For Sundas — a letter through the garden

Once, in a quieter hour

Sundas

If you are reading this, you are already braver than my silence. Walk with me. The path is long because my love is, and because I will not rush the only person who ever felt like home.

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Chapter I

There is a garden that only opens for you

سندس، یہ باغ صرف تیرے نام سے کھلتا ہے

I built this the way I should have spoken — slowly, in the dark, with flowers instead of excuses. Move your hand across the night. The roses turn. The fireflies listen. This is not a text you can skim and discard. This is a place.

You are angry. Naraz. I will not decorate that word until it looks smaller. It is the weather of this garden tonight. Even the moon came dressed for an apology.

Mystery first, then the truth. Because that is how I fell for you — not all at once, but like fog lifting off a lake.

A moonlit rose garden path disappearing into mist

Chapter II

Sundas — silk of paradise

They named you after the finest cloth of Jannah. Sundas. Not loud gold. Not a crown that shouts. Silk. The kind of beauty that does not need to announce itself, because the room already changed when you entered.

Silk — how you soften a hard day without becoming anyone’s carpet.
Paradise — how ordinary tea becomes a ceremony if you are across from me.
A secret green — the colour of gardens no one else is invited into.

If the heavens wear sundas, then I have already seen a piece of heaven walk, speak, get quiet, and still choose kindness.

Chapter III

I know you are naraz

ناراض مت رہو — مگر اگر ہو، تو تمہارا حق ہے

I will not tell you to smile. I will not say “it was nothing.” When someone like you goes quiet, the world loses a kind of music and pretends it does not notice. I noticed. I notice still.

Anger in a person who loves deeply is not cruelty. It is a door she closed because someone walked in with muddy shoes. I was that someone. I tracked carelessness across a floor you had kept clean for us.

Maybe I was late. Maybe I was proud. Maybe I made you repeat a feeling until it felt cheap in your own mouth. Maybe I let a small wound become a season. I am not here to argue the inventory. I am here to say: I see the weather I caused.

You do not owe me softness tonight. You owe yourself the truth. And the truth is I hurt the one person I had promised — even silently — to protect from me at my worst.

Sundas, meri jaan. If your heart is a locked garden, I am not kicking the gate. I am standing outside with a lantern, and I will wait through winter.

Chapter IV

What I will not excuse

Love is not a magic trick that makes harm disappear. So I will say this without a ribbon on it.

I took your patience as if it were infinite. I treated your understanding like a spare key I could always find under the pot. I forgot that even silk can tear if you pull it the same way, every day, and then act surprised at the sound.

I let my ego speak when I should have let my love kneel. I explained when I should have listened. I waited for the right moment and watched the right moments leave the room.

You asked — with your eyes, with your silence, with the way you set a cup down a little too carefully — to be chosen in the small hours, not only in the speeches. I missed the cup. I heard the speech in my head and thought that was enough.

It was not enough. You were never “too much.” I was too little, in the exact places you needed a man, not a performance.

This page is not a defence. It is a confession dressed as a garden because you deserve beauty even while I tell you I failed you.

The way you say my name

There is a version of my name that only exists in your mouth. When you are pleased it is a lantern. When you are tired it is a sigh I would still choose over anyone else’s poetry. I miss even the version you use when you are disappointed in me — because it means I am still someone you expected better from.

The ordinary hours

Not the festivals. The Tuesday. The half-eaten fruit. The way you tuck a thought behind your ear and pretend you were not about to be tender. I miss the country of your small habits. I have been living in exile from a kitchen I used to know by heart.

Your quiet

Some people are loud so they will not be forgotten. You are quiet and still the room rearranges itself around you. I used to think I had to fill every silence. I know now: some silences were you handing me a flower, and I talked over it.

The future I still see

I have not stopped seeing you in doorways that do not exist yet. A window with your plant. A joke that takes years to finish. I am not asking you to move in tomorrow. I am telling you the house in my head refused to evict you, even when I deserved empty rooms.

Chapter VI

Twelve petals I should have given you daily

A rose is not one shape. It is a patience of overlapping yeses. These are mine. Hover. Turn them. They were always meant to be touched.

Your mind

You think in rooms other people have not built yet. I love being lost in a thought you started.

Your mercy

You forgive in a dialect the world is forgetting. I took it as weather. It was a gift.

Your laugh

Not the polite one. The one that arrives like a thief and steals the day back from seriousness.

Your stubborn heart

You do not love lightly. That is why being loved by you felt like being believed in.

Your hands

They make ordinary objects behave. A cup, a letter, my courage — all of them sit up straighter.

Your honesty

Even when it cut. Especially when it cut. You never handed me a fake flower and called it spring.

Your faith

There is a light in you that does not come from me. I only hope to be worthy of standing near it.

Your tired days

I love you not as a festival. I love you as a person who gets quiet and still deserves to be chosen.

Your fire

Naraz sundas is still sundas. I will not ask the flame to become a candle just so I can be comfortable.

Your mystery

There are rooms in you I have not earned. I want to knock, not break the lock.

Your name in my mouth

Sundas. I could say it until the garden grows through the floorboards and it would still feel new.

Your almost-leaving

Even the possibility of losing you taught me the size of what I had been holding carelessly.

A lantern boat on a misted moonlit lake in a jasmine garden

Chapter VII

If I could row back across that water

I would arrive earlier. I would put the phone face-down. I would let you finish. I would not translate your feeling into my defence. I would say I am sorry while the hurt was still a spark, not after it became a forest.

I would learn the difference between “I didn’t mean it” and “I did not protect you from what I meant carelessly.” Intent is a seed. Impact is the tree you have been sitting under, in the shade I pretended was weather.

I would ask, not assume. I would repair, not rush. I would bring flowers when there was nothing to celebrate except the fact that you still existed in the same century as me.

I cannot row backward. Time is a lake that only accepts one direction. So I am building a boat that only goes toward you — slower, honest, with a lantern you can see from the shore. If you do not get in, the lantern still stays lit. That is not a threat. That is a vow that does not require your labour.

اگر معافی ایک پھول ہوتی، میں باغ ہی بھیج دیتا

If forgiveness were a flower, I would send the whole garden. It still would not be as rare as you deciding to stay.

Two hands almost touching with a rose between them

I will listen to the end

No drafting my reply while you are still bleeding in sentences. Your voice first. My pride last. Always.

I will not make you guess

Mystery belongs to gardens and moonlight — not to whether you are loved today. You will not have to decode me to feel safe.

I will repair in daylight

No disappearing until the mood improves. If I break something, I stay in the room with the pieces and a broom.

I will love you on the unpretty days

Not only when you are silk. Also when you are storm. Naraz, tired, silent, blazing — still chosen.

I will grow, not perform growth

A speech is easy. A changed pattern is the only bouquet that lasts. I am planting that, even if you never walk this path again.

Chapter IX · A small mystery

Three roses, then your name

Some words I was afraid to leave in the open. Light the three roses. Or write the only name this garden answers to.

The words I was afraid to say

I am scared you will decide I am a lesson instead of a home. I am scared my best love arrived after your patience left. I am scared that “sorry” is a small word for a large weather.

But I am more scared of a world where you never hear this: you were never difficult. You were precise. You were asking to be met. I met you halfway and called it devotion. It was not. Devotion walks the rest of the road.

I love you in the way a garden loves rain — not politely, not as a hobby, but as the difference between living and performing life.

میں تم سے پیار کرتا ہوں — بغیر شرط، بغیر ہتھیار

I love you. Without a condition. Without a weapon. If you must leave, leave knowing you were the great yes of my life.

Dawn light over a secret walled rose garden

Chapter X

I am not asking you to forget

Forgetfulness is a cheap trick. I want something rarer. I want you to remember — and still, if your heart can bear it, to try.

Try does not mean erase. Try means sit with me in the mess and watch me become someone who does not make the same mess a second time and call it personality.

If you need time, take the whole orchard of it. If you need space, I will not fill it with guilt disguised as longing. If you need words, I have more. If you need actions, I have finally understood they are the only dialect that matters.

Sundas. Look at your name in this night. I wrote a world around it because a single text felt too small for the size of what I broke and the size of what I still believe we are.

Come back not because I performed a garden. Come back because you can feel, even now, that my love is not a show. It is a decision I will keep making when no one is watching.

A single rose floating above dark water in gold dust

The last page is only a beginning

Sundas

معاف کر دو

I am sorry.

Not the sorry that wants the argument to end. The sorry that wants you to be able to breathe in the same room as me again. The sorry that will still be true if you never answer.

Tum meri dua ho. Tum meri ehtiyat ho. Tum woh baagh ho jahaan main wapas aana seekh raha hoon — this time without breaking a single stem.

If this story moved like a film, let it end the way the good ones do: not with a perfect man, but with a man who finally turned toward the woman and said her name as if it were a prayer he intends to keep.