Lahore, October 2000.
The air smelled faintly of roasted corn and the smoke of firecrackers that drifted across the old city like restless ghosts. The evening light was golden, pouring over the minarets and the peeling walls of Anarkali Bazaar, where stalls glowed with glass bangles, embroidered dupattas, and paper lanterns imported from Delhi.
Arif stood behind the counter of his father’s stationery shop, his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, counting rupees with the mechanical patience of a man who had learned early that small businesses survive not by passion but by habit. The day had been long, but profitable—students from the nearby college had bought Diwali cards, despite the festival not being part of Lahore’s official rhythm anymore.
He looked up when the bell above the door jingled.
A girl entered, her dupatta fluttering like a strip of firelight. She had the look of someone who didn’t belong entirely to this side of town—clean sandals, pressed kurta, a quiet nervousness in her eyes.
“Do you sell diyas?” she asked, her Urdu careful and lilting.
Arif blinked. “Clay ones?”
She nodded.
He hesitated. “You won’t find them easily here. Maybe in Shah Alami, if someone still makes them.”
“I tried,” she said softly. “They told me to come here. Said you might help.”
Her voice carried a trace of Indian Hindi, not Punjabi. Arif tilted his head. “You’re not from here, are you?”
“My family moved last year. From Delhi.”
That explained it. The Partition had been fifty-three years ago, but its shadow still leaned over both sides of the border, shaping who belonged and who didn’t.
“I’m Arif,” he said finally. “Let me check the back.”
He rummaged through old stock and returned with a small box of terracotta lamps, dusted with age. “Leftovers from the nineties,” he smiled. “No one buys them anymore. You can take them.”
Her eyes brightened. “No, I’ll pay.”
He shook his head. “Consider it a gift for your festival.”
She smiled—a small, grateful smile that lingered longer than courtesy required.
Her name was **Kavya Mehta**, the daughter of a retired professor who had come to Lahore for a teaching exchange at Punjab University. They lived in a modest house near Gulberg, where her mother grew tulsi plants in secret and lit a small diya every evening behind drawn curtains.
In the days that followed, Kavya returned to Arif’s shop often—sometimes for notebooks, sometimes for nothing at all. She asked him questions about the city, about where to find good samosas, about whether the Shalimar Gardens still looked like the ones in the Mughal paintings.
He found himself answering more than he needed to.
They began to meet outside—first by accident, then by unspoken intent. They walked along Mall Road, past the old cinema halls where Indian movies were occasionally screened in secret. She liked talking about Delhi; he liked listening, though he’d never admit it.
One evening, when the air turned crisp with autumn, she said quietly, “It’s strange. Back there, we heard stories of Lahore as something lost, something we could never see. And now I’m here, but everyone reminds me that I’m still an outsider.”
Arif looked at her. “Maybe we all are outsiders in our own cities now.”
She smiled. “You sound like a poet.”
He laughed. “No, I just listen too much to Radio Pakistan.”
Their laughter echoed under the gulmohar trees, mingling with the distant sound of a muezzin’s call to prayer.
Diwali approached quietly that year, almost like a rumor. The few Hindu families left in Lahore planned small gatherings behind closed doors, lighting oil lamps discreetly so as not to attract attention. But Kavya wanted more.
“I miss the sky full of lamps,” she told Arif. “Here it’s just… dark.”
Arif was closing his shop when she said this, her voice heavy with homesickness. He hesitated, then said, “Come tomorrow evening. Near the old bridge across the Ravi.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
---
The next night, Kavya arrived at the bridge just after sunset. The river flowed sluggishly, reflecting the lights of passing motorbikes and the occasional spark of fireworks from a distant neighborhood. Arif stood there with a small paper bag.
Inside were a dozen clay diyas.
“I cleaned them,” he said. “And borrowed oil from the shop next door.”
Her eyes widened. “Arif, if someone—”
“No one will care,” he said softly. “It’s just light. Light doesn’t ask who you are.”
They placed the lamps along the railing, shielding them from the wind with their palms. One by one, the flames flickered to life, their reflections trembling on the dark surface of the water.
For a moment, the Ravi looked like it was carrying stars.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.
He didn’t answer. He was watching her face, how the firelight caught in her eyes.
But beauty, in their world, was never without consequence.
The next week, rumors began to swirl—someone had seen Arif with “that Hindu girl from India.” His uncle warned him: “This is not Bombay, boy. People talk.”
Kavya faced her own storm. Her father, already cautious about their presence in Lahore, forbade her from visiting the old city again. “We’re guests here,” he said. “And guests don’t make noise.”
For days, she stayed away. The shop felt emptier to Arif. He told himself it didn’t matter, that he was foolish to let someone from across the border take root in his thoughts. But each evening, he found himself watching the door.
Then, one afternoon, she appeared—breathless, eyes wet.
“My father’s been transferred,” she said. “We’re going back to Delhi next week.”
He froze. “So soon?”
“They said it’s better. Safer.”
There was silence between them, thick and aching.
Finally, she said, “I wanted to thank you. For the lamps.”
He tried to smile. “Maybe one day you’ll light them again. On your side of the border.”
“And you?” she asked. “Will you light them here?”
He looked away. “Maybe I’ll try.”
Their last evening together was on the same bridge. The air was cooler now, and the water below darker. They didn’t speak much. She handed him a small packet—inside was a diya, wrapped carefully in cloth.
“Keep it,” she said. “Light it when you think of me.”
He nodded, unable to speak.
When she turned to leave, he said, “Kavya.”
She stopped.
“Do you think… people like us can ever belong to the same sky?”
She smiled faintly, tears in her eyes. “The sky doesn’t have borders, Arif. Only the people who look up at it do.”
And then she was gone.
---
Years passed.
Lahore changed, as cities do. The old bazaar shrank, swallowed by modern shops and neon signs. Arif took over his father’s store and later moved it online. He married once, briefly, but the relationship dissolved quietly, leaving behind polite distance and a shared silence.
Every Diwali, though, he climbed to the roof of his building with that same clay diya. He would fill it with mustard oil, light the wick, and place it beside the radio that still played old ghazals.
No one in the neighborhood ever asked why a Muslim shopkeeper lit a lamp on a Hindu festival. Maybe they thought it was for decoration. Maybe they didn’t want to know.
But he knew.
Across the river, beyond the invisible line that cut through maps and hearts, there was a city called Delhi. And perhaps, on some terrace there, a woman named Kavya Mehta lit another lamp at the same time—its flame trembling against the October wind, mirroring his.
He liked to think of it that way: two tiny points of light, miles apart, keeping faith with a memory that had outlived everything else.
In 2010, a group of Indian journalists visited Lahore for a cultural exchange. Arif, now in his forties, was invited to speak at a small heritage event about preserving old city crafts. He almost declined—public speaking wasn’t his strength—but something nudged him to go.
After his talk, a woman approached him. Her hair was streaked with gray, her sari modest, her eyes still carrying that unmistakable mixture of curiosity and courage.
“Arif?” she said softly.
He froze.
“Kavya?”
She nodded, smiling through tears.
They stood there, wordless for a long time. The years between them fell away like dust shaken from an old book.
Later, they walked through the bazaar together, now noisy with tourists and electric lights. “You stayed,” she said.
“And you came back.”
“I told them I wanted to see the city again,” she said. “I wanted to see if it still remembered me.”
He looked around at the changed streets, the posters, the crowd. “Cities forget,” he said. “But rivers remember.”
That evening, he took her once more to the bridge. The old lamps were gone, but the river was still there, dark and slow.
“I still have it,” he said, pulling the diya from his pocket. It was chipped now, the clay brittle.
“You kept it all this time?” she whispered.
He nodded. “It’s the only thing that ever crossed the border and stayed alive.”
She took a matchstick, lit the wick, and together they placed it on the water. The small flame drifted downstream, trembling like a heartbeat.
Neither of them spoke. They didn’t need to.
When Kavya returned to Delhi, she wrote him a letter—not romantic, not sentimental, but filled with the quiet truth that comes after years of silence.
> “Maybe love is not always meant to win,” she wrote. “Maybe it’s meant to endure quietly, like a lamp that refuses to go out, even when no one is watching.”
He never replied. There was nothing left to say. But every year, when Diwali came, he still lit that single lamp on his roof.
Sometimes the flame sputtered in the wind. Sometimes it burned steady till dawn.
And in those moments, Arif believed that love, like light, doesn’t belong to one faith or one country. It simply exists—fragile, luminous, and infinite, crossing rivers and borders alike.
In 2020, a journalist writing a story on “vanishing Hindu memories of Lahore” found an old man tending a stationery shop near Anarkali Bazaar.
When she asked him if he remembered the Hindu families who once lived there, he smiled faintly and said, “I remember one. She used to buy diyas.”
He said nothing more.
But that evening, as the sun sank over the Ravi, the old man climbed to his rooftop once again. He lit a single clay lamp, the same one he had kept for twenty years, and placed it by the edge.
From across the horizon, a faint wind blew, carrying with it the smell of fireworks and incense.
He closed his eyes, imagining another flame flickering somewhere far away, across a border drawn by men who never knew how love could outlast their maps.
The diya’s light wavered once, then steadied—soft, persistent, and eternal.