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In the village of Bandina, twilight was never silent. Between the call of distant muezzins and the sigh of the cold river, the village breathed like an old soul wrapped in fog. The people, weary from a day’s labor, gathered at the steps of the newly constructed concrete shops. They smoked, spoke, and stared — half at the clouds glowing red above the peaks, half at the wandering one-eyed dog/bitch that limped across the cold lane.
She had a strange stillness, a rhythm of pain made visible. Children whispered of her ugliness. Men laughed, calling her cursed. Yet, in their laughter, there was the strange fear humans carry when faced with blemished beauty — a mirror too honest for their liking.But only I knew the true story written on her wounded frame. Only I had heard the cry that tore through that pitch-dark night.
It was a night without stars, the air thick with the scent of damp earth and pine resin. The wild wolves howled in the orchards. Just behind my home, a trembling whimper became a defiant growl — the voice of a mother refusing to let darkness undo her creation. When I reached the barn, I could see only madness and struggle, a circle of fangs around a fury greater than fear.
The bitch fought till her strength bled into dust. When dawn came creeping over the Tall Popular tops, her eye had gone blind, clawed by the wild jaws of envy and hunger. Three of her puppies lay silent, their small forms like fallen blossoms in blood-tainted straw. The fourth, a little brown one with a gasping throat, lived — barely.
That morning, I heard her cry. It was not an animal wail but a tone that belongs to existence itself — that primal music which rises when life refuses to surrender even to grief. Her wounded voice carried through the chest of the valley; it reached the sleeping roofs, the river’s edge, perhaps even the ear of God.And I thought — maybe all creation begins again through pain.
The Wandering
Days passed. Her hollow eye healed into a scar that shone when the sun poured through the chinar leaves. Each morning, she roamed the lanes — a figure of famine and faith — searching for scraps of bread thrown from the shops, the stalls, or the school corner where children left their biscuits half-eaten.
Her breasts hung low, swollen with a mother’s ache. She had no sense of self — only the ceaseless duty of love. I often saw her stop mid-lane, lift her nose to the wind, and sigh. The pup waited in the dry corner of the stable, trembling, throat marked by a faint scab of survival.
The villagers mocked her persistence. “Even nature denies the ugly ones,” one shopkeeper said, spitting tobacco into the dust. The others nodded, wrapping their shawls tighter. In their words, I heard the oldest blindness of humankind — how we curse the shapes of things while remaining lost to their souls.
They judged her for her missing eye, unaware that faith often gouges one eye so that the other may see eternity more clearly.
Every evening, as the sun sank behind the walnut groves, I’d pass by the shop steps. The old men smoked, the young laughed, and the dogs of the village slept beneath the benches. Amid this ritual idleness, they talked about her — the one-eyed bitch — as though her ugliness had become their evening prayer. They called her “half made”, “curse-bound”, “the ghost of a bad omen.”
I listened without protest, hearing in their voices the fragile defense of men who feared truth shaped in suffering. Every soul, I thought, seeks something to ridicule — a scapegoat to escape its own imperfection. It is easier to mock a wounded animal than to face your wounded spirit.
Language of Tears
One day, a soft drizzle covered the fields, and I found her lying beside her puppy. Both were quiet — too quiet. The pup made a sound like the faint hum of a reed flute, throat wheezing, eyes glazed with pain that only love could answer. The mother licked the wound again and again, her tongue trembling, her voice breaking into low sobs that came more from within than out.
That sound was language — the purest kind. It had no grammar, no name, no pretense — only essence. I knelt beside her, and for the first time, she lifted her one good eye to meet mine. There was no fear, only recognition — as if we both remembered something ancient about the soul’s contract with sorrow.
Life, at that moment, felt like a circle of thirst that returns as compassion. Perhaps that is what Sufis mean when they speak of annihilation — to lose every worldly eye until what remains sees only love.
Weeks turned into whispers. Her wounds deepened, and her walks became slower. Some evenings she wouldn’t rise. Then, one dusky winter day, she was gone. The puppy too. The villagers didn’t notice their absence, but the air of the lanes had changed — softer, more deliberate, as if consciousness itself had lost one of its quiet watchers.
I still walk those paths after sunset. Sometimes I sense her presence — not in form, but in the rhythm of the world: in the hush before the azaan, in the cry of a winter bird seeking its nest, in the wet scent of soil after rain. Perhaps divinity takes such shapes when the world stops paying attention.
We spend our lives fearing loss, but loss, in truth, is what teaches us to love without naming. That one-eyed creature had reminded me that the divine eye never judges beauty by symmetry — it listens only to the purity of struggle. Her ugliness had been a scripture, her cry a hidden verse.
And tonight, when the village talks again on those steps, I walk by smiling — carrying her story like a secretprayer:that love, when it sees the wound beneath appearance, becomes the nearest thing to God.
The author is a Gold medalist in Environmental Engineering from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).
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