At long last, the letter I promised you all those years ago. I don't know if this will even reach you but I have to send it all the same. I owe her that much.
On the day I left, your instructions were so clear: find our mother and send her to the palace. You would talk to the emperor, our mother's charges would be lifted, and she could live in the city with you, free of her guilt and shame, blessed by the emperor himself. It was the perfect plan, but it's not what our mother wanted. Do you think she cared about your status, Sadiqa? Maybe most mothers want their daughters to marry well, but all ours ever wanted was for us to be a family. The three of us living together in our village would have been good enough for her. I guess that wasn't good enough for you.
At the time that you told me to find her, it had already been six years since I saw her last. You knew, yet you still sent me after her, out into the deserts and forests and mountains. I searched for ten years, Sadiqa. Of course I tried our village first. Then the neighboring ones and the ones past those. She left no trace. Everywhere I went, no one seemed to know who she was. It was as if she had never existed.
I was able to just barely support myself by my Saroz playing and by the kindness and hospitality of strangers. I eventually stopped looking. Knowing I could never return to the city, I became set on my nomadic way of life, and I roamed from village to village playing my Saroz and singing the legends of the great kings and queens.
And then, after a few weeks in a small village in the Sulaiman mountains, I met an old woman who asked me where I had learned one of my songs. I told her it was a lullaby my mother had sung to me as a child (you know the one with the trees and the pond and the little girl that leans too far). I began singing it again, and as soon as she started singing along, I knew. But if she ran before, would she not, upon realizing who I was, run again? I couldn't risk losing her a second time, so I played a different song and we didn't speak of it until the day she died.
Sadiqa, I took care of our mother until her last day on this earth. She became more and more ill until she couldn't even speak. She would just lay there and stare nothing until she finally breathed her last. Before she lost her words, however, she told me the truth about her. About us.
This is why I write to you. Our mother is dead but our story is very much alive and real. When I return to the city, I will tell everyone the truth about our family. There's nowhere you can run. It's all coming out now.
تمہارے پیارے بھائی
رضوان
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