Page 7 of The Circle of Exile
“I… wrote. After a long time. And…” she stared between her legs, at her hands, palms up, cupped, asking for what, she did not know.
“And what, gurun?”
Tears fell down her eyes and into her cupped palms. She fisted them and more tears fell, on her knuckles this time. Kept falling.
“I want to go home.”
No sound. Just the steady breaths of Gul’s breathing.
“Do you want me to call your husband?”
“No!” Iram whirled on her. Her husband, the Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir? Call him and tell him what? Take your wife from her sister’s house in PoK?
“Then?”
“Rahim Chacha and I will leave the way we came.”
"Rahim Chacha and you cannot leave from here without raising questions. Faiz… he is curious about you. If you leave like that,” Mehrunisa’s expression turned solemn. “I will not be strong enough to stop him, or the ISI officers he tips, from coming after you.”
“You can say I went back to my husband.” They had lied that she was a local from PoK, married to a man on the Indian side. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for her to return to her husband.
“I could say that if you leave here just now and cross the border within the hour. Jannat, it’s two days of travel from here to the border. And they will not spare you…”
Trapped. She felt trapped. But strangely, this feeling of being trapped made her feel more alive than she had felt in days. To get out of here, to go to Atharva, to finally go to a version of her she had begun to recognise again, even if partly — it lit a tiny spark of purpose.
“Are you feeling better? Is that why you want to go? Or you don’t like to stay here with me?”
Iram looked at Mehrunisa’s hesitant face.
“In the days that I have been here, I don’t even know what months have passed. I just remember snippets. All of those have you. Your dates dipped in chocolate hidden for me…”
“You need it every morning when you start to lose yourself,” Mehrunisa countered. Iram felt her own lips widen.
“The way you shield me, sit with me and say nothing for hours…”
“It’s to see how long you can keep silent. Once upon a time you did not stitch those lips even when it was time to eat,” Mehrunisa’s face split into a grin. “Ammi used to say you were born with a loudspeaker screwed inside you.”
Iram chuckled through the water in her eyes. And then a thought struck.
“Did you miss me?” Iram asked. “You told me how your Ammi did…” she stuttered.
“OurAmmi,” Mehrunisa clarified, shaking her head. “Gurun,ourAmmi. She did nothing but cry at the door for you both. She died raving about you both. If only…”
“If only?”
Her gaze tore away, staring down — “If only Abba had not done this.”
Iram knew Mehrunisa carried a world of bitterness inside her for her father. It was apparent in the way she spoke about him — respectfully because she had been conditioned to, but with anguish, anger, pain too. That man had torn his twins from his sleeping wife’s bed and handed them over — not to die, but to burn in a cruel fate he believed was glorified by his personal gains. He had killed them for his kingdom. Held a funeral too. There were graves of those children here. He had barred the two people who knew about it from ever uttering their names out loud. While Mehrunisa, still a child, had gone silent, her mother had been unable to stop.
Iram thought about that mother, trying to picture her sitting here looking just like Mehrunisa. She no longer had to imagine her. She had seen photographs.
“What happened, Jannat?” Mehrunisa’s warm hand pressed over her cold forearm. “Are you feeling it?”
Iram shook her head. “Thank you.”
“What do you mean ‘thank you?’”
“For being here and believing me. For keeping me. For showing me those photographs of your mother…”
