🌑 “BENEATH THE DUST”
Lahore had a way of swallowing the truth.
Not suddenly—no.
It did it slowly, grain by grain, like dust settling on forgotten windowsills.
People walked through the narrow streets as though their footsteps left no trace, as though their sins scattered and dissolved into the city’s evening smog.
Kashif often wondered if the city had a conscience.
He doubted it.
Nineteen years old, lanky, soft-spoken, and haunted by the echo of his mother’s voice, he moved through the streets of Misri Shah with the uneasy sensitivity of someone who saw too much and spoke too little. His mother had raised him with outdated things—honesty, dignity, decency—words most people now used sarcastically.
When she died, the neighborhood aunties brought dishes of biryani and spiritual comfort that felt as artificial as their smiles. They said he would “learn the world now.” He didn’t know then how sharply their prophecy would unfold.
I. The Neighbourhood With Two Faces
Misri Shah was full of contradictions.
Every street had a mosque, every home had a moral slogan above the door.
Yet, right beside those words, people carved out little windows of corruption and peered through them proudly.
On Fridays, during noon prayer, the entire lane echoed with virtue. The men pressed their foreheads to prayer mats, and the women lectured girls about modesty and reputation. But once night fell, the moral script flipped entirely. Gambling tokens clattered behind steel shutters, cheap drugs passed from hand to hand, and gossip flowed like open sewer water.
Kashif saw it all — and felt sickened by it in a way that made him feel old.
But no one represented this hypocrisy more perfectly than Chaudhry Nafees.
II. The Guardian of Morality
Chaudhry Nafees, the local political heavyweight, had a belly full of biryani, a beard trimmed with surgical precision, and a voice that could drown out microphones.
His posters—massive, smiling, preaching honesty—hung on every pole.
He often gave little sermons before elections, standing on a stage, one hand on his heart:
“Our youth must stay pure. Our women must stay modest. Our culture must stay protected.”
People clapped enthusiastically. Kashif did not.
He knew what the others didn’t — or pretended not to know.
Because Billo Masi, the old maid who cleaned the politician’s house, had told him stories.
III. The Truth Billo Masi Carried
Billo Masi was sixty, with a hunched back and a tongue sharp enough to cut through steel.
She cleaned homes, overheard secrets, and stitched people’s reputations together like old cloth.
One day she told Kashif:
“Beta, the dirtiest rooms are not the ones I clean. They are the ones behind locked doors.”
She described things with disgust:
the whispered promises, the late-night meetings, the underage maid who had disappeared after “helping with election paperwork.”
Everyone knew something, but no one said anything.
One night, while returning from work, Billo saw Chaudhry Nafees slipping into a small hotel with a scared, trembling girl barely sixteen.
“Studying,” he had said when the girl’s mother asked where she was going.
Studying.
The word was filthier than anything Billo had scrubbed in her life.
She told Kashif because she trusted him—and because she knew no one else cared.
IV. Sana: The Girl With a Target on Her Back
Across the lane lived Sana, 22 years old, bold-eyed, tired from life, and fighting a war no one wanted to understand.
Her father was on dialysis; her brother had disappeared abroad and sent nothing home.
Sana worked at a small IT office, often returning home late.
That alone was enough to ruin her image.
At first, it was whispers:
“She comes home after 10.”
“Must be something wrong.”
“She laughs too freely.”
“She wears lipstick.”
Then it turned uglier.
Boys giggled when she walked past. Men stared from behind newspapers. Women made dua that their daughters would not “become like her.”
Only Kashif knew the truth:
Sana worked late because overtime paid for her father’s treatment.
Her entire life revolved around keeping him alive one more month, one more week, one more day.
But the city didn’t care.
It smelled vulnerability like blood.
V. The Day the Rumor Became a Weapon
One evening, Kashif found Sana crying beside the shutter of a closed milk shop.
Her shoulders shook quietly, like she didn’t want the world to see her break.
He hesitated, then approached softly.
“Sana apa… what happened?”
She looked at him with eyes filled with exhaustion rather than tears.
“They said I was seen in a hotel,” she whispered, voice trembling.
“I wasn’t even on that side of the city.”
A hotel.
Kashif felt the ground shift under him.
That was Chaudhry Nafees’s whisper campaign — the same tactic he used on any girl who rejected his “protection” or dared walk independently.
He destroyed reputations to hide his own sins.
The hypocrisy burned inside Kashif.
VI. Kashif Decides to Fight Back
For the first time in his quiet life, Kashif felt a rage that did not fit inside his body. He decided he would expose the politician, reveal the truth, show the city what it refused to see.
Billo Masi gave him details:
dates
hotel receipts she had secretly photographed
the girl’s name
the lies being told
Sana wanted none of it.
She pulled him aside and hissed urgently:
“You think anyone will believe you? They will crush you, Kashif. Truth doesn’t survive here.”
He didn’t listen.
Somewhere deep inside, his mother’s voice whispered:
“You don’t stand with the powerful. You stand with the right.”
VII. The First Blow
Kashif printed the receipts.
He wrote down the girl’s statement.
He gathered proof—real, undeniable proof—and took them to the neighborhood elders.
They looked at the evidence, stroked their beards, exchanged glances.
Then they said the sentence that killed something in him:
“Maybe the girl misunderstood.”
“Maybe the receipts are forged.”
“Maybe you’re being manipulated.”
And finally—
“Beta, don’t involve yourself. Chaudhry sahib is a respected man.”
Respected.
The word tasted like poison.
VIII. The Retaliation
By morning, rumors about Kashif had started.
He was “unstable.”
He was “influenced by bad company.”
He was “spreading lies because he wanted attention.”
Sana was blamed again.
“First the girl… now the boy. Bad character spreads fast.”
Kashif looked around and saw masks everywhere.
Real faces were rare, almost mythical.
He understood then:
This city did not want truth.
It wanted silence.
IX. Confrontation
Frustrated, he went to Chaudhry Nafees directly.
The powerful man sat in his plush living room like a king on a throne.
Kashif placed the proof on the table.
“This is the truth,” he said quietly.
Chaudhry Nafees smiled gently, almost kindly.
“Beta, truth is not in paper. Truth is in power.”
Then he whispered, leaning close:
“And I have power.
You have nothing.”
The sentence crushed him more brutally than any slap.
X. The Final Betrayal
The next evening, police arrived.
Not for Nafees.
For Kashif.
They accused him of blackmailing the politician.
Someone had filed a complaint.
A “concerned citizen,” they said.
Sana rushed out of her home, shouting that it was a lie, but no one cared.
Women peeked from balconies.
Men shook their heads sadly.
Children giggled.
As the police dragged him away, Kashif realized the city had chosen its villain—and it wasn’t the guilty one.
XI. The Quiet Departure
He was released after two days — the station officer knew he had done nothing. But they warned:
“Leave the neighborhood. It’s safer for you.”
So he did.
He packed a small bag, walked through the street one last time, and noticed how the dust hung heavy in the air — thick, suffocating, indifferent.
As he left the lane, azan echoed from the mosque.
A pure sound, calling toward purity.
But Kashif knew better now.
Purity ended at the mosque door.
Outside, the city returned to its darker nature.
He whispered as he walked away:
“The filth isn’t in the streets.
It’s in people’s minds.”
And the dust swallowed him, the same way it swallowed truth.
✍ Written by:
Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal
Pen Name: Faraz Parvez
🌐 Read more powerful stories, thought pieces, and insightful articles at:
www.TheMindScope.net
