913 Kilometers from Mohenjodaro

I. MULAQAT

At nightfall, two rivers meet in secrecy. 

The Indus arrives first, as it always has. Broad-shouldered and unhurried, moving languidly through the alleys of the land. Powdered stones, glacial melt, and the memories of eviscerated kingdoms remain suspended in its silty depths. Moonlight stretches across its surface and settles there, unbroken. It rolls forward in measured silence, calm and venerable. 

The Chenab arrives later, slipping from the north with the final traces of daylight still caught in its currents. Its water is green, torrential, and younger in temperament if not in age. It bends and twists, restless from its passage through narrow valleys and steep gorges. The river has spent the day arguing with rocks, throwing itself against cliffs, and gathering stories from shepherds, farmers, fishermen, and children. Even now, it cannot stay still, with small eddies spinning from its edges like frayed, incomplete thoughts. 

The two recognize one another immediately, as they always do. 

They have spent centuries beyond counting carrying pieces of the same land toward one another. Snowmelt from distant peaks, mud from fertile plains, ashes of the dead, prayers murmured into cupped and clasped hands, petals of marigolds and gulmohar, and the forgotten remnants of entire lives. Millenia spent in exchanging these offerings without ever needing words. 

Tonight, however, they speak. 

Above them, the sky is clear with stars scattered across the darkness with a careless abundance. Somewhere in the distance, checkpoints and barbed-wire fences stand guard. Floodlights hum. Soldiers keep watch over lines drawn by a cruel empire. Maps folded in government offices insist that one shore belongs to one nation, and the other shore belongs to another. 

The rivers pay little attention, for water never learned ownership. 

Instead, the Indus remembers when this land had no borders at all. It recalls boundless forests, small towns baked from mudbrick, potters kneading clay from its banks, merchants loading boats onto its waters, and children running barefoot through streets whose names have long since disappeared beneath the dust. 

The Chenab reminisces about different things. Songs, to be precise. It remembers lovers speaking in whispers along its embankments, farewells shouted from crowded train platforms, and the weight of carrying tears so numerous they seemed capable of altering its course. 

It knows that grief is heavier than stone. 

For a long while, neither river speaks. A fish breaks the surface and vanishes again. Somewhere within the woods, an owl hoots in hushed towns, as though probing them to speak. The moon climbs higher to sit with Venus. 

At last, the Chenab stirs in anticipation. “What news?” It asks. 

The other considers the question. It has witnessed the rise of empires with declarations of permanence and their consequential collapse into footnotes. It has seen kings etch their names into rocks only for the wind and water to erase them. It knows that most human certainties can survive only a few generations. Still, it answers, “The hostility persists.” 

The Chenab responds with a deep sigh before curling around a bend and falling quiet. How many years has it been now? It has no perception of time, but its water holds memory. More importantly, it has hauled across its surface an endless inheritance of anger passed from one generation to the next like a family heirloom that nobody remembers choosing. “Strange,” it says at last. “They built a border between themselves, but not between us.” 

The Indus allows the observation to settle. Its water babbles up to respond in kind, “They tried.” A long stretch of silence ensued. Both were haunted by the memories of concrete walls driven into their riverbeds, the sounds of gates opening and closing according to treaties signed in distant rooms, and their tributaries being severed and redirected. Veins cut beneath the skin, floodwaters measured and negotiated, entire stretches polluted and left exposed to the sun. 

There was never a fence drawn across the waters.

But there were other ways of teaching a river where it ought not to go. 

“They tried,” the Indus repeats. “And sometimes, they succeeded.” The Chenab lets out a small and awkward chuckle, its sound rippling through the reeds and startling a family of birds into flight. For a moment, the stale grief loosens its grip.

“There is something else,” the Chenab begins with some restraint, growing serious once more. “I heard news of the girl.”

The Indus says nothing but its water stills. Far downstream, where moonlight pools in silver patches across the surface, memory begins to stir. “Where?” It asks.

“Far from your banks.”

“I know that much.” 

“A group of historians passed by my waters some weeks ago,” says the Chenab. “They say that she lives several borders across the city that made her.” 

“Lives?” The Indus asks, ruminating over a city of kiln-fired brick where dust rose almost constantly from the narrow streets. 

“As much as memory can,” the other responds with caution. “ I never knew her as you did. By the time her story reached me, she was already behind glass.”

“So she still cannot return.” The Indus falls silent. 

Somewhere, the rivers continue their meeting, indifferent to the borders drawn above them.

II. AYENA

It was a sweltering summer day in Delhi when I first met her. 

Accompanied by a few of my college friends, I decided to go museum-hopping on what seemed like the sunniest day of the year. It was not. The capital continued to have several such days. Looking back now, it makes perfect sense why the inhabitants of this city speak and act the way that they do. With profanity upon profanity in every sentence, they are only mirroring a relentless sun that constantly mocks them between April and August.

As half a dozen of us spilled out of the auto-rickshaw, we felt the overhead sun cursing and belittling us. Within moments, we turned into ill-begotten monsters that only settled down once we reached the air-conditioned corridors of the National Museum. It always brought me great joy to see the ticket prices: 20 Rupees for Indians, 500 Rupees for firangis. A decent method of receiving reparations for more than 200 years of colonization, I’d say. I did the math once. With approximately 250,000 annual tourists visiting the National Museum, it would still take 34,301,070 years to make up for the 45 trillion dollars stolen by the British Empire. 

Inside, the air changed its temperature but not its weight. It carried the stillness of preserved entities; objects that had outlived their urgency were now suspended in a bureaucratic eternity. I walked through its passages of chronologically divided history. My friends dispersed quickly, each drawn to artifacts that called out to them through glass. I lingered behind, folding my arms behind my back, as one does in museums.

What stopped me had not been any grand sculptures or neatly arranged timelines of dynasties. Instead, it had been something small, almost dismissible: a figure no larger than my palm, standing alone in her vitrified silence. One arm rested on her hip with the casual arrogance of someone unafraid of being seen. The other hung loosely, unbothered by symmetry. Her head tilted slightly, as if listening to a rhythm no one else in the room had been invited to hear. The label read: 

Dancing Girl, Mohenjo-daro. Bronze. c. 2500 BCE.

A small mirthless laugh escaped my lips. Mohenjo-daro? As in, present-day Sindh, Pakistan? That meant she was 913 kilometers from her home. How far was I? I would never know. 

An aftermath of the partition was the division of archeological relics between the two countries. From the Indus Valley Civilization, India received the Dancing Girl, while Pakistan received the Priest King. Here, I stood in front of a “Pakistani” in India. The irony was not lost on me. I was surprised that they did not put handcuffs on her wrists and create a biopic where she used the word ‘maqsad’ in conversation.

Regardless, the sight of her was unsettling. Between Mohenjo-daro and New Delhi lay countless cities, rivers, and fences. Amongst them were trains that departed full and arrived empty, makeshift tents and camps that swelled beneath the Red Fort, families carrying keys to houses they would never see again, wells crowded with corpses, residues of riots in the lakes, vultures feeding on the living dead, and thousands treading a one-way path toward uncertainty. The Dancing Girl had crossed none of it herself, yet somehow, she stood at the end of that journey too.

Minutes passed, but I could not stop staring at her wrists. 

The two dozen bangles climbing up her arms kept me frozen in my place. At some point, I looked down at my own wrists. I was wearing thin bangles that day—mismatched and colorful pieces I picked up from Janpath and Sarojini. They clinked softly when I moved, a sound so ordinary I had never once paid attention to it before. But in that moment, the noise felt newly legible; as if sound itself could be a kind of inheritance. 

Her stillness, and my noise. 

Her bronze certainty, and my restless urge toward lineage. 

Since that day in 2022, I have not been without a stack of bangles; never matching, never arranged with care—glass, metal, thread, and sometimes beads that crack if you look at them too long. I wear them as a reminder for my reflection in a bronze statue trapped behind a looking glass. I wear them as a keepsake for the dancing girl with a visceral longing to return home. 

I wear them so I do not forget my rage. 

III. ABA O AJDAD

When I was sixteen, I traveled to New York by myself. I knew nobody in the city except a set of distant relatives whom I had only met twice in my life. Partly because they lived in America, and mostly because they were from Pakistan. My parents trusted them to take care of me while I was abroad. And God, did they take care of me! If given the chance, they would have set their hearts out on a platter. As in all desi cultures, their primary priority was to feed me. They took me on multiple tours across the city, introduced me to their favorite restaurants, showed me their workplaces, and bragged about me to their family friends. 

I constantly saw reflections of my aunts and uncles back in Lucknow in them, and often called them by the wrong names because of how familiar they seemed to me. In a sense, it was pattern recognition; the same kind of devotion threaded through their actions, the same sense of love exuding from their words, and the same facial structures and hair. I wondered then, how distant could we possibly be? 

It was through them that I learned more about my lineage and the inevitable grief that surrounded it. After the partition, my grandmother’s oldest sister got married and caught a train to Karachi. Several decades later, I met her descendants in Damascus. In 2019, I crossed the oceans that lay between us and visited them in New York. They told me, with vivid detail, about their home back in Pakistan, and I spoke to them about Lucknow. We laughed at how analogous the two cities sounded; littered with monuments and crafted by a similar strand of people running its bazaars. Tucked in between were communities that held similar mannerisms, foods, fashion styles, and languages. 

A few years later, I would befriend a girl from Pakistan who seemed to be a replica of my inner self in a different body. We treaded parallel life paths that crossed only when the time was right. We found, in our limited differences, that our experiences of growing up between India, Pakistan, Dubai, and New Zealand were nearly identical. And so, the same thought recurs in my mind, looping itself into a knot that I cannot seem to unravel. 

How do we name distance when resemblance keeps returning?

My ancestors must have crossed many borders. 

But I inherited one that continues to haunt me. 

My heart sinks to my stomach when I write about this. So I evade the possibility of writing it at all. Or perhaps I only write around it, circling its edges the way water circles a shore it cannot cross. Still, something pulls me back to the rivers that run through these divided and undivided lands. The Indus. The Chenab. They do not speak in histories or nations, but in accumulation; in what has been carried, lost, and refuses to settle.  

In their depths, I find the blood of countless ancestors slain for a nameless power—their names rearranged by geographies, their lives split by maps drawn elsewhere, and their cities divided by borders that never made any sense to me. Hostility tends to run deep, but so does grief, which is what remains as the price we pay for love and connection stretched across impossible distances. 

My connection to people on the other side of the barbed wire often runs in circles, but always arrives at the same conclusion. The borders were only drawn up to keep us apart. Now, seventy-something years later, descendants of both nations meet like the sun and the moon in the fragile seams of the sky; in distant lands, in the vanishing twilight, or in the hesitant hours of dawn. They appear as a brief alignment of light that lasts just long enough to suggest that separation was never complete, only scheduled. When the day renews, they withdraw into opposite horizons, as if proximity itself were something that the world could not sustain for long. 

In these brief moments of alignment, I carry with me a past that is secondhand. It comes to me not as an experience, but as a relay: stories told across tables, names repeated until they begin to sound like memory, and places I can point to but never enter. Without my trying, I become the dancing girl behind a glass pane. 

It is a realization that knocks the breath out of my lungs. All that I have inherited is an echo; fragments of lives that insist on resemblance even as they remain out of reach. History that returns to me in refractions as though it too, understands that some distances are not meant to be crossed—only circulated between people who are not allowed to meet except in passing light. 

The rivers continue to flow across India and Pakistan. The water finds its way home. 

The people do not.