The river had always known more than it let on. It carried truths in silence—heavy, waterlogged, and secretive. For twelve winters, it had ferried Afrooza’s souls messages across the scarred valley—beneath the watchful rifles, across maps smeared with the arrogance of empire, and between a Kashmir split like a wound that refused to clot.
Every new moon, when the dogs howled and the valley slept in fear, Afrooza crept to the edge of the Jhelum. Her heart, frantic. Her hands, trembling. The bottle she carried was warm with the heat of confession. Inside: folded words that couldn’t survive the air.
She would lower the bottle into the water, watching it slip away into blackness. The current, unbothered by borders, would carry it across no-man’s-land, through machine-gun silence, into Rafiq’s waiting world.
He was on the other side now. The side history had handed to the enemy. But the river—the river remembered. It was not the border. It was the shah rag of the valley.
“My Rafiq, The Jhelum knows what we do not say. I talk to her. I give her my silence, my longing, my guilt. I imagine you under the same moon, same stars and same sky wrapped in the same cold, breathing the same air—if not with me, then near enough to ache. The world carved up our land but forgot our hearts were whole. Yours, Afrooza”
But there was a second current in Afrooza’s life, one that ran deeper and muddier than the first. She had another routine, another meeting place, another rafiq, of much different consequence. Every few weeks, she would walk to the old mosque ruins outside her village, where Captain Sharma waited in civilian clothes. He wore no uniform when they met—that made it worse somehow. He spoke gently, of ending the violence, of protecting mothers, of saving brothers. But each word carried the weight of unspoken threats. “Just names,” he said. “Just safehouses. You’re not a traitor, Afrooza. You’re a sister. A lover. A daughter. Save them. Save him.”
And after they showed her photographs of Sameer her brother, who was picked up during a nightraid and he had not returned ever since, in photograph Afrooza saw his dead body.—what was left of him—she didn’t have a choice. Afrooza told herself she was buying time. Telling herself love survives in silence. That betrayal, if performed in the name of love, is not betrayal.
But the truth was simpler. And crueler: they had made her afraid.
And so she gave names. Routes. Details whispered by Rafiq in trust and in love now reshaped and handed to the very hands that broke Sameer. In hope of PEACE.
She began to notice changes in Rafiq’s letters—pride in his work, his careful craftsmanship, his belief that every weapon he forged brought Kashmir closer to freedom. He wrote about training young fighters, about supply routes through the mountains, about hope for liberation. His words burned her with their innocence. Rafiq’s letters remained full of fire:
“The boys here remind me of your brother Sameer—so eager, so ready to sacrifice everything for our cause. I think of you when I work, knowing that each rifle I complete, each grenade I assemble, brings us closer to the day when no river will need to carry our love across enemy lines. My Kashmir starts and ends with you. Soon, inshallah, we will walk to each other freely. Forever yours, Rafiq”
That night, Afrooza sat by her window and wept. In the morning, she would meet Captain Sharma again. She would tell him about the new safe house, about the weapons cache, about the boys who reminded Rafiq of her dead brother. The current was carrying them all downstream, and she could no longer tell which way was toward safety.
Winter came early that year. The snows were heavy, and the Jhelum ran high and fast. Afrooza had not heard from Rafiq in twelve weeks—their longest silence since the letters began. She was returning from another meeting with Captain Sharma when she found them waiting in her house. Five men with faces she recognized from the neighborhood, transformed now by rage, certainty and hate. They had intercepted one of her communications. They had followed her to the mosque ruins. They had watched her take money from an Indian intelligence officer.
“Twelve years,” said Aasif, her neighbour’s son who used to help in their fields and bring her family bread, in the freezing mornings of the Kashmir winter. “Twelve years you fed them our secrets.You were my sister.”
There were no questions after that. No trial. No mercy, nor would she ask for it. She was ready for her final sacrifice. They used Rafiq’s own weapons—the rifles he had crafted with such care, the knives he had forged with love for Kashmir burning in her chest. They carved symbols into her flesh that mocked his devotion. They violated her with a cruelty that sought to erase not just her life but the very idea of her. They stripped her dignity layer by layer, as if erasing the woman before them would erase their own pain. “This is for every brother you betrayed,” they whispered. “For every son.”
The ancient trees stood stoic, listening to her screams, as they had listened to so many others. When they were finished, they carried her to the Jhelum. The same waters that had borne her love letters for twelve years now received her broken body. The current took her gently, as it always had, toward the other side.
Three days later, Rafiq stood by the riverbank as he did each morning, watching for bottles that no longer came. The waiting had carved lines around his eyes, silvered his beard, bent his shoulders—but still he came. And then he saw her. She drifted toward him like a firefly finds its candle, drifting with purpose. Her hair spread dark against the gray water. Around her neck hung a necklace of bullets—bullets he had made. The wounds on her body spoke their own language of suffering.
In her stiff hand, bound with bloodied cloth, she carried one final bottle. Rafiq waded into the icy water and lifted her into his arms. She felt impossibly light, as though the river had already claimed most of her substance. His hands shook as he untied the bottle from her grip. Inside, the same careful script, the words—bloodstained–and a bullet.
“My beloved Rafiq, By the time you read this, you will know what I was. You will know that I loved you and betrayed you both, that I tried to save us and destroyed us instead. They made me choose between your life and other lives, and in trying to protect everyone, I protected no one. I am sorry. I am sorry for my brother, for your boys, for every secret I sold. I am sorry that the weapons you made with such hope became the instruments of my punishment. The river knows all our sins now. Let it carry this last truth: that in twelve years of lies, my love for you was the only honest thing. Forgive me, if you can. Afrooza”
Rafiq read the letter three times before the words penetrated. Then he pressed his face against her cold neck and sobbed—great, tearing sounds that seemed to come from the earth itself.
“Hai Khudaya, tawan ha pyoum, oh God i am doomed” he cried to the indifferent sky. “Oh Allah, what have we done to each other?” He held her until the sun set, until the river sang its evening song around them both. Then he carried her to the shore and began to dig her grave with his bare hands in the rocky soil. The Jhelum flowed on, carrying its secrets across the border. It had carried their love for twelve years. Now it carried their tragedy. And still, it flowed—through the divided valley, past the broken bridges, between the separated hearts of Kashmir. The river always knew more than it ever told. But sometimes, in the end, the river tells everything.
Author: Moomin Maqbool