Faraz Parvez

The Wedding Guest Who Never Came By Faraz Parvez Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA It was the grandest wedding Karachi had seen that year — fairy lights strung across the Clifton beach lawn, a stage covered in fresh roses, a buffet stretching endlessly under white canopies. And yet, for Sana, the bride, the evening was incomplete. She kept glancing toward the entrance, scanning each new arrival. Guests assumed she was nervous, or overwhelmed by the occasion. Only she knew the truth — she was looking for one person. Zayan. They had met four years earlier in a bookshop on Zamzama, reaching for the same copy of The Forty Rules of Love . He had smiled, let her take the book, and somehow stayed in her life ever since — not as a lover, not exactly, but as someone who always seemed to be there when she needed him most. He was the one who walked her home when her car broke down at midnight. The one who sent her recording...

  Letters That Arrived Too Late By Faraz Parvez Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA The first letter came on a quiet Thursday afternoon in Lahore. The winter light was fading, turning the old city into a painting of dust and gold. Amina had been returning from her teaching job, her head full of unfinished lesson plans, when the postman handed her a thick ivory envelope. It had no return address. Only her name — written in an elegant, looping hand that felt strangely familiar. She tore it open absentmindedly, expecting a bill or an invitation. But the words inside made her sit down on the stairs before even closing the gate. "I have loved you for years, Amina. Loved the way you tilt your head when listening, the way you bite your lip when hiding a laugh. I know your hands smell faintly of books and sandalwood soap. I know your heart lives between poetry and silence." She froze. No one had ever written to he...

Two Drabbles for a Changing World By Faraz Parvez Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA A drabble is a complete story told in exactly 100 words — no more, no less. It is the art of telling a universe in the space of a breath. Today, I give you two such worlds. 1. The Envelope The envelope sat on Fatima’s desk for three days. No return address. No seal. On the fourth day, she opened it. Inside: a single photograph of her standing at the edge of the Clifton beach — but it was dated ten years in the future. She was smiling in the picture, holding hands with someone she had never met. The sea behind them was calm, the sky golden. She taped the photo to her wall. And every weekend, she went to the beach, waiting for the stranger who would make that smile real. 2. The Last Bus Arif boarded the last bus of the night in Islamabad. There were no other passengers, only the driver — who never looked back. The bus move...

Ten Vignettes from a Restless Subcontinent By Faraz Parvez Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA The vignette is a brief flame of a story — it flares, dazzles, and fades before you can name the colour of its light. In the lanes of the Subcontinent, where the past lingers like the scent of old rain and the future hums like wires above crowded bazaars, a thousand stories breathe in every street corner. Today, dear reader, I bring you ten of them . They may be fleeting, but each holds the weight of a novel. 1. The Man at the Railway Bench He wore a white kurta, his beard soaked from the drizzle. The train had left hours ago, yet he sat unmoving. When asked, he said, “I’m waiting for the 1972 express. My wife is on it.” The station master did not tell him that train had been discontinued decades ago. 2. Mangoes in Winter Shazia opened her fridge in Karachi and gasped — mangoes, fresh and golden, lay there. A note rea...

  The Widow Who Lived in the Mirror By Faraz Parvez Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA In the narrow lanes of Lahore’s Mochi Gate , where the houses leaned toward each other like old gossips whispering over steaming cups of chai, there stood a crumbling haveli that everyone avoided after sunset. The windows were always shut. The courtyard always damp. And behind a rusted iron gate covered in jasmine vines, there lived Bibi Rukhsana , a widow who no one had seen in daylight for decades. Children said she was a ghost. Adults said she was cursed. But the truth was stranger — Bibi Rukhsana lived in a mirror . The Mirror in the Haveli The tale began long before most of the city was born. Rukhsana was once a celebrated beauty, married into wealth, her husband a silk trader with ships sailing to Muscat and Zanzibar. One evening, on a trip to Delhi, he returned with a gift — a full-length, Venetian mirror framed in ...

  The Grave That Moves at Night By Faraz Parvez (Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal — Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA) In the far-flung outskirts of Lahore, beyond the crumbling brick walls and the lazy canals where buffaloes swam in the heat, there stood a graveyard the elders called Maqbara-e-Sukoon . “Graveyard of Peace,” they called it — though no one had felt peaceful there in over fifty years. It was said that one grave in Maqbara-e-Sukoon did not stay in its place. By day, it looked like any other — a simple mound of earth, a weather-worn headstone with no name, only the word “Ajeeb” ( strange ) carved crudely into it. But at night, villagers claimed it shifted. Sometimes to the left. Sometimes to the far right of the graveyard. Sometimes it disappeared entirely, only to return by dawn. The elders swore this was no illusion — footprints would appear around it in the morning, as if someone had been pacing. The Dare One hot July evenin...