A Mother's Love

"They called her mad. But if madness is loving your child beyond death, then let the world go insane."

The villagers of Kohsar still whisper about the woman in the crimson shawl who waits by the old train station every Thursday, long after the trains stopped running through those mountains. Her name is Salma. But to those who remember her tragedy, she is simply known as The Waiting Mother.

Twenty years ago, Salma lived in a modest clay house on the edge of the forest with her husband Zafar and their only son, Daniyal. He was her miracle child—born after seven years of tears, prayers, and whispered hopes beneath the full moon. Salma would wrap him in warm wool even in spring, feed him with her hands until he was ten, and guard him like the moon guards the night.

But love alone cannot stop fate.

One bitter December morning, Zafar lost his job at the local factory. With mouths to feed and no money, he decided to go to the city for work. Daniyal, just thirteen, insisted on going with him. “I’m a man now, Ammi. I want to help,” he said, puffing his chest like a sparrow trying to be an eagle.

Salma's heart protested, but a mother’s love isn’t always about clinging—it’s about trusting, even when your soul screams not to. So she packed their bags with roti, achar, and a tattered photo of their little family. She kissed Daniyal’s forehead thrice, a ritual she believed would protect him.

The two boarded the 7:30 AM train. It never reached the city.

A landslide in the mountains crushed three of the four cars, and with them, the dreams of twenty-two families. Zafar’s body was recovered days later. Daniyal’s was never found.

Salma refused to believe he was gone.

“He’s just lost. Confused. Maybe he has no memory. Maybe he’s waiting for me somewhere,” she would say, clinging to the photo like a lifeline.

The villagers pitied her at first. They brought food, sat with her in silence. But as weeks became years, and years layered like dust on old windows, their patience wore thin. They called her mad, cursed by grief, cursed by obsession.

Every Thursday—the day Daniyal left—Salma would go to the abandoned train station. She cleaned the broken benches, lit a lantern, and waited. “Maybe this Thursday,” she’d whisper. “Maybe today he’ll remember.”

Years passed. Her hair turned the color of winter fog, her back curved like a wilted branch. Still, she waited.

Then, one stormy Thursday, something changed.

Lightning danced like wild spirits across the sky as Salma sat with her lantern. Just as she was about to leave, she heard it—a whistle.

Not the wind.

A train’s whistle.

The tracks, rusted and overgrown, suddenly hummed. A train, ethereal and glowing, rolled into the station. Salma stood, eyes wide. Through the misty windows, she saw them—faces, familiar and young, pressed to the glass. Faces lost long ago.

And then—Daniyal.

Thirteen, just as he was when he left. His eyes locked onto hers.

“Ammi,” he mouthed, a smile trembling on his lips.

Tears streamed down Salma’s face. She took a step forward, then another. The villagers would find her shawl near the platform the next morning—warm despite the cold.

They say the train never returned.

But if you visit Kohsar on a Thursday night, some say you can still see a woman in a crimson shawl, sitting on the platform, holding her son's hand.

Was it grief? Was it a mother’s unyielding love defying the boundaries of life and death?

Perhaps it was both.

But in that moment, for Salma, love was enough to bring her child home.

Even if only in the space between worlds.

A mother's love doesn’t end. It waits, it believes, and sometimes—it brings back the lost