to continue?

That night, the moon was sharp and full, casting shadows so distinct they looked drawn by hand. The fields beyond the house glowed softly in its light—mustard leaves glistening faintly, water pooled in irrigation furrows like dark mirrors. The village behind them had gone to sleep. Only the occasional cry of a night heron or the rustle of a rodent in the dry hay interrupted the silence.

Usman stood at the edge of the mustard plot, his hands in the pockets of his wool vest. He was barefoot. He hadn’t meant to walk out without sandals, but the earth had called him softly, and he hadn’t wanted to interrupt it with noise. Beside him, Zooni stood wrapped in a shawl—the green one, Dei’d’s last gift. It smelled faintly of cedar and ash.

They said nothing for a long time.

The field didn’t need speech.

The soil had taken the seed.

The stone from Ameena’s hand still sat beside it, marking nothing official, but marking all the same.

Usman finally broke the silence.

“She’ll ask again,” he said.

Zooni didn’t look away from the field. “About going back?”

He nodded.

“She should,” she said. “That’s the sign she remembers.”

He shifted slightly. “And what will we tell her then?”

Zooni turned to him, her face soft in the moonlight, tired but not worn.

“We’ll tell her this,” she said. “That going back isn’t just about feet on soil. It’s about taking what they tried to erase—and making it grow again.”

Usman looked at her. “Even here?”

“Especially here,” she answered.

Behind them, the lamp still burned low in the window.

Inside, the girl slept under the scarf from Dei’d’s orchard.

And beside her, on the wooden ledge, the letter from Kashmir remained unfolded—its six lines memorized, its wax seal broken, but its fire untouched.

Usman placed his hand on the fence post.

The wood was warm from the day’s sun, still holding heat the way memory holds a name whispered too often to be forgotten.

He said, almost to the field, “I never thought I’d survive to see a place where no one knows what I did.”

Zooni turned fully now.

“Then teach them,” she said.

“Teach them what?”

She smiled—not a broad one, but one carved gently from the face of survival.

“Teach them how you lived.”

He looked at her for a long time.

Then turned back to the field.

They stood that way for a while longer.

Not as fugitives.

Not even as survivors.

But as sowers.

As names written into soil.

As proof that even when history closes its fist, the smallest seed can split it open—quietly, persistently, without apology.

Next Chapter: Chapter Seventeen: Return of the Flame