Ashes of Her Dreams

Her eyes were beautiful but did not sparkle with joy—only glowing with something heavier. The almond-shaped eyes were large and beautiful. There was a quiet storm that lived there. A tiredness she never spoke of.  She had learned too early that the world could be cruel.

Sachaan always thought herself the luckiest among her family. While other stayed behind in the village, she was the luckiest to study in the city. For many years, she carried the gift, believing that it meant her parents trusted her to build a life, like a crown. It was not in the wildest imagination of her that every exam she passed and every book she read brought her to an end she had not chosen.

It was the day before her first semester exam. Economics has always been the most challenging subject for her, so she decided to study in the library with concentration. However, fear had overtaken every inch of her being as she heard something from her siblings. She was heading to the library and wearing her Baluchi dress. She tried to appear strong and walked with even more determination. The day felt like it always did. Simple, focused, full of plans for tomorrow. Then her phone rang. She left the library to attend the call. It was Gul, the girl who had lived next door since childhood.

Her voice was trembling on the other end. “There are guests in your house,” Gul said, “for your proposal.. Your family is giving you to them.” Sachaan was listening silently, a kind of silence that wrapped around the lungs, and even the tightest breath felt like a betrayal. Her body inhaled pain, exhaled despair. Her legs weakened. She stood frozen in the pavement and her heart shivering and head aching. Tears rolled down unstoppable as if they had been waiting for years for this exact moment to escape. In that instant moment, she felt her soul had quietly stepped out of her body—only leaving a shell behind.

A flashback triggered her when she recalled a glimpse of the day when her father has promised her carte blanche—filling her heart with new dreams and telling her she was still his little princess—who would never be forced into anything. Instantly, all this crumbled before her eyes when she learned of his betrayal.

The heaviness of each step her took carried the painful truth she had been promised. Not just a single day, but her whole life was destroyed. Her heart sank with the realization that this single step would put a full stop of the life she had always dreamt. She went straight to her mother with a trembling voice and swollen eyes drench in tears. She begged and pleaded straight to her mother not to do this to her, saying she did not want to marry anyone, but her mother’s words sharp, each one cutting deeper than the last. “We educated you, we gave you everything, and now you say no? You dare to dishonour us?”

The words chanted in her head repetitively, but all she could feel was the inevitable flatline of her heart. An ache stretches beyond understanding, a final, silent goodbye to her happy soul. Her mother’s face was cold, her voice felt like a knife, “and now on the day we ask something in return, you tell us a straight no, so you choose shame for us?”

Dragging her feet towards her father, the man she had once thought was her safe place, she fell at his feet, clutching his hand as if holding on to her life itself. Her words came in broken gasps, “Abba, please… don’t do this.”

He just glanced her with displease as if she was not his daughter but a problem to be resolved soon. The silence was worse than a slap. Worse than any scream. In that moment, she knew she could set herself on fire in front of them, and they still won’t see her burning.

That was the time to face something she had begged God not to let her parents do. The time for the end of her choices. Her body became stilled, stilled in final acceptance, her face etched in sorrow and eyes brimming with unsaid emotions as she was barely carrying the weight of her own survival.

Her parents, she doesn’t say that she calls them the light of her life, or that she’s terrified of that light going out because even death is easier to face than watching your family’s betrayal. Not because she doesn’t know, but because every possible answer has already betrayed her. The door of last hope also faded.

At night, she closes her eyes. No dreams. Only the creak of pain, the throb of the heart. This isn’t survival, she thinks. It’s mourning—slow, breath by breath. Every woman knows it. Every woman feels the cold grip tightening around hope.

When your dreams are locked away behind closed doors, when the future you imagined is ripped from your hands, there are no words left to say, and Sachaan’s soul left her body that day.

Balochistan, where the mountains are strong and so are the women. Life here has always been a struggle for women, but they’ve clung to hope. These days, we see fathers and brothers for whom the presence of daughters and sisters at home feels like a burden heavier than they can bear, constantly contemplating how to alleviate this weight. They have become a spectator of life. They are supposed to be living, like puppets tied to strings, pulled by men in suits who reshape their fate according to traditional and cultural norms. This is not the story of Sachaan but the story of every women in Balochistan who dare to dream and meet the same fate as Sachaan. How dare they?

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