The city of forgotten names

 


Urban Fable | The City of Forgotten Names

By Faraz Parvez
Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal
Former Faculty Member, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA
(Pseudonym of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal)

🌃 “When you forget your name, you don’t disappear. You become something worse—empty.”

It started on a Tuesday.

People woke up staring at their passports, ID cards, wedding certificates... but nothing clicked. They could read their names, yes—but they couldn’t feel them. Couldn’t say them. Couldn’t own them.

They looked into mirrors and saw strangers blinking back.

By Friday, the whole city was afflicted.

The Crisis of Identity

Doctors called it “Nominal Dissociation Syndrome.”
Poets called it “The Vanishing.”
The government called it “a manageable anomaly.”

But for the people who lived it, it was terror.

Fathers forgot what their children called them.
Lovers stopped calling each other anything.
Teachers couldn't take attendance.
Graves went unvisited because names faded from memories.

A silence fell over the city—not of sound, but of identity.

Enter the Librarian

Her name was Muneeza—or so she hoped.

She had worked at the Central Archive Library for decades, cataloguing everything from folk tales to war records.
But now, even the names on book spines blurred under her eyes.

One night, in desperation, she descended into the Sub-Archive, a forbidden basement beneath the library.

There, bound in rusted chain and forgotten ink, she found it:

The Master Book of Names.

A book that breathed.
A book that whispered.

And on its first page, it said:

“Each soul is given one true name. Forget it, and the world forgets you back.”

The Rules of Naming

To retrieve a name, Muneeza had to find it written by hand, in love, and in pain.

Not typed.
Not printed.
Not machine-made.

She began collecting old letters, scribbled diary pages, dedications on grave markers, and school slam books.

Each time she found a handwritten name, it glowed—and its bearer remembered who they were.

But some names... were too lost.

The Cost of Remembering

People begged her to find theirs.

But with each name she retrieved, a part of her memory faded.

Her mother’s face.
Her wedding day.
The scent of her childhood garden.

She had saved the city—but forgotten herself.

The Final Entry

When she realized her own name was slipping, she wrote it by hand in the Master Book.

Then locked the book away forever.

Now, every month, strangers visit the library.
They don’t know why.
They just feel drawn to it.
Some say when they enter the basement, they hear whispers:

“Remember who you are. Or vanish like smoke.”

🌌 What This Fable Teaches Us

In an age of usernames, handles, avatars, and filtered selfies—we often forget:

A name is not just a label.
It’s a witness to your story.
It’s your echo through time.

And when we stop calling each other by name, we lose more than syllables—we lose meaning.

📌 Return to where stories remember you:
🔗 farazparvez1.blogspot.com
A digital sanctuary for fables that flicker and truths that remain.

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