The Man Who Walked Backwards

By Ikhtisham Hayat

In the small village of Muridwala, where time seemed to rest beneath the shade of old banyan trees and children still played with marbles in dusty streets, lived a strange man everyone called Peeru Chacha. No one knew his real name anymore. What made him peculiar wasn’t just his weathered shawl or his rusted lantern, but the fact that he had been walking backwards for nearly ten years.
Yes, backwards.
Children laughed and mimicked him. Adults whispered stories. Some believed he’d lost his mind. Others said he had seen something that no man should ever see.
But no one ever asked him why.
Except I did.
It was the winter I turned seventeen. My mother had passed away, and grief sat like cold iron in my chest. I wandered the village aimlessly, feeling detached from life, when I saw him – walking backwards from the masjid toward the hill that led to the old graveyard. He stopped, turned only his head, and looked straight at me.
“Beta,” he said gently, “You walk forward, but your eyes are filled with the past.”
His words stunned me. I don’t know what made me follow him, but I did.
He led me to a bench under a neem tree. He sat, facing the opposite direction, still not turning his body. “You wonder why I walk like this?” he asked.
I nodded.
He smiled faintly. “Because the world taught me everything forward... but healing, healing came only when I walked back.”

He began his story.
Many years ago, he had been a teacher in the same village, a man of books and quiet smiles. He had a wife named Naseem and a son named Daniyal. His life was simple, but beautiful. Every morning, he walked to school, and every evening, Daniyal would run into his arms.
But one rainy night changed everything.
Daniyal had gone out to fetch a kite that had landed on the road. A speeding truck, a slippery corner, a scream that split the rain—and just like that, his son was gone.
“My legs forgot how to stand,” he said, eyes glassy. “My wife never spoke again. She just... disappeared inside herself.”
A week after the funeral, she handed him a box. Inside were Daniyal’s drawings—of kites, the masjid, a little family holding hands.
“I kept walking forward,” Peeru Chacha said. “Everyone told me to. ‘Time heals,’ they said. ‘Move on.’ But every step forward felt like I was walking away from him.”
Then one day, sitting beside Daniyal’s grave, he tried something different.
“I took one step backward,” he whispered, “and it felt like I was returning to him.”
So he kept doing it. One step, then another. It felt absurd at first. But strangely... freeing. It was his way of grieving, remembering, healing.
People mocked him. Some called him mad. But he didn’t care.
“Walking backwards reminded me of where I came from,” he told me. “Of who I had loved. And in that process, I found pieces of myself again.”

I sat silently, the winter air biting at my fingers, but my heart warmer than it had been in weeks. My mother’s memory rose inside me like sunlight through mist.
“You know,” he said, “we’re told to look ahead, dream of the future. But sometimes, to truly understand where we are... we must turn around.”
Peeru Chacha never stopped walking backwards. But I saw him differently after that. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t feel pity. I felt... respect.
One day, a traveler came through Muridwala. He watched Peeru Chacha, curious. I overheard him ask, “Is he mad?”
I stepped forward and said, “No. He just walks where his memories live.”

Years later, I moved to the city. Life was fast. The kind of fast that makes you forget who you are. But every now and then, when grief knocked, or loneliness curled around me, I’d walk backward down a quiet lane. And I’d remember my mother’s hands, her prayers, her stories.
Sometimes, in the act of going back, we find the strength to face forward again.
And perhaps that’s what Peeru Chacha had been teaching us all along.
Not madness. Not obsession.
But a strange, beautiful kind of wisdom...
The wisdom of walking backwards.