He had hoped the night would end his torment. It didn’t. He thought the storm in his mind might calm with the dawn. But the storm raged on. Standing rigid behind his gun, his lifeless gaze locked on the barrel jutting out from the narrow window of the muddy bunker, perched high on the mountaintop.
In the beginning, he found a strange comfort in staring at the barren, lifeless slope on the enemy’s side, its dry earth stretching into an endless desolation. The enemy pickets, hidden among the distant rocky precipices, visible only through his binoculars, rarely troubled him. But the world beyond those jagged peaks—untouchable, unreachable—haunted him more than any threat of war. Oddly, their own side of the mountain unsettled him the most. The lush green slope, dense with deodar trees, the shimmering stream weaving through the valley below—it all felt like a scene from someone else’s life. A life he no longer belonged to. Yet the tiny houses, no larger than matchboxes from his vantage, always drew his eye. There was something about them. He couldn’t say what. Maybe it was the thought that people still lived inside those fragile shells, even while he stood alone, staring at a world that no longer made sense.
He wanted to squeeze the trigger, to empty the entire LMG into the misty mountainside. Reload. Fire again. Anything to silence the restless storm inside him. But nothing would settle. His anger simmered just beneath the surface, a volatile mix of frustration and suffocating boredom. The night stretched on, endless and consuming, swallowing him in its choking darkness—a darkness that burned like fire, thick with smoke he couldn’t escape.
In the filthy, abandoned barrack at the far corner of the camp, his comrades would be gathered—drinking, gambling, losing themselves in the haze of liquor and late-night revelry. He would imagine the door still ajar, the stench of spilled blood thickening the air. He could see his father, the hypochondriac, pacing madly, unable to bear the sight. He thought of him, and the memory sent a twisted satisfaction through him. He could almost hear the echo of his father’s frantic mutterings.
But none of it mattered. Not the men, not the barracks, not the maddening silence. The only thing that held his focus now was the gun. His fingers twitched on the trigger, drawn to the cold, familiar steel. It fascinated him, how easy it would be to let loose, to unleash all that rage in a single violent burst.
He wanted to scream. To tell them all—his comrades, his father, anyone—that they didn’t know, that no one could understand how hard it was to be him, to be stuck in this place, in this skin, under this endless, heavy sky. But the words wouldn’t come. All that filled him was the blackness of the night, sinking deeper into his heart, his mind, his soul.
And still, he couldn’t fire. The darkness only deepened.
Some things aren’t meant to be, some are beyond your control, and others—utterly unnecessary—are thrust upon you to break you. Bloody fate. No, not fate—it was helplessness that wasn’t part of the plan. It was forced there. A soldier has no fate of his own. It’s shaped for him in the grandest of words, dressed up in promises of purpose, but concealing the bitter truth beneath—the agony.
What better place to amplify his suffering than this barren hilltop, overlooking a few distant enemy pickets on one side and a valley on the other—so still, so detached from the world that even the small cluster of Gujjars seemed forgotten by time. He had his answer: there was no better place because, after that night, he knew he had nowhere to go.
Fifteen days and nights—that’s all. Then he would return. It felt like a cruel transaction: sacrificing something precious just to cling to something that had become a necessity. He felt trapped between the two, caught in the limbo of a twisted bargain. Bloody fate wasn’t written in his stars; it was abandoned here, on this godforsaken hill.
There was something deeply wicked—at least, disgustingly unfair—about trying to justify anyone’s misery by calling it fate. It was easier to blame fate than admit the truth: that none of this should have happened. And yet here he stood, his fate written in the nothingness of this place, while the world spun on, indifferent.
He had loved everything about the marriage—the preparations, the way tradition blended with longing, how emotion intertwined with involvement, excitement with anticipation. The house had been alive, glowing with lights that, in the night, seemed like a flame burning bright in the dark furnace of the world. Everything overflowed with warmth, every corner brimming with life.
Now, back in the cold isolation of the mountain wilderness, that warmth felt like a distant memory. His body ached, and his soul felt hollow. This place, which once held some purpose, now seemed devoid of meaning. The endless days blurred into weeks, weeks into months, as the wilderness stretched out before him, tired and lifeless. He hadn’t noticed before how utterly empty it was. The enemy side, often shrouded in impenetrable mist for weeks at a time, had become as distant as his own sense of duty. Even the valley below, with its stream cutting through the foothills, felt as unreachable as home.
The separation changed him. It warped his perceptions—about duty, about his nation and its bond with this barren land, about marriage, home, and even his beloved wife. Doubt gnawed at his mind. In the loneliness of his cold bunker, sitting behind the big gun, he began to realize that doubting was its own form of journey. A slow, painful descent into self-realization, into the fragility of self-worth. He imagined the bullets in the magazine rusting, just like his own purpose.
He thought now that perhaps all this—the grand ideals, the noble duty, the sacrifices—meant nothing. Perhaps they had never meant anything at all, just illusions propped up to give shape to something hollow. And maybe they would remain that way for ages, lost to time and meaning, continuing on as empty echoes.
Integrity? To hell with it. Nothing, no one – not even the indifferent elements of nature – remains consistent. Inconsistency is woven into the fabric of existence. Yet we humans crave stability, especially in relationships. We demand it and cling to it, despite knowing that nothing endures unchanged. Yes, for as long as one can, one should hold onto it. But even the strongest relationships, the ones built on trust and loyalty, inevitably buckle under the weight of inconsistency. His doubts, once quiet whispers, grew into an obsession, filling the barren wilderness of his soul. The desolate landscape around the bunker only served to amplify the inner turmoil. He withdrew from the rowdy late-night gatherings in the abundant barracks, no longer drinking, no longer gambling. He stopped caring about the numbers in his salary account or what remained of his connection to the world outside.
The thought of betrayal gnawed at him like a wound that refused to heal. His mobile phone, once a link to the distant world, now seemed like a mocking presence, incapable of guiding him through the shadows of his mind. Doubt, he realised, was a journey – a descent into the primal, crude essence of one’s being. And it terrified him.
The doubt became real. Palpable. Like a river swelling with the pressure of a coming flood, it built within him, threatening to burst its banks. Betrayal – the one thing he couldn’t bear. The one thing he saw, he would never tolerate – loomed over him like a spectre. Sometimes, alone in the bunker, he wept behind the big gun, feeling smaller, more insignificant with every sob. A man lost, shaded by the large hat that he pulled down to his chin as if trying to hide from the world and from himself.
The doubt grew unbearable. And so, one night, without telling anyone, he slipped away from the camp. Two days later, in the dead of night, he murdered them both in their bed. His suspicions, his fears, had been true all along. He left the dagger buried in her stomach, a twisted sense of justice searing through him as he made his way back to the mountain wilderness.
The camp did not report him missing. They found him, questioned him, but never spoke of it. He didn’t care. His soul had been hollowed out, and the man he once was had vanished. The night never ended for him after that. He was trapped in it, suffering, endlessly suffering. And when the weight of it all became too much, when he could no longer endure the darkness pressing in on every side, he turned the gun on himself in that cold muddy bunker.
As the final shot echoed across the empty mountains, he screamed, “Oh great mountains! I am sorry. I couldn’t protect you.”
Ghulam Mohammad Khan was born and raised in Sonawari (Bandipora); an outlying town located on the wide shores of the beautiful Wullar Lake. Ghulam Mohammad believes that literature is the most original and enduring repository of human memory. He loves the inherent intricacies of language and the endless possibilities of meaning. In his writing, he mainly focuses on mini-narratives, local practices and small-scale events that could otherwise be lost forever to the oblivion of untold histories. Ghulam Mohammad considers his hometown, faith, and family to be the most important things to him. He writes for a few local magazines and newspapers. His short story collection titled The Cankered Rose is his first major forthcoming work.
You can find more of Ghulam’s work here on Ink Pantry.
