This chapter opens the life of Madahv Koul, a lower-caste Pandit in the Dogra-era social hierarchy of Kashmir. It captures not just the weight of caste, but the early emergence of wit as resistance.

Born Between Walls

In the back lanes of Mattan, where the sun reached only in slivers and roofs leaned against each other like tired shoulders, Madahv Koul was born—feet-first, wailing into a world that had already decided what he could not become.

He was born to a name, but not to a place.

His father, Rama Koul, a temple cleaner and part-time grain measurer, had once told him:

“We are Pandits, but not the kind they write hymns for.”
“Our thread is cotton, not sacred.”
“Our tongue prays, but our back still bends.”

Madahv was a lower-caste Kashmiri Pandit, a child marked by ritual without privilege, born into a caste that bore a name with honor but a body with none. The upper Pandits referred to them with a glance—never a greeting. They sat apart during temple feasts, drank tea from separate cups, and were never asked to recite anything louder than silence.

His mother, Radha, made a living spinning wool for shawls that were never theirs. Her hands were cracked like riverbeds in drought. She washed them with ash before every prayer, but no ritual could scrub away the scent of hard labor.

They lived in a single-room house with walls darkened by smoke and the grief of unsaid things. The roof leaked in three places. The hearth was their calendar—if there was wood, it meant the month had been kind. If not, they burned books, paper, anything that would catch.

And yet, there was a joy in Madahv’s childhood that flickered like ghee in a clay lamp—faint, but determined not to die.

He was clever.

Too clever for the lanes that raised him.

He mimicked voices perfectly—priests, fish sellers, landlords. He could speak like the inspector’s clerk and make it sound like poetry. He imitated the purring of alley cats so well that once, in the dead of night, he drew a dozen cats to a rooftop in confusion.

He made toys out of matchsticks. Made whistles out of walnut shells. Made words dance. And though his belly often growled, his mind was always fed.

But cleverness is not a coin that buys dignity.

Not in Dogra Kashmir.
Not in Mattan.
Not in the skin he wore and the name he bore.

One day, when he was seven, Madahv tried to play with a group of upper-caste boys near the temple well. They were drawing birds in the dust with sticks. He smiled, approached, and traced a sparrow of his own.

The eldest boy looked at him and spat near his foot.

“You don’t draw where we draw.”

Madahv looked down. Then up. Then smiled, slightly.

He said nothing.

But that night, he began sharpening a stick of bamboo.

The Koul family loses its ancestral land not through theft, but through a cruel arithmetic of unpaid taxes—and how the humiliation of watching his mother beg plants in young Madahv a deeper hunger: not for food, but for dignity reclaimed through wit.

A House Measured in Inches

There is a pain peculiar to the poor—not the pain of hunger or cold, but the pain of watching your home erased by paper.

The Koul family had lived on one kanal of land just outside Mattan—a plot gifted, they believed, by a long-dead priest in a better century. It had a pear tree, a drying rack for radishes, and a patch of earth that grew mustard in spring. The house itself was a crooked thing of wood and clay, but it breathed like a body, and it remembered their laughter.

Until the collector came.

Not in the night, like a thief. But in broad daylight—like the law.

He wore no gun, only a shawl of pashmina and a scroll case tucked under his arm like scripture. He did not raise his voice. He simply unrolled a piece of parchment and read aloud:

“Due to nonpayment of state land tax—nine rupees and four annas—this property is henceforth to be reclaimed by the Crown and offered to the land broker Mir Shambu Nath as settlement for loyalty duties rendered.”

Madahv’s mother fell to her knees.

“Nine rupees?” she whispered. “For nine rupees…?”

But pleading had no place in the royal revenue book.

They were given two days.

No hearing. No magistrate. No appeal.

Madahv watched as their belongings were carried out. Clay pots. A broken comb. A prayer mat. He watched as the pear tree was hacked at the root to make way for a new courtyard wall. He watched as his mother, Radha, sat in the mud, whispering a mantra between dry sobs.

That night, they took shelter in the back room of a shawl dyer’s shop. No window. One mat. Cold wind snuck in like a rat between the wooden planks.

And in the corner of the room, Madahv stared at the bamboo stick he had sharpened the night before.

He no longer wanted to mimic cats.

He wanted to bite.

Not with teeth.
But with ants.

It was then he began collecting them.

Red ants, the kind that stung like fire. He found them in the mulberry hedges behind the temple, gathering them gently with a piece of cloth, sliding them into a hollow pipe of bamboo sealed at one end. He carved a thin mouth-hole at the other and practiced blowing air through it—controlled, steady, like a flautist practicing rage.

The idea came not as vengeance, but as balance.

He would not raise a hand.

He would raise a question.

And he would ask it of the man who owned no whip but commanded all fear—

Inspector Mohan Lal Dhar.

Madahv observes, plans, and prepares for his silent, subversive strike—a moment of rebellion not with fists, but with red ants, directed at the embodiment of state cruelty: Inspector Mohan Lal Dhar.

The General and His Bed

Inspector Mohan Lal Dhar’s house stood like a smug monument in the heart of Achabal Mohalla—a two-storey structure with wooden eaves shaped like teeth and a rose garden in front that bloomed only for visitors from the Dogra court. The doors were red, lacquered, and always shut tight. The windows were framed with embroidered curtains. A brass bell hung above the gate—not to be rung by the poor, but to warn their shadow from touching the threshold.

Mohan Lal was not merely an officer.

He was a man who had converted fear into furniture.

In his drawing room, he kept a Saber once used during the siege of Gilgit, mounted beside a painting of the Maharaja. His dog, a snarling brute named Rajaji, had its own copper bowl. And his bed—Ah, the bed—was a four-poster Kashmiri walnut marvel, with legs carved into lion’s paws, draped in imported silk.

He called it "The Throne of Law."

And it was there that he slept each night—wrapped in comfort, belly full, mind at ease.

Madahv studied the house from a distance for three days.

He posed as a turmeric runner, carrying bundles of yellow root from the spice stalls. He traced the perimeter at different times—noon, dusk, midnight. He learned the gate creaked at the bottom corner. He saw the cook slip out the back door to meet a washerwoman. He counted how often the Inspector drank from the brass goblet placed on his windowsill each night before bed.

Most importantly, he noticed the ventilation shaft—a long, hollow pipe that ran from the back wall of the kitchen to the rear chamber upstairs.

It wasn’t large, but it was just wide enough for a boy to crawl through.

And so, on the fourth night, as snow fell in brittle flakes and the city prepared for another round of silence, Madahv crept through the alleys, bamboo pipe in hand, pocket full of fire.

He reached the back wall, climbed a stack of discarded bricks, and slithered into the shaft.

Inside, it smelled of old oil, rat droppings, and saffron. He moved slowly, clutching the pipe to his chest, careful not to rattle the ants trapped inside. They were angry now—banging against the hollow walls like prisoners in a drum.

When he emerged in the top chamber, he crouched above the wooden rafter, directly above the sleeping figure of Mohan Lal Dhar.

The man snored softly. His arm dangled off the bed. The goblet glinted in the moonlight.

Madahv placed the mouth of the bamboo pipe near the edge of the bed linen.

He took a breath.

A long, slow inhale—
and a sudden, calculated blow.

The red ants poured out like vengeance wearing feet.

They scurried into the folds of the silk sheet. Into the seams of the Inspector’s uniform draped at the bedside. Into the hollow of his collarbone and the soft skin behind his knees.

At first, nothing.

Then came the twitch.
Then the slap.
Then the scream.

“YA RAM! YA RAAAMMM!”

Mohan Lal leapt out of bed, naked, flailing, shouting. He stumbled into a side table, knocked over a vase, slipped on the brass goblet, and fell into the rosewood dressing stand.

His dog began barking. His cook came running. His dignity, meanwhile, crawled across his body with six legs and pincers.

Above, Madahv watched it all, curled in the rafter’s shadow, hand over mouth, eyes gleaming with delight.

He whispered,

“You sleep like a lion. Now wake like a servant.”

Then, as the Inspector screamed for a musket and cursed the heavens, Madahv slipped back into the pipe and vanished.

No one saw him.

Only the ants knew.

And they were loyal.

The aftermath of Madahv’s mischief—the ripple effects of his defiance, how rumors morph into legend, and how a child’s prank begins to feel like revolution.

The Cat with No Master

By sunrise, the story had already escaped the house.

The Inspector had ordered the servants not to speak, but gossip in Srinagar moved faster than commandments. And by mid-morning, every barber, baker, and grain broker between Zaldagar and Habba Kadal knew two things:

1. Mohan Lal Dhar had awoken screaming, covered in ant bites, and
2. No one had entered his house—not even God.

The version told by the spice merchants had red ants raining from the rafters like holy punishment. In the temple alley, a man claimed the boy had come in disguised as a delivery ghost. In the meat market, the old gossip Ghulam Haji declared:

“He wasn’t a thief. He was a message. Written in bites and laughter.”

And just like that, Madahv Koul, the boy without land or surname worth respect, became someone else entirely.

He became Madhav Bisht—
“the cat with no master.”

At the tea stalls, men whispered his name with amusement and wonder.

“They say he climbed through a pipe.”
“He doesn’t steal gold. He steals sleep.”
“No knife. No blood. But the pride of the Inspector still hasn’t come back to his bed.”

Children in the alleyways began to play a new game called “Chor-Chash!” One child would be the Inspector, lying on the mat, while others pretended to blow ants through a stick. The game would end with a dramatic shriek and exaggerated fall.

Even the butchers laughed.

Even the beggars smiled.

But the Inspector did not.

Mohan Lal Dhar had not slept properly since that night. The bites had faded, but the humiliation had nested deep in his skin. He scratched even when nothing crawled. He began double-bolting his chamber doors. A soldier was stationed in the hallway. The brass goblet was replaced with a copper one “for protection.”

He issued an order to raid the lower quarters.

Ten boys were arrested over two days. None of them had ants. One of them didn’t even have shoes.

When asked what the raids were for, a constable answered:

“For suspicion of mockery.”

It was a new crime now.

As for Madahv, he didn’t hide.

He simply moved.

One night he slept on a tanner’s roof. The next, under a fisherwoman’s porch. He ate whatever was shared. He asked for nothing. He mimicked birds to entertain crying babies. He whistled at guards to make them look the wrong way. And always—just as he had learned from the ants—he stung quickly, then vanished into the cracks.

But deep inside him, something stirred.

Not just mischief.

Not just revenge.

But the desire to belong to something greater than wit. To a purpose.

He didn’t know what it was called yet.

But the city had begun naming it for him.

Mischief to moral awakening—as Madahv witnesses the public humiliation of his mother and begins to understand that wit without justice is only a half-formed weapon.

Ash on Her Hair

It was Saptami, the seventh lunar day of the fortnight, when the temples filled with sandal smoke and the rich wore their shawls a little tighter around their egos.

The bazaars of Mattan were decorated in strands of marigold. Offerings of rice and ghee were carried in brass thalis. Priests blessed landlords by name, and even the moneylenders offered grain to the poor—for the sake of their own salvation, not theirs.

And in the midst of all this pageantry, Radha Koul stood quietly at the temple threshold, holding a copper bowl wrapped in old cloth.

She wasn’t begging.

Not exactly.

She was returning a favor once given—a piece of grain lent by the upper Pandits two winters ago, when snow and death had arrived together. Her intention was simple: to return what she owed, to clear her name before the gods.

But the gods had many gatekeepers.

As she approached the first pillar, a young priest with scented hair and rings on each finger raised his hand.

“No further,” he said, voice not cruel, just indifferent.

Radha bowed her head.

“I bring no offering. Only the return of one.”

He looked at her—at the coarse cotton of her shawl, at her cracked heels, at the callouses on her fingers that marked her caste more loudly than any scroll.

“You bring your poverty with you,” he said, “and it offends the altar.”

Someone nearby laughed. A woman, adorned in silks, whispered to her friend:

“I thought the lower castes no longer had the courage to climb these steps.”

Radha said nothing.

But her hands trembled, and one grain from the bowl spilled onto the steps.

She bent to pick it up.

The priest shook his head.

“Go, woman. God sees you from afar.”

And that was the moment Madahv saw her.

He had been hiding behind the chinar tree, waiting for a chance to snatch an offering bowl he had seen left unattended on the temple sill. But when he saw her—his mother—bowing not in prayer, but in defense of her right to exist, something in him shifted.

The stick in his hand went slack.

He stepped out from behind the tree, almost blindly, his body moving before his thoughts.

Radha saw him and straightened.

Their eyes met.

Not in shame. Not in apology.

In understanding.

This was the cost of being born as they were.

Even their dignity required permission.

That night, as Radha roasted a handful of rice in a broken pan, Madahv sat in the corner, silent. The bamboo pipe lay beside him, cleaned and polished. But it no longer felt like a toy.

“They’ll never let us be,” he finally said. “Even when we return what we owe.”

His mother stirred the rice, gently.

“Then take what they fear.”

“Which is?”

She smiled.

“The day you no longer wait at their door.”

And that night, Madahv didn’t sleep.

He lay awake, not dreaming of red ants or mimicry, but of silence broken by truth sharper than humor.

The cat had played long enough.

Now, it was time to learn how to bite.

The evolution of Madahv Bisht from a mischievous mimic to a calculated saboteur—a boy who understands now that humiliation can be political theatre, and laughter, a sharpened blade.

The Theatre of Shame

In the weeks that followed, Madhanv Bisht spoke little and listened more.

He lingered in pan stalls and watched how landlords flinched when their names were mentioned beside unpaid debts. He crouched beside temple pillars and heard priests mutter complaints about the Inspector’s “itching ailment” that still hadn’t gone away.

He wasn’t seeking information.

He was taking measure.

Of people. Of habits. Of the cracks in power’s armor.

And one morning, while helping a grain seller sift spoiled wheat from the good, he heard a phrase that clicked in his chest like a lock catching:

“The Dogra officers will be inspecting accounts at the municipal granary next Friday.”

That granary—just behind the post office near Ganpatyar Mandir—was the beating heart of local corruption. Landowners stored their overcounted taxes there. Revenue officers weighed grain in scales already rigged. Madahv knew families who had lost their oxen for half a sack of mildewed rice.

He also knew something else: the grainkeeper was an anxious man with a weak bladder, who always took his afternoon nap on top of the weighing scale itself.

And that gave Madahv an idea.

That week, he stole not money, not food, but crows.

Yes, crows—clever, greedy, and easy to bait with crushed walnuts. He spent two nights building a simple bamboo cage in the ruins of an old hamam. With borrowed thread and honey-soaked cloth, he lured five of them into the trap. They squawked, cursed him in their black tongues, and flapped against the bars. He fed them just enough to keep them angry.

On the eve of the inspection, he crept into the granary’s storage loft, the cage tied to his back, and hid above the rafters—where shadows hung thick as shawls.

The officers arrived the next morning.

They came in pairs—each draped in wool and arrogance. Inspector Mohan Lal Dhar led the group, his lips still chapped from the cold and perhaps the lingering poison of red ant bites. He moved like a man watching the air itself for betrayal.

Behind him came two landlords, one grain broker, and the granary manager.

The manager offered them sweet tea, then retired to his corner.

As expected, he lay across the weighing scale, arms folded across his chest, his snores beginning like distant thunder.

Madahv watched from above, waiting.

And then—when the second officer bent to measure the grain, when Mohan Lal adjusted his coat and the clerk unfolded the revenue sheet—Madahv pulled the string.

The bamboo cage dropped open.
Five crows exploded out, screaming.

One landed on the weighing scale man’s face. Another knocked the inkpot into Mohan Lal’s lap. A third pooped directly on the revenue book.

The officer shrieked. The landlord slipped and fell. The manager woke screaming. Mohan Lal stood frozen, dripping blue ink, the red scarf of shame returning like déjà vu.

“What madness—what sorcery is this?!”

Madahv didn’t wait.

He slid down a grain sack rope, dashed through the side door, and vanished into the alley as if carried by the wind.

By noon, the tale had already passed through the bazaars.

“Did you hear?”
“Mohan Lal attacked by crow militia!”
“They say the ghost-thief trained them!”
“No blood. But he lost his dignity again!”

And back in the ruins of the hamam, Madahv sat under a broken arch, wiping bird feathers off his sleeve. He didn’t smile.

Not yet.

Instead, he took out the copper bowl his mother had once held at the temple. He placed in it a handful of cracked wheat.

“This time,” he whispered, “I don’t return offerings. I collect them.”

Then he placed the bowl at the entrance of the alley.

For the next boy
who might need
a different kind of prayer.

Madahv Bisht begins to feel the weight of his growing legend—how laughter can echo too far, and how even the clever grow tired of applause when there’s no one to come home to.

The Weight of Laughter

It began like all myths do—with exaggeration.

A boy had released five crows to humiliate a Dogra official. Within three days, the tale became ten crows trained to defecate on command. Some said he whispered mantras to them. Others claimed he fed them gunpowder and set them loose like dark fireworks.

In Rainawari, they said the thief could ride the crows.

In Habba Kadal, a dying man muttered, “Find the boy with the red pipe. He’ll carry my last prayer.”

And in the city’s gutters, between moldy walls and broken rooftops, children fashioned their own bamboo tubes and blew at each other with pebbles, grain husks, or just spit.

They named it the Bisht Blow.

And Madahv… watched.

He stood on a slanted rooftop in Fateh Kadal, hidden in the shadow of a crumbling chimney, listening to a group of boys imitate his crow attack.

“Screee! Screee!”
“Ant army, march!”
“Bisht Baba ki Jai!”

The boys erupted in laughter, falling over each other.

Madahv didn’t laugh.

Not because he didn’t enjoy mischief.

But because the laughter no longer belonged to him.

It had grown too large, too loud. It clung to him like an overcoat stitched from stories he had never told.

He turned and walked away, stepping from rooftop to rooftop like a tired wind.

That evening, he sat by the riverbank behind the spice market, legs in the freezing water, face turned away from the crowd.

A woman passed, her face veiled, a small child clinging to her side. The child stopped and pointed at him.

“Maa… that’s the one with the ants.”

The mother hushed him and pulled him close.

“Don’t look. He’s cursed with cleverness.”

Madahv said nothing.

He just lowered his eyes and let the river numb his feet.

The crowd loved him.

But the crowd loved masks.

No one knew what kept him awake at night.
No one knew he still checked the grain shop door each week to leave something behind.
No one knew the man he hated most shared his skin—himself before the bamboo, before the ants, before the applause.

That night, he returned to the shawl dyer’s attic, where he sometimes slept on old bolts of pashmina. He lit a small candle stub and took out his notebook—a leather-bound thing he had stitched himself, with blank pages.

He opened it.

And wrote:

“They laugh at what I do.
But none ask why I do it.”

He closed the book, placed it under his head, and lay in the dark.

Far away, a dog howled.

Somewhere, a window slammed shut.

And in his chest, the boy who once mimicked cats finally felt tired of purring.

A fateful encounter between Madahv Bisht and Dei’d, the mysterious Sufi grandmother, whose silence holds stories older than the regime—and introduces Zooni, a girl whose stillness is louder than applause.

Two Shadows and a Prayer Mat

It was nearing Maghrib when Madahv turned down the spice-lane near Gad Kocha, hoping to steal warmth from a dying kiln. The alley was damp, smelling of turmeric, rotting plums, and the ash of wet firewood. A trickle of sewage ran down the center, winding past broken bricks like a small, sick river.

He walked slowly, head down, lost in the fog of his own fatigue, when he saw them—

Two figures.

One seated.

One standing.

Both quiet.

The older one sat against the wall of a shuttered rice shop, wrapped in a faded green shawl whose ends dragged in the dirt, her back straight despite age. Her hair, white and uncovered, fell to her shoulders like smoke. Before her, on the damp earth, she had spread a tattered prayer mat, even though the adhan had not yet been called.

She was not praying.

She was simply there—like a relic too heavy for time to carry forward.

Beside her stood a girl, perhaps thirteen. Thin. Alert. Her skin the color of river clay in winter, her lips slightly parted as if caught between silence and memory. She wore a patched pheran, and her fingers were ink-stained.

What startled Madahv was not their presence.

It was their stillness.

In a lane that never ceased, they had created a pocket of still air, like a pond untouched by wind.

He paused.

The girl noticed.

Their eyes met—not like strangers, but like questions.

Madahv blinked.

The girl did not.

He stepped forward, cautious.

“Do you live here?”

The girl did not answer.

The old woman looked up, her eyes milky with age yet piercing.

“We live where God forgets to send the landlord,” she said.

Her voice was low, worn, but held the rhythm of someone who had once spoken often—and been heard.

Madahv stood still, unsure whether to laugh or apologize.

“You shouldn’t sit here,” he said. “They come at night. Drunk. Angry. Boys from the revenue quarters. If they find you—”

The old woman raised a hand.

“They won’t see us.”

Madahv furrowed his brow.

“Why?”

She pointed to the wall behind her. A single word was scratched into the stone, surrounded by soot and candle smoke.

"Naamless."

Then she leaned back against the wall, as if her body had said enough.

Madahv looked at the girl again.

Still she said nothing.

But her eyes softened, ever so slightly.

As if to say, “We’ve heard your stories.”

As if to ask, “But have you heard ours?”

He stood there another moment, unsure what had just passed between them.

Then, without thinking, he untied the cloth from his wrist—the red scrap that had once dangled from a bamboo pipe—and placed it gently on the corner of the old woman’s prayer mat.

“For whatever you believe in,” he whispered.

The girl didn’t thank him.

But she bent, picked up the cloth, folded it once, and placed it in the old woman’s hand.

And for the first time in weeks, Madahv walked away smiling—not because he had tricked someone, but because he hadn’t needed to.

Madahv’s encounter with Dei’d and Zooni, drawing him—reluctantly yet irresistibly—into a quiet world that doesn’t ask for laughter, but offers something far rarer: witness without judgment.

The Girl Who Folded Fire

The next day, Madahv returned.

Not because he had planned to. Not because he expected anything. But because something in him refused to settle. The streets were noisy, the city still pulsing with rumours of crows and saboteurs, but inside him—there was only the image of a girl folding a red cloth with fingers blackened by ink.

He arrived just past noon. The sun, veiled in gauze-like clouds, cast a soft light through the alley. A dog barked twice and disappeared around the bend. A bread seller sang an old Bhaderwahi folk tune off-key.

And there they were—again.

Same wall. Same prayer mat. Same stillness.

Dei’d, seated upright, her eyes closed, hands resting in her lap as if holding something too fragile for words. And Zooni, sitting this time, scribbling in a small notebook with a reed pen, pausing every few lines to stare into space, as though remembering someone else’s story she was borrowing.

Madahv approached slowly, pretending to check a stone in his sandal.

The girl didn’t look up.

But the old woman spoke.

“We were wondering when the cat would come again.”

He froze.

“You heard about me?”

Dei’d opened her eyes, cloudy but amused.

“Heard? My child—this city echoes you. You walk like mischief with a message. But your feet are getting heavier.”

Madahv sat down near the edge of the mat, cautious not to touch it.

“I never meant to be known,” he said, almost defensively. “I just wanted them to remember how small they really are.”

“And has it worked?”

He didn’t answer.

Zooni looked up now, her gaze cool, quiet, and unnervingly steady.

“You humiliate power,” she said. “But what will you do when it starts laughing with you?”

The question hit harder than any slap. Because he had no answer.

They sat in silence after that.

The kind of silence that doesn’t ache, but absorbs. Like wool in snowfall.

Madahv watched Zooni’s hands move—ink pooling at the tips of her fingernails, her strokes neat, firm, controlled. She wasn’t doodling. She was documenting.

He leaned slightly.

“What do you write?”

She replied without looking up.

“What men forget.”

“Like what?”

Now she met his eyes again.

“Girls’ names. Prices paid. Songs sung before doors were locked.”

She turned a page. Her voice did not waver.

“My mother’s name was Sabra. She liked dried rose petals in her tea. She was sold near Batala.”

Madahv felt something catch in his throat.

Zooni said it so plainly, like reporting the weather. And yet, in that one line, she had handed him more truth than he had found in any ledger or scroll.

Dei’d tapped the mat gently.

“Sometimes, the ones who laugh loudest are just trying not to weep.”

Madahv rose slowly.

“And sometimes,” he whispered, “those who weep quietly are the ones teaching us how to fight.”

He looked at Zooni again—her calm, her weight—and realized she wasn’t a girl who needed saving.

She was a girl who had already survived what he had only mocked.

And he knew then—

The real revolution didn’t begin with bamboo or ants.

It began with witness.

Madahv, once a boy who stole attention, now walks toward something heavier, nobler. He doesn’t yet know he’s about to meet Usman Chash. But the paths are already converging.

A Name for the Silence

That night, Madahv walked without aim.

The city, dimly lit by oil lanterns and curtained stars, stretched before him like a question he no longer knew how to answer. The streets he once ruled with clever footsteps now felt larger, deeper. Every shadow he passed reminded him not of fear—but of a girl sitting beside an old woman, writing history while the city pretended it was sleeping.

He passed the shrine at Kathi Darwaza, where an old faqir was singing a line he’d heard a hundred times before.

“Woh jo hans ke chalte hain, unke pair chhil jaate hain…”
“Those who walk smiling—look closely—their feet are bleeding.”

It didn’t feel like a verse anymore.
It felt like a mirror.

In the alley behind the copper market, he found a boy crying. Eight years old, maybe nine. Muffled sobs in the hollow of a broken drum.

Madahv crouched beside him.

“What’s wrong?”

The boy wiped his nose with his sleeve.

“They took our cart. Baba couldn’t pay the toll.”

“Who?”

“The men in black coats. They said we owed land tax. Baba doesn’t have land. We have a cart. That’s it.”

Madahv stood silently.

Then he handed the boy his last copper coin. It wasn’t much—but it was his. And he had never given anything freely before.

“Buy tea for your father,” he said. “With sugar. Two cubes.”

The boy looked at him, surprised.

“Who are you?”

Madahv paused.

Then he smiled—softly this time, not like a trickster but like someone remembering something old and warm.

“Just a cat with sore paws.”

And he walked away.

Later, alone in the dyeing shed where he sometimes slept, he looked out over the Jhelum.

The water shimmered in silence. Boats floated without oars. Somewhere, a baby cried into the night.

Madahv unrolled a blank scrap of paper and wrote:

“I no longer want to sting their pride. I want to steal their permission—to make us invisible—and burn it. Slowly. So the whole city sees the smoke.”

He folded the paper, tucked it into his pocket, and rested his head on a sack of old shawl wool.

Tomorrow, he would find the girl again.

Not to impress her.

But to listen.

And maybe—just maybe—she would name the silence in him that even laughter couldn’t fill.

Next Chapter: Chapter Four: Threads of Lament