🧕 Zooni

Role: Survivor, Scribe, Gardener of Memory
Background: A young Muslim girl rescued from a brothel network by Dei’d and raised among the spiritual women of the shrine. Zooni carries the trauma of abandonment, the dignity of quiet resistance, and the burden of witnessing injustice against women under Dogra rule. She evolves from a protected ward to a caretaker of stories—planting names into the soil and reviving forgotten legacies.
Symbolism: Zooni represents Kashmir’s feminine will—scarred but unbroken, turning pain into planting, silence into memory. She embodies the soul of the valley and becomes the mother of resistance.

🧓 Dei’d / Khatun

Role: The Sufi Matriarch
Background: A nameless elder known only as “Dei’d” (grandmother). Her real name, Khatun, is revealed only after Zooni carves it into clay. Once trafficked and brutalized, she becomes a mystic guardian of lost children and wounded rebels. She never seeks revenge—only remembrance.
Symbolism: Dei’d stands for the erased histories of Kashmiri women. She is the valley’s conscience, a mother-figure born from pain but defined by grace. Her quiet leadership binds the Robin Hoods.

🧔 Usman Chash

Role: The Butcher’s Son / The Announced Thief
Background: A strong, bold Muslim man from Saraf Kadal. As a child, he witnessed the execution of his father—half-fried in oil and hung on a river pole—for selling beef under Dogra laws. He becomes a heroic outlaw, famed for stealing two sheep under his arms and escaping over high walls while playing with his pursuers. He often declares his raids in advance.
Symbolism: Usman is the fire of resistance, rooted in memory and trauma. He carries both anger and purpose, embodying the raw, fearless dignity of the oppressed Kashmiri Muslim under colonial monarchy.

🎭 Madhav Koul / Madhav Bisht

Role: The Trickster, the Lower-Caste Pandit
Background: A lower-caste Kashmiri Pandit from Mattan, displaced by debt and caste prejudice. Nicknamed “Madhav Bisht,” he becomes a master mimic and illusionist. Known for his clever pranks—most famously, blowing red ants into the bed of the city’s cruel Inspector using a bamboo pipe.
Symbolism: Madhav represents subaltern wisdom—his tools are satire, mimicry, and nerve. Through him, the novel critiques upper-caste dominance while reclaiming Kashmiri Hindu identity from collaborationist elites.

🧑‍🌾 Layaq Singh

Role: The Grief-Struck Sikh, Weaver of Justice
Background: Born into a shawl-weaving Sikh family whose labor was exploited by Hindu traders and Dogra taxation. His sisters were abducted and trafficked to pay tax debts. Despite immense pain, he is gentle and poetic, and once abandons a theft upon Dei’d’s plea—realizing morality can override hunger.
Symbolism: Layaq stands for humility forged in suffering. As a Sikh character, he expands the novel’s intercommunal lens. His death in the frozen river marks the novel’s most tender tragedy, reminding readers that kindness doesn’t always survive—but it never disappears.

👧 Ameena

Role: The Witness Child
Background: A child once destined for sale, rescued by Dei’d after her mother was trafficked to Punjab. Raised in the shrine, she travels with Usman and Zooni after Dei’d’s death. She carries a wooden horse—a symbol of innocence saved, of stories in transit.
Symbolism: Ameena is Kashmir’s future. She questions. She remembers. She plants. Her journey from fear to planting her name in clay marks the rebirth of dignity. She is the living heir of Dei’d’s silence and Zooni’s voice.

👁️ Zenab

Role: The Messenger from the Shadows
Background: Once a trafficked girl rescued by Dei’d, later presumed lost. She reemerges years later, hardened by survival, carrying intelligence about the state’s plans and whispering warnings across valleys. Her bell signals others before words do.
Symbolism: Zenab represents the invisible sisterhood—the network of silenced women who become keepers of resistance. She is survival unspoken.

👩‍🦳 Samiullah’s Mother

Role: Keeper of the Hidden Path
Background: An old woman living beneath the ruined orchard. She was Dei’d’s silent companion in younger years. She offers the rebels a route out of Kashmir—on the condition that her son, falsely executed and erased from records, is buried and named again.
Symbolism: She represents memory as geography. Her pact with Zooni links past injustice with sacred burial. Through her, the novel restores nameless martyrs to the living land.

🧑‍🌾 Ranjit Singh

Role: The Silent Helper
Background: A Punjabi Sikh farmer and mason who had once been aided by Dei’d during a famine. He shelters Zooni and Usman in exile without question.
Symbolism: Ranjit is the embodiment of gratitude without speech. He affirms that justice travels—across language, faith, and border—and that kindness owed is never truly forgotten.

👮 Inspector Ramachand Mohanlal Dhar

Role: Dogra-Era Law Enforcer; Antagonist-turned-Relic
Background: A high-ranking Kashmiri Pandit police inspector in Srinagar during the Dogra monarchy. Closely related to one of the oppressive landlords, he sees justice not as truth but as order maintained by submission. Ruthless toward poor Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, especially Madhav. His most humiliating moment comes when Madhav blows red ants into his bed using a bamboo pipe—after which he finds his stolen uniform hanging over the city’s main river with a note: “You can’t catch a shadow.”
Symbolism: Inspector Dhar represents the collaborationist elite class—especially among those Pandits who served Dogra rule to maintain caste and state hierarchy. He is a symbol of false decorum, punishment disguised as discipline, and the institutional cruelty of “law and order” regimes. By the end, he disappears—not in death, but in irrelevance. History outlives him.

🧑‍🎓 Mohandas “Mohanlal” Dhar

Role: Cousin to Madhav Koul; Caste-Conscious Contrast
Background: A high-caste Kashmiri Pandit and cousin to Madhav, though their lives are worlds apart. While Madhav was displaced for his caste and poverty, Mohanlal remained safe within temple circles and British-administered education. He tries to convince Madhav to surrender, and claims resistance is “childish rebellion.”
Symbolism: Mohanlal represents privileged neutrality—those who neither oppress directly nor resist injustice. His failure to understand Madhav is not malicious, but ideological. He believes that endurance is safer than resistance. He fades from the story after his cousin’s death, his voice no longer relevant in a world that requires moral clarity.

💰 The Landlord (Unnamed Pandit Zamindar)

Role: Feudal Oppressor; Keeper of Debt Scrolls
Background: A feudal Brahmin landlord based in Srinagar, responsible for evicting over 900 Kashmiri families over unpaid debt. He stores eviction records in an ornate iron chest until they are stolen and burned publicly in Lal Chowk by the Robin Hoods.
Symbolism: He personifies institutionalized caste-capitalism—profiting from debt, drought, and forced prostitution. His character is deliberately left unnamed to emphasize how the system survives through structure, not just individuals.

🧑‍🦲 The Dogra Royals and Nobles

Role: Distant Tyrants; The Unseen Spectacle
Background: Members of the Dogra monarchy appear only in glimpses—during the opening chapter’s Pari Mahal debauchery, where underage girls are forced to dance and are later killed or sold to brothels. The royals are not always seen clearly, but their violence is always felt—in the hung body of Usman’s father, in the taxes collected with fire pokers, in the silence of trafficked girls.
Symbolism: They embody colonial cruelty dressed in gold. Their absence from much of the novel is deliberate—they do not need to be present to inflict suffering. Their power is systematized, spectral, and deeply gendered.

🪔 The Potter Girl and Potter Elder

Role: Silent Guardians of Clay Memory
Background: Members of the Kumhar tribe who shelter Zooni and Dei’d in the caves. The potter girl helps Zooni inscribe “Khatun” into wet clay, beginning the sacred record of Dei’d’s life. The elder commits to firing the clay tablets “so they last longer than palace stones.”
Symbolism: They represent the working class of memory-keepers—those who don’t write history but preserve it through craft. Their kiln is more permanent than Dogra courts. The potters show how even the most marginalized can become stewards of dignity.

📜 Samiullah Moinuddin

Role: The Erased Son
Background: Never seen in the present narrative, Samiullah is the executed son of the orchard woman who shelters the Robin Hoods. Branded a criminal, stripped of records, and buried in anonymity, he is finally remembered when Zooni buries his nameplate and ashes in a mustard field across the border.
Symbolism: Samiullah is every forgotten rebel. His story is the novel’s act of political exhumation—proof that to remember someone truly is not to grieve, but to write them back into history with love.

Next Chapter: Prologue