Lahore, 1604 CE.
The walled city, shrouded in the mysticism of Mughal grandeur, stood swathed in fog. Autumn had breathed its full chill into the heart of Punjab. The mornings were veiled in silence; the evenings wrapped in longing. Beneath the fading archways of Mochi Gate, nestled within the cracked stone walls of an ancient haveli, sat a man—his fingers ink-stained, his heart bleeding verse.
Murtasim Khan, once the voice that serenaded emperors, now lived amongst ghosts.
He was a poet who had tasted the fruits of divine inspiration. His ghazals—written in gold-threaded ink—once echoed through the marble halls of Jahangir’s court. But those days had dimmed like a dying flame, for the muse that ignited his soul had vanished like smoke.
Her name was Meerab.
A name he had memorized into the marrow of his bones.
She had entered his world during the spring of 1599, like the first rains after drought. She was the daughter of a nobleman—a creature carved out of elegance, pride, and duty. Her beauty was not the kind sung in ordinary songs; it was quiet and devastating, like a dagger of silk.
They met under peculiar circumstance—a poetry mehfil held at her father’s estate. She wandered into the garden where Murtasim recited verses to an enthralled audience.
Her presence disarmed him.
When their eyes met, time stumbled. Her ruby-colored dupatta fluttered like an omen in the wind, and he forgot every metaphor he ever crafted.
She approached him boldly. "Are you the poet who makes queens weep with ink?"
He bowed. "Only a man who bleeds in verses, begum. And queens, they merely drown in their own longing."
She smirked. "Then I must guard my heart."
He smiled, already wounded.
From that day forward, he was not a man. He was a shrine built in her name. His ghazals bore her scent. His metaphors curled around the shape of her eyes, her voice, her silence.
But she was never his.
Her hand was promised to a Rajput prince, and with it, the illusion of a political truce. She belonged to a legacy older than his dreams. She belonged to duty.
He belonged to yearning.
Once, under the crescent shadows of Shahi Qila, they met alone. He had waited, drenched in moonlight and madness.
"You shouldn’t have come," she said, her voice trembling.
"And yet you’re here."
She looked away. "We must not meet again. This…this is a path that ends in fire."
He stepped closer, voice low. "Then let us burn. But let me burn beside you."
Her eyes glistened. "You speak as if love conquers fate."
"No," he whispered. "But it survives it."
She turned, walking away. Her anklets left a melody behind.
He never heard that sound again.
She was married the following month.
A grand wedding. Trumpets. Fireworks. Gold. He watched from the shadows, drowning in the silence between each celebratory cheer.
She never looked back.
And Murtasim Khan began to die.
He stopped performing at court. He refused invitations from royals and scholars. When the emperor summoned him personally, he merely replied:
"The sun does not shine twice for the same flower."
Emperor Jahangir, moved by his madness, let him go.
He returned to his haveli, where only ink and silence kept him company. Day after day, he sat by the jharokha, waiting. Every clatter of hooves. Every scent of jasmine. Every breeze from Agra.
Waiting.
His friend and fellow poet, Sadiq, visited him one dusky evening. He found Murtasim gaunt, his eyes sunken into caverns of sleeplessness.
"You must move on, dost," Sadiq pleaded. "You have shriveled into a myth."
Murtasim smiled, bitter and brittle. "A myth is better than forgetting."
"You are alone."
"I am with her in every verse."
Sadiq knelt before him. "But she is not with you."
Murtasim’s voice cracked. "I would rather live with her ghost than live without her name."
Years passed.
He grew old, but never stopped waiting.
Each night, he lit a candle by the balcony. Each dawn, he extinguished it alone.
And then, one winter’s night, a rider arrived from Agra.
A scroll. A royal seal. Trembling hands.
Meerab had died.
Complications during childbirth. She was twenty-seven.
Murtasim sat frozen for hours. He did not scream. He did not cry. He merely walked to his desk, opened his old ink pot, and dipped his quill.
He wrote.
And wrote.
And wrote until dawn.
When his servant entered the next morning, the candle was nothing but wax and smoke. And Murtasim Khan’s head lay on parchment, ink-stained tears dried on his cheeks.
He had passed.
His hand clutched the edge of his final verse:
"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."
He was buried beneath the neem tree near Shalimar, where once, Meerab had laughed while watching pigeons take flight.
There was no tombstone.
Only a stone plaque bearing a single line:
"She was not his. Yet he was always hers."
They say when jasmine blooms in Lahore, and the fog clings low, a voice rises with the mist. Reciting verses no one remembers writing, in a language only the heart understands.
Because Murtasim never stopped waiting.
And Meerab never came.
