When Love Is One-Sided In A Kashmiri Marriage

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer)
Representational Photo

By Syed Majid Gilani

They weren't always silent. There were days when the house echoed with the sound of children running down the hallway, their laughter spilling into the corners. But when the noise faded, what remained was silence. The kind that presses against your chest. Sahil lived inside that silence for years.

He married Muskaan with hope in his heart. He had seen her once, and something about her stayed with him. A softness in her eyes, maybe. He thought it was love. But Muskaan didn't see him the same way.

Her family had chosen Sahil for her, and she walked into the marriage without a word of protest, but also without a trace of warmth.

From the beginning, her distance wasn't hard to miss. She answered his questions in half-sentences, never met his gaze for too long, never asked how his day had gone.

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It was a slow, silent pushing away. But enough to leave Sahil standing alone, even when they sat beside each other.

“She never said it outright,” Sahil once told a friend.“But her silence said everything.”

Still, he stayed. Because love, for him, wasn't conditional. He believed in staying through the cold days, in waiting for spring. He made tea for her every morning, fixed the loose hinge on her cupboard, remembered the dates she forgot. He believed that one day, something would melt in her.

But Muskaan was not waiting to be melted. She had built walls early and kept them strong. She visited her parents' home often, ignoring Sahil's messages while she was away. Sometimes, days would pass without a proper word between them.

He asked her once, politely, if she was happy.

She looked away and said,“This is my life now. What does happiness have to do with it?”

It was the closest she ever came to telling the truth.

Over time, Muskaan's coldness shifted into something sharper. She didn't raise her voice, but she made sure her indifference stung. She involved their children in it too, carefully planting ideas in their young minds. Ideas that made Sahil the outsider in his own home.

“She's turning them against me,” he confided to a cousin one night, his voice barely above a whisper.“I don't know what I've done to deserve this.”

What he had done was love too much. He had mistaken tolerance for strength, and silence for peace.

Muskaan's family, always on her side, saw Sahil's kindness as weakness. They knew she hadn't wanted the marriage. But no one had asked Sahil what he wanted, or how it felt to wake up every day beside a woman who wouldn't meet his eyes.

The room he had decorated with soft curtains and pale green walls for her comfort became his prison. She never touched the books he bought her. Never noticed when he changed the curtains with the seasons. He began to feel invisible inside his own efforts.

The children were growing. They loved him, but he saw confusion in their eyes now. They didn't know why their mother was always cold, or why their father was always silent. They only knew something was missing. Something important. Something neither parent could explain.

“I didn't want them to suffer,” Sahil said,“so I stayed. I told myself love means sacrifice. But I was the only one sacrificing.”

There's a kind of heartbreak that doesn't announce itself. It just builds, moment by moment, in the space between two people who once shared a bed but never truly shared their lives. Sahil's heartbreak was like that.

He started waking up earlier than usual. Sitting on the balcony with tea, watching the fog settle over the rooftops. That's when the questions came. Not the ones about Muskaan. But the ones about himself. Was this love? Was this loyalty? Or was it fear? What was he afraid of?

Losing the marriage? Or losing himself?

The answer came slowly. In the silence of those mornings. In the tired eyes of his children. In the ache in his chest that had nothing to do with illness and everything to do with emptiness.

When he finally decided to let go, it wasn't dramatic. He didn't shout. He didn't accuse. He simply stopped waiting. Stopped hoping. He began to live for something else. Maybe peace. Maybe the chance that one day, his children would come to him not out of habit, but out of understanding.

Muskaan never asked why he stopped trying. Maybe she knew.

There is no tidy ending to this story. No last-minute reconciliation. No perfect healing. Sahil still carries the scars. But he carries them with the strength of a man who chose truth over illusion.

And as for justice, Sahil doesn't seek it from this world.

“In the end,” he says,“I've left it to Allah. I trust His court more than any other.”

Maybe that is where true healing begins. Not in forgetting the hurt, but in letting go of what you can't change, and stepping into the light with what's left of your heart.

• Syed Majid Gilani writes about emotional truths, unspoken pain, and the courage found in ordinary lives. He is a government officer and a father. He can be reached at [email protected] .

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