A Shadow of Our Love

I.

Mehtab lived in silence and quite.

Not the kind that is peaceful, but the kind that presses in on the chest. His world was a gray one that was shaded alleyways, empty benches, and books that no one borrowed. He worked in a bookstore that was fading, tucked between a shuttered tailor’s shop and a tea stall where the kettle never stopped singing. His only joy came at dusk, when the city softened and the streets glowed like old memories.

It was on such an evening, just as the call to prayer echoed between the minarets, that he saw her.

Sakina.

She was crying beneath a flickering streetlamp, her scarf caught on a rusted gate, her eyes wide like someone who had lost not a person, but a future. Mehtab, awkward and unsure, offered her a handkerchief and a quiet place to sit.

She laughed through her tears. “Do all booksellers rescue strangers?”

He smiled, and for the first time in years, he felt the silence lift.

II.

They met every evening after that. Always after dusk, always in the same corner of the world. They spoke of old novels and broken clocks, of lost fathers and the smell of rain on stone. Sakina told him of a man she had once loved—a poet, now engaged to another, leaving her with letters she could no longer read aloud.

Mehtab never asked for more. He only listened, and he loved her in the stillness between her sentences.

And for a while, that was enough.

III.

One night, as winter crept in on the wind, Sakina didn’t come.

He waited until the moon had climbed the sky, then returned home with a heaviness he could not name. The next evening, she returned—wrapped in a white shawl, her eyes distant.

“I’m leaving, Mehtab,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “My mother has arranged it. I am to marry a man in Lahore. A man who builds, not writes.”

He felt himself unravel, word by word.

“But why?” was all he managed.

“Because love,” she said, “is not always enough. Not for a woman alone in the world.”

She touched his hand, just once.

“You will forget me,” she said.

“I will spend my life remembering you,” he replied.

IV.

He never saw her again.

Years passed. The bookstore closed. The alleyway grew weeds. But every dusk, Mehtab returned to that bench, to the spot beneath the flickering streetlamp.

He brought a book. He brought silence.

And he waited, not for her, but for the ache she left behind.