We now move into Usman’s past—his childhood in Srinagar’s Saraf Kadal, his family’s modest life, and the first winds of cruelty that shaped him.

The Sound of Bone

Before he was Usman Chash, the thief with a red scarf, the shadow of rooftops, the man whose name frightened tax collectors and soothed starving widows—he was Usman, son of Rahim Bhat the Butcher, and his world was made of bone.

The shop was not large. Just a wooden stall under a corrugated tin roof at the mouth of Saraf Kadal, beside the bridge that groaned with every cart that passed over it. A wooden table always stained but always scrubbed. Hooks dangling from a low beam. Knives on a mud shelf. And a stone slab, flat and smooth, worn by years of cutting and prayer alike.

Usman grew up among the smells of salt, blood, and turmeric. As a boy of eight, he knew how to hold a cleaver. At ten, he could skin a goat in under seven minutes. His hands were small, but they were sure. His father used to say,

“A good butcher isn’t cruel. He’s clean.”

That was how Usman understood the world. Not through books or maps, but through the precision of his father’s hands. The careful way he separated bone from meat. The tenderness with which he placed the leftover scraps in cloth bags for the beggar women from Rainawari.

Theirs was not a rich house, but it was clean. His mother, Zahida, kept her hair always braided, her prayer mat always facing the window. She hummed songs from her village in Bandipora, verses about snow geese and almond trees. Usman would watch her knead dough at dusk, the flour catching the light like dust from a sunbeam. She smelled of soap, cumin, and cedar.

They lived in a one-room home above the shop—walls of brick, roof patched with tarpaulin. The window faced the river. Usman slept beside his parents on a mat of straw. And on nights when it snowed, his father would wake in the middle of the night to check if the goat was cold, or if the lantern needed oil.

They had no books. No paintings. But they had rhythm.

The rhythm of trade, prayer, washing, resting.

And laughter.

So much laughter.

Until the day the man came with the badge.

This page brings us closer to the tension simmering beneath the peaceful rhythms of Usman’s childhood—the creeping presence of Dogra authority, and the moment the family begins to feel the state’s cold breath.

The Man with the Badge

It was the winter of 1932, and the snow had arrived early—soft at first, then relentless. The rooftops of Srinagar sagged under its weight, and the bridges echoed with the groan of wooden beams. At Saraf Kadal, the river moved slower, its surface like smoked glass. The city had begun to wear its cold like a second skin.

Usman was eleven.

He had just swept the front of their shop, sprinkling ash and rice husk to keep the stone dry, when he saw the man.

Tall, wiry, face like an unsheathed knife. He wore a dark woolen overcoat, the kind only government men could afford, with boots too polished for the mud of their street. But what struck Usman most was not the man’s gait—it was the badge, shaped like a Dogra crest, pinned neatly to the left breast.

He walked past the shrine of Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jeelani, past the cobbler’s shed, and stopped directly in front of Rahim Bhat’s stall. He said nothing for a moment. He just looked.

Usman watched from the doorway, broom still in hand.

His father straightened from behind the table, wiping his hands on a bloodstained cloth.

“Salaam, sahib,” he said politely.

The man didn’t return the greeting.

Instead, he glanced at the meat on display—goat, chicken, and a small section of beef, wrapped in banana leaves.

His lip curled slightly.

“This cow,” he said. “Where was it slaughtered?”

Usman felt something shift. He didn’t understand the full meaning yet, but he felt the sharpness in the air—the kind that comes before thunder. His mother, upstairs, had stopped humming.

Rahim Bhat was calm.

“It was an old cow, sahib. Sick. Purchased from Pampore last week. Slaughtered here, respectfully, as per our custom. We sell only to those who ask. No one’s forced.”

The man didn’t nod. He looked over his shoulder, where a second man stood—shorter, holding a notebook.

The notebook was opened. A name was scribbled down.

“You know the State Order,” said the first man, voice low. “Cow slaughter is forbidden under the Maharaja’s law. Beef trade, unless for export, is punishable. You’ve violated both.”

Rahim Bhat’s brow furrowed.

“But sahib,” he said, respectfully but firmly, “we’ve sold like this for years. Our fathers, their fathers before them. No harm. No complaint.”

The man leaned in.

“And now we write a new story.”

He turned and walked away. The man with the notebook lingered a second longer, looked at Usman with something between pity and indifference, then followed.

Usman stepped beside his father.

“Baba… who was he?”

His father didn’t answer. He stared at the street for a long moment, then bent to wrap the beef in cloth, setting it aside.

“He was a man,” he said finally, “who has forgotten what hunger smells like.”

The state’s presence now turns from surveillance to punishment, and the rhythm of Usman’s family begins to fracture under its weight.

The Weight of the Law

The snow deepened in the following days. It settled into the alleys like a quiet guest overstaying its welcome. And yet, Rahim Bhat continued to open his shop every morning—placing the cleaver at its usual angle, sweeping the floor thrice before the first customer, and hanging fresh salt in a cloth pouch above the meat, as his father had done before him.

But something had changed.

The familiar customers—tailors, vegetable hawkers, the widow from Zadibal—still came, but they came nervously, eyes flicking toward the street. The baker across the bridge no longer lingered to joke about rising flour prices. Even the call to prayer from the mosque across the river felt shorter, as if the muezzin, too, feared the air had ears.

And then, on the sixth morning, the boots returned.

It was not the quiet man this time.

It was five men. Dogra soldiers in dark wool and brass buttons. Their uniforms bore the lion-emblem of the Maharaja, and their rifles hung not as tools, but as threats. They moved with purpose—not like guests, but like men coming to claim something.

Usman had just finished tying a string of frozen chilies above the threshold when the door burst open.

“Rahim Bhat, butcher of Saraf Kadal,” barked the officer in front, “you are summoned under Order 479-C, Section IV of the State Animal Protection Edict.”

His father looked up from the chopping block, cleaver in hand.

He didn’t flinch.

He wiped his hands, removed his apron, and said,

“I am here.”

Zahida came running down the stairs, shawl loose around her shoulders.

“What has he done?! There’s no crime—he feeds children!”

One of the soldiers pushed her aside, not violently, but with the cold indifference that wounds deeper than force.

“He will be questioned. If he is innocent, he’ll return.”

Rahim Bhat turned to her, his voice calm as stone.

“Warm the milk for Usman. And don’t forget the cumin.”

Then he turned to his son.

“Don’t stop sweeping. Dust returns even when we’re gone.”

Usman stood frozen, fists clenched, the bristles of the broom cracking in his grip.

They marched him out with hands bound—not in chains, but in twine, as if mocking his place in the world. Not even deserving of metal.

And as they crossed the bridge at Saraf Kadal, neighbours peeked through torn curtains. No one stepped forward. No one spoke. Only a few men removed their caps silently as he passed. A gesture not of farewell—but of mourning.

From their rooftop, Usman watched them vanish into the fog.

His mother sat behind him, whispering the same prayer again and again.

But the prayer could not unwrite what had begun.

Depiction of the cruel public punishment of Rahim Bhat—not as justice, but as a staged spectacle under Dogra rule—and marks the beginning of Usman’s transformation from a boy into a rebel.

Oil and Silence

They called it a hearing, but no one heard him speak.

The courtyard outside the Kotwali Chowk was turned into a stage. The morning after Rahim Bhat’s arrest, the square was swept clean, banners were strung between two leafless poplars, and a brass chair was carried out like a throne for the magistrate. A wooden scaffold was erected, not for execution—but for example.

Men with robes of office sat with shawls drawn high around their necks. A small fire pit was lit at the center. A copper vat was placed over it, its belly wide as a cauldron, its rim already blackened by use. Beside it sat a sack of rock salt and a jar of mustard oil.

Rahim Bhat stood in the middle of the square, hands tied, head held steady. He wore the same woolen pheran he had when they dragged him from the shop. Blood had dried on the cuff. His shoes were gone.

Usman stood among the crowd—wedged between two tall men, barely breathing.

He had snuck out before dawn, telling his mother he was going to fetch water. Instead, he followed the cart that carried his father, moving in the shadows like a whisper. Now, he watched from behind a vendor’s cart, heart pounding so loudly he was sure the soldiers would hear it.

The magistrate stood. He did not read a charge. He did not ask for a plea.

Instead, he raised his hand and declared,

“In the interest of law and order under the Dogra crown, and to preserve the sanctity of our revered customs, this butcher shall receive half-boil punishment for selling cow meat in defiance of the Maharaja’s law.”

The words rolled like stone across a frozen lake.

Someone in the crowd gasped. Another turned away.

Usman didn’t move.

The soldiers forced Rahim Bhat to sit on the edge of the vat. The oil inside was already bubbling—mustard seeds dancing like demons. They tied his legs with rope and dipped only his feet at first. Then slowly, as if time itself had joined the punishment, they lowered him—hip-deep, then waist-deep—into the burning oil.

He did not scream.

Not once.

His face remained still. Only his beard trembled in the steam. His eyes searched the crowd, but not for mercy.

They searched for Usman.

And they found him.

A child, cloaked in fear and fury, shaking behind a fruit cart.

Their eyes locked.

Rahim Bhat smiled.

Then came the second part of the punishment.

They removed him, still alive, body half-cooked, flesh blistered and raw. His breathing was ragged. His lips blackened. And yet—he stood.

They tied him upright to a wooden pole, driven into the shallow banks of the Jhelum. There, birds would come. There, winds would bite. There, people would see what happened to those who defied the crown.

Three days he hung like that.

Day and night, through snow and frost, through silence and stares. His body fed the vultures, his dignity fed the legend.

On the third night, Usman returned to the riverbank.

He crouched near the pole, clutching a shawl stitched by his mother. The body no longer looked like his father—it looked like a question no one dared ask.

And beneath his breath, Usman whispered:

“You fed the hungry. They fed you to birds.”

He untied the shawl and placed it over the pole like a funeral cloth.

And something inside him tore.

Not like paper.
Not like bone.
But like faith.

Hence, the disappearance of young Usman and the slow, silent metamorphosis of a grief-stricken child into a rebel without a grave.

The Boy Who Vanished

The morning after Rahim Bhat’s body was untied from the river pole, Usman was gone.

His mother Zahida awoke to the faint crackle of coals and the quiet emptiness of a mat that should’ve been warm. His shawl was gone. So were his boots. She searched the rooftop, the shop, the neighbours’ homes. She called his name at the shrine. She walked barefoot to the Kotwali. The soldiers laughed behind their mustaches. One said,

“Perhaps he’s gone to buy oil.”

She did not cry.

Not yet.

She returned home and placed her son’s old trousers in a tin trunk. Then she closed the trunk. Then she sat.

And waited.

In the city’s underbelly, a different story began to unfold.

Whispers of a boy seen on rooftops at dusk. A shadow that leapt between chimneys. A hand that left warm bread at the door of the widow in Zadibal. A noise in the night, like someone sharpening a blade against stone. A red cloth tied to a sleeping mule’s ear.

He had no name now.

Not among the people.

They called him Chash—the one with eyes that never blinked.

No one remembered exactly when the name attached itself to Usman. It came slowly, like mist over the lake, until even children stopped calling him by his birth name. “Usman Chash”—half myth, half warning.

He lived in alleys, in rooftops, under stalls. His companions were pigeons and mice. He ate what others threw away, drank from frozen wells, and spoke only when silence failed. He grew taller. His shoulders widened. His hands roughened.

But inside, he burned.

Not just with grief, but with memory. He remembered the sound of oil bubbling. He remembered the smell of singed flesh. And most of all, he remembered the quiet smile of a man who chose dignity over breath.

At night, when the wind carried the call to prayer through cracks in the rooftops, Usman would whisper back—not prayers, but promises.

“They took him. Now I take back what’s ours.”

He did not yet know how.

But he knew this:
He would never sell meat again.
He would steal instead—
Not food, but justice.

Usman’s first theft, not as a crime—but as a ritual of remembrance, defiance, and quiet service to the hungry.

The First Theft

It began with bread.

Not gold, not silver—not grain nor wool nor anything a ruler would guard. Just three loaves of stale barley bread stacked on a clay shelf behind Habib the Baker’s shop near Naid Kadal.

The baker was an old man with trembling hands and eyes half-blind from years of smoke. Each evening, just before sunset, he placed unsold bread on the shelf behind his kiln—a gift, unspoken, to those whose hands could not offer coin. But even charity had its limits. When frost grew cruel and wheat vanished from the godowns, the shelf behind the kiln stood bare.

Except on that day.

That day, Usman returned.

The baker had not seen him in over a year. Not since his father was taken. But he knew that gait—the deliberate silence, the stillness of breath, the eyes that measured corners before footsteps. The boy no longer looked like a boy. He looked like absence wrapped in shawl threads.

Usman said nothing.

He stood beside the kiln and looked at the shelf.

Empty.

Habib cleared his throat, embarrassed.

“There are none today, my son. The soldiers took the last sack. Even I have eaten only onion.”

Usman nodded.

Then turned and walked away.

That night, three loaves appeared.

Warm, wrapped in cotton, left quietly behind the shrine of Pir Dastgeer Sahib, where a widow and her daughter slept on a mat of dry reeds.

The next night—five loaves.

Then seven.

Each time, left silently, anonymously.

But in the baker’s alley, someone had noticed.

Two nights later, just after midnight, a voice broke the silence.

“You’ll get caught, boy.”

Usman paused. He didn’t look back.

The voice belonged to Habib, wrapped in a shawl, seated beside the dying embers of his kiln.

“Why bread? There are richer things to steal.”

Usman finally turned.

His voice was calm, but sharp.

“Because they tried to boil my father. I’d rather feed the poor than let them eat from the pot that killed him.”

Habib said nothing. He only reached behind the wall and handed him a cloth pouch.

“Take this. It’s not much. A little saffron. A little trust.”

Usman nodded.

The wind howled through the alley. The city slept.

But the hunger of the poor had found a new baker.

One with a red scarf,
a silent hand,
and a memory sharper than any blade.

In this scene, Usman’s quiet acts of theft evolve into a public campaign of defiance. The city begins to see the red scarf not merely as fabric, but as a banner of the poor, fluttering over hunger and fear.

The Banner of Bread

It was the winter that the famine arrived like a second government.

It did not knock. It did not speak. It simply took its seat at every Kashmiri table and announced its reign.

Grain stores locked their doors. Traders doubled prices by candlelight. Rice was measured in teaspoons. Salt in tears. Children ate boiled grass. In one alley of Fateh Kadal, a man was found chewing the bark off his own wooden doorpost.

And yet, in the upper neighbourhoods, smoke still rose from banquet halls. The Dogra-appointed revenue officers held feasts behind curtained windows—meat platters, buttered breads, saffron custards. Their wives washed pashmina shawls with rosewater. Their sons raced ponies through the snow.

Usman watched it all.

He watched a mother exchange her wedding ring for a handful of cracked wheat. He watched a boy scrape flour dust from the inside of a grain sack just to lick his fingers clean. He watched a father dig through the refuse pile outside the Collector’s bungalow, hoping to find spoiled lentils still fit to boil.

And on that night, the storm inside him hardened into direction.

He chose the godown near Zaldagar, a stone storehouse where confiscated grain was hoarded under Dogra guard. Built during the reign of Gulab Singh, it once stored salt and gunpowder. Now it stored life.

Usman studied the guards for four days—silent, patient. He memorized their rotations, the squeak of the hinges, the placement of keys. He studied the rats, too. Where they entered. Where they feasted.

On the fifth night, he entered through the side wall—through a crack only a child or a ghost could slip through.

Inside: sacks upon sacks, stacked to the ceiling. Wheat, barley, rice—all sealed, marked with ink, hoarded while the streets wept.

He didn’t take much.

Just four sacks.

But he took them all at once.

Tied to a cart stolen from the tannery, pulled by a mule whose blind eye made him invisible in the dark.

He rolled silently through the lanes of Rainawari, Zaina Kadal, and Rajouri Kadal, leaving one sack at each shrine, and the fourth near the orphan school.

And on each sack, he left a red scarf—folded once, not tied.

It was his signature.

But it became something else.

By morning, the city stirred with disbelief.

Old women gathered around the sacks, weeping openly. Children touched the grain as if it were gold dust. A cleric from the shrine raised the scarf and declared:

“This—this is the new flag of Kashmir.”

The Inspector, upon hearing the news, slammed his fist into a desk and shouted:

“Who is this red-scarved bastard?”

But the poor already had a name.

They whispered it at wells, at shops, over dry bread and salted tea.

Usman Chash.
The thief who gives.
The ghost of the river.

The growing tension in the city—the rising myth of Usman Chash, the fear it sows among the powerful, and the quiet pride it nurtures among the poor.

The Red Thread and the Throne

The city had seen thieves before. Pickpockets in the Sunday bazaar. Rice snatchers in the famine lines. Bandits who preyed on merchants along the Mughal Road. But what made Usman Chash different was not the act.

It was the absence of greed.

He took nothing for himself.

No gold. No roof. No woman. No wine.

And wherever he stole, he left more than he took.

Bread in an empty pot. Grain in a hollow tandoor. A loaf outside a madrasa. A goat’s hide left at a doorstep so the widow might sell it at Lal Chowk.

And always—always—a red scarf, folded like a prayer, left as the only signature.

It was not long before that scarf began to appear elsewhere.

On the wrists of children.
Tied to the handles of shop shutters.
Pinned to the breast of a dead rickshaw puller as his body was lowered into the frozen earth.

The scarf had become more than cloth.

It had become resistance.

Inside the stone halls of Dogra administration, that cloth became a curse.

In Sher Garhi Palace, where the Maharaja’s ministers dined beneath chandeliers, the name “Usman Chash” was now uttered with tight jaws.

“He mocks our law,” growled one official.
“He steals from the Crown itself,” said another.
“He is not just a thief—he’s a story, and stories are harder to kill than men.”

In the Kotwali office, Inspector Mohan Lal Dhar stood before a map of the city riddled with pins. Each red pin marked a theft. Each scarf recovered was laid out on his table like enemy flags.

“This is not rebellion,” he snarled to his officers, “this is infection. And I will be the cure.”

He ordered raids on bakeries, random arrests of shawl weavers and mule boys, and a bounty doubled to a thousand rupees. But still, Usman slipped through shadows like a wind only the poor could feel.

At night, in secret, Mohan Lal Dhar would lie awake with his revolver under his pillow, hearing footsteps on the roof that were never there.

And in his dreams, the red scarf floated like a noose.

In the alleys of Khodadad Mohalla, an old shawl weaver whispered to his grandson:

“They think the throne is made of stone. But this thief—he’s found the crack.”

And in a tea stall near Chattabal, a schoolteacher scrawled on the back of a used ration slip:

“A man who feeds the poor with stolen grain is more king than the one who steals their hunger.”

By the end of that month, every quarter of the old city had heard his name.

They had not seen his face.
But they knew his grief.
Because it was their grief too.

And in a land where hope had been bartered, buried, and sold—Usman Chash had become the thief who gave it back.

Usman Chash’s first targeted blow against the landlord class—the collaborators who bled their own people for Dogra revenue—and sets the stage for the rise of brotherhood in rebellion.

A Visit to the House of Paper

They said the house was made of stone.

But Usman Chash knew it was built on paper.

Mir Baz Pandit, the landlord of Nawakadal, was neither soldier nor minister—yet he wielded more power than both. His strength lay not in steel, but in scrolls. In ledgers. In documents signed under lantern-light by fathers desperate to keep their land, by widows hoping to stall eviction, by mothers giving their last gold bangles to buy one more month of shelter.

Mir Baz called himself a collector. The people called him a vulture in a dhoti.

His mansion stood like a fortress, its wooden latticework carved with peacocks, its pillars painted in pastel pink and saffron. He had once hosted a Dogra prince in his drawing room. Now, he hoarded land receipts in a tall iron cupboard whose keys he wore on a chain around his neck.

Every document inside that cupboard was a noose.

Every name—every thumbprint—meant a family one step closer to the street.

It was a moonless night in late January, when the frost made wood crack like bones and dogs barked at nothing. Usman approached from the back lane, through a cluster of fig trees and a narrow passage used by servants. His footsteps made no sound—not because he was light, but because the ground itself wanted him to pass.

He wore no shoes.

Only the red scarf, now tied across his mouth.

The rear gate was barred with rope and a rusted lock, but the window near the granary was ajar—just as he had seen three nights earlier when the cook had forgotten to shut it after relieving himself.

Inside, the house smelled of mothballs and power. Old wealth. Quiet cruelty.

He moved like breath—through the hallway, past portraits of bearded ancestors, past shelves of tea sets that had never known calloused hands. In the study, the cupboard stood—six feet tall, black iron, heart of the empire.

He knelt.

The lock was a simple clasp. Nothing more than a dare.

He pried it open with a stolen spoon.

Inside—parchments, records, deeds.

He took ten.
Then twenty.
Then all of them.

He filled a burlap sack. Heavy, not with grain, but with guilt made legal.

And before he left, he dipped his thumb in the landlord’s own inkwell and stamped a single page:

“Debt returned. —U.C.”

That night, as dawn curled over the minarets, a bonfire burned at Lal Chowk.

A circle of people gathered. At first in curiosity. Then in joy.

One by one, the papers were fed to the flame. And with each curl of burning contract, a family somewhere in the city found itself free.

No collector came.

No constable dared.

And when the morning newspapers asked who had done it, the city had already answered:

“The butcher’s son has come. And he has come for the books.”

Usman’s silent war against injustice begins to ripple across communities—drawing the attention of two others whose lives, though different in caste and creed, have been burned by the same fire.

Echoes in the Shadows

In the old city, where alleys wound tighter than fate and rooftops kissed in secret, stories traveled faster than guards.

By dusk, the fires of Lal Chowk were nothing but ash, yet their smoke lingered in whispers, floating between tea stalls and shrine courtyards, carried on the breath of widows and weavers alike.

“He burned the debt rolls.”
“Mir Baz Pandit wept in his nightgown.”
“They say he left a red scarf inside the inkwell.”

And somewhere, under the crooked eaves of a crumbling haveli in Zaina Kadal, a boy in a moth-bitten pheran listened while mimicking the chirp of a street cat. He smiled. Then disappeared into the night with a coin purse not his own.

His name was Madhav Bisht.

On the outskirts of Habba Kadal, near a dyeing workshop, a young Sikh man wrapped warm threads of maroon shawl around his frostbitten fingers, humming a wedding tune he had never heard at his own home. He paused mid-hum, turned to an old loom master, and said:

“Did you hear about the fire in Lal Chowk?”

The old man nodded.

“I heard he burned papers. But he lit hearts instead.”

The Sikh said nothing. Only stared into the flame of the dyeing cauldron, where white wool slowly turned crimson.

His name was Layaq Singh.

That night, Usman did not sleep.

He crouched on the roof of a shrine in Rainawari, knees drawn to his chest, breath rising like smoke from a dying wick. His fingers ached from cold, but his eyes stayed sharp. The pole where they had once hung his father still rose in the distance—now bare, wrapped only in snow and silence.

He looked at the stars.

He remembered the smile of a man half-boiled, who still stood.

And he whispered:

“They have pens.
I have fire.”

Across the city, three names stirred in the dark.

One had lost his caste to hunger.
One had lost his sisters to taxes.
And one had lost his father to oil.

They had not yet met.
But already, their stories were leaning toward each other—
like candles in the same gust of wind.

Next Chapter: Chapter Three: Bamboo and Ants