Title: “Gulab Jamun for Two”
—A Love Story Measured in Rupees, Secrets, and Steam
By Faraz Parvez
Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal
Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA
(Pseudonym of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal)
Karachi, 1998. A Bakery. A Boy. A Secret.
The city’s electricity was gone again, but Rehmat Sweets glowed like a stubborn ember in Saddar.
Inside, the boy from the tandoor stood over a vat of syrup, his shirt wet with steam. He was Kashi, orphan of Lyari, part-time cook, full-time dreamer. He had fallen in love with a customer—one who never spoke to him.
She came every Thursday at dusk.
She wore a school uniform. Tight braids. Ink on her fingertips.
And always ordered the same: two gulab jamuns, in one box.
A Bakery of Silences
The bakery workers noticed. Teased him. “Your girlfriend is punctual.”
Kashi only smiled.
He had never dared speak. But he began to arrange the gulab jamuns with care—softest ones in the center, a drop of rosewater like perfume.
One Thursday, she didn’t come. Nor the next.
He told himself she had exams. A wedding. A fever. But the box he prepared stayed untouched.
Until six weeks later… she returned.
Wearing a white scarf. No braids. Her eyes swollen from tears or sleep.
But she smiled.
“Two gulab jamuns, please.”
He passed the box.
“Why always two?” he finally asked.
She looked down. Whispered.
“One for me. One for someone who no longer eats sweets.”
What Was Never Said
That night, he went home with burns on his arms—and a smile on his face.
He never asked again. But every Thursday, he waited.
Sometimes she came. Sometimes not.
But he always made the box.
Because love, sometimes, is not proposal or poetry.
It is warm sugar, offered in silence.
By Faraz Parvez
Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal
Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA
(Pseudonym of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal)
📚 For more romantic fables from the tea-stalls, tandoors, and train stations of the subcontinent, visit our blog:
🌐 farazparvez1.blogspot.com
Some love stories end in weddings. Others end in warm syrup, slowly cooling in a box that no one opens.
