The night was unusually quiet.
Not the kind of silence that soothes you—but the kind that gnaws at your spirit, like a shadow creeping up your back. Somewhere in the narrow lanes of Old Kashmir—where time walks barefoot and stories are etched on air—she sat by the chinar tree, her dupatta trailing in the soft dust, her fingers tightly clutching a small, withered letter.
Aarzoo.
The name meant hope, and yet she had none.
Her kohl-smeared eyes glistened not with beauty, but the weight of unshed storms. Her love story had no lanterns to guide it, only the darkness of memory. She had fallen in love with someone who didn't belong to the world of ordinary men. He was not just flesh and blood. He was myth. He was music. He was the echo of forgotten promises—Zayan.
Zayan—whose name meant 'grace'—walked like poetry and spoke like destiny had whispered in his ears. When he sang, even silence paused to listen. A Sufi singer with a voice that felt like it had bled through lifetimes, Zayan lived in the sacred space between two worlds: the living and the beyond.
They met one evening when the rivers turned golden beneath the setting sun. He sang beside the water, and she stood spellbound, as if her soul had finally heard its own name.
But this wasn't a fairy tale.
It was a maze of longing, divine timing, and cruel fate. Their love did not bloom in gardens—it bled in silence, it grew in distance.
Zayan carried a curse—one that bound his soul to a sacred promise made generations ago. He could never truly belong to one woman, one place, or one lifetime. He was chosen to carry the music of the ancient, to heal the broken, and to never be healed himself.
"Dard woh hota hai jo sirf mehsoos hota hai, likha nahin ja sakta."
And Aarzoo... she became his pause between two eternities. A soft note in the middle of a roaring raga.
Every night, he would return in her dreams—not as a memory, but as a presence. He'd sing the same ghazal:
"Na tha kuch toh khuda tha, kuch na hota toh khuda hota,
Duboya mujh ko hone ne, na hota main toh kya hota."
And she'd wake up, tear-streaked, feeling like she'd just left a concert only her heart had attended.
People called her mad. They said she spoke to the wind. But in truth, she was only speaking to Zayan.
As time passed, Aarzoo began to write his songs into her diary—each one a memory of their silent meetings, each one a wound dressed in poetry.
But the world grew colder.
War crept into the valleys. People forgot about music. And one day, the chinar tree was burnt in a riot. When it fell, she wept not for the tree—but for the last place where she had seen him.
That night, Zayan came one last time.
He stood near her window, soaked in the moonlight.
"I must go," he said, his voice trembling like the last string of a sitar.
"Where?" she asked, her voice breaking.
"Beyond memory. Beyond even the soul."
He pressed a kiss to her forehead.
"Yeh ishq nahin aasan, bas itna samajh lijiye;
Ek aag ka dariya hai, aur doob ke jaana hai."
And just like that, he was gone.
Aarzoo never spoke again. But every Friday, someone found a rose by the ruins of the chinar tree.
No one knew who placed it there.
But some say, when the wind is just right, you can still hear his voice beneath the stars.
—End of Chapter 1