grungus

boyfriend!uzair who is extremely awkward initially and keeps overdoing everything because he doesn’t want you to feel that this is his first real relationship ever. instead of all of those things coming across as overbearing, you are totally endeared by his over-the-top gestures. even after a significant time has passed in your relationship and he has become much more relaxed around you now, his habit of doing extra never really goes away— the constant overcompensation just becomes his permanent love language.

boyfriend!uzair who silently starts observing Rehman’s behavior towards Ulfat with very keen, sharp eyes and then tries to imitate the same when he is around you with utmost sincerity in his imperfectly perfect actions. any and every ounce of his tough guy persona is entirely dismantled whenever he is around you.

boyfriend!uzair who is even more of a yapper than you are and tells you about his day in detail, including the number of goals he scored in the daily football match of their factory and every other inside joke that was pulled during the day, even mimicking everyone’s voice while telling you about those tales. 

boyfriend!uzair who is just as much of a listener. he never interrupts you while you are speaking, sitting there like a starstruck, dazed statue, too lost in the glint of your beautiful eyes, which often irritates you because it makes you think that he wasn’t listening to anything you said.

“tum sunn bhi rahe ho mai tab se kya keh rahi hu?” he would then proceed to smoothly recount everything you had said word by word, erasing away all your doubts. 

he also loves to spend hours being on call with you, especially during the night hours, eating your head away in peace, refusing to hang up until both of you are half asleep. 

boyfriend!uzair who won’t stop speaking about football and his eternal love for Maradona whenever he gets a chance. his definition of an ideal date is you agreeing to watch a football match with him inside his jeep where he has arranged a warm blanket, your favorite snacks and cold drinks for the two of you as the game plays out on a propped up screen.

boyfriend!uzair who can’t keep his hands off you. they are a permanent fixture on your waist if you are within arm’s reach. his heavy palm resting against you, pulling you flush against his side. he also loves keeping his fingers intertwined with yours, squeezing gently every few minutes, that feeling grounding him more than words ever could.

boyfriend!uzair who loves to drive you around in his jeep. one hand stays on the steering wheel but the other one always on your thigh. his hand grows increasingly restless with every passing moment, travelling upwards, tracing slow circles over your clothes with a smirk plastered on his face and sometimes even cupping your pussy over the layers of clothes only to tease you.

boyfriend!uzair who secretly wishes to get stuck in a traffic jam every time the two of you go out. just as he has his passenger princess trapped in the seat, he pushes your legs apart, his fingers going under your clothes and curling deep in your velvety walls, fingerfucking you till you gush all over his thick digits. the windows of his jeep are tinted for a reason—a very filthy one at that.

boyfriend!uzair who will help you sneak out of your house at night for a long drive with him. on most such nights, both of you end up eating kulfi while sitting on the cool sand of the clifton beach with your head on his shoulder. many other nights end up with your thighs clamped around his head as he eats you out relentlessly on the bonnet of his jeep in some secluded place and sometimes with you pinned down in his backseat, the windows fogged up as he ruts in you, desperate to have you then and there.

boyfriend!uzair who knows he’s packing and would be comforting you profusely during your first time with him, talking you through every inch in the softest voice possible, kissing your tears away and murmuring praises against your skin until the pain melts into pleasure

boyfriend!uzair who turns into the whiniest, most pathetic boy ever the moment you tell him to put on a condom. he will literally pout, groan, and bury his face in the crook of your neck, kissing you there softly in an attempt to change your mind this time, complaining in his rough, husky voice about how he wants to feel you raw and how better it would feel that way. he has to give in eventually, and this is something that happens every single time, yet the grumbling is a sure thing.                                               

husband!uzair who went feral the first time you let him hit it raw on your wedding night. his thrusts were deep, messy, and desperate that night as if he was trying to carve his place inside your walls forever. he couldn’t stop moaning your name against your neck, hands gripping your hips hard enough to leave marks, completely lost in the feeling of his wife.

husband!uzair who wakes up before you every morning just so he can watch you sleep like a baby. he tucks your hair behind your ear, traces your cheek with his thumb, and presses the softest kiss to your forehead like you are the most precious thing in his world. to him, you actually are. 

husband!uzair who is a certified joru ka gulam. he never says it out loud but it is very much visible in his actions— one soft look from you and he is down to do anything you want him to. whatever his wife wants, his wife gets.

husband!uzair who never fails to call you up atleast once during the day, no matter how busy he is in the factory, even if the call lasts for just two minutes. he just needs to hear your voice to go about the rest of his day.  

husband!uzair who loves to lay down with his head in your lap after an exhausting day. he is addicted to the way your fingers thread through his hair, his eyes fluttering shut as you scratch his scalp and within minutes he’s half-asleep, completely at peace, mumbling sleepy compliments against your thigh because nothing relaxes him more than this.

husband!uzair who secretly loves getting sick or injured because it means he gets to have you fussing over him. he literally turns into the biggest baby in the smallest of such situations, wanting to soak up all of your undivided love, care and attention. 

but if you reverse the condition, he becomes a worried mother hen. he hates seeing you sick. he just hates seeing his wife in any sort of discomfort. when you are sick, he will skip work without a second thought just to stay by your side the whole day, feeding you warm soup and running his fingers through your hair till you fall asleep. 

husband!uzair who turns into a dramatic, clingy husband the moment you mention going to your parents’ house, even if it’s just for a few days. he will hover around you while you are packing your bag, sulking and asking you silly questions like “jana zaroori hai?”, “kitne din tak mujhe akela chhod ke jaa rahi ho?”, “mere bina mann lag jayega?”. he keeps pestering you and kissing you at the most random moments before you leave, already counting down the days till you would be back in his arms.

husband!uzair who would definitely fuck you in your childhood bedroom when he visits your parents’ home with you, telling you to tame your screams because the room next to yours was your parents’. “shhh, jaan… you wouldn’t want anyone to hear us, right?”. his heavy palm would remain clamped over your mouth as he plowed into you, eyes glinting with filthy satisfaction each time your cries and moans got muffled against his hand.

husband!uzair who gets hit with the worst baby fever when he saw you cradling your sister’s daughter against your chest. The way you were so soft with the little baby, cooing and talking in that baby language made something primal twist in his gut. that night, he pulled you close, his lips begging against your ear “mujhe bhi ek baccha chahiye, jaan… need to see you round with our baby.”

husband!uzair who comes back home for a short break from the factory, saying he needs to have his lunch at home, but he has come home only to eat you out. he loves ravishing your cunt, swallowing every honeyed drop of your essence like he has been starved of food and water for days. his nose nudges your clit deliciously each time he tries to reach his tongue far too deep in you. 

husband!uzair who doesn’t like to be disturbed when he is having his meal. he delivers a firm slap to your drenched core if you are squirming too much, before pulling you flush against his mouth again by a bruising grip on the soft skin of your plush thighs. he feels like he is in heaven between your thighs, getting pussydrunk, stopping only when you forcefully tug him up by his hair, drooling and begging for his cock.

husband!uzair who would tell you to “take it” in time with a particularly hard thrust when you are crying from overstimulation after having orgasmed… three— no four— actually you lost count. his fingers and mouth and cock have all had their turns and he still won’t stop, fucking you through every sob or whimper of “too much”

husband!uzair who would moan “meri jaan”, breathing hot and heavy next to your ear, peppering feverish kisses mindlessly down the column of your throat when he’s spilling thick ropes of his load deep inside you, breeding you nice and well. 

husband!uzair who has a habit of pressing a solitary, reverent kiss to your collarbone after he is done with you. it feels almost grateful, like a thank you to the woman who owns him  completely.

husband!uzair who loves falling asleep still buried deep inside your cunt. he says it keeps him warm, but in reality, he just loves the intimacy of staying connected to you, cock softening inside your warmth as he drifts off with his face tucked into your neck.

a/n: this has been in my drafts for over a month now... i remember isko road pe likhte likhte aa rahi thi main and i almost got hit by a car that day😭😭

taglist: @scarlet-shine @cloudmast @cherryyelixir @tanipartner @rehmandakaitswife @ninnimouse @budugu @celestecelina @desi-brownie @work-of-procrastination @prahelika-fics @baddiefication101 @obsessedwidskincare @mainyahaankyunhoon @harrystyleskiwi9 @goldenharrysworld @goodnightkatherine @kamalkafool @hereforfanfictionsfr @hairandjhumkhasintheverandah @cherryyelixir @layinglowkey @sanpiece @scentedwolfdragon @seasonofthenerd @psychicpandadefendor @sabii5 @yearnerray @maraudersbitchesassemble @noor-archive @kenkozkmg @gulaabjamun08 @warnermeadowsgirl @patrakilekha @clownoiogy @luvvkk @akshi-the-nirmata @kajuuuukatliiiiii @ninnimouse @sparksfromhell @chocolate-and-trouble @kriti-ki-dulhania @katieverstappen (using the taglist from one of my prev uzair fics, please dm me if you want to be removed)

JUST REALISED THAT PEOPLE HAVE NEVER CALLED ME HOT OR COOL, KAHI MAIN GUNGUNA TOH NAHI HOON 😭

ME WHEN MY COUSIN EATS MY SNACKS

Mummy, meri behn kithe hai?

ME AND MY ALL NIGHTER STUDY SESSIONS OVER ANYTHING >>>

POSSESSED BY CAFFINE AND MANIFESTATION

ME RN:

IF INDIAN PARENTS SPOKE HONESTLY

TO ALL THE DIVAS WHO DM ME/ FLOOD MY COMMENT SECTION OR ASK BOX/ MENTION ME IN ANY POSTS

LOVE YA GIRLSSSSSS 🫵💖💖🫂

SYNOPSIS: Uzair Baloch has run protection rackets, settled border disputes, and once made a man cry without saying a word. He cannot, it turns out, successfully pretend to court the wrong woman in front of the right one.

Akhlaq's idea. Akhlaq's terrible, terrible idea.

word count: 3.8k

A/N: kya matlab kal mera exam hain ? i actually had FUN writing which feels illegal. no angst. i tried to put angst in twice and physically deleted it both times. growth.

There is a category of decisions Uzair Baloch makes that he later understands, with total clarity and no possibility of appeal, to have been made by a stupider man wearing his face.

This is one of those decisions.

He is aware of this even as he is making it. That is the specific humiliation of it — it is not a decision he stumbles into. He walks into it with his eyes open.

It starts with Akhlaq, which to be honest most bad ideas do.

"Aap use dekhte hain," Akhlaq says, "aur phir kuch nahi karte. Yeh teen mahine se chal raha hai."

"Mein dekhta nahi hun."

Akhlaq has exprienced this first hand, and would like for it to be known that—he is very annoyed.

"Bhai." Akhlaq says this with the patience of a man addressing someone who has just claimed the sky is not blue. "Aap Aiza ki dukaan ke saamne se teen baar gol gol ghoom ke nikalte hai jab kuch lena tak nahi hota."

This is, unfortunately, true.

Aiza Sheikh runs a small stationery and embroidery-thread shop two streets from the Haveli, inherited from an aunt who had no children of her own and decided, with the brisk efficiency of a woman tired of waiting for the world to organise itself, that Aiza would do.

She is twenty-four. She has opinions about thread quality that she will share whether you have asked or not. She does the books for the shop in a hand so neat it looks typed, and she has never once, in the eight months Uzair has been finding excuses to walk past her shop, given any indication that she has noticed him noticing her.

This last part is the problem.

"Toh baat karien usse," Akhlaq says.

"Tujhe pata hai itna simple nahi hai."

"Kyun nahi hai bhai?"

Uzair does not have a clean answer for this, which is itself unusual, because Uzair Baloch generally has a clean answer for everything, filed and ready, the way other men keep correct change.

The honest answer is something closer to: because she has a way of looking at a person that makes him feel as though he is being assessed for structural integrity, and he is not entirely confident he would pass.

He does not say this to Akhlaq.

"Bohot kaam hai," he says instead.

Akhlaq looks at him the way you look at a man who has just told you the moon is made of roti.

The actual plan — and Uzair wants this on record, for whoever is keeping the record, that the plan was never his — arrives three weeks later, after a Friday in which Uzair walks past Aiza's shop, finds her in conversation with a man he does not recognise, and experiences a reaction so immediate and so physically uncomfortable that he has to stop on the corner and pretend to check his phone for several seconds before his face is safe for public viewing.

The man, it turns out, is her cousin from Hyderabad, visiting for a wedding.

Uzair learns this later, from Akhlaq, who finds the entire episode the single most entertaining thing that has happened to him in calendar memory.

"Aap wahan khade thein," Akhlaq says, wheezing slightly, "phone dekh rahe the jaise usme Pakistan ka future likha ho."

"Bas kar."

"Uska cousin tha!"

"Mujhe pata hai ab."

"Aapko nahi pata tha!" Akhlaq wipes his eyes. He is enjoying this in a manner Uzair finds personally offensive. "Yaar, agar tujhe itna farak padta hai jab koi aadmi uske saath khada ho, toh —" He stops.

Something crosses his face. The specific, dangerous something that means Akhlaq has had an idea, and Akhlaq's ideas, historically, have a success rate that does not encourage further ideas.

"Kya?" Uzair says, already suspicious.

"Aap kisi aur ke saath dikh jao."

Uzair stares at him.

"Sochiye," Akhlaq says, warming to it now, sitting forward, hands moving the way they do when he believes he is being brilliant. "Abhi tak aap sirf chakkar laga rahe hai. Woh aapko sirf grahak ki tarah dekhti hai. Lekin agar usne aapko kisi aur larki ke saath dekha — agar usne socha ki aap kisi aur mein interested hai —"

"Toh kya hoga?"

"Toh use farak padega!" Akhlaq spreads his hands as though he has just solved something in physics. "Bhai. Sabse purana tareeka hai."

"Yeh bewakoofi hai."

"Yeh purani aur azmaai hui bewakoofi hai," Akhlaq corrects. "Farak hai."

Uzair says no.

He says no for four full days, with conviction, the kind of conviction he applies to refusing bad business deals and worse alliances, and on the fifth day he is standing across the road from Aiza's shop watching her laugh at something her shop-neighbour's son has said — actually laugh, head back, the full unguarded version of it that she has never once produced in Uzair's direction in eight months of strategic loitering — and something in his chest does an undignified, expensive thing, and he goes and finds Akhlaq and says, with the air of a man surrendering a city: "Theek hai. Bata."

[The plan, as constructed by Akhlaq, has exactly one design flaw, which is that it requires a second woman, and the only woman Akhlaq can produce on short notice who is willing to participate in an elaborate scheme to manufacture romantic jealousy is his own younger sister, Saba, who agrees on the condition that Uzair owe her a favour of her choosing, unspecified, to be redeemed at any point in the future, no questions asked.

Uzair should have recognised this term as a warning.

He does not.]

The first attempt happens outside the mosque after Friday prayers, which is, in retrospect, not the ideal venue for a man to be seen romantically pursuing anyone, but Akhlaq's logic was that "sab log wahan hote hain, sabko pata chal jayega," which has the unfortunate virtue of being correct.

Saba is supposed to walk past, see Uzair, stop, and engage him in friendly, visible conversation. Uzair is supposed to receive this conversation with the warm, slightly besotted energy of a man being courted.

Aiza, who walks this route home from the shop every Friday at this approximate time, is supposed to see this, register it, and experience some galvanising jealousy that will rearrange eight months of indifference into something workable.

What actually happens is this:

Saba walks up, says, "Salaam, Uzair bhai," with a completely straight face, and Uzair — who has had four days to prepare for this moment and has used none of them productively — says, "Salaam," in a voice so stiff it could have been notarised.

"Tujhe muskuraana tha," Saba mutters, still smiling for the benefit of any audience. "Itna khush dikh jaise tujhe maine nahi Aiza ne bulaaya ho"

"Mein khush hun."

"Tu aise khush hai jaise koi tera vehicle impound kar raha ho."

He attempts a smile. It does not go well. He can feel it not going well — can feel his own face failing to cooperate, the muscles arranging themselves into something closer to a man bracing for impact than a man enjoying a conversation — and Saba, watching this unfold with visible horror, says, under her breath, "Khuda ke liye, Uzair bhai, mein teri behen jaisi hun, tujhe itna ajeeb hone ki zaroorat nahi —"

"Mujhe pata hai."

"Toh aisa kyun kar raha hai —"

"Pata nahi!"

They are still arguing, in fierce undertones, both smiling with the desperate brightness of two people performing a play neither of them rehearsed, when Uzair looks past Saba's shoulder and sees Aiza.

She is standing outside her shop, locking up for the afternoon, and she has clearly seen the entire exchange — has seen Uzair Baloch standing in front of the mosque with a young woman, smiling the specific smile of a man trying too hard, and her expression is not jealousy.

Her expression is concern.

Genuine, uncomplicated concern, the look you give a man who appears to be having a difficult conversation, possibly a breakup, possibly a family dispute, possibly some private trouble that is none of her business but is nonetheless visible from across a street.

She does not look jealous.

She looks like she is wondering if he is okay.

This is worse. This is so much worse than indifference that Uzair spends the walk home recalculating the entire architecture of the plan, because somewhere in his chest a new and specific fear has installed itself: that Aiza Sheikh does not see him as a man who could plausibly be desired by anyone, only as a man who is, apparently, going through something.

"Pehli koshish thi bhai," Akhlaq says, unbothered, when Uzair reports the failure. "Aise nahi hota pehli baar mein."

"Mein iska part nahi banna chahta tha."

"Aapne hi kaha tha mujhse."

"Tune kaha tha 'soch'!"

"Aur aapne socha aur maan gaye," Akhlaq says, with the serene logic of a man who feels entirely vindicated. "Toh ab dosra try karte hain."

The second attempt is worse.

It is worse because Saba, having decided that subtlety was clearly not Uzair's strength, takes matters into her own hands and arrives at the small chai dhaba near Aiza's shop on a Tuesday evening, sits across from Uzair with the deliberate, theatrical fondness of someone performing courtship for an audience of one, and says, loudly enough to carry: "Uzair bhai, aapne mere liye yeh laaya?" — referring to a box of mithai that Uzair did, in a moment of poor planning, actually bring, on Akhlaq's insistence, as a "prop."

"Haan," Uzair says, because the lie has already been constructed and he is merely operating it.

"Kitna sweet hain aap," Saba says, opening the box with great ceremony, and then, lower, through her teeth, without moving her smiling mouth: "Yeh kaafi achi hain, waise. Tu khareed sakta hai mere liye aur bhi."

"Yeh ek baar ke liye tha."

"Tune kaha tha jo mein maangun."

He has, in fact, said this. He regrets it specifically and completely.

The performance proceeds. Saba laughs at things Uzair has not said anything funny about. Uzair attempts to look fond, which on his face resembles a man squinting into difficult sunlight. And Aiza — Aiza, who is sweeping the front step of her shop with the brisk efficiency she brings to everything — looks over exactly once.

She looks at the mithai box.

She looks at Saba, laughing.

She looks at Uzair, squinting.

And then she goes back inside and Uzair hears, with the specific clarity that only humiliation provides, the bell above her shop door ring as she shuts it slightly harder than necessary.

"Dekha," Akhlaq says later, when Uzair recounts this with the flat despair of a man describing a structural collapse. "Reaction mil gayi!"

"Woh gussa thi."

"Gussa bhi reaction hai!"

"Mujhpe nahi! Mithai pe thi shayad — "

"Bhai." Akhlaq leans forward, deeply serious, deeply wrong. "Gussa tab aata hai jab kisi cheez ki parwaah ho. Agar use farak nahi padta toh woh darwaza zor se band nahi karti."

Uzair wants to believe this. This is, he understands later, the precise mechanism by which he allows the plan to continue for a third, catastrophic attempt: he wants to believe it so badly that he stops applying to Akhlaq's theories the scrutiny he applies to literally everything else in his life.

[The archive — because there is always an archive, because Uzair Baloch is constitutionally incapable of not keeping one — does not begin with the mosque or the mithai. It begins four months earlier, with a torn shirt sleeve and a question of thread colour, and Uzair revisits it now with the specific masochism of a man checking old wounds to see if they still hurt.

He had gone in for thread. Black thread, specifically, for Ulfat bhabi, who had sent him with a swatch and very precise instructions he had already forgotten by the time he reached the shop.

Aiza had taken one look at the swatch and said, without looking up from her ledger, "Yeh kaala nahi hai. Yeh charcoal hai."

"Kya farak hai?"

She had looked up then. The look. The structural-integrity look. "Roshni mein farak padta hai." She had pulled three spools from the shelf without checking the labels, set them in a row, and said, "Yeh teeno mein se ek hoga jo bhabi ne maanga hai. Bata do unhe agli baar khud aayein, ya phone pe sahi rang bata dein — aap mardon ko rang nahi pehchaante."

He had bought all three spools, out of some instinct he did not examine at the time, and had walked home faintly amused by being scolded with such complete confidence by a woman half his size, and it had taken him almost three weeks to admit to himself that the amusement was the early architecture of something much larger.

He has been faintly amused, in this specific and expensive way, ever since.]

The third attempt is meant to be the conclusive one. Akhlaq, having exhausted subtlety and theatre, has decided the missing ingredient is stakes — a scenario in which Aiza is forced not merely to witness affection but to confront the possibility of losing access to Uzair entirely, which Akhlaq describes, with the confidence of a man who has clearly been reading something, as "scarcity."

"Scarcity?"

"Log cheezein zyada chahte hain jab unhe lagta hai ki woh chali jayengi."

"Mein cheez nahi hun."

"Aap samajhiye baat ko."

The plan, such as it is: Saba will arrive at the shop directly, under the pretext of buying thread, and will mention — casually, conversationally, the way you mention weather — that she and Uzair are discussing families meeting soon.

Marriage-adjacent language.

The nuclear option.

Akhlaq's theory is that this will collapse whatever wall of indifference Aiza has built and produce, finally, the jealousy the entire operation has been constructed to extract.

Uzair has serious reservations.When does he not?

But will he agree? Yes.

He voices none of them, because by this point he has entered the specific psychological state of a man so deep into a bad plan that turning back feels more humiliating than continuing, which is its own kind of stupidity, possibly the most dangerous kind, the kind that has historically ended empires.

He is standing across the road when it happens — close enough to see, far enough to maintain what he is still, against all evidence, calling deniability.

Saba goes in. He watches through the shop's open doorway as she picks up a spool of thread, says something he cannot hear, and watches Aiza's face do something complicated and fast that he also cannot read from this distance.

Then Aiza puts down her ledger.

Then Aiza walks to the doorway of her own shop, looks directly across the road at Uzair Baloch standing there with his hands in his pockets and his face arranged into what he believes is casual indifference, and says, in a voice that carries the entire length of the street with no particular effort:

"Uzair bhai. Idhar aao."

It is not a request. It has the same quality Aiza's voice always has, the brisk, structural, no-nonsense quality of a woman correcting thread colour, except now it is aimed directly at him, and every person within earshot — the paan shop owner, two boys on a single bicycle, an elderly man who has been pretending to read a newspaper outside the shop for the last twenty minutes for reasons of his own — turns to watch him cross the road.

He crosses the road.

Inside the shop, Saba has gone very still, the stillness of a co-conspirator recognising, late, that the operation has been compromised.

Aiza looks at Uzair. She looks at Saba. She looks back at Uzair.

"Aap dono shaadi kar rahe hain?" she says. Plainly. The same tone she uses for thread.

"Nahi," Uzair says, too fast.

"Saba ne abhi bataya."

"Woh —" He looks at Saba. Saba looks at the ceiling, which has, apparently, become extremely interesting. "Galat samjha aapne."

"Mujhe theek se samajh aaya," Aiza says. "Maine khud suna." She crosses her arms"Toh batao. Shaadi ho rahi hai, ya nahi ho rahi?"

"Nahi ho rahi," Saba says quickly, finding her voice, clearly deciding that self-preservation outranks loyalty to a plan she never fully believed in. "Maine — galti se — "

"Saba," Aiza says, without looking at her, "tum bahar jaake mera intezaar karo. Mein tumhe thread de dungi do minute mein."

Saba goes. Fast. Uzair has rarely seen a person leave a room with such efficiency.

This leaves Uzair Baloch alone in a thread shop with Aiza Sheikh, who is looking at him the way she looks at fabric she suspects has been mislabelled.

"Ab," she says. "Mujhe sach bolo."

He considers, briefly, the architecture of a lie. He has several available. He discards all of them, which surprises him, because lying has historically been a skill he is quite good at, and he finds that in this specific room, in front of this specific woman, the skill has simply stopped functioning, the way a key stops fitting a lock that has been changed.

"Saba meri kuch nahi hai," he says. "Akhlaq ki behen hai."

"Yeh mujhe pata hai. Poore mohalle ko pata hai."

"Toh —"

"Toh mujhe yeh samajh nahi aa raha,"Aiza says, "ki tum log pichle teen haftay se mere dukaan ke aas paas natak kyun kar rahe ho. Mithai, mosque, ab shaadi ki baatein.Uzair bhai. Mujhe dikhta hai jab koi cheez asli nahi hoti."

He has no response prepared for this, because no version of the plan accounted for the possibility that Aiza would simply identify the plan as a plan, correctly, on sight, the way she identifies charcoal pretending to be black.

"Toh kya tha yeh?" she says. Not angry. Worse than angry. Genuinely, simply curious, with the specific patience of someone willing to wait as long as necessary for an honest answer.

He could still lie. There is a version of this conversation where he produces some explanation about Saba, about a misunderstanding, about nothing at all, and walks out with his dignity slightly dented but intact, and never has to say the thing he has been not-saying for eight months.

He looks at her. At the ledger behind her with its perfect handwriting. At the three spools of thread, still on the shelf, still in the row she had arranged them in months ago, because apparently she had simply left them there, because apparently some small part of that day had also stayed with her, which he had not allowed himself to consider until exactly this moment.

"Mein chahta tha tumhe farak pade," he says. "Mujhse."

Silence.

"Isliye yeh sab kiya," he continues, because he has started now and there is no clean place to stop, the way there is no clean place to stop a wall once it has begun coming down. "Socha agar tum mujhe kisi aur ke saath dekhogi, tumhe — " He stops. Reorganises. "Akhlaq ka idea tha. Bahut bura idea tha."

"Bahut bura idea tha," Aiza agrees, immediately, with no hesitation whatsoever, which under different circumstances might have stung and right now simply feels like relief, like a window opening in a room that has been shut too long.

"Haan."

"Tumhe pata bhi hai shaadi ka jhoot kitna risky tha? Iss mohalle mein? Kal tak sabko pata chal jata ki Uzair Baloch ne Akhlaq ki behen se shaadi todi."

"Mujhe pata hai. Ab pata hai."

She looks at him for a long moment. The look has changed slightly — still the structural-integrity assessment, but with something underneath it now that he cannot immediately name, something that makes him feel less like fabric under inspection and more like a person standing in a room that has gotten suddenly very small.

"Tum seedha bata sakte the," she says.

"Haan."

"Toh kyun nahi bataya?"

This is the actual question. The one Akhlaq's entire elaborate, humiliating, multi-week plan had been constructed to avoid asking honestly even once, and here it is anyway, delivered plainly, by the one person whose plain delivery he has apparently spent eight months unable to stop thinking about.

"Kyunki," he says, "agar mein seedha bolta aur tum mana kar deti, toh kam se kam mujhe pata chal jata sach mein. Iss tarah —" He stops. Finds the rest of it. "Iss tarah mein bewakoof reh sakta tha thoda aur."

Something in her face moves. Not quite a smile.

"Aur ab?" she says.

"Ab tumne pakad liya. Toh ab koi rasta nahi bacha bewakoof rehne ka."

"Toh seedha pucho."

He looks at her. She is standing with her arms crossed, in a shop that smells like new thread and old paper, having just dismantled three weeks of strategy in under two minutes with nothing but plain observation, and he understands, with the specific clarity of a man finally arriving somewhere he has been circling for a long time, that this — exactly this, the bluntness, the refusal to let anything go unexamined, the complete absence of patience for his nonsense — is the precise quality that made him stupid about her in the first place.

"Aiza," he says. "Mujhe tumse pyar hain."

"Yeh behtar tha," she says. "Dekha, kitna asaan tha."

"Teen haftay lage."

"Tumhari galti hai. Maine pehle din se intezaar kiya tha ki tum seedha pucho."

He stares at her.

"Mujhe teen din mein pata chal gaya tha. Tum bahut subtle nahi ho, Uzair bhai."

"Akhlaq ne kaha tha mein achi acting kar raha hun."

"Akhlaq," Aiza says, with the flat, final judgement of a woman delivering a verdict, "ko thread aur logon dono ki samajh nahi hai."

[Outside, Saba is waiting exactly where she was told to wait, and when Uzair finally emerges — considerably later than two minutes, considerably more undone than when he went in — she takes one look at his face and says, "Theek hai. Ab tu mujhe woh favour de raha hai jo maine maanga tha, aur woh favour hai: kabhi mujhe dobara apne natak mein mat ghaseet."

"Manzoor hai."

"Aur Akhlaq ko batana mat ki uska plan kaam kar gaya."

"Kaam nahi kiya uska plan."

"Toh kya kaam kiya?"

Uzair considers this. The mosque, the mithai, the shaadi ki jhooti baat — none of it had worked, not in the way Akhlaq intended. What had worked was simpler and stupider and entirely outside Akhlaq's design: three weeks of bad theatre finally exhausting Uzair's capacity to keep not-saying the thing, in front of a woman patient enough, and unimpressed enough, to wait him out.

"Mein," he says, eventually. "Mein kaam kar gaya."

Akhlaq will, when he hears the full story two days later, claim total credit regardless, and will spend the better part of a year bringing it up at any opportunity, and Uzair will let him, mostly, because correcting him would require explaining the actual ending, which belongs — he has decided — to exactly two people, and a shop full of thread that has, since that Tuesday, started keeping slightly later hours than the rest of the street.]

one final author's note: AHHHHHHHHHH (cheee ye kya likh diya)

SYNOPSIS: Uzair Baloch has run protection rackets, settled border disputes, and once made a man cry without saying a word. He cannot, it turns out, successfully pretend to court the wrong woman in front of the right one.

Akhlaq's idea. Akhlaq's terrible, terrible idea.

word count: 3.8k

A/N: kya matlab kal mera exam hain ? i actually had FUN writing which feels illegal. no angst. i tried to put angst in twice and physically deleted it both times. growth.

There is a category of decisions Uzair Baloch makes that he later understands, with total clarity and no possibility of appeal, to have been made by a stupider man wearing his face.

This is one of those decisions.

He is aware of this even as he is making it. That is the specific humiliation of it — it is not a decision he stumbles into. He walks into it with his eyes open.

It starts with Akhlaq, which to be honest most bad ideas do.

"Aap use dekhte hain," Akhlaq says, "aur phir kuch nahi karte. Yeh teen mahine se chal raha hai."

"Mein dekhta nahi hun."

Akhlaq has exprienced this first hand, and would like for it to be known that—he is very annoyed.

"Bhai." Akhlaq says this with the patience of a man addressing someone who has just claimed the sky is not blue. "Aap Aiza ki dukaan ke saamne se teen baar gol gol ghoom ke nikalte hai jab kuch lena tak nahi hota."

This is, unfortunately, true.

Aiza Sheikh runs a small stationery and embroidery-thread shop two streets from the Haveli, inherited from an aunt who had no children of her own and decided, with the brisk efficiency of a woman tired of waiting for the world to organise itself, that Aiza would do.

She is twenty-four. She has opinions about thread quality that she will share whether you have asked or not. She does the books for the shop in a hand so neat it looks typed, and she has never once, in the eight months Uzair has been finding excuses to walk past her shop, given any indication that she has noticed him noticing her.

This last part is the problem.

"Toh baat karien usse," Akhlaq says.

"Tujhe pata hai itna simple nahi hai."

"Kyun nahi hai bhai?"

Uzair does not have a clean answer for this, which is itself unusual, because Uzair Baloch generally has a clean answer for everything, filed and ready, the way other men keep correct change.

The honest answer is something closer to: because she has a way of looking at a person that makes him feel as though he is being assessed for structural integrity, and he is not entirely confident he would pass.

He does not say this to Akhlaq.

"Bohot kaam hai," he says instead.

Akhlaq looks at him the way you look at a man who has just told you the moon is made of roti.

The actual plan — and Uzair wants this on record, for whoever is keeping the record, that the plan was never his — arrives three weeks later, after a Friday in which Uzair walks past Aiza's shop, finds her in conversation with a man he does not recognise, and experiences a reaction so immediate and so physically uncomfortable that he has to stop on the corner and pretend to check his phone for several seconds before his face is safe for public viewing.

The man, it turns out, is her cousin from Hyderabad, visiting for a wedding.

Uzair learns this later, from Akhlaq, who finds the entire episode the single most entertaining thing that has happened to him in calendar memory.

"Aap wahan khade thein," Akhlaq says, wheezing slightly, "phone dekh rahe the jaise usme Pakistan ka future likha ho."

"Bas kar."

"Uska cousin tha!"

"Mujhe pata hai ab."

"Aapko nahi pata tha!" Akhlaq wipes his eyes. He is enjoying this in a manner Uzair finds personally offensive. "Yaar, agar tujhe itna farak padta hai jab koi aadmi uske saath khada ho, toh —" He stops.

Something crosses his face. The specific, dangerous something that means Akhlaq has had an idea, and Akhlaq's ideas, historically, have a success rate that does not encourage further ideas.

"Kya?" Uzair says, already suspicious.

"Aap kisi aur ke saath dikh jao."

Uzair stares at him.

"Sochiye," Akhlaq says, warming to it now, sitting forward, hands moving the way they do when he believes he is being brilliant. "Abhi tak aap sirf chakkar laga rahe hai. Woh aapko sirf grahak ki tarah dekhti hai. Lekin agar usne aapko kisi aur larki ke saath dekha — agar usne socha ki aap kisi aur mein interested hai —"

"Toh kya hoga?"

"Toh use farak padega!" Akhlaq spreads his hands as though he has just solved something in physics. "Bhai. Sabse purana tareeka hai."

"Yeh bewakoofi hai."

"Yeh purani aur azmaai hui bewakoofi hai," Akhlaq corrects. "Farak hai."

Uzair says no.

He says no for four full days, with conviction, the kind of conviction he applies to refusing bad business deals and worse alliances, and on the fifth day he is standing across the road from Aiza's shop watching her laugh at something her shop-neighbour's son has said — actually laugh, head back, the full unguarded version of it that she has never once produced in Uzair's direction in eight months of strategic loitering — and something in his chest does an undignified, expensive thing, and he goes and finds Akhlaq and says, with the air of a man surrendering a city: "Theek hai. Bata."

[The plan, as constructed by Akhlaq, has exactly one design flaw, which is that it requires a second woman, and the only woman Akhlaq can produce on short notice who is willing to participate in an elaborate scheme to manufacture romantic jealousy is his own younger sister, Saba, who agrees on the condition that Uzair owe her a favour of her choosing, unspecified, to be redeemed at any point in the future, no questions asked.

Uzair should have recognised this term as a warning.

He does not.]

The first attempt happens outside the mosque after Friday prayers, which is, in retrospect, not the ideal venue for a man to be seen romantically pursuing anyone, but Akhlaq's logic was that "sab log wahan hote hain, sabko pata chal jayega," which has the unfortunate virtue of being correct.

Saba is supposed to walk past, see Uzair, stop, and engage him in friendly, visible conversation. Uzair is supposed to receive this conversation with the warm, slightly besotted energy of a man being courted.

Aiza, who walks this route home from the shop every Friday at this approximate time, is supposed to see this, register it, and experience some galvanising jealousy that will rearrange eight months of indifference into something workable.

What actually happens is this:

Saba walks up, says, "Salaam, Uzair bhai," with a completely straight face, and Uzair — who has had four days to prepare for this moment and has used none of them productively — says, "Salaam," in a voice so stiff it could have been notarised.

"Tujhe muskuraana tha," Saba mutters, still smiling for the benefit of any audience. "Itna khush dikh jaise tujhe maine nahi Aiza ne bulaaya ho"

"Mein khush hun."

"Tu aise khush hai jaise koi tera vehicle impound kar raha ho."

He attempts a smile. It does not go well. He can feel it not going well — can feel his own face failing to cooperate, the muscles arranging themselves into something closer to a man bracing for impact than a man enjoying a conversation — and Saba, watching this unfold with visible horror, says, under her breath, "Khuda ke liye, Uzair bhai, mein teri behen jaisi hun, tujhe itna ajeeb hone ki zaroorat nahi —"

"Mujhe pata hai."

"Toh aisa kyun kar raha hai —"

"Pata nahi!"

They are still arguing, in fierce undertones, both smiling with the desperate brightness of two people performing a play neither of them rehearsed, when Uzair looks past Saba's shoulder and sees Aiza.

She is standing outside her shop, locking up for the afternoon, and she has clearly seen the entire exchange — has seen Uzair Baloch standing in front of the mosque with a young woman, smiling the specific smile of a man trying too hard, and her expression is not jealousy.

Her expression is concern.

Genuine, uncomplicated concern, the look you give a man who appears to be having a difficult conversation, possibly a breakup, possibly a family dispute, possibly some private trouble that is none of her business but is nonetheless visible from across a street.

She does not look jealous.

She looks like she is wondering if he is okay.

This is worse. This is so much worse than indifference that Uzair spends the walk home recalculating the entire architecture of the plan, because somewhere in his chest a new and specific fear has installed itself: that Aiza Sheikh does not see him as a man who could plausibly be desired by anyone, only as a man who is, apparently, going through something.

"Pehli koshish thi bhai," Akhlaq says, unbothered, when Uzair reports the failure. "Aise nahi hota pehli baar mein."

"Mein iska part nahi banna chahta tha."

"Aapne hi kaha tha mujhse."

"Tune kaha tha 'soch'!"

"Aur aapne socha aur maan gaye," Akhlaq says, with the serene logic of a man who feels entirely vindicated. "Toh ab dosra try karte hain."

The second attempt is worse.

It is worse because Saba, having decided that subtlety was clearly not Uzair's strength, takes matters into her own hands and arrives at the small chai dhaba near Aiza's shop on a Tuesday evening, sits across from Uzair with the deliberate, theatrical fondness of someone performing courtship for an audience of one, and says, loudly enough to carry: "Uzair bhai, aapne mere liye yeh laaya?" — referring to a box of mithai that Uzair did, in a moment of poor planning, actually bring, on Akhlaq's insistence, as a "prop."

"Haan," Uzair says, because the lie has already been constructed and he is merely operating it.

"Kitna sweet hain aap," Saba says, opening the box with great ceremony, and then, lower, through her teeth, without moving her smiling mouth: "Yeh kaafi achi hain, waise. Tu khareed sakta hai mere liye aur bhi."

"Yeh ek baar ke liye tha."

"Tune kaha tha jo mein maangun."

He has, in fact, said this. He regrets it specifically and completely.

The performance proceeds. Saba laughs at things Uzair has not said anything funny about. Uzair attempts to look fond, which on his face resembles a man squinting into difficult sunlight. And Aiza — Aiza, who is sweeping the front step of her shop with the brisk efficiency she brings to everything — looks over exactly once.

She looks at the mithai box.

She looks at Saba, laughing.

She looks at Uzair, squinting.

And then she goes back inside and Uzair hears, with the specific clarity that only humiliation provides, the bell above her shop door ring as she shuts it slightly harder than necessary.

"Dekha," Akhlaq says later, when Uzair recounts this with the flat despair of a man describing a structural collapse. "Reaction mil gayi!"

"Woh gussa thi."

"Gussa bhi reaction hai!"

"Mujhpe nahi! Mithai pe thi shayad — "

"Bhai." Akhlaq leans forward, deeply serious, deeply wrong. "Gussa tab aata hai jab kisi cheez ki parwaah ho. Agar use farak nahi padta toh woh darwaza zor se band nahi karti."

Uzair wants to believe this. This is, he understands later, the precise mechanism by which he allows the plan to continue for a third, catastrophic attempt: he wants to believe it so badly that he stops applying to Akhlaq's theories the scrutiny he applies to literally everything else in his life.

[The archive — because there is always an archive, because Uzair Baloch is constitutionally incapable of not keeping one — does not begin with the mosque or the mithai. It begins four months earlier, with a torn shirt sleeve and a question of thread colour, and Uzair revisits it now with the specific masochism of a man checking old wounds to see if they still hurt.

He had gone in for thread. Black thread, specifically, for Ulfat bhabi, who had sent him with a swatch and very precise instructions he had already forgotten by the time he reached the shop.

Aiza had taken one look at the swatch and said, without looking up from her ledger, "Yeh kaala nahi hai. Yeh charcoal hai."

"Kya farak hai?"

She had looked up then. The look. The structural-integrity look. "Roshni mein farak padta hai." She had pulled three spools from the shelf without checking the labels, set them in a row, and said, "Yeh teeno mein se ek hoga jo bhabi ne maanga hai. Bata do unhe agli baar khud aayein, ya phone pe sahi rang bata dein — aap mardon ko rang nahi pehchaante."

He had bought all three spools, out of some instinct he did not examine at the time, and had walked home faintly amused by being scolded with such complete confidence by a woman half his size, and it had taken him almost three weeks to admit to himself that the amusement was the early architecture of something much larger.

He has been faintly amused, in this specific and expensive way, ever since.]

The third attempt is meant to be the conclusive one. Akhlaq, having exhausted subtlety and theatre, has decided the missing ingredient is stakes — a scenario in which Aiza is forced not merely to witness affection but to confront the possibility of losing access to Uzair entirely, which Akhlaq describes, with the confidence of a man who has clearly been reading something, as "scarcity."

"Scarcity?"

"Log cheezein zyada chahte hain jab unhe lagta hai ki woh chali jayengi."

"Mein cheez nahi hun."

"Aap samajhiye baat ko."

The plan, such as it is: Saba will arrive at the shop directly, under the pretext of buying thread, and will mention — casually, conversationally, the way you mention weather — that she and Uzair are discussing families meeting soon.

Marriage-adjacent language.

The nuclear option.

Akhlaq's theory is that this will collapse whatever wall of indifference Aiza has built and produce, finally, the jealousy the entire operation has been constructed to extract.

Uzair has serious reservations.When does he not?

But will he agree? Yes.

He voices none of them, because by this point he has entered the specific psychological state of a man so deep into a bad plan that turning back feels more humiliating than continuing, which is its own kind of stupidity, possibly the most dangerous kind, the kind that has historically ended empires.

He is standing across the road when it happens — close enough to see, far enough to maintain what he is still, against all evidence, calling deniability.

Saba goes in. He watches through the shop's open doorway as she picks up a spool of thread, says something he cannot hear, and watches Aiza's face do something complicated and fast that he also cannot read from this distance.

Then Aiza puts down her ledger.

Then Aiza walks to the doorway of her own shop, looks directly across the road at Uzair Baloch standing there with his hands in his pockets and his face arranged into what he believes is casual indifference, and says, in a voice that carries the entire length of the street with no particular effort:

"Uzair bhai. Idhar aao."

It is not a request. It has the same quality Aiza's voice always has, the brisk, structural, no-nonsense quality of a woman correcting thread colour, except now it is aimed directly at him, and every person within earshot — the paan shop owner, two boys on a single bicycle, an elderly man who has been pretending to read a newspaper outside the shop for the last twenty minutes for reasons of his own — turns to watch him cross the road.

He crosses the road.

Inside the shop, Saba has gone very still, the stillness of a co-conspirator recognising, late, that the operation has been compromised.

Aiza looks at Uzair. She looks at Saba. She looks back at Uzair.

"Aap dono shaadi kar rahe hain?" she says. Plainly. The same tone she uses for thread.

"Nahi," Uzair says, too fast.

"Saba ne abhi bataya."

"Woh —" He looks at Saba. Saba looks at the ceiling, which has, apparently, become extremely interesting. "Galat samjha aapne."

"Mujhe theek se samajh aaya," Aiza says. "Maine khud suna." She crosses her arms"Toh batao. Shaadi ho rahi hai, ya nahi ho rahi?"

"Nahi ho rahi," Saba says quickly, finding her voice, clearly deciding that self-preservation outranks loyalty to a plan she never fully believed in. "Maine — galti se — "

"Saba," Aiza says, without looking at her, "tum bahar jaake mera intezaar karo. Mein tumhe thread de dungi do minute mein."

Saba goes. Fast. Uzair has rarely seen a person leave a room with such efficiency.

This leaves Uzair Baloch alone in a thread shop with Aiza Sheikh, who is looking at him the way she looks at fabric she suspects has been mislabelled.

"Ab," she says. "Mujhe sach bolo."

He considers, briefly, the architecture of a lie. He has several available. He discards all of them, which surprises him, because lying has historically been a skill he is quite good at, and he finds that in this specific room, in front of this specific woman, the skill has simply stopped functioning, the way a key stops fitting a lock that has been changed.

"Saba meri kuch nahi hai," he says. "Akhlaq ki behen hai."

"Yeh mujhe pata hai. Poore mohalle ko pata hai."

"Toh —"

"Toh mujhe yeh samajh nahi aa raha,"Aiza says, "ki tum log pichle teen haftay se mere dukaan ke aas paas natak kyun kar rahe ho. Mithai, mosque, ab shaadi ki baatein.Uzair bhai. Mujhe dikhta hai jab koi cheez asli nahi hoti."

He has no response prepared for this, because no version of the plan accounted for the possibility that Aiza would simply identify the plan as a plan, correctly, on sight, the way she identifies charcoal pretending to be black.

"Toh kya tha yeh?" she says. Not angry. Worse than angry. Genuinely, simply curious, with the specific patience of someone willing to wait as long as necessary for an honest answer.

He could still lie. There is a version of this conversation where he produces some explanation about Saba, about a misunderstanding, about nothing at all, and walks out with his dignity slightly dented but intact, and never has to say the thing he has been not-saying for eight months.

He looks at her. At the ledger behind her with its perfect handwriting. At the three spools of thread, still on the shelf, still in the row she had arranged them in months ago, because apparently she had simply left them there, because apparently some small part of that day had also stayed with her, which he had not allowed himself to consider until exactly this moment.

"Mein chahta tha tumhe farak pade," he says. "Mujhse."

Silence.

"Isliye yeh sab kiya," he continues, because he has started now and there is no clean place to stop, the way there is no clean place to stop a wall once it has begun coming down. "Socha agar tum mujhe kisi aur ke saath dekhogi, tumhe — " He stops. Reorganises. "Akhlaq ka idea tha. Bahut bura idea tha."

"Bahut bura idea tha," Aiza agrees, immediately, with no hesitation whatsoever, which under different circumstances might have stung and right now simply feels like relief, like a window opening in a room that has been shut too long.

"Haan."

"Tumhe pata bhi hai shaadi ka jhoot kitna risky tha? Iss mohalle mein? Kal tak sabko pata chal jata ki Uzair Baloch ne Akhlaq ki behen se shaadi todi."

"Mujhe pata hai. Ab pata hai."

She looks at him for a long moment. The look has changed slightly — still the structural-integrity assessment, but with something underneath it now that he cannot immediately name, something that makes him feel less like fabric under inspection and more like a person standing in a room that has gotten suddenly very small.

"Tum seedha bata sakte the," she says.

"Haan."

"Toh kyun nahi bataya?"

This is the actual question. The one Akhlaq's entire elaborate, humiliating, multi-week plan had been constructed to avoid asking honestly even once, and here it is anyway, delivered plainly, by the one person whose plain delivery he has apparently spent eight months unable to stop thinking about.

"Kyunki," he says, "agar mein seedha bolta aur tum mana kar deti, toh kam se kam mujhe pata chal jata sach mein. Iss tarah —" He stops. Finds the rest of it. "Iss tarah mein bewakoof reh sakta tha thoda aur."

Something in her face moves. Not quite a smile.

"Aur ab?" she says.

"Ab tumne pakad liya. Toh ab koi rasta nahi bacha bewakoof rehne ka."

"Toh seedha pucho."

He looks at her. She is standing with her arms crossed, in a shop that smells like new thread and old paper, having just dismantled three weeks of strategy in under two minutes with nothing but plain observation, and he understands, with the specific clarity of a man finally arriving somewhere he has been circling for a long time, that this — exactly this, the bluntness, the refusal to let anything go unexamined, the complete absence of patience for his nonsense — is the precise quality that made him stupid about her in the first place.

"Aiza," he says. "Mujhe tumse pyar hain."

"Yeh behtar tha," she says. "Dekha, kitna asaan tha."

"Teen haftay lage."

"Tumhari galti hai. Maine pehle din se intezaar kiya tha ki tum seedha pucho."

He stares at her.

"Mujhe teen din mein pata chal gaya tha. Tum bahut subtle nahi ho, Uzair bhai."

"Akhlaq ne kaha tha mein achi acting kar raha hun."

"Akhlaq," Aiza says, with the flat, final judgement of a woman delivering a verdict, "ko thread aur logon dono ki samajh nahi hai."

[Outside, Saba is waiting exactly where she was told to wait, and when Uzair finally emerges — considerably later than two minutes, considerably more undone than when he went in — she takes one look at his face and says, "Theek hai. Ab tu mujhe woh favour de raha hai jo maine maanga tha, aur woh favour hai: kabhi mujhe dobara apne natak mein mat ghaseet."

"Manzoor hai."

"Aur Akhlaq ko batana mat ki uska plan kaam kar gaya."

"Kaam nahi kiya uska plan."

"Toh kya kaam kiya?"

Uzair considers this. The mosque, the mithai, the shaadi ki jhooti baat — none of it had worked, not in the way Akhlaq intended. What had worked was simpler and stupider and entirely outside Akhlaq's design: three weeks of bad theatre finally exhausting Uzair's capacity to keep not-saying the thing, in front of a woman patient enough, and unimpressed enough, to wait him out.

"Mein," he says, eventually. "Mein kaam kar gaya."

Akhlaq will, when he hears the full story two days later, claim total credit regardless, and will spend the better part of a year bringing it up at any opportunity, and Uzair will let him, mostly, because correcting him would require explaining the actual ending, which belongs — he has decided — to exactly two people, and a shop full of thread that has, since that Tuesday, started keeping slightly later hours than the rest of the street.]

one final author's note: AHHHHHHHHHH (cheee ye kya likh diya)

SYNOPSIS: Uzair Baloch has run protection rackets, settled border disputes, and once made a man cry without saying a word. He cannot, it turns out, successfully pretend to court the wrong woman in front of the right one.

Akhlaq's idea. Akhlaq's terrible, terrible idea.

word count: 3.8k

A/N: kya matlab kal mera exam hain ? i actually had FUN writing which feels illegal. no angst. i tried to put angst in twice and physically deleted it both times. growth.

There is a category of decisions Uzair Baloch makes that he later understands, with total clarity and no possibility of appeal, to have been made by a stupider man wearing his face.

This is one of those decisions.

He is aware of this even as he is making it. That is the specific humiliation of it — it is not a decision he stumbles into. He walks into it with his eyes open.

It starts with Akhlaq, which to be honest most bad ideas do.

"Aap use dekhte hain," Akhlaq says, "aur phir kuch nahi karte. Yeh teen mahine se chal raha hai."

"Mein dekhta nahi hun."

Akhlaq has exprienced this first hand, and would like for it to be known that—he is very annoyed.

"Bhai." Akhlaq says this with the patience of a man addressing someone who has just claimed the sky is not blue. "Aap Aiza ki dukaan ke saamne se teen baar gol gol ghoom ke nikalte hai jab kuch lena tak nahi hota."

This is, unfortunately, true.

Aiza Sheikh runs a small stationery and embroidery-thread shop two streets from the Haveli, inherited from an aunt who had no children of her own and decided, with the brisk efficiency of a woman tired of waiting for the world to organise itself, that Aiza would do.

She is twenty-four. She has opinions about thread quality that she will share whether you have asked or not. She does the books for the shop in a hand so neat it looks typed, and she has never once, in the eight months Uzair has been finding excuses to walk past her shop, given any indication that she has noticed him noticing her.

This last part is the problem.

"Toh baat karien usse," Akhlaq says.

"Tujhe pata hai itna simple nahi hai."

"Kyun nahi hai bhai?"

Uzair does not have a clean answer for this, which is itself unusual, because Uzair Baloch generally has a clean answer for everything, filed and ready, the way other men keep correct change.

The honest answer is something closer to: because she has a way of looking at a person that makes him feel as though he is being assessed for structural integrity, and he is not entirely confident he would pass.

He does not say this to Akhlaq.

"Bohot kaam hai," he says instead.

Akhlaq looks at him the way you look at a man who has just told you the moon is made of roti.

The actual plan — and Uzair wants this on record, for whoever is keeping the record, that the plan was never his — arrives three weeks later, after a Friday in which Uzair walks past Aiza's shop, finds her in conversation with a man he does not recognise, and experiences a reaction so immediate and so physically uncomfortable that he has to stop on the corner and pretend to check his phone for several seconds before his face is safe for public viewing.

The man, it turns out, is her cousin from Hyderabad, visiting for a wedding.

Uzair learns this later, from Akhlaq, who finds the entire episode the single most entertaining thing that has happened to him in calendar memory.

"Aap wahan khade thein," Akhlaq says, wheezing slightly, "phone dekh rahe the jaise usme Pakistan ka future likha ho."

"Bas kar."

"Uska cousin tha!"

"Mujhe pata hai ab."

"Aapko nahi pata tha!" Akhlaq wipes his eyes. He is enjoying this in a manner Uzair finds personally offensive. "Yaar, agar tujhe itna farak padta hai jab koi aadmi uske saath khada ho, toh —" He stops.

Something crosses his face. The specific, dangerous something that means Akhlaq has had an idea, and Akhlaq's ideas, historically, have a success rate that does not encourage further ideas.

"Kya?" Uzair says, already suspicious.

"Aap kisi aur ke saath dikh jao."

Uzair stares at him.

"Sochiye," Akhlaq says, warming to it now, sitting forward, hands moving the way they do when he believes he is being brilliant. "Abhi tak aap sirf chakkar laga rahe hai. Woh aapko sirf grahak ki tarah dekhti hai. Lekin agar usne aapko kisi aur larki ke saath dekha — agar usne socha ki aap kisi aur mein interested hai —"

"Toh kya hoga?"

"Toh use farak padega!" Akhlaq spreads his hands as though he has just solved something in physics. "Bhai. Sabse purana tareeka hai."

"Yeh bewakoofi hai."

"Yeh purani aur azmaai hui bewakoofi hai," Akhlaq corrects. "Farak hai."

Uzair says no.

He says no for four full days, with conviction, the kind of conviction he applies to refusing bad business deals and worse alliances, and on the fifth day he is standing across the road from Aiza's shop watching her laugh at something her shop-neighbour's son has said — actually laugh, head back, the full unguarded version of it that she has never once produced in Uzair's direction in eight months of strategic loitering — and something in his chest does an undignified, expensive thing, and he goes and finds Akhlaq and says, with the air of a man surrendering a city: "Theek hai. Bata."

[The plan, as constructed by Akhlaq, has exactly one design flaw, which is that it requires a second woman, and the only woman Akhlaq can produce on short notice who is willing to participate in an elaborate scheme to manufacture romantic jealousy is his own younger sister, Saba, who agrees on the condition that Uzair owe her a favour of her choosing, unspecified, to be redeemed at any point in the future, no questions asked.

Uzair should have recognised this term as a warning.

He does not.]

The first attempt happens outside the mosque after Friday prayers, which is, in retrospect, not the ideal venue for a man to be seen romantically pursuing anyone, but Akhlaq's logic was that "sab log wahan hote hain, sabko pata chal jayega," which has the unfortunate virtue of being correct.

Saba is supposed to walk past, see Uzair, stop, and engage him in friendly, visible conversation. Uzair is supposed to receive this conversation with the warm, slightly besotted energy of a man being courted.

Aiza, who walks this route home from the shop every Friday at this approximate time, is supposed to see this, register it, and experience some galvanising jealousy that will rearrange eight months of indifference into something workable.

What actually happens is this:

Saba walks up, says, "Salaam, Uzair bhai," with a completely straight face, and Uzair — who has had four days to prepare for this moment and has used none of them productively — says, "Salaam," in a voice so stiff it could have been notarised.

"Tujhe muskuraana tha," Saba mutters, still smiling for the benefit of any audience. "Itna khush dikh jaise tujhe maine nahi Aiza ne bulaaya ho"

"Mein khush hun."

"Tu aise khush hai jaise koi tera vehicle impound kar raha ho."

He attempts a smile. It does not go well. He can feel it not going well — can feel his own face failing to cooperate, the muscles arranging themselves into something closer to a man bracing for impact than a man enjoying a conversation — and Saba, watching this unfold with visible horror, says, under her breath, "Khuda ke liye, Uzair bhai, mein teri behen jaisi hun, tujhe itna ajeeb hone ki zaroorat nahi —"

"Mujhe pata hai."

"Toh aisa kyun kar raha hai —"

"Pata nahi!"

They are still arguing, in fierce undertones, both smiling with the desperate brightness of two people performing a play neither of them rehearsed, when Uzair looks past Saba's shoulder and sees Aiza.

She is standing outside her shop, locking up for the afternoon, and she has clearly seen the entire exchange — has seen Uzair Baloch standing in front of the mosque with a young woman, smiling the specific smile of a man trying too hard, and her expression is not jealousy.

Her expression is concern.

Genuine, uncomplicated concern, the look you give a man who appears to be having a difficult conversation, possibly a breakup, possibly a family dispute, possibly some private trouble that is none of her business but is nonetheless visible from across a street.

She does not look jealous.

She looks like she is wondering if he is okay.

This is worse. This is so much worse than indifference that Uzair spends the walk home recalculating the entire architecture of the plan, because somewhere in his chest a new and specific fear has installed itself: that Aiza Sheikh does not see him as a man who could plausibly be desired by anyone, only as a man who is, apparently, going through something.

"Pehli koshish thi bhai," Akhlaq says, unbothered, when Uzair reports the failure. "Aise nahi hota pehli baar mein."

"Mein iska part nahi banna chahta tha."

"Aapne hi kaha tha mujhse."

"Tune kaha tha 'soch'!"

"Aur aapne socha aur maan gaye," Akhlaq says, with the serene logic of a man who feels entirely vindicated. "Toh ab dosra try karte hain."

The second attempt is worse.

It is worse because Saba, having decided that subtlety was clearly not Uzair's strength, takes matters into her own hands and arrives at the small chai dhaba near Aiza's shop on a Tuesday evening, sits across from Uzair with the deliberate, theatrical fondness of someone performing courtship for an audience of one, and says, loudly enough to carry: "Uzair bhai, aapne mere liye yeh laaya?" — referring to a box of mithai that Uzair did, in a moment of poor planning, actually bring, on Akhlaq's insistence, as a "prop."

"Haan," Uzair says, because the lie has already been constructed and he is merely operating it.

"Kitna sweet hain aap," Saba says, opening the box with great ceremony, and then, lower, through her teeth, without moving her smiling mouth: "Yeh kaafi achi hain, waise. Tu khareed sakta hai mere liye aur bhi."

"Yeh ek baar ke liye tha."

"Tune kaha tha jo mein maangun."

He has, in fact, said this. He regrets it specifically and completely.

The performance proceeds. Saba laughs at things Uzair has not said anything funny about. Uzair attempts to look fond, which on his face resembles a man squinting into difficult sunlight. And Aiza — Aiza, who is sweeping the front step of her shop with the brisk efficiency she brings to everything — looks over exactly once.

She looks at the mithai box.

She looks at Saba, laughing.

She looks at Uzair, squinting.

And then she goes back inside and Uzair hears, with the specific clarity that only humiliation provides, the bell above her shop door ring as she shuts it slightly harder than necessary.

"Dekha," Akhlaq says later, when Uzair recounts this with the flat despair of a man describing a structural collapse. "Reaction mil gayi!"

"Woh gussa thi."

"Gussa bhi reaction hai!"

"Mujhpe nahi! Mithai pe thi shayad — "

"Bhai." Akhlaq leans forward, deeply serious, deeply wrong. "Gussa tab aata hai jab kisi cheez ki parwaah ho. Agar use farak nahi padta toh woh darwaza zor se band nahi karti."

Uzair wants to believe this. This is, he understands later, the precise mechanism by which he allows the plan to continue for a third, catastrophic attempt: he wants to believe it so badly that he stops applying to Akhlaq's theories the scrutiny he applies to literally everything else in his life.

[The archive — because there is always an archive, because Uzair Baloch is constitutionally incapable of not keeping one — does not begin with the mosque or the mithai. It begins four months earlier, with a torn shirt sleeve and a question of thread colour, and Uzair revisits it now with the specific masochism of a man checking old wounds to see if they still hurt.

He had gone in for thread. Black thread, specifically, for Ulfat bhabi, who had sent him with a swatch and very precise instructions he had already forgotten by the time he reached the shop.

Aiza had taken one look at the swatch and said, without looking up from her ledger, "Yeh kaala nahi hai. Yeh charcoal hai."

"Kya farak hai?"

She had looked up then. The look. The structural-integrity look. "Roshni mein farak padta hai." She had pulled three spools from the shelf without checking the labels, set them in a row, and said, "Yeh teeno mein se ek hoga jo bhabi ne maanga hai. Bata do unhe agli baar khud aayein, ya phone pe sahi rang bata dein — aap mardon ko rang nahi pehchaante."

He had bought all three spools, out of some instinct he did not examine at the time, and had walked home faintly amused by being scolded with such complete confidence by a woman half his size, and it had taken him almost three weeks to admit to himself that the amusement was the early architecture of something much larger.

He has been faintly amused, in this specific and expensive way, ever since.]

The third attempt is meant to be the conclusive one. Akhlaq, having exhausted subtlety and theatre, has decided the missing ingredient is stakes — a scenario in which Aiza is forced not merely to witness affection but to confront the possibility of losing access to Uzair entirely, which Akhlaq describes, with the confidence of a man who has clearly been reading something, as "scarcity."

"Scarcity?"

"Log cheezein zyada chahte hain jab unhe lagta hai ki woh chali jayengi."

"Mein cheez nahi hun."

"Aap samajhiye baat ko."

The plan, such as it is: Saba will arrive at the shop directly, under the pretext of buying thread, and will mention — casually, conversationally, the way you mention weather — that she and Uzair are discussing families meeting soon.

Marriage-adjacent language.

The nuclear option.

Akhlaq's theory is that this will collapse whatever wall of indifference Aiza has built and produce, finally, the jealousy the entire operation has been constructed to extract.

Uzair has serious reservations.When does he not?

But will he agree? Yes.

He voices none of them, because by this point he has entered the specific psychological state of a man so deep into a bad plan that turning back feels more humiliating than continuing, which is its own kind of stupidity, possibly the most dangerous kind, the kind that has historically ended empires.

He is standing across the road when it happens — close enough to see, far enough to maintain what he is still, against all evidence, calling deniability.

Saba goes in. He watches through the shop's open doorway as she picks up a spool of thread, says something he cannot hear, and watches Aiza's face do something complicated and fast that he also cannot read from this distance.

Then Aiza puts down her ledger.

Then Aiza walks to the doorway of her own shop, looks directly across the road at Uzair Baloch standing there with his hands in his pockets and his face arranged into what he believes is casual indifference, and says, in a voice that carries the entire length of the street with no particular effort:

"Uzair bhai. Idhar aao."

It is not a request. It has the same quality Aiza's voice always has, the brisk, structural, no-nonsense quality of a woman correcting thread colour, except now it is aimed directly at him, and every person within earshot — the paan shop owner, two boys on a single bicycle, an elderly man who has been pretending to read a newspaper outside the shop for the last twenty minutes for reasons of his own — turns to watch him cross the road.

He crosses the road.

Inside the shop, Saba has gone very still, the stillness of a co-conspirator recognising, late, that the operation has been compromised.

Aiza looks at Uzair. She looks at Saba. She looks back at Uzair.

"Aap dono shaadi kar rahe hain?" she says. Plainly. The same tone she uses for thread.

"Nahi," Uzair says, too fast.

"Saba ne abhi bataya."

"Woh —" He looks at Saba. Saba looks at the ceiling, which has, apparently, become extremely interesting. "Galat samjha aapne."

"Mujhe theek se samajh aaya," Aiza says. "Maine khud suna." She crosses her arms"Toh batao. Shaadi ho rahi hai, ya nahi ho rahi?"

"Nahi ho rahi," Saba says quickly, finding her voice, clearly deciding that self-preservation outranks loyalty to a plan she never fully believed in. "Maine — galti se — "

"Saba," Aiza says, without looking at her, "tum bahar jaake mera intezaar karo. Mein tumhe thread de dungi do minute mein."

Saba goes. Fast. Uzair has rarely seen a person leave a room with such efficiency.

This leaves Uzair Baloch alone in a thread shop with Aiza Sheikh, who is looking at him the way she looks at fabric she suspects has been mislabelled.

"Ab," she says. "Mujhe sach bolo."

He considers, briefly, the architecture of a lie. He has several available. He discards all of them, which surprises him, because lying has historically been a skill he is quite good at, and he finds that in this specific room, in front of this specific woman, the skill has simply stopped functioning, the way a key stops fitting a lock that has been changed.

"Saba meri kuch nahi hai," he says. "Akhlaq ki behen hai."

"Yeh mujhe pata hai. Poore mohalle ko pata hai."

"Toh —"

"Toh mujhe yeh samajh nahi aa raha,"Aiza says, "ki tum log pichle teen haftay se mere dukaan ke aas paas natak kyun kar rahe ho. Mithai, mosque, ab shaadi ki baatein.Uzair bhai. Mujhe dikhta hai jab koi cheez asli nahi hoti."

He has no response prepared for this, because no version of the plan accounted for the possibility that Aiza would simply identify the plan as a plan, correctly, on sight, the way she identifies charcoal pretending to be black.

"Toh kya tha yeh?" she says. Not angry. Worse than angry. Genuinely, simply curious, with the specific patience of someone willing to wait as long as necessary for an honest answer.

He could still lie. There is a version of this conversation where he produces some explanation about Saba, about a misunderstanding, about nothing at all, and walks out with his dignity slightly dented but intact, and never has to say the thing he has been not-saying for eight months.

He looks at her. At the ledger behind her with its perfect handwriting. At the three spools of thread, still on the shelf, still in the row she had arranged them in months ago, because apparently she had simply left them there, because apparently some small part of that day had also stayed with her, which he had not allowed himself to consider until exactly this moment.

"Mein chahta tha tumhe farak pade," he says. "Mujhse."

Silence.

"Isliye yeh sab kiya," he continues, because he has started now and there is no clean place to stop, the way there is no clean place to stop a wall once it has begun coming down. "Socha agar tum mujhe kisi aur ke saath dekhogi, tumhe — " He stops. Reorganises. "Akhlaq ka idea tha. Bahut bura idea tha."

"Bahut bura idea tha," Aiza agrees, immediately, with no hesitation whatsoever, which under different circumstances might have stung and right now simply feels like relief, like a window opening in a room that has been shut too long.

"Haan."

"Tumhe pata bhi hai shaadi ka jhoot kitna risky tha? Iss mohalle mein? Kal tak sabko pata chal jata ki Uzair Baloch ne Akhlaq ki behen se shaadi todi."

"Mujhe pata hai. Ab pata hai."

She looks at him for a long moment. The look has changed slightly — still the structural-integrity assessment, but with something underneath it now that he cannot immediately name, something that makes him feel less like fabric under inspection and more like a person standing in a room that has gotten suddenly very small.

"Tum seedha bata sakte the," she says.

"Haan."

"Toh kyun nahi bataya?"

This is the actual question. The one Akhlaq's entire elaborate, humiliating, multi-week plan had been constructed to avoid asking honestly even once, and here it is anyway, delivered plainly, by the one person whose plain delivery he has apparently spent eight months unable to stop thinking about.

"Kyunki," he says, "agar mein seedha bolta aur tum mana kar deti, toh kam se kam mujhe pata chal jata sach mein. Iss tarah —" He stops. Finds the rest of it. "Iss tarah mein bewakoof reh sakta tha thoda aur."

Something in her face moves. Not quite a smile.

"Aur ab?" she says.

"Ab tumne pakad liya. Toh ab koi rasta nahi bacha bewakoof rehne ka."

"Toh seedha pucho."

He looks at her. She is standing with her arms crossed, in a shop that smells like new thread and old paper, having just dismantled three weeks of strategy in under two minutes with nothing but plain observation, and he understands, with the specific clarity of a man finally arriving somewhere he has been circling for a long time, that this — exactly this, the bluntness, the refusal to let anything go unexamined, the complete absence of patience for his nonsense — is the precise quality that made him stupid about her in the first place.

"Aiza," he says. "Mujhe tumse pyar hain."

"Yeh behtar tha," she says. "Dekha, kitna asaan tha."

"Teen haftay lage."

"Tumhari galti hai. Maine pehle din se intezaar kiya tha ki tum seedha pucho."

He stares at her.

"Mujhe teen din mein pata chal gaya tha. Tum bahut subtle nahi ho, Uzair bhai."

"Akhlaq ne kaha tha mein achi acting kar raha hun."

"Akhlaq," Aiza says, with the flat, final judgement of a woman delivering a verdict, "ko thread aur logon dono ki samajh nahi hai."

[Outside, Saba is waiting exactly where she was told to wait, and when Uzair finally emerges — considerably later than two minutes, considerably more undone than when he went in — she takes one look at his face and says, "Theek hai. Ab tu mujhe woh favour de raha hai jo maine maanga tha, aur woh favour hai: kabhi mujhe dobara apne natak mein mat ghaseet."

"Manzoor hai."

"Aur Akhlaq ko batana mat ki uska plan kaam kar gaya."

"Kaam nahi kiya uska plan."

"Toh kya kaam kiya?"

Uzair considers this. The mosque, the mithai, the shaadi ki jhooti baat — none of it had worked, not in the way Akhlaq intended. What had worked was simpler and stupider and entirely outside Akhlaq's design: three weeks of bad theatre finally exhausting Uzair's capacity to keep not-saying the thing, in front of a woman patient enough, and unimpressed enough, to wait him out.

"Mein," he says, eventually. "Mein kaam kar gaya."

Akhlaq will, when he hears the full story two days later, claim total credit regardless, and will spend the better part of a year bringing it up at any opportunity, and Uzair will let him, mostly, because correcting him would require explaining the actual ending, which belongs — he has decided — to exactly two people, and a shop full of thread that has, since that Tuesday, started keeping slightly later hours than the rest of the street.]

one final author's note: AHHHHHHHHHH (cheee ye kya likh diya)

SYNOPSIS: Uzair Baloch has run protection rackets, settled border disputes, and once made a man cry without saying a word. He cannot, it turns out, successfully pretend to court the wrong woman in front of the right one.

Akhlaq's idea. Akhlaq's terrible, terrible idea.

word count: 3.8k

A/N: kya matlab kal mera exam hain ? i actually had FUN writing which feels illegal. no angst. i tried to put angst in twice and physically deleted it both times. growth.

There is a category of decisions Uzair Baloch makes that he later understands, with total clarity and no possibility of appeal, to have been made by a stupider man wearing his face.

This is one of those decisions.

He is aware of this even as he is making it. That is the specific humiliation of it — it is not a decision he stumbles into. He walks into it with his eyes open.

It starts with Akhlaq, which to be honest most bad ideas do.

"Aap use dekhte hain," Akhlaq says, "aur phir kuch nahi karte. Yeh teen mahine se chal raha hai."

"Mein dekhta nahi hun."

Akhlaq has exprienced this first hand, and would like for it to be known that—he is very annoyed.

"Bhai." Akhlaq says this with the patience of a man addressing someone who has just claimed the sky is not blue. "Aap Aiza ki dukaan ke saamne se teen baar gol gol ghoom ke nikalte hai jab kuch lena tak nahi hota."

This is, unfortunately, true.

Aiza Sheikh runs a small stationery and embroidery-thread shop two streets from the Haveli, inherited from an aunt who had no children of her own and decided, with the brisk efficiency of a woman tired of waiting for the world to organise itself, that Aiza would do.

She is twenty-four. She has opinions about thread quality that she will share whether you have asked or not. She does the books for the shop in a hand so neat it looks typed, and she has never once, in the eight months Uzair has been finding excuses to walk past her shop, given any indication that she has noticed him noticing her.

This last part is the problem.

"Toh baat karien usse," Akhlaq says.

"Tujhe pata hai itna simple nahi hai."

"Kyun nahi hai bhai?"

Uzair does not have a clean answer for this, which is itself unusual, because Uzair Baloch generally has a clean answer for everything, filed and ready, the way other men keep correct change.

The honest answer is something closer to: because she has a way of looking at a person that makes him feel as though he is being assessed for structural integrity, and he is not entirely confident he would pass.

He does not say this to Akhlaq.

"Bohot kaam hai," he says instead.

Akhlaq looks at him the way you look at a man who has just told you the moon is made of roti.

The actual plan — and Uzair wants this on record, for whoever is keeping the record, that the plan was never his — arrives three weeks later, after a Friday in which Uzair walks past Aiza's shop, finds her in conversation with a man he does not recognise, and experiences a reaction so immediate and so physically uncomfortable that he has to stop on the corner and pretend to check his phone for several seconds before his face is safe for public viewing.

The man, it turns out, is her cousin from Hyderabad, visiting for a wedding.

Uzair learns this later, from Akhlaq, who finds the entire episode the single most entertaining thing that has happened to him in calendar memory.

"Aap wahan khade thein," Akhlaq says, wheezing slightly, "phone dekh rahe the jaise usme Pakistan ka future likha ho."

"Bas kar."

"Uska cousin tha!"

"Mujhe pata hai ab."

"Aapko nahi pata tha!" Akhlaq wipes his eyes. He is enjoying this in a manner Uzair finds personally offensive. "Yaar, agar tujhe itna farak padta hai jab koi aadmi uske saath khada ho, toh —" He stops.

Something crosses his face. The specific, dangerous something that means Akhlaq has had an idea, and Akhlaq's ideas, historically, have a success rate that does not encourage further ideas.

"Kya?" Uzair says, already suspicious.

"Aap kisi aur ke saath dikh jao."

Uzair stares at him.

"Sochiye," Akhlaq says, warming to it now, sitting forward, hands moving the way they do when he believes he is being brilliant. "Abhi tak aap sirf chakkar laga rahe hai. Woh aapko sirf grahak ki tarah dekhti hai. Lekin agar usne aapko kisi aur larki ke saath dekha — agar usne socha ki aap kisi aur mein interested hai —"

"Toh kya hoga?"

"Toh use farak padega!" Akhlaq spreads his hands as though he has just solved something in physics. "Bhai. Sabse purana tareeka hai."

"Yeh bewakoofi hai."

"Yeh purani aur azmaai hui bewakoofi hai," Akhlaq corrects. "Farak hai."

Uzair says no.

He says no for four full days, with conviction, the kind of conviction he applies to refusing bad business deals and worse alliances, and on the fifth day he is standing across the road from Aiza's shop watching her laugh at something her shop-neighbour's son has said — actually laugh, head back, the full unguarded version of it that she has never once produced in Uzair's direction in eight months of strategic loitering — and something in his chest does an undignified, expensive thing, and he goes and finds Akhlaq and says, with the air of a man surrendering a city: "Theek hai. Bata."

[The plan, as constructed by Akhlaq, has exactly one design flaw, which is that it requires a second woman, and the only woman Akhlaq can produce on short notice who is willing to participate in an elaborate scheme to manufacture romantic jealousy is his own younger sister, Saba, who agrees on the condition that Uzair owe her a favour of her choosing, unspecified, to be redeemed at any point in the future, no questions asked.

Uzair should have recognised this term as a warning.

He does not.]

The first attempt happens outside the mosque after Friday prayers, which is, in retrospect, not the ideal venue for a man to be seen romantically pursuing anyone, but Akhlaq's logic was that "sab log wahan hote hain, sabko pata chal jayega," which has the unfortunate virtue of being correct.

Saba is supposed to walk past, see Uzair, stop, and engage him in friendly, visible conversation. Uzair is supposed to receive this conversation with the warm, slightly besotted energy of a man being courted.

Aiza, who walks this route home from the shop every Friday at this approximate time, is supposed to see this, register it, and experience some galvanising jealousy that will rearrange eight months of indifference into something workable.

What actually happens is this:

Saba walks up, says, "Salaam, Uzair bhai," with a completely straight face, and Uzair — who has had four days to prepare for this moment and has used none of them productively — says, "Salaam," in a voice so stiff it could have been notarised.

"Tujhe muskuraana tha," Saba mutters, still smiling for the benefit of any audience. "Itna khush dikh jaise tujhe maine nahi Aiza ne bulaaya ho"

"Mein khush hun."

"Tu aise khush hai jaise koi tera vehicle impound kar raha ho."

He attempts a smile. It does not go well. He can feel it not going well — can feel his own face failing to cooperate, the muscles arranging themselves into something closer to a man bracing for impact than a man enjoying a conversation — and Saba, watching this unfold with visible horror, says, under her breath, "Khuda ke liye, Uzair bhai, mein teri behen jaisi hun, tujhe itna ajeeb hone ki zaroorat nahi —"

"Mujhe pata hai."

"Toh aisa kyun kar raha hai —"

"Pata nahi!"

They are still arguing, in fierce undertones, both smiling with the desperate brightness of two people performing a play neither of them rehearsed, when Uzair looks past Saba's shoulder and sees Aiza.

She is standing outside her shop, locking up for the afternoon, and she has clearly seen the entire exchange — has seen Uzair Baloch standing in front of the mosque with a young woman, smiling the specific smile of a man trying too hard, and her expression is not jealousy.

Her expression is concern.

Genuine, uncomplicated concern, the look you give a man who appears to be having a difficult conversation, possibly a breakup, possibly a family dispute, possibly some private trouble that is none of her business but is nonetheless visible from across a street.

She does not look jealous.

She looks like she is wondering if he is okay.

This is worse. This is so much worse than indifference that Uzair spends the walk home recalculating the entire architecture of the plan, because somewhere in his chest a new and specific fear has installed itself: that Aiza Sheikh does not see him as a man who could plausibly be desired by anyone, only as a man who is, apparently, going through something.

"Pehli koshish thi bhai," Akhlaq says, unbothered, when Uzair reports the failure. "Aise nahi hota pehli baar mein."

"Mein iska part nahi banna chahta tha."

"Aapne hi kaha tha mujhse."

"Tune kaha tha 'soch'!"

"Aur aapne socha aur maan gaye," Akhlaq says, with the serene logic of a man who feels entirely vindicated. "Toh ab dosra try karte hain."

The second attempt is worse.

It is worse because Saba, having decided that subtlety was clearly not Uzair's strength, takes matters into her own hands and arrives at the small chai dhaba near Aiza's shop on a Tuesday evening, sits across from Uzair with the deliberate, theatrical fondness of someone performing courtship for an audience of one, and says, loudly enough to carry: "Uzair bhai, aapne mere liye yeh laaya?" — referring to a box of mithai that Uzair did, in a moment of poor planning, actually bring, on Akhlaq's insistence, as a "prop."

"Haan," Uzair says, because the lie has already been constructed and he is merely operating it.

"Kitna sweet hain aap," Saba says, opening the box with great ceremony, and then, lower, through her teeth, without moving her smiling mouth: "Yeh kaafi achi hain, waise. Tu khareed sakta hai mere liye aur bhi."

"Yeh ek baar ke liye tha."

"Tune kaha tha jo mein maangun."

He has, in fact, said this. He regrets it specifically and completely.

The performance proceeds. Saba laughs at things Uzair has not said anything funny about. Uzair attempts to look fond, which on his face resembles a man squinting into difficult sunlight. And Aiza — Aiza, who is sweeping the front step of her shop with the brisk efficiency she brings to everything — looks over exactly once.

She looks at the mithai box.

She looks at Saba, laughing.

She looks at Uzair, squinting.

And then she goes back inside and Uzair hears, with the specific clarity that only humiliation provides, the bell above her shop door ring as she shuts it slightly harder than necessary.

"Dekha," Akhlaq says later, when Uzair recounts this with the flat despair of a man describing a structural collapse. "Reaction mil gayi!"

"Woh gussa thi."

"Gussa bhi reaction hai!"

"Mujhpe nahi! Mithai pe thi shayad — "

"Bhai." Akhlaq leans forward, deeply serious, deeply wrong. "Gussa tab aata hai jab kisi cheez ki parwaah ho. Agar use farak nahi padta toh woh darwaza zor se band nahi karti."

Uzair wants to believe this. This is, he understands later, the precise mechanism by which he allows the plan to continue for a third, catastrophic attempt: he wants to believe it so badly that he stops applying to Akhlaq's theories the scrutiny he applies to literally everything else in his life.

[The archive — because there is always an archive, because Uzair Baloch is constitutionally incapable of not keeping one — does not begin with the mosque or the mithai. It begins four months earlier, with a torn shirt sleeve and a question of thread colour, and Uzair revisits it now with the specific masochism of a man checking old wounds to see if they still hurt.

He had gone in for thread. Black thread, specifically, for Ulfat bhabi, who had sent him with a swatch and very precise instructions he had already forgotten by the time he reached the shop.

Aiza had taken one look at the swatch and said, without looking up from her ledger, "Yeh kaala nahi hai. Yeh charcoal hai."

"Kya farak hai?"

She had looked up then. The look. The structural-integrity look. "Roshni mein farak padta hai." She had pulled three spools from the shelf without checking the labels, set them in a row, and said, "Yeh teeno mein se ek hoga jo bhabi ne maanga hai. Bata do unhe agli baar khud aayein, ya phone pe sahi rang bata dein — aap mardon ko rang nahi pehchaante."

He had bought all three spools, out of some instinct he did not examine at the time, and had walked home faintly amused by being scolded with such complete confidence by a woman half his size, and it had taken him almost three weeks to admit to himself that the amusement was the early architecture of something much larger.

He has been faintly amused, in this specific and expensive way, ever since.]

The third attempt is meant to be the conclusive one. Akhlaq, having exhausted subtlety and theatre, has decided the missing ingredient is stakes — a scenario in which Aiza is forced not merely to witness affection but to confront the possibility of losing access to Uzair entirely, which Akhlaq describes, with the confidence of a man who has clearly been reading something, as "scarcity."

"Scarcity?"

"Log cheezein zyada chahte hain jab unhe lagta hai ki woh chali jayengi."

"Mein cheez nahi hun."

"Aap samajhiye baat ko."

The plan, such as it is: Saba will arrive at the shop directly, under the pretext of buying thread, and will mention — casually, conversationally, the way you mention weather — that she and Uzair are discussing families meeting soon.

Marriage-adjacent language.

The nuclear option.

Akhlaq's theory is that this will collapse whatever wall of indifference Aiza has built and produce, finally, the jealousy the entire operation has been constructed to extract.

Uzair has serious reservations.When does he not?

But will he agree? Yes.

He voices none of them, because by this point he has entered the specific psychological state of a man so deep into a bad plan that turning back feels more humiliating than continuing, which is its own kind of stupidity, possibly the most dangerous kind, the kind that has historically ended empires.

He is standing across the road when it happens — close enough to see, far enough to maintain what he is still, against all evidence, calling deniability.

Saba goes in. He watches through the shop's open doorway as she picks up a spool of thread, says something he cannot hear, and watches Aiza's face do something complicated and fast that he also cannot read from this distance.

Then Aiza puts down her ledger.

Then Aiza walks to the doorway of her own shop, looks directly across the road at Uzair Baloch standing there with his hands in his pockets and his face arranged into what he believes is casual indifference, and says, in a voice that carries the entire length of the street with no particular effort:

"Uzair bhai. Idhar aao."

It is not a request. It has the same quality Aiza's voice always has, the brisk, structural, no-nonsense quality of a woman correcting thread colour, except now it is aimed directly at him, and every person within earshot — the paan shop owner, two boys on a single bicycle, an elderly man who has been pretending to read a newspaper outside the shop for the last twenty minutes for reasons of his own — turns to watch him cross the road.

He crosses the road.

Inside the shop, Saba has gone very still, the stillness of a co-conspirator recognising, late, that the operation has been compromised.

Aiza looks at Uzair. She looks at Saba. She looks back at Uzair.

"Aap dono shaadi kar rahe hain?" she says. Plainly. The same tone she uses for thread.

"Nahi," Uzair says, too fast.

"Saba ne abhi bataya."

"Woh —" He looks at Saba. Saba looks at the ceiling, which has, apparently, become extremely interesting. "Galat samjha aapne."

"Mujhe theek se samajh aaya," Aiza says. "Maine khud suna." She crosses her arms"Toh batao. Shaadi ho rahi hai, ya nahi ho rahi?"

"Nahi ho rahi," Saba says quickly, finding her voice, clearly deciding that self-preservation outranks loyalty to a plan she never fully believed in. "Maine — galti se — "

"Saba," Aiza says, without looking at her, "tum bahar jaake mera intezaar karo. Mein tumhe thread de dungi do minute mein."

Saba goes. Fast. Uzair has rarely seen a person leave a room with such efficiency.

This leaves Uzair Baloch alone in a thread shop with Aiza Sheikh, who is looking at him the way she looks at fabric she suspects has been mislabelled.

"Ab," she says. "Mujhe sach bolo."

He considers, briefly, the architecture of a lie. He has several available. He discards all of them, which surprises him, because lying has historically been a skill he is quite good at, and he finds that in this specific room, in front of this specific woman, the skill has simply stopped functioning, the way a key stops fitting a lock that has been changed.

"Saba meri kuch nahi hai," he says. "Akhlaq ki behen hai."

"Yeh mujhe pata hai. Poore mohalle ko pata hai."

"Toh —"

"Toh mujhe yeh samajh nahi aa raha,"Aiza says, "ki tum log pichle teen haftay se mere dukaan ke aas paas natak kyun kar rahe ho. Mithai, mosque, ab shaadi ki baatein.Uzair bhai. Mujhe dikhta hai jab koi cheez asli nahi hoti."

He has no response prepared for this, because no version of the plan accounted for the possibility that Aiza would simply identify the plan as a plan, correctly, on sight, the way she identifies charcoal pretending to be black.

"Toh kya tha yeh?" she says. Not angry. Worse than angry. Genuinely, simply curious, with the specific patience of someone willing to wait as long as necessary for an honest answer.

He could still lie. There is a version of this conversation where he produces some explanation about Saba, about a misunderstanding, about nothing at all, and walks out with his dignity slightly dented but intact, and never has to say the thing he has been not-saying for eight months.

He looks at her. At the ledger behind her with its perfect handwriting. At the three spools of thread, still on the shelf, still in the row she had arranged them in months ago, because apparently she had simply left them there, because apparently some small part of that day had also stayed with her, which he had not allowed himself to consider until exactly this moment.

"Mein chahta tha tumhe farak pade," he says. "Mujhse."

Silence.

"Isliye yeh sab kiya," he continues, because he has started now and there is no clean place to stop, the way there is no clean place to stop a wall once it has begun coming down. "Socha agar tum mujhe kisi aur ke saath dekhogi, tumhe — " He stops. Reorganises. "Akhlaq ka idea tha. Bahut bura idea tha."

"Bahut bura idea tha," Aiza agrees, immediately, with no hesitation whatsoever, which under different circumstances might have stung and right now simply feels like relief, like a window opening in a room that has been shut too long.

"Haan."

"Tumhe pata bhi hai shaadi ka jhoot kitna risky tha? Iss mohalle mein? Kal tak sabko pata chal jata ki Uzair Baloch ne Akhlaq ki behen se shaadi todi."

"Mujhe pata hai. Ab pata hai."

She looks at him for a long moment. The look has changed slightly — still the structural-integrity assessment, but with something underneath it now that he cannot immediately name, something that makes him feel less like fabric under inspection and more like a person standing in a room that has gotten suddenly very small.

"Tum seedha bata sakte the," she says.

"Haan."

"Toh kyun nahi bataya?"

This is the actual question. The one Akhlaq's entire elaborate, humiliating, multi-week plan had been constructed to avoid asking honestly even once, and here it is anyway, delivered plainly, by the one person whose plain delivery he has apparently spent eight months unable to stop thinking about.

"Kyunki," he says, "agar mein seedha bolta aur tum mana kar deti, toh kam se kam mujhe pata chal jata sach mein. Iss tarah —" He stops. Finds the rest of it. "Iss tarah mein bewakoof reh sakta tha thoda aur."

Something in her face moves. Not quite a smile.

"Aur ab?" she says.

"Ab tumne pakad liya. Toh ab koi rasta nahi bacha bewakoof rehne ka."

"Toh seedha pucho."

He looks at her. She is standing with her arms crossed, in a shop that smells like new thread and old paper, having just dismantled three weeks of strategy in under two minutes with nothing but plain observation, and he understands, with the specific clarity of a man finally arriving somewhere he has been circling for a long time, that this — exactly this, the bluntness, the refusal to let anything go unexamined, the complete absence of patience for his nonsense — is the precise quality that made him stupid about her in the first place.

"Aiza," he says. "Mujhe tumse pyar hain."

"Yeh behtar tha," she says. "Dekha, kitna asaan tha."

"Teen haftay lage."

"Tumhari galti hai. Maine pehle din se intezaar kiya tha ki tum seedha pucho."

He stares at her.

"Mujhe teen din mein pata chal gaya tha. Tum bahut subtle nahi ho, Uzair bhai."

"Akhlaq ne kaha tha mein achi acting kar raha hun."

"Akhlaq," Aiza says, with the flat, final judgement of a woman delivering a verdict, "ko thread aur logon dono ki samajh nahi hai."

[Outside, Saba is waiting exactly where she was told to wait, and when Uzair finally emerges — considerably later than two minutes, considerably more undone than when he went in — she takes one look at his face and says, "Theek hai. Ab tu mujhe woh favour de raha hai jo maine maanga tha, aur woh favour hai: kabhi mujhe dobara apne natak mein mat ghaseet."

"Manzoor hai."

"Aur Akhlaq ko batana mat ki uska plan kaam kar gaya."

"Kaam nahi kiya uska plan."

"Toh kya kaam kiya?"

Uzair considers this. The mosque, the mithai, the shaadi ki jhooti baat — none of it had worked, not in the way Akhlaq intended. What had worked was simpler and stupider and entirely outside Akhlaq's design: three weeks of bad theatre finally exhausting Uzair's capacity to keep not-saying the thing, in front of a woman patient enough, and unimpressed enough, to wait him out.

"Mein," he says, eventually. "Mein kaam kar gaya."

Akhlaq will, when he hears the full story two days later, claim total credit regardless, and will spend the better part of a year bringing it up at any opportunity, and Uzair will let him, mostly, because correcting him would require explaining the actual ending, which belongs — he has decided — to exactly two people, and a shop full of thread that has, since that Tuesday, started keeping slightly later hours than the rest of the street.]

one final author's note: AHHHHHHHHHH (cheee ye kya likh diya)