As a toddler, being forced to hold the pencil between my thumb and fingers at an angle that would hurt, drawing circles were the easiest. No abrupt pauses to define the edges, but one stroke perfecting with each passing day—sun in a monochrome scenery, the belly of a cat or Aftab. One for the face, two for the eyes, and a small one in the centre like his mouth on eating  ginormous laddoos Ammi made.

Only this time, instead of the flour tousling with ghee and sugar, an expanding silence fills the kitchen. It’s as cruel and stubborn as grief that settles into the core of existence like an indefinite ache in the bones. So, Ammi and Abba waste away in each other’s arms—their desperate attempts at making that ache bearable. I can’t do that—unravel and lay bare. My recoiling is instinctive. I can’t give up so easily on Aftab—he loved me.

It showed in the last bar of chocolate that he hid in an inconspicuous corner but willingly gave away. Or when he sproinged from behind the almirah—to shield me from the gangsters—in Ammi’s blue dupatta flowing flawlessly around his shoulder. Kapow! Boom! Zap! With little arms resting on the waist, he would don a crown of invincibility while the rugged rubber pellets glumly bounced off his skin – pew pew pew.

‘Run. Hide. Fight. Choose wisely,’ he had said.

Then, along with the weekends came an unyielding chore list. I would mostly dawdle around, and right before it became too apparent for Ammi to discern my prevarications, I’d bury myself in the textbooks that lay about unloved for days. Aftab took the fall for much of my troublemaking, yet he’d accompany me to my evening dance classes. I would twist, stretch, arc, spin and twinge, while he’d sit through it all, besotted with the threadbare comics picked up from the adjacent bazaar.

Every so often, I flip through a precious keepsake—a picture album memorabilia perched upon the shelf, gathering dust. It’s nothing but a crumbling doorway to our shared adventures and dreamscapes. My favourite is where he, seven and I, five are jumping midair from a park bench. I had sensed Abba’s patience burdened by his camera as I kept jolting Aftab back from the edge every time we were about to take off. 

Aftab had smiled and said, ‘You’ll never know how fun it is until you try. I won’t let go, Marvel Girl! Trust me, okay?’

I had promptly held my chin up at this reverential salutation—though still cowering as he held my hand tight. A sweeping tingle later, I could taste the triumph in feeling the freshly mowed grass beneath my feet.

He signalled at Abba to click. And this time, we sprang the highest.

***

At night, once the quickened breaths become calmer, I tiptoe across the hall, climb up the patina ladder to the other end of the craggy terrace—hoping to see him appear out of thin air or next to my reflection in the glass window. I tire myself from trying to feel him in the slightest movements of the draught, gazing at the crystalline twinkling, especially the cluster that shines the brightest.

I pull my knees to the chest and wrap my arms around them. The chalk in my hand traces over the circles on the wall once again. One for the face, two for the eyes, and a small one like his mouth while trying hard to vet the mysteries of the universe. That’s another way I keep his phantom alive. 

His skin burns light amber in the streetlight whilst long tresses ruffle like a shadow, hiding him from the rest of the world. Even though he is distant, he is somewhat always there.

 

I escape into a drift, and a memory stowed away from two months ago resurfaces.

‘Do you reckon there could be a secret stairway to the galaxies far beyond?’ I asked curiously.

He drew in a sharp breath. ‘I believe somewhere, there’s a camouflaged multiverse of superheroes,’ he replied as if he already knew, shifting his steady gaze from one star to another.

‘Then, why is earth always in trouble?’

‘Maybe, they’re trying to make it a better place and a thousand other things that could go wrong, aren’t. Like killing the monsters prowling in the dark that you don’t ever want to know about.’

I resisted a shudder.

‘Or rescuing those who are helpless. Remember, Danish—he only bruised his hand after falling from the fifth floor and that girl from your class, came out unscratched in a car accident?’

‘But the rest of her family died!’ I spluttered.

His butterscotch eyes sparkled even brighter. ‘She must be important, you know, like a purpose she’s yet to fulfil.’

‘Ha! So, what’s yours—to drive me out of my wits?’ I exclaimed, bursting into a guffaw.

The amber light slowly snuffs. I look at the cratered moon, hoping to catch a flowing cape gliding across the jagged silhouette of towering skyscrapers or bright sparks—turning blue to emerald and then silver—flying about from any spells cast. The sky forms a dome of an ascending abyss, weighing down heavily on my shoulders. Every time my head burns, it sends me reeling down to the concrete. With hands clasped on my ears, I try to escape Ammi’s unsparing screams from the day everything had changed.

***

The news had spread far and wide—an attack in mid-morning. Even though their phones rang incessantly, no one in the family said a word. Instead, they quietly slid away from the house as “a sudden matter had to be looked after”. To them, a false alarm as this was ridiculous, causing unwarranted panic. It was the army school, after all. You don’t expect such kind of horror lurking there.

But soon, everyone’s worst nightmare was rampaging its way into reality. The school facility had high iron-grilled walls, razor-wired from all sides, but scalable. The sentinels were well trained but unprepared and a little too late to cease the grenades and rifles blowing up children like ragdolls. The hallways that had echoed with noisy chatters and assembly prayers until a few hours ago were rife with bullets ricocheting off concrete and flesh alike. The white plaster, now dappled in red, resounded the shrieks and howls right until the terrorists watched the light go out of the eyes.

While the crossfire was still on, I heard it on the radio as the vile words burst into a coppery tang. My vision went white, and I pictured Aftab lying in a corner, under a desk in a pool of blood—not his—to play dead and then sneak away furtively. Run. Hide. Fight.

Of course, that scrawny body of his didn’t even stand a chance to fight. But he knew he had to run for a place to hide—in the Janitor’s cupboard under the stairs, the corner in the library where no one ever got caught or the unobtrusive exit opening into the bramble? I knew he would come through.

But the carnage captured on the tapes had left no room for anticipation. I watched him rushing a dozen battered mates into the abandoned furniture room, teetering back, desperately looking for survivors in the rubble and lugging two severely injured to the nearest bathroom. He should have known better than to hunker down with their hands clasped into his.

My pathetic brother, Aftab. He only had to leave everybody alone and get away, but instead, he chose the cold tiles, watching blood and life spew out of him. Nobody conjured through the roof or from under the floor to save him. The superheroes he fervently believed in didn’t show up.

A few forced nudges on the door. Pew pew pew. Seven perfect crinkle-edged circles.

The headlines had read: ‘The gunmen only meant to kill and not take any hostages’; ‘Mourning day for the nation: PM to draw up a National Action Plan’; ‘TPG claims responsibility, says the attack was in retaliation for the country’s joint military offensive’.

Aftab’s life was duly compensated with reasonings, resolutions and a bundle of cash.

That I happened to be sick and home this day was a string of solace for Ammi and Abba to hold on to for the rest of their disconsolate lives. But there aren’t enough times I have beaten myself over for staying back. The guilt still gnaws at my soul. If I could, I’d choose to be in school, a hundred times over. Then maybe, just maybe Aftab would have powered his stealth, employed an ingenious stratagem—the way we had played it out years ago with Ammi’s blue dupatta—and escaped to rescue me like he always did.

***

The autumn of gold and crimson invariably turns to the winter of grey and white. Oftentimes visitors drop by—some 

bless Aftab’s soul; others pay tributes and call him a god-sent divine interference. However, they invariably end on the same note, their faces lacquered with wanton and souls gravid with rage — ‘Merciless death upon these perpetrators and their families! We’ll make sure they feel the same pain!’

With every such word uttered, I see through their wounds rankling deep beneath the skin like their belief in the very act of destruction for catharsis. While Ammi’s and Abba’s faces inundate with warm tears, mine bears deep depressions of nothingness—a sullen expectation of what could have been. A part of me will never accept that Aftab won’t come bouncing out of some corner, laughing riotously at me for falling for his crude, puerile joke.

My brother was just a gawky sixteen-something who knew little that in his unfaltering resolve to search for superheroes, he was toughening up his inherent fragility to salvage what could have gone wrong but didn’t. When hope threatened to become an empty word, he had discovered a wellspring of unbridled courage within for those wishing upon a miracle.

So perhaps, it wasn’t about extraordinary abilities to stop the massacre that day. It has never been. Maybe, the rescuing begins with saving the troubled minds caught in the never-ending loop of hate and vengeance, violence and depravity—those who choose to undervalue the dignity of human life.

And, while we fight the chaos and pillage each day brings forth, life continues to find light in the deepest corners. The universe keeps going, breathing in and out. In his circle of life, my brother was an ordinary teenager who fulfilled his purpose and emboldened mine. He left me to seek hope with an acute awareness of my own finely threaded impermanence.

The inky sky slowly melts into balmy undertones of dawn. The sun flits over the horizon, compelling the shadows and monsters skulking in the dark to retreat. And, there he is, aftab, not in the twinkling of the stars but shining over Peshawar in its brilliant sanguine hue, lighting up the world.