A Short Story by Ghulam Mohammad Khan
The squeezed heart, the weary body. The weight of unvoiced tales, millennia of silence. All of it flows into the invincible Jhelum.
It is a silent witness. A keeper of our pain. Its currents try to comfort. In its rage, it claws at the embankments.
After each furious swell, it subsides. It understands. It prefers its waters murky, a shroud of silt to absorb the sorrow. The blood. The dead. It has seen all. Its surface lies heavy, a mirror of our grief.
Still, it flows. An ancient, scarred vein, flowing.
Jabeena watched the river that morning. It flowed in a rage, swollen by days of rain. It’s current churned with a dark, bruised hue.
On both banks, a restless crowd waited. They sought a clue, a sign of the dead. Another life, discarded to the Jhelum.
She lifted her camera, its click a silent protest. Her choice of journalism, a defiance of family, was not easy. To set the narrative. To capture the perfect, terrible truth. To measure the depth of pain and explain the reason for a death. She had heard unsavoury words from the crowd. She dismissed the noise. It was hard enough to be a woman. To be a journalist was to invite its own perils. But her mind was armoured with de Beauvoir. Her soul, tempered by Shakespeare and Plath. She understood the theory, the fury, the very fabric of struggle. And so, she walked. Unsettled. Unbowed.
The river seethed, agonising under a thousand watchful eyes. Its waters boiled, threatening to disembowel their burdens. Then, it subsided. It understands. Its murky depths preferred to hide. To shield the sacred from the desperate crowd. It did not want so many hands to claw at a silent mass. It heard the human whispers, the cries. It fondly patted the divers searching below. It handled the boats with gentle care.
This was not new. In its safe, murky folds, it had carried countless others. For those, no crowds wailed. No cries pierced the air. It was a grave without a count. Its fury was a frustration, a failure to keep the tally of the dead. Today, it would hide this one. It was weary of the human commotion that always followed. It carried the body as a mother carries a child in her womb. Waiting for a safer, quieter delivery. A place without crowds.
The people returned to the town. Numb. Whispering possibilities. Jabeena also left, disheartened by the river’s perceived indifference. She decided to return at dawn. To watch the silent water with the grieving few.
He was a shopkeeper. A man in his late thirties. A father of two. This was the common whisper. He did not return home that day. The next morning, the mosque’s loudspeaker cracked the dawn open. A message, pasted on the gate, became a roar. “Do not look for him here and there. Search for him only in the Jhelum.” The words were lightning. A shock that had become commonplace. The streets thickened with gossip. Connections were drawn, theories spun, silences held. A haemorrhage of speculation. The bloody symptoms of uncertainty.
The next day, Jabeena walked the riverbank alone. Diving teams were awaited by anxious onlookers. She moved past villages unknown to her.
The river gnawed at its banks in a silent agitation. In some places, it widened its belly, becoming a fearsome expanse. In others, it contracted to a narrow, choked throat. There, the water’s passage felt most threatening. A dark gurgle. She thought a body could not stop there.
Drowsy, poorly managed bastiyan clung to the shores. The battered yarbals cut into the river banks like gaping wounds. She walked in a state of grim anticipation, her eyes locked on the busy, murky water. It could yield its secret at any moment.
Beyond the villages, the Jhelum spread wider. The banks grew greener, cleaner. Here, even its silent flow had a voice. No crowds waited. She was alone. Cattle grazed in willow-dotted meadows. She clicked photos. At times, she felt small. Lost. But she concentrated on the dead, her gaze fixed on the river. She reached a spot where two young men extracted sand from a large boat. One, lanky and brown, drove a large shovel deep into the riverbed. Its handle, a ten-meter spear. The other, burly and thoughtful, hauled the rope, dragging a load of wet sand onto the wooden deck.
They repeated the motion. A slow, muscular ritual. She watched, her curiosity a silent question.
“Do you know about the dead body?” she called out, her voice cutting the river’s murmur.
They halted. The rhythm is broken. “We heard,” one said, before driving the shovel back into the depths. “But we see dead bodies even when there is no clamour.”
“What do you do with them?” Jabeena asked. “The dead.”
“Hand them to the police. If they could be recognised. Sometimes,” he added, his voice flat, “they tear apart on touch. Like wet paper.”
They resumed their work, the conversation buried under the strain of muscle and rope. Then, a sudden stop. The shovel emerged, not with sand, but with a clear, bony frame. A skull.
The lanky man shook the sand from it. A gritty rain. He held it high in his hand, just as Hamlet would, a solemn offering to the sky.
“Tell me, friend. Who were you?” he whispered to the hollow form. “We are sorry to disturb you. It is not for the first time.” His voice was a soft, sad river. “I will bury you on the shore. Beside the others. Where no one will ever disturb you again.”
He muttered a prayer in Arabic, the ancient words a balm on the raw air. Then, he placed it softly on the wooden deck, a thing of utmost care.
The other man watched, his curiosity now a silent reverence. Jabeena stood dumbfounded, her journalism, her questions, all washed away by this simple, sacred ritual.
“Is that human?” Jabeena’s voice was a strangled whisper. The click of her camera sealed the moment in a mixture of horror and awe.
“We believe they are,” the lanky man replied, his voice worn smooth as a river stone. “This Jhelum is a deep grave. It has swallowed much.” Their mechanical work resumed, a stark counterpoint to the sacred interruption.
In the silence they left, the river murmured its endless, sad song. A ballad of butchered history. And around this quiet epicentre of death, life persisted in brutal, beautiful contrast. A breeze rustled the willows. White, long-necked birds pecked in the watered grass. Eagles swirled in a patient gyre over some distant carcass. A new-born foal danced beside its grazing mother. A horn-curled bull pursued a heifer. A nest crooned with the noise of new-born life.
Jabeena stood at the nexus, distressed to her core. She thought of all the water that had flowed down, all the dead carried in its dark embrace, the skeletons anchored in its watery grave. Hamlet’s agony was no longer a play; it seeped into her, a chilling truth. The skull. The unknown killer. The endless, filthy game of history. Her mind, like the river, had become murky, occluded by the weight of it all.
“So, you don’t know who these remains belong to? No idea?” She sank against the gnarled bark of an old willow, her energy spent.
The sand-digger paused, his gaze distant. “Baba told me… decades ago, a gang of armed men haunted these woods. They killed for paltry reasons. Even for a suspected thought. A refusal not yet spoken. They hounded the well-read, the affluent, those with a beautiful daughter.”
Weary from the darkness, from the ghosts history had gobbled, she pushed herself up. She walked back briskly, until a sound struck her—the roar of a hundred voices jumbled upon the bank.
Oh god, what is this mayhem?
The crowd suddenly erupted. Something had been found. What a plight, this collective anticipation. What does a crowd want? It is a hive-mind forged in a moment. One mind in frenzy. In a virulent ecstasy.
Cries and shrieks pierced the air. Jabeena wove through the throng. On the water, boats and divers performed a grim surgery on the Jhelum, extracting a dead mass from its broiling belly.
When the body was hauled onto a boat, the crowd exploded. Spontaneous slogans burst forth—unrelated, unmoored. When emotion spills over, it abandons language. It becomes a roar. A bestial sound.
A figure plunged into the river, screaming. Perhaps the young wife. A flurry of men dove after her, a frantic counter-current of salvation.
And the Jhelum wept at the meaninglessness. At this absurd human drama. It wanted to close its eyes, to flow blindly past the plight of these crazy, tragic people.
As the last boat retreated and the final voice faded, a profound silence descended. The river was left alone once more. It watched them go, its current whispering a timeless judgment.
Silly, stupid, helpless folk, it seemed to jeer. You who know nothing of the shades you seek. You cannot even comprehend your own suffering. You are deprived of that very understanding. And you will be back.
The water flowed on, a fresh anger simmering beneath its surface. Their ignorance was a final insult. They believed it had carried only that one body. They reduced its endless, drowning memory to a single, fleeting tragedy.
Jabeena stood at the crossroads of sound and silence. Behind her, the receding clamour of the crowd. Before her, the river’s relentless, murmuring flow. A choice whispered in her soul: to follow the human chaos, or to surrender to the water’s pull—to trace its story until it spilt, wider and quieter, into the majestic, forgiving expanse of Wullar.
The murmur was everywhere now. It was in the shouts fading behind her, and in the ancient, patient voice calling her forward.
For Jabeena, who turned back to her books and to history, the Jhelum remained an endless, flowing charade. She saw the truth now. It was never just water. It was their own story, given the form of a river, a liquid chronicle of all they had endured and forgotten.
And so, it went on. The indifferent cycle held. People died. The Jhelum flowed. A current of silent witness, carrying the same sorrows in an eternal, murmuring loop.
Ghulam Mohammad Khan is a writer and academic from Bandipora, Kashmir. He holds a PhD from the Central University of Haryana, India, where his research focused on narratology and the interplay of memory in postcolonial storytelling. Khan is the author of two books: Anecdote, History and Kashmir: And Other Essays (2025), a collection that interrogates dominant discourses through literary critique and counter-narratives, weaving Kashmir’s socio-political fabric into universal human struggles, and Elements of Literary Theory, an engaging introduction to key concepts and movements in theory and criticism. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Indian Literature, Indian Review, Out of Print, KITAAB, and Kashmir Lit, among others. Fascinated by the subversive potential of language, Khan’s writing bridges scholarly rigour and narrative intimacy, often challenging static conceptions of identity and power.