Lahore, 1604 CE.
The walled city stood cloaked in fog. Autumn had set its roots deep into the soil and the mornings were draped in an eerie chill. In a small haveli near Mochi Gate, where walls were covered in Persian calligraphy and rosewater always lingered faintly in the air, a man sat hunched over parchment, quill in hand, the ink bleeding sorrow onto the page.
Murtasim Khan, once the most celebrated shayar of Emperor Jahangir's court, now lived in seclusion. There were tales of his voice echoing across Mughal durbars, of princesses weeping at his verses. But none of that mattered to him anymore. Not the emperor's praise. Not the golden coins that once rained upon him.
Because she was gone.
Meerab.
His soul had only known one name.
---
He had met her during the spring of 1599. She was the daughter of a nobleman—elegant, untouchable, engaged to a Rajput prince for political alliance. Yet, when her laughter rang in the courtyard that day, Murtasim forgot every couplet he had ever written.
She was standing beside the jasmine arch when their eyes met. Her dupatta, the colour of crushed rubies, floated in the breeze like a promise never made. And in that moment, she looked straight into his soul and did not flinch.
"Are you the poet everyone speaks of?" she had asked, voice curious but bold.
He bowed slightly. "I am only a servant of letters, begum. But if people speak, then perhaps it is the echo of madness."
"Madness makes the best poetry," she had replied, a playful smile gracing her lips.
From that moment, he stopped writing for the emperors. His ink now belonged to her.
---
He wrote of her hair, long as midnight, tumbling over his dreams.
He wrote of her lips, the colour of secrets and sins.
He wrote of her silence, more piercing than swords.
But he never touched her. Never even held her hand.
Because Meerab was never his to hold.
She belonged to duty. To legacy. To the cage of noble blood.
---
One rainy night, under the carved eaves of the Shahi Qila, they stood again, cloaked in shadow.
"You must stop," she whispered. Her voice trembled, but not from the cold.
"Stop what?"
"Writing about me. Dreaming about me. Waiting for me."
"Tell the stars to stop burning then," he replied, his voice a low rumble. "Tell the wind to stop carrying your scent. Tell this heart to stop bleeding every time I close my eyes."
She looked away.
"You're going to destroy yourself, Murtasim."
He smiled, but it did not reach his eyes. "I was born for it."
---
She left Lahore a week later.
Married. Crowned. Sealed into the pages of someone else’s fate.
And Murtasim Khan began to die.
Not in the way of men who fall sick.
But slowly. Silently.
Like ink fading on parchment.
He stopped attending the courts.
He stopped reciting.
The Emperor himself summoned him. "Write us a verse, Murtasim. For the glory of the crown."
He looked up, eyes hollow.
"My ink has turned to ash."
---
Years passed.
He remained in his haveli. Grew thin. Grew grey. The servants came and went, and the city changed its skin. But Murtasim waited.
Every evening, he sat by the arched jharokha, eyes on the cobbled lane below.
Some said he had gone mad.
Some said he was touched by divine love.
But he waited.
---
Once, his friend and fellow poet, Sadiq, came to visit him.
"Murtasim, you must let her go."
"I did," he replied. "But she never left."
Sadiq placed a hand on his shoulder. "You write no more. You eat little. You smile never. This is not love. This is torment."
Murtasim looked at him then, and something flickered in those weary eyes.
"My torment is the only proof that she was real."
---
One night, a messenger arrived from Agra.
The letter bore the royal seal.
Meerab had passed.
Complications in childbirth.
She was twenty-seven.
Murtasim held the letter, and a strange silence fell over him. He did not weep. He did not speak. He simply walked to his writing desk and picked up his old quill.
That night, he wrote.
And wrote.
Until the candle burned down to its base.
When morning came, his servant found him slumped over the desk.
Gone.
A single parchment lay beneath his hand.
A final ghazal, smeared in tears and ink.
"I waited by the moonless well, where our shadows once kissed,
You left your breath in my lungs, now I exhale only mist.
The hourglass broke, my beloved, when your anklets walked away,
And time itself knelt in grief, begging you to stay.
I was never a poet, merely a prayer in disguise,
Each verse a gravestone beneath your silent skies.
Come now, if only in wind, in dream, in death’s disguise—
My pen still waits, my heart still writes, my soul still cries."
Murtasim Khan was buried beside the canal, under the old neem tree where he once first saw her ride by on horseback.
No tombstone bore his name.
Only a plaque with a single line:
"She was not his. Yet he was always hers."
And somewhere in the folds of Lahore’s centuries, the scent of jasmine still lingers at twilight, and the echoes of an unclaimed ghazal drift in the wind.
Because Murtasim never stopped waiting.
And Meerab never came.
