Na to raahat hai jannat mein, na sukoon jahanam mein, Main to us dil mein rehta hoon, jahan Nizamuddin Auliya hain.

— Amir Khusrau

It begins, as all hauntings worth keeping do, with rain.

Not the brash, boastful kind that bruises the streets of Delhi , but the slower, secretive drizzle that lingers—like memory, like melancholy, like a voice that won’t be silenced. It was on such a night, when thunder murmured its monsoon prayers and the house breathed in half-sleep, that I first heard the song that would become my shadow.

Kahe ko byaahe bides, arre lakhiya baabul mohe?

Why have you married me off to a foreign land, O father with the eyes of light?

I must have been 10, perhaps 11—too young to name despair, old enough to recognise it. Umrao Jaan (1981) shimmered on our television scr

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