Semua Bab Ashes of the Beloved: Bab 1 - Bab 10

It did not begin in a way that announced itself as important, and there were no signs at the time that anything about that afternoon would refuse to fade later on, because it unfolded with the kind of ordinary stillness that most people pass through without retaining, the kind of moment that does not ask to be remembered and therefore is not guarded by attention, and perhaps that was the reason it survived at all, because memory often protects what was not expected to matter.The university library that day existed in a state of suspended quiet that did not feel empty but instead felt layered, as though sound itself had been softened into different distances, some close enough to be noticed and others far enough to exist only as impression rather than clarity. The air carried the faint smell of old paper and polished wood, mixed with the slightly metallic scent of sunlight that had passed through glass for too long, and the tall arched windows along the eastern wall allowed long stream

By morning, the rain had stopped.But something inside the house had changed forever.The silence no longer felt peaceful. It pressed against the walls like breath trapped inside a coffin. Even Zara seemed to sense it, moving quietly through rooms with wide, uncertain eyes.Meher barely came downstairs. When she did, her face looked pale and hollow, shadows bruising the skin beneath her eyes. She avoided looking directly at Arman, and when their gazes accidentally met, something unreadable flickered across her expression.Fear. Or guilt.Arman no longer knew the difference. And somehow, that frightened him most of all.The days stretched painfully after Zara’s homework confession.Meher tried speaking several times.“Arman, please…”“We should talk…”“You’re misunderstanding—”But every word sounded distant to him now, muffled beneath the roaring inside his own head.At work, he found himself staring blankly at reports he could no longer process. Numbers blurred together meaninglessly

The rain returned again that evening.Not loudly.Not with violent thunder or screaming wind.Just soft endless rain drifting across the town in silver sheets while darkness settled slowly through the forest beyond the house. The trees swayed gently beneath the storm, their branches moving like shadows whispering to one another in the dark.By the time Arman reached home, exhaustion had settled so deeply into his body it no longer felt physical.It felt permanent.His hands trembled slightly while unlocking the front door. His eyes burned from sleeplessness. Every muscle in his body ached beneath the weight of too many nights spent awake listening for sounds he prayed were imaginary.The house greeted him with silence. A lamp glowed softly near the living room couch. Zara’s small shoes sat neatly beside the doorway. Somewhere deeper inside the house, a clock ticked slowly through the dark.For several long moments, Arman remained standing in the kitchen listening to rain move through

The rain lasted three days.Not the violent kind that arrived with thunder and lightning, but the slow, persistent sort that settled over the hills and refused to leave. Every morning Belle Vue Psychiatric Hospital emerged beneath the same blanket of gray clouds, and every evening darkness arrived early, swallowing the forests that surrounded the property until only silhouettes remained beyond the windows.By the fourth day, Aisha had begun noticing something peculiar.Every time it rained, Arman wrote more.The observation started innocently enough. She happened to pass through the eastern observation corridor several times during her shifts and found him exactly where he always seemed to be—sitting beside the large window overlooking the forest, a notebook balanced carefully on his lap while his pen moved steadily across the page.He never appeared rushed.Never seemed frustrated.The writing flowed naturally, almost peacefully, as though he were recording memories rather than creat

The rain had stopped again, but Belle Vue Psychiatric Hospital did not feel like it had returned to normal. Instead, it felt as though the building had simply changed the way it held silence, as if every corridor and every locked door was now carrying something that had not been fully spoken aloud. Aisha noticed it first in the small interruptions of her routine, the way she paused longer than necessary between patient files, the way her attention drifted back to Arman’s case even when she was supposed to be focused elsewhere, and the way certain words now carried a weight they had not carried before she began reading the deeper archives.M. Qureshi was one of those words.It no longer behaved like an initial.It behaved like an absence that had been carefully shaped.Aisha had expected clarity after the archives, but what she had found instead was something more disorienting, because the records did not form a single narrative so much as they revealed fractures in time, places where