Ayaan Venkatesh
Sand Without Time
Haider Khan stepped down from the rickety minivan with the stiffness of a man far older than his 38 years. The heat pressed against his face like a hand that didn’t care for permission. Red sand stretched endlessly ahead, framed by towering rocks carved into bizarre, wind-scoured shapes. Wadi Rum. He’d seen it once in a documentary, years ago. “The Valley of the Moon,” the narrator had called it. But here, in real time, there was no poetry. Only stillness. Only silence.
The group disembarking with him was an odd assortment — a French woman with too many scarves, a Japanese man with prayer beads, a Sikh grandfather with a khaki notebook, and a small girl, perhaps ten, clutching a battered sketchpad like a lifeline. None of them spoke.
That was the rule.
No talking. No devices. No clocks. No mirrors.
The retreat guidelines had been clear. “Silence reveals what noise conceals,” it had said, printed in bold over a silhouette of a desert sun.
A man emerged from the shadows of the tent — tall, sun-dark, with a face carved like flint. “Salim,” said the retreat coordinator back in Amman. “He doesn’t speak much. But he’s the one who listens.”
Salim made a gesture toward the open desert, then tapped his wrist twice. No watches allowed — but time would still move.
Haider followed.
The first night passed in a sandstone cave cooled by evening winds. Mats were laid in a circle. Food was passed around — warm lentils, flatbread, dates. No one asked for more. No one offered. The silence wasn’t awkward. It was something else. Dense. Sacred, even.
Haider lay awake as the desert cooled, watching the stars arrange themselves like forgotten scripts. Something moved in the sky — a falling star, or a signal flare from a memory he couldn’t bury.
He hadn’t told anyone why he’d come.
Not the retreat organizers. Not even himself.
But the truth was folded inside the camera bag he had left zipped shut since arriving in Jordan. Inside was the photograph — that photograph. A boy, 8 or 9 years old, crouched beside a building moments before an airstrike leveled it. Haider hadn’t known until the next morning that the child had died. But the photo had gone viral. It had been praised. Celebrated. “War’s Most Honest Frame,” one article called it. It won him the Prix Demir.
He had not touched his camera since.
On Day Two, they walked — barefoot across warm sands, following Salim without question. There were no paths. Only patterns. Shadows curved in crescent shapes along the dunes. A crow circled high above. The girl with the sketchpad stopped often to draw something. Haider glimpsed a few lines — they looked like symbols. Ancient ones. The kind he’d seen on Nabataean ruins once in Petra.
By sunset, his throat was cracked with thirst. Salim stopped by a rock face and poured water from a goatskin bag. Everyone drank. Then Salim pointed to the sand and traced a spiral. Around it, he tapped four dots. Then he swept the image away with one slow stroke of his palm.
The gesture hit Haider like a metaphor. So easy to erase. So permanent, once gone.
That night, Haider opened his journal for the first time in three years.
He wrote:
“The desert doesn’t echo. It absorbs. It doesn’t ask. It waits.”
On the third day, Haider woke before dawn and wandered away from the camp. The silence now clung to him like a second skin. The rocks glowed blue in the pre-sunrise hour. As he climbed a narrow ledge to a shaded overlook, he heard it — a whisper.
Not wind. Not birds. Not imagination.
It sounded like a name. But in a language he didn’t know. A hum, a chant, then silence again.
He stood still. Not frightened. Not yet.
When he returned to camp, the girl handed him a drawing. A boy — small, dark-eyed, sitting by a pool of water surrounded by rocks shaped like teeth. Below it, a symbol: a spiral with three dots.
Haider stared. That was what Salim had drawn in the sand.
He opened his mouth to ask something. But stopped. Remembered the rule. Silence. Instead, he touched his heart and nodded.
The girl smiled.
That night, Haider dreamed in symbols.
He was walking barefoot through the desert, and the sand was whispering. Not words, but feelings. Regret. Longing. Forgiveness. A boy walked beside him, holding a lantern that didn’t cast light but shadow. The boy stopped at a cave and said — not aloud, but directly into Haider’s chest — “The well remembers.”
When he woke up, his journal was open. The page he had written on the night before had more words now. Words he didn’t remember writing:
“The desert doesn’t speak in sentences.
It speaks in scars, wind-etched.”
Haider closed the journal slowly.
He was no longer sure what he had come to forget.
Only that something — or someone — was trying to help him remember.
The Spiral and the Silence
On the fourth day, Haider began to hear breathing.
Not his own. Not anyone else’s in the camp. The desert itself seemed to inhale and exhale beneath his feet. The sand moved with tiny sighs. The wind pulled his sleeves like a child seeking attention.
He had barely spoken a word in four days.
He didn’t miss speaking.
Salim led them farther east that morning, toward what looked like nothing — a flat, ochre plain dotted with thorn bushes and occasional black stones. But as they walked, Haider noticed formations in the rocks. Not random. Deliberate. Arranged. They passed one that looked like a reclining lion. Another like a pair of outstretched hands.
The girl with the sketchpad — Haider now thought of her as “the Oracle” — stopped beside a pile of rocks and sat cross-legged. She drew quickly, obsessively, tearing pages out as she went. Her hand moved like she wasn’t thinking, only listening.
Haider sat nearby, watching.
She handed him a page. It showed a cave opening between two columns. In front of it, a small boy. Not her usual spirals, but a face. Haider’s chest tightened.
It was the boy from the photograph.
Same eyes. Same posture. Same haunting calm.
Later, under the shade of a cliff, Haider pulled out his old Canon camera. It still worked. The weight of it in his hand made him sweat. He didn’t raise it to his eye. Just held it. Like a relic. Like a weapon.
He didn’t know why he brought it to the desert. Maybe he thought silence would erase its guilt.
He put it down beside him and pulled out the photograph. The original print. The one he had carried for three years in a sealed envelope. A boy kneeling next to a wall. Looking directly into the lens. A second before the sky cracked open behind him.
Haider remembered the shutter click.
He remembered not shouting.
He remembered the award ceremony. The applause. The flight to Paris. The hotel. The rain.
He remembered throwing up in the sink that night and whispering, “I’m sorry,” over and over.
That evening, they gathered around the fire pit. Salim placed five stones in the center. One for each traveler.
He picked up a sixth stone — larger, dark red — and held it high. Then, with a sharp motion, he smashed it against the other five. It broke into pieces. Dust flew.
Then he blew the dust into the fire.
The flames hissed. Shifted green.
The old Sikh man stood suddenly. He pointed at the flames, then at the sky. Then sat back down. No one reacted.
Silence remained.
Haider scribbled in his journal:
“Fire doesn’t ask what it burns. It just burns.”
On the sixth day, Salim took them to a cliff with an overhang of jagged rock. Below, a dry wadi. A narrow path led down into shadow. Haider hesitated. But Salim nodded once. This was not optional.
They descended one by one.
Inside, it was cool. The walls of the cave shimmered with mineral streaks — black, green, rust-red. Petroglyphs lined the inner chamber. Camels. Hands. Eyes. Spirals. Always spirals.
In the center, a hole in the rock. Not deep. Dry.
Salim knelt beside it. He placed both palms on the earth and closed his eyes.
Haider mimicked him.
He felt nothing. Then — something.
A vibration. Faint but real.
The earth hummed beneath his fingers, like a heartbeat from far below.
He opened his eyes and found the Oracle staring at him. She held up her sketchpad.
A spiral inside an eye.
Below it: a name. Written in Arabic script. He couldn’t read it. But he knew it.
The boy’s name.
A chill ran through his spine despite the heat.
Back at camp, Haider didn’t eat. He lay on his mat, staring at the stars.
That night, the boy came again in a dream. This time, older. Taller. He led Haider by the hand through the dunes. Past bones, past watchtowers buried in sand. Past a stone tablet half-swallowed by the earth.
He said — softly, gently —
“You saw me. That’s all you had to do.”
Haider woke with tears caking his eyes.
He did not wipe them away.
Instead, he picked up his camera, walked to the ridge, and waited for the sunrise.
When it came, the sky lit up in burning orange and deep crimson. The light crawled over the rocks like a revelation.
Haider raised the lens. Not to take a photo.
Just to see.
To see again.
Water in Stone
The sun rose like a slow confession — bleeding light across the sandstone. Haider stood at the edge of the world, camera in hand, eyes wide open. He didn’t press the shutter. Not yet. The moment didn’t ask to be captured. It only asked to be witnessed.
Behind him, the camp stirred. The Sikh grandfather wrapped his turban tighter. The Frenchwoman began tracing her steps with a twig. The Japanese man lit incense from a tiny brass holder, the smoke curling like memories.
But it was the Oracle who moved with purpose.
She pointed toward the eastern horizon — a slope they hadn’t crossed yet — then back at her sketchpad.
Salim walked over, studied the page, and nodded. His expression didn’t change, but the message was clear: today, they would follow the child.
The journey was longer this time. Uphill, the sand turned pale and stony, the air thinner, the heat sharper. Haider felt his breath shorten with each step. His shoulders ached under the weight of the camera bag he had begun carrying again — not to shoot, but perhaps to bear penance.
The Oracle walked ahead, never tiring. Her steps were precise, as if retracing footprints only she could see.
They stopped near a rock wall shaped like a crooked gate. Petroglyphs lined its base — but these were different.
Not camels, not hunters.
Eyes. Spirals. Wells. And flames.
Haider traced one symbol with his fingertips. It pulsed faintly, like the stone remembered the stories carved into it.
Salim knelt beside a boulder, then pushed it aside with surprising strength.
Beneath was an opening.
A hollowed stairway cut into the earth.
The Oracle nodded. This was it.
They descended in silence.
The air turned cold. The light grew faint. The only sounds were their footsteps and the soft drip of water from somewhere unseen.
At the base of the stairs, the chamber widened.
A pool of water, black and still, lay at its heart — like an eye staring up at them. Around it were Nabataean inscriptions. Circular. Repetitive.
Haider’s breath caught.
The boy from his dream had stood here. He was sure of it.
He moved closer, knelt beside the pool, and touched the surface.
It was warm.
And then the voice returned — but not from outside. From within.
A whisper in his bones.
“Truth has no camera. Memory is the only lens.”
The pool shimmered.
And he saw — not a vision, but a remembering.
A woman’s voice, urgent:
“Keep him safe. They’re coming.”
A man’s arms lifting a boy into a niche behind a wall.
The crash of boots. The flash of light. A shutter click.
And then, silence.
Haider gasped.
He saw himself — standing across the street, camera in hand.
He had taken the picture after the blast.
But the boy had already died — long before that final click.
He hadn’t captured death. He had captured emptiness.
The guilt that had crushed him for three years began to shift — not disappear, but loosen. The boy had not died because of him. But he had lived after because of that frame. The world had seen him.
“You saw me,” the voice echoed again, softer now.
“That was enough.”
Salim placed his hand on Haider’s shoulder and handed him a small, clay cup.
Haider scooped water from the pool and drank.
It tasted of salt and fire and dust older than language.
The Oracle drew again, furiously now, filling page after page. Haider glimpsed one:
A figure, kneeling by water. Above him — stars arranged in a spiral. Below him — fire contained.
He took the page and folded it into his journal.
He had not taken a photograph. But this — this would stay.
When they climbed back up, the sky was darker. A sandstorm brewed far in the west. But no one hurried.
Back at camp, Salim gathered everyone for one final ritual.
He drew a spiral in the sand. Placed their five stones around it.
Then he picked up Haider’s camera and held it aloft.
Haider stepped forward.
Salim placed it in his hands. Not to return it — but to give it meaning again.
Haider turned the camera over. Inside the lens cap was a spiral etched with tiny carvings — perhaps just scratches, or perhaps deliberate.
He looked at the Oracle.
She smiled. Just once.
Then walked away toward the dunes.
That night, the wind howled like a choir of ghosts.
But for the first time, Haider slept without dreaming.
His body rested.
His soul listened.
And the desert, finally, said nothing.
It had spoken enough.
The Child Who Waited
The storm arrived just before dawn.
It came not with thunder, but with a great silence — a sudden stilling of air, as though the earth itself held its breath. Then the wind surged, fine sand flying like arrows, stinging cheeks and eyes. Tents collapsed in minutes. Haider wrapped his scarf tightly, crouched low beside the fire pit, and watched as the desert erased its own footprints.
By noon, it was over.
The storm passed as quickly as it had come, and the landscape looked utterly changed. The spirals Salim had drawn in the sand were gone. The rocks bore new wounds. It was as if the desert had shuffled its secrets, asking them to be discovered all over again.
Haider wandered, restless, toward the eastern slope — the direction the Oracle had led them yesterday. His steps, once heavy, now moved with purpose.
He carried no journal. No camera. Just one question, not yet fully formed.
As he reached the ridge, he noticed something strange: a new path. It hadn’t been there before. The storm had unearthed it. Flat stones arranged like a mosaic, partially exposed beneath the sand. Spirals again — but this time interwoven with human forms, like dancers or seekers.
He followed them.
The path led to a shallow depression between two rocks — and there, half-buried, lay a small leather pouch.
Haider dug carefully.
Inside: a handful of faded sketches on parchment. A copper pendant shaped like an eye. And a strip of cloth bearing a boy’s name — handwritten in Arabic and Hindi.
Same name as in the Oracle’s drawing.
He sat down on the warm earth, fingers trembling. The boy wasn’t imagined. He had existed. Perhaps not the exact one from the photograph, but a boy, long ago, who had also been hidden, lost, buried — and remembered only because someone had dared to see him.
That night, Haider approached Salim after dinner. For the first time, he broke the vow of silence.
In a soft voice, cracked from disuse, he asked,
“Who was the child?”
Salim looked at him for a long moment. Then picked up a stick, walked to the sand, and drew two eyes connected by a spiral.
He pointed to one, then to Haider.
Then he pointed to the other.
And to the sky.
Haider didn’t need words.
“The child was the desert.
And the desert waits for those who will look back.”
The next morning, the retreat was over.
The group boarded the same rickety van that had brought them. But something had changed in each of them. The Frenchwoman now smiled without reason. The Sikh grandfather sang a line of poetry in Punjabi under his breath. The Japanese monk handed out sugar cubes to passing children.
The Oracle was not among them.
She had vanished at dawn. Her sketchpad remained — left inside Haider’s sleeping mat, filled with pages he hadn’t yet seen.
He didn’t search for her.
Some people weren’t meant to be followed. They were meant to arrive, gift something, and disappear like wind.
At the Amman airport, Haider passed through security, holding his camera like a book of scripture.
He didn’t fly home.
Instead, he booked a second bus — this time to Petra.
He would walk again, deeper into history, now not for a story, or a photograph, but to listen to the places that still held breath. He had a duty now — not to document, but to witness with grace.
Before boarding, he opened the Oracle’s sketchpad one last time.
On the final page was a drawing of him.
Standing on a dune, camera by his side.
And the boy.
Not behind him. Not haunting him.
But beside him.
Smiling.
Memory Beneath the Dust
The road to Petra was uneven, winding through quiet villages and red plains littered with ruins and goat herders. Haider sat by the window, a plastic bottle of warm water in his hand, the Oracle’s sketchpad in his lap. The sun cast long, brittle shadows across the desert floor. His reflection in the dusty glass looked different. Not younger. Not older. But… stripped of something.
He turned to a new page. One of the final drawings.
A doorway carved into stone. A spiral above the arch.
A phrase written in pencil below it:
“The door remembers the ones who knock with silence.”
At Petra, Haider entered through the Siq — the narrow canyon that curled like a secret toward the famed Treasury. Tourists buzzed around with selfie sticks and camel guides called out in five languages. But he walked past all that, deeper still. He wasn’t there for monuments.
He was following symbols now.
Beyond the public trails, guided by whispers and maps from a local Bedouin boy, he found Wadi al-Muthlim — a gorge less traveled, echoing with forgotten footsteps. Here, the stone held not just architecture, but residue — stories the sand hadn’t fully buried.
Haider climbed a broken ledge and saw it: a cave mouth, dark and unmarked, except for a single spiral etched into its lintel.
The exact one from the Oracle’s sketchpad.
He ducked inside.
It was narrow. Dry. Silent in a way that city-born ears never knew.
Inside, faint carvings lined the walls — not in Arabic, but an older, sinuous script. Nabataean, perhaps. Or something older still. Below it all, almost missed in the dim light, were two handprints in ochre red.
One large. One small.
Haider reached out and pressed his palm against the smaller print.
The stone was warm.
And a scent rose from the floor — subtle but real.
Not incense.
Not smoke.
Cardamom. And old paper.
He moved deeper, phone flashlight guiding him now.
At the far end of the cave, protected by a makeshift shelf of stacked stones, lay a small clay urn. Next to it, wrapped in oilcloth, was a bundle of parchment sheets.
Not modern.
Not preserved.
Just… left behind.
He unwrapped them carefully.
Each was a drawing — simple, almost childlike. Eyes. Spirals. Stars. A desert. A fire.
And always, a boy.
One showed the boy holding hands with a man who looked just like Haider.
Another showed the same boy standing on a dune, arms raised toward the sky, as eyes wept tears made of stars.
On the back of the final parchment, in fading ink, were just three words in English:
“You saw me.”
Haider sat cross-legged for a long time, silent.
He thought about all the places he had been. Gaza. Aleppo. Tripoli. Srinagar. Places that devoured names and replaced them with headlines. He had always seen the damage. The aftermath. The statistics.
But he had never stayed long enough to remember the child.
Until now.
Here, in this cave, was something no war ever destroyed: memory that chose to wait.
He left the parchments where they were.
He wasn’t a thief of the sacred.
But he folded one of the blank parchment pages into his journal.
That night, back in the Petra guesthouse, he wrote a line on it with a borrowed pen:
“The desert doesn’t bury the dead.
It holds them until someone remembers.”
At breakfast, an old woman — the guesthouse owner — placed a bowl of dates in front of him.
“You came back,” she said in Arabic.
Haider looked up, startled.
“I’ve never been here before.”
She smiled without answering and walked away.
Later, he found a spiral drawn on the table under his cup.
Chalk. Just faint enough to miss.
That afternoon, Haider packed his bag.
He didn’t erase the spiral.
He left it.
For the next traveler who came looking not for answers, but for questions that belonged to the soul.
The One Who Watches
Two weeks later, Haider stood in a museum in Jerash, northern Jordan — a city of columns and ghosts. A tour group shuffled past him, their eyes glazed from too many plaques. But he stood rooted before a fragment of stone — nothing spectacular — just a weather-worn slab marked by a single etching.
A spiral.
Uneven. Deep. The center bore a small hole, as though something had once been placed there — a gem, or maybe an eye.
His breath caught.
The label below said:
“Nabataean Ritual Stone, Circa 100 BCE.
Function unknown.”
But Haider knew.
Not what it was, perhaps.
But what it meant.
The spiral had followed him. Or maybe he had followed it.
Later, while sketching the stone into his journal, he noticed a woman in a red scarf watching him. Middle-aged, with sharp eyes and sand-lined hands. She didn’t speak but walked over and placed a small object on the bench beside him.
A smooth black pebble, engraved with a single spiral.
Before he could ask, she was gone.
On instinct, he flipped the pebble.
There was a name scratched faintly into the underside:
“Ayaan.”
His own name.
Not his real one — but the pen name he used for poetry. The one he hadn’t shared with anyone in years.
He sat still for a long time, the pebble warm in his hand.
Somewhere, the lines between the seen and the unseen had blurred.
That evening, he boarded a local bus to Amman.
As it pulled out of Jerash, a small child — a boy no older than six — ran alongside the bus for a few seconds. Just long enough to lock eyes with Haider through the window.
The boy smiled.
And raised his hand in a spiral wave.
Haider blinked.
Gone.
Just dust and a setting sun behind him.
At the Amman hostel, Haider finally opened the Oracle’s sketchpad again. He had only skimmed most of the pages — overwhelmed, reluctant. Now, he studied them one by one.
They weren’t just drawings.
They were visions.
- One page showed the cave in Wadi Rum, long before he saw it.
- Another, Petra’s secret alcove, with two handprints.
- One showed him sleeping in a field of red sand, while a shadowed figure watched from the ridge.
And on the final two-page spread:
A city skyline.
And spirals hidden everywhere — in clouds, in window grills, in the curls of a child’s hair.
The message was simple.
The desert wasn’t a place.
It was a way of seeing.
And it had followed him home.
Haider no longer dreamed of explosions.
Now, he dreamed of spirals.
Sometimes etched in stone.
Sometimes drawn in salt on tables.
Sometimes appearing in the eyes of strangers.
But always the same feeling — not fear. Not grief.
But knowing.
He returned to India in late spring.
Not to Srinagar. Not yet.
Instead, he moved into a quiet guesthouse in Pushkar, Rajasthan — another desert. Another place of echoes. He taught photojournalism to local students. Held poetry readings in a rooftop café with seven chairs and a cat named Ravi.
He didn’t tell them where he’d been.
He didn’t have to.
But sometimes, during evening chai, he would draw a spiral in the steam on the glass table.
And wait to see if anyone noticed.
One night, a student — young, shy, curious — pointed to the spiral and said,
“Sir… it looks like an ear.”
Haider smiled.
And whispered,
“Exactly.”
Part 7 — Echoes in Dust
In Pushkar, the desert was not endless like Wadi Rum, but it whispered all the same — through temple bells, camel hooves, and the dry rustle of wind-blown prayer flags. Haider walked its narrow lanes each morning, camera swinging at his side. Not to shoot. Just to feel its weight. Just to listen.
On the twenty-first morning, he followed a group of children to a dried-up stepwell near the edge of the town. They had been laughing about ghosts and secret doors. Haider trailed behind with the curiosity of a child, and the sadness of a man learning to laugh again.
The stepwell was crumbling, vines curling around stone balustrades. A monkey sat on a ledge, blinking as if guarding a story.
One of the boys shouted, “Uncle! Look, there’s a drawing!”
Haider stepped forward. Faded, nearly invisible on the back wall, was a shape carved into the stone.
A spiral.
The children soon lost interest and ran off. But Haider stayed behind.
He crouched beside the marking and reached out, brushing off dust and moss.
This spiral was different. It had a second spiral inside it, curled the other way — like two forces dancing toward and away from each other.
He took out his journal and copied it carefully.
Then he sat on the lowest step, closed his eyes, and waited.
He was no longer afraid of silence.
That night, in his rooftop room, he had a dream.
The boy was back. But older now — maybe twelve or thirteen. He had longer hair. A mark on his wrist.
They sat beside a pool of black water under starlight.
“Why me?” Haider asked.
The boy smiled. “Because you stopped seeing through the lens.”
Haider looked down. The camera in his lap was broken. Useless.
“But I still carry it.”
“You carry the witness, not the weapon,” the boy said. “That’s enough.”
Then he vanished into the pool, like breath into the dark.
When Haider awoke, he found a line scribbled into his journal, written in his own handwriting — but he had no memory of writing it.
“Not all ghosts haunt.
Some just wait to be remembered.”
One week later, a letter arrived at the Pushkar guesthouse, addressed only to “A. Venkatesh, Poet-Journalist, Desert Room.”
Inside was a torn page from a French magazine.
An article titled: “Les enfants oubliés — The Forgotten Children of War.”
It featured Haider’s photograph — the boy by the crumbling wall. But the caption was different now. It read:
“Not a casualty.
A memory.
A story that demanded to be seen.”
Someone had underlined the words “demanded to be seen.”
On the back of the page, scrawled in black ink:
“You are not forgiven.
You are remembered.
And that is more.”
There was no signature.
Only a tiny spiral drawn at the bottom.
That night, Haider sat alone on the rooftop, the torn page fluttering beside his journal, the stars above turning slowly like ancient wheels.
He lit a candle. Drew a spiral in the wax as it melted.
And began to write his first poem in years:
They call it a desert
but I have heard its voice.
Not thunder, not scripture —
just the breath of a boy
who once was,
and still is,
because I listened.
The Archive of Silence
Monsoon winds arrived early in Pushkar that year. Not full storms—just teasing gusts that carried the scent of wet earth yet to be. Haider walked through the market in the morning, a jhola slung over his shoulder, spiral patterns stitched faintly into the canvas. Not intentional. A gift from a Rajasthani woman who said, “You seem to carry storms with you. Let the bag carry some instead.”
He smiled. People saw things now. As if his silence told stories louder than his speech ever did.
One day, he visited the Ajmer Public Library.
Not for books.
But for something else.
He had heard whispers among the old tea-drinkers near the lake — of an underground archive that once cataloged voices of Partition refugees. Their poems. Their interviews. Many of whom were children.
It had been shuttered years ago. Lost in funding cuts and mold.
But Haider had learned that in deserts — things never disappear, they just bury themselves until called.
A frail librarian with a trembling moustache showed him a basement room.
“There’s nothing here now,” he said. “Just dust and silverfish.”
Haider nodded. “Still. I’d like to sit for a while.”
He descended into the archive alone.
The air was heavy with age.
Shelves leaned like exhausted elders. Boxes collapsed under their own forgotten weight. The lights buzzed weakly.
And yet…
In the farthest corner, beneath a broken chair, he found a cassette recorder.
Worn. Dead. But intact.
Next to it, a tin box filled with tapes.
Each labeled with a name and date. Most from the 1950s.
One stood out.
No name. Only a spiral drawn in ink.
His hands shook slightly as he fed it into the recorder.
It didn’t play at first.
Then—static.
Then—a child’s voice.
Soft. Cracked with accent. Speaking Hindi.
“Mujhe sirf yaad rakhna…”
“Just remember me.”
Then silence.
Then breathing.
Then humming — a lullaby. Haider had never heard it before, yet somehow, he knew the tune.
When the tape ended, he sat motionless, the machine still turning long after the reel had stopped.
Back in his room, Haider opened his notebook and sketched the spiral from the tape box beside the one from Wadi Rum, Petra, and Pushkar. All slightly different. All the same root.
He began to think of them not as symbols, but coordinates. Markers of a map only the heart could read.
Two days later, he received an email.
From a film student in Amritsar.
Subject: “Sir, I saw your poem.”
The student had found Haider’s rooftop poem in a zine. She wanted to interview him for a documentary on memory and displacement.
“We don’t just lose land,” she wrote.
“We lose the faces we never saw clearly.”
Haider responded with one line:
“Then let’s learn how to see.”
By the time the rains finally came — loud, earnest, washing away the red dust — Haider sat on his balcony, eyes closed, letting it soak into his skin.
He was not dry anymore.
He was porous.
The spiral had moved through him. Left something behind. Or maybe returned something forgotten.
And far in the distance, between thunderclaps, he thought he heard a child laugh.
Not a ghost.
Not memory.
Just presence.
The Map Within the Mirror
In late August, Haider boarded a train to Delhi.
The film student from Amritsar — Anamika — had arranged a gathering at a quiet arts collective in Hauz Khas. A night of shared memory. Survivors, grandchildren, poets, and journalists. The invitation simply read:
“For the ones who listened when no one else did.”
He carried only two things: his battered journal, and the Oracle’s sketchpad, now wrapped in cotton cloth like scripture.
Delhi was loud again. Chaotic. Neon lights and chai stalls and the jarring hum of the city’s second skin — impatience.
Haider did not shrink from it.
He walked slowly through Lajpat Nagar, where his great-grandfather had once arrived after Partition with only a brass plate and a daughter who never spoke again.
He paused before a bookstore. The display window showed a new release:
The War We Forgot: Visual Memory and the Price of Witness.
Inside it, one of his photographs — the boy, reframed with new eyes.
The caption read:
“A lens cannot lie. But it can choose where to look.”
At the gathering, he sat in the back, listening.
An old woman recited poetry from her father’s letters.
A young man wept while playing a sarangi he had inherited from a grandfather who was blind.
Anamika showed a short clip — fragments of Haider’s Wadi Rum journal, overlaid with sand visuals and a child’s voice humming the lullaby from the cassette.
No one clapped.
They simply sat with it. Like grief. Like grace.
Later, Anamika found him in the courtyard.
“You don’t say much,” she smiled.
“I used to,” Haider replied. “But I talked over the voices I should’ve heard.”
She held out a printed invitation.
“We’re going to Barmer next. Thar desert. There’s a forgotten school near the border. Rumors say a boy there draws spirals in the sand every morning.”
Haider folded the paper, nodded.
“Yes. I think he’s waiting.”
That night, in his Delhi guesthouse, he stood before the mirror to shave.
But when he leaned closer, he paused.
On the glass, fogged from steam, was a faint marking drawn by an earlier guest — a spiral, right over where his heart would reflect.
He stared at it for a long time.
Then pressed his palm to it.
The spiral blurred under his touch — but something in him settled. Anchored. As if, finally, the desert had arrived within him.
He wrote in his journal:
“I am no longer looking for the child.
I am learning to become the man he waited for.”
The One Who Became the Echo
Barmer.
A border town where the desert thins into haze, where sand creeps into everything — rooftops, tea stalls, prayer books. The Thar sun beat down like a test of endurance, yet the people smiled through cracked lips, their eyes lined with stories older than asphalt or flag.
Haider stepped off the rickety bus with a leather-bound notebook and a spiral stitched on the back of his kurta. A gift from Anamika. She had reached two days earlier with her crew, setting up interviews in a village outside town.
He wasn’t here to film.
He was here to find the boy.
The school was a mud building with a tin roof and a painted wall that said “Knowledge is Light” in Hindi, though some of the letters had faded into ghostly outlines.
The teacher — a wiry man in his forties with a harmonium voice — pointed toward the far end of the schoolyard.
“He doesn’t speak. Not since his father crossed the border and never returned,” the man said. “But every morning, he draws that sign. You’ll see.”
Haider walked past the neem trees and found him.
A boy. Barefoot. Seven, maybe eight. Skinny arms, thick lashes. Kneeling in the sand with a twig.
Drawing.
The spiral.
But not just one.
He had drawn seven, arranged in a circle. At the center: a single dot.
Like an eye.
Like a soul.
The boy looked up.
They held eye contact.
And then, without hesitation, the boy handed him the twig.
Haider crouched beside him.
He didn’t ask anything. Didn’t break the silence.
Instead, he completed the eighth spiral. Closed the circle. Then placed his palm over the center dot.
The boy smiled — the kind of smile not meant for photographs.
They sat in the heat, wind brushing past like approval.
And in that moment, Haider understood:
He wasn’t here to find the boy from the photo.
He was here to meet every child history left behind.
To bear witness.
Not to tragedy.
But to the survival of memory.
He returned to the school the next day.
And the next.
He began teaching the children how to take pictures — without a camera.
“How?” they asked with curious eyes.
“First,” he said, “you listen. To the wind. To your feet on the earth. To the silence between heartbeats.”
He gave them empty cardboard frames. Told them to look through them and describe what they saw. Not what was there — but what called to be seen.
One afternoon, a girl whispered,
“I see my grandmother in the clouds.”
Another said,
“I see my brother running toward me, but slower than the wind.”
The spiral had spread.
Not like wildfire.
But like song.
On his final evening in Barmer, Haider walked alone into the dunes.
He carried nothing.
No camera.
No journal.
No pen.
Just the silence.
He traced a spiral with his foot into the sand.
And for the first time in his life, he didn’t look back to see if the wind would erase it.
Because he understood now:
The spiral doesn’t need to remain.
It needs to be drawn.
That is enough.
Somewhere far away, in a cave in Wadi Rum, a stone warmed under the setting sun.
A sketchpad rested beside it.
The final page fluttered in the wind, revealing the drawing of a man and a boy —
hand in hand,
walking into a spiral
that vanished into the horizon.
END
