The Broken Toys

The small decrepit room was thoroughly silent and filthy as if time itself had gone to sleep beneath the cobwebs. Afnan hadn’t been in this room since he was a boy. Now decades later, the old wooden house in his native village was almost empty and deserted; echoing with the memories of voices no more. He was here to search through what remained—faded photographs, worn-out books and one specific thing he couldn’t ignore was the trunk.

It was there under the low slope of the roof; its corners chewed by time and its lock was almost rusted but loose. With a creak that sounded like a sigh, it opened and inside were the broken toys.

There was the wooden spinning top and its edges dulled and nicked. The tin soldier with one missing leg and red paint. A slingshot splintered at the handle. And wrapped in a corner, the limp, headless rag doll that had once belonged to his sister.

Afnan was looking at these toys not as a man but as a boy again with barefoot in the summer dust, running through mango groves with his childhood friend Abuzar carelessly.

Abuzar always the loudest and the bravest; the one who made slingshots from tree branches and dared Afnan to steal guavas from the landlord’s garden. They would hide behind the banyan tree, pockets full of stones.

Abuzar had once said "imagine this soldier’s from a defeated army, holding the same tin soldier in his palm. We’ll fight to bring back his lost kingdom".

Afnan smiled at Abuzar's statement long ago. Abuzar had moved away when they were twelve. His father found work in the city and took the whole family with him saying nothing to Afnan just leaving an empty space where the laughter used to be.

Afnan picked up the spinning top tried. It spun once then wobbled and fell just like the world they had built so carefully—tents of bedsheets, treasure maps on old newspapers, thrones made of bricks and banana leaves.

The doll brought back another face that of Mona.

She had been quiet always watching the boys from a distance until one day she joined their game, offering tea from her toy cups, her doll tucked under one arm. Afnan had laughed at first but he came to love those moments—how she would braid wildflowers into her hair, how her hands moved gently and carefully as if she could stitch love into everything she touched.

He once gave her a broken toy horse carefully painted blue. “It’s missing a leg,” he had said embarrassingly. But she just smiled. “Then he’s a warrior,” she replied, like your soldier. I’ll name him Prince.”

She left too. Her family moved after the floods—her house swallowed by the river that had swelled beyond its banks one monsoon.

They all left.

The village was quieter now. The banyan tree still stood, but the children were fewer. Many houses were locked up, their walls cracked and there was absence of voices.

Afnan looked down at the toys spread around him like small monuments to an old kingdom. There was no great tragedy in their loss—no violent end, no last goodbye. Just the soft erosion of time, washing away the edges of those golden afternoons.

Childhood; he thought: is not something that ends. It fades quietly like sunlight slipping off a wall as the day grows old and yet these toys remained.

It tells that joy had once lived here, that under the blistering village sun, amid the call of cuckoo birds and rustle of sugarcane leaves; a boy had once built kingdoms and imagined a world where nothing ever changed.

But things do change.

Abuzar might be in a high-rise apartment somewhere, his hands wrapped around a phone instead of a slingshot. Mona might not remember the doll or the boy who gave her a broken horse.

And Afnan—older now, lonelier—sat in that house with pieces of a past too fragile to recollect.

Still he gathered the toys back into the trunk, carefully, like sacred things. He didn’t know why—maybe for the next child who might open it or maybe just to remember that once; before life scattered everyone like seeds in the wind; he had been part of something whole. The trunk clicked shut. Outside the wind stirred the trees and somewhere deep in his heart, a spinning top danced one last time.