Ghulam Mohammad Khan
The streets are tombs. Rubble stretches like the bones of a gutted beast. The wind carries the scent of crushed concrete and something older—buried breaths, unfinished screams. At the airport, the conveyor belt swallowed his words. His anger was a live wire. Stubble shadowed his jaw, rough as a rusted blade against sweat-drenched skin, wheat fields scorched under a merciless sun.
Writing. The word was a curse in his mouth. Useless. Worse than useless—theft.
Earlier, in the trembling belly of the plane, he had laughed, a sound like a snapped rib. A refuge for the guilty. Woke priests begging absolution in ink. His scorn was a boot heel grinding into dust.
You don’t get to wear their wounds like a costume, he said. Words don’t bleed. They don’t starve.
Writing is a corpse. And the dead have no use for elegies. No metaphor can suture their wounds.
Not the rusted spoons clawed from dirt, stinking of graves. Not the poetry of pity. Nothing eternalises pain; it just rots, louder than words.
He was there when the planes came. Not to save. To report. The food drops were a joke—Here, eat before the bullet finds you. The logic was a noose dressed as a gift.
Cringe, he hissed. You won’t stop the knives, but oh—let’s toss crumbs to the bleeding—a sacrament for the doomed. Fatten the lambs.
His voice broke—Shit—a whimper, wet and raw, like a man choking on his teeth.
The memory sat in his throat like a stone—choking, unswallowable.
In the plane’s dim hum, he told me of her. A girl in the rubble, her lip split by a bruise the colour of old wine. A fly circled her face, relentless. A single curl swayed in front of her eyes, a pendulum between fear and forgetting. Her clothes were maps of dirt. Her skin begged for water, for hands that still knew tenderness.
She crouched before a shattered wall, its green paint stubbornly bright, nature’s last stand against ruin. When he approached, she lifted a chipped teacup to him, her smile sudden as a struck match. Here, she said. You must be hungry too.
The gesture gutted him. His daughter’s face flickered beneath the grime.
On my shoulder, his sobs were raw, animal. Nothing is enough, he whispered. The pain lives there. It dies there. Nowhere else.
Hell with the reports.
Hell with the pastel-suited prophets on screens, crunching numbers like salted nuts, debating which mass grave makes for better optics. War’s end looms! They chirp, as if it’s a weather forecast. As if ceasefires could cauterise the wound.
Hell with their bickering. Who’s wrong? Who’s right? Fools tallying sins on abacuses while her bruise darkens, a storm-cloud on a child’s mouth. Their words are dry leaves scraping pavement. Worthless. Less than worthless.
The plane droned on, a steel womb of false calm. Passengers slumped in Xanax haze. But he burned. Twitching, searing, a live fish flung into oil, skin blistering to gold, eyes wide as the futility swallowed him.
None of it— his voice cracked, —none of it is worth the dirt under her fingernails.
He vanished like a shadow. No goodbye. Just the frantic scuff of his shoes, the damp ghost of sweat blooming across his shirt—a pale blue surrender to the heat of his torment.
She’d lost everything. That’s what he’d told me. And yet—eight or nine, same as his daughter—she knew hunger like a second skeleton. Knew it well enough to cradle a chipped teacup in her palms, some hurried charity thrust upon her, and offer it to him with a smile. Here. You too?
That moment had metastasised in him. A tumour in the marrow of his memory. No amount of scrubbing would lift the stain.
The conveyor belt coughed up my suitcase. His back was already dissolving into the crowd.
His restlessness had seeped into me, a stain no sunlight could bleach.
Outside the airport, the world was polished clean. No rubble. No girl. Just brilliant, indifferent sunshine, gilding the edges of everything.
A young woman strode past, her blond hair a silk banner in the wind. Denim-clad, sunglasses glinting, sandals slapping the pavement in perfect, careless rhythm. On a towering screen, an advertisement flickered—teeth too white, laughter too loud. The crowd moved like clockwork shadows.
She didn’t exist here.
My chest tightened. I thought of my daughter. The fear rose, slow and thick—tar in the veins.
I stared at the screen, willing it to fracture, to show her instead—that cracked teacup, her grimy fingers offering a sip of mercy. But the pixels didn’t care. The world didn’t care.
Nothing cared but the pain, and the pain had no place here.
Couldn’t watch her die,” he said. So, he had left.
The words clung to me, rotting in my ribs. She must be dead by now. How many more, as I walk this spotless street where even the air smells filtered? Our shoes never scuff. Our consciences never scar.
We have built a cathedral of abstractions. Democracy. Rights. Liberty. Marble words, echoing in halls where no child kneels in rubble. Hospitals. Universities. Science. Pristine, gleaming—and useless to her.
We have dissected the world into categories, labelled each cruelty, and filed each horror under tragedy or geopolitics. But none of it tells us how to cradle that girl’s face, how to wipe the dust from her eyelids before they stiffen.
Because she is not us.
And so, we turn away. Not in ignorance—in knowing, complicit silence.
Yes. We are hypocrites.
And the worst kind: the kind who know.
I held my daughter in the dark. Her breath warm, her heartbeat a steady drum against mine—alive, so alive.
Somewhere, the girl curled against that shattered wall, the green plaster her only blanket. No lullabies. No nightlight. Just the hum of drones or the scuttle of rats keeping watch.
They are ghosts in our world. And when ghosts go unseen long enough, they dissolve. Not just from sight, from existence. Their pain fades into static, drowned out by the bright noise of our peace.
We have built a civilisation that polishes its windows while drawing the blinds. Look how clear the glass is! we crow, as shadows starve behind them.
Visibility is a lie we tell ourselves to feel human.
And all the while, we hang medals on our chests for progress, for tolerance, for the quiet violence of forgetting.
Yes. We are hypocrites.
And the proof is in how well we sleep.
The night stretched like an open grave.
My daughter slept beside me—soft, whole, unbroken.
But his fury had teeth. It gnawed at me, a slow poison in the veins. Writing is a farce, he’d spat. And he was right.
Words don’t stop bullets.
They don’t rebuild shattered walls or wipe the dust from a child’s still-warm cheek. The girl would die, and some poet would spin her into a metaphor—as if grief could be distilled into stanzas and sold.
The dead don’t read elegies. And the living? They skim the headlines between sips of coffee. Another tragedy. A shake of the head. A sigh. Then on to the weather.
Her death wouldn’t just defy language; it would obliterate it.
What good are syllables when they can’t even scream loud enough to wake us?
Hell with this.
Hell with the ink-stained hands that pretend to hold the world’s weight while it burns.
Ghulam Mohammad Khan is a writer and academic from Bandipora, Kashmir. He holds a PhD from the Central University of Haryana, where his research explored narratology and the role of memory in postcolonial storytelling. He is the author of two books: Anecdote, History and Kashmir: And Other Essays (2025), which interrogates dominant narratives through literary critique and counter-histories, weaving Kashmir’s socio-political reality into broader human struggles; and Elements of Literary Theory, an accessible introduction to key concepts and movements in literary criticism. Khan’s short stories and essays have appeared in Indian Literature, Indian Review, Out of Print, KITAAB, and Kashmir Lit, among others. Drawn to the subversive power of language, his work bridges scholarly insight and narrative intimacy, often challenging fixed notions of identity, history, and power.