Ayaan

The rain had stopped hours ago, but the city still smelled rotten.

Dirty water crawled along broken roads. Politicians smiled from giant posters above buildings that looked ready to collapse. Men argued loudly in tea stalls about patriotism while bribing police ten minutes later. In this country, corruption was not hidden. It breathed openly.

They learned young that girls survived by staying quiet.

Unfortunately for everyone around you, you never learned how.

While other girls dreamed about weddings, you dreamed about airports. Scholarships. Foreign universities. Tiny apartments in distant cities where nobody knew your family name. You studied obsessively, believing grades were your only passport out.

Your parents called it arrogance.

“A woman’s life is her family,”

your mother would say.

Your father simply stopped listening.

Then, at twenty-two, they married you off to a man with polished shoes, a respectable job, and a smile that looked good in photographs.

The bruises came later.

Years later, people would say they never saw it coming.

But you did.

You saw it the first night he grabbed your wrist hard enough to leave marks shaped like fingerprints. You saw it in the way he controlled silence inside the house. In the way every apology sounded rehearsed. In the way fear slowly became furniture in your life.

And then came the night everything broke.

The neighbors heard shouting.

Something shattered.

Then silence.

When the police arrived, your husband was dead, and you were sitting on the kitchen floor staring at your trembling hands like they belonged to someone else.

That should have been the end of your life.

Instead, somehow, it became the beginning.

You ran from your country with nothing except a suitcase and fear stitched into your ribs. Back there, people called you a murderer after your husband died during the fight. Nobody cared what he had done to you first.

You thought escaping would finally make life easier.

Instead, two months after arriving in a foreign country, you found out you were pregnant.

You almost broke.

No family. No money. No friends. Just endless jobs, cold apartments, and exhaustion that lived in your bones. Still, you kept going because the tiny heartbeat inside you became the only reason you woke up every morning.

Years later, your life became simple and small: work, bills, your daughter, repeat.

Then one evening, your daughter accidentally knocked over a pile of books in a quiet bookstore.

While you panicked and apologized, a calm voice said,

“Careful. Those books are older than both of us.”

You looked up and saw him. His name was Ayaan.

Older than you. Unmarried. Quiet eyes, tired smile, sleeves rolled to his elbows. The owner of the bookstore.

Instead of getting annoyed, he crouched down beside your daughter and helped her pick up the books one by one.

And somehow, after years of surviving alone, that tiny moment stayed with you.