THE KASOOR

 I was there that morning.

Eid had just begun, warm light spilling over the city like a promise it couldn’t keep. People call it a day of joy, a day meant for everyone. But I know better. I always see the ones the light doesn’t reach. He walked slowly, the boy, dragging the sack behind him. It wasn’t heavy because of what was inside; it was heavy because of everything he’d never been given. His footsteps were small, but the silence around him felt vast, the kind that makes your chest tighten without warning. I followed him the way I always follow those who walk alone. The street bloomed with colour and voices. Families opening their doors, laughter rising like it had somewhere important to be. And he passed through it all unnoticed, as if he were made of something the world had long stopped acknowledging. That’s where I live...in the spaces people pretend not to see. When a child rushed past and brushed against him, he didn’t flinch. He was used to being collided with, walked through, walked over. Being unseen had become a familiar ache, the kind that no longer surprises...only sinks deeper. He paused then, watching a family pose for a photograph. I felt something shift inside him, a breath he couldn’t quite take. Longing wasn’t the right word. It was something quieter, something resigned. A realization he had swallowed too early in life: that joy was a room he was never going to be invited into. Someone noticed him. Just one person. And I watched the moment the person’s heart cracked, not dramatically, just the way thin glass does when the pressure becomes too much. The boy’s eyes held nothing; no plea, no expectation. Just a soft, tired acceptance that cut deeper than any cry ever could. It’s always the quiet ones who hurt the most. Then the wind carried a wrapper toward him. He picked it up gently, almost tenderly. As if even the world’s leftovers deserved more care than he did. That motion…that’s when I tightened my grip around the watcher’s throat. Not out of cruelty, but out of truth. Some things deserve to be felt sharply. I was a raging sorrow. He turned away after that. Slipped into the alley where the light didn’t bother, trying to follow. Darkness knows how to hold children like him; it doesn’t pretend, it doesn’t promise. It just receives. Behind him, laughter swelled again. Too bright. Too careless. Too loud for the kind of hurt that had just walked past. And in the space he left, I lingered. Because there are moments that are not meant to pass. Moments that settle into the chest and stay there, like unanswered questions or unspoken apologies. This was one of them. Some children breathe without thinking. Some breathe like it hurts. And the world calls both lives equal. But I know the truth. I carry it. The kasoor, the quiet, suffocating wrongness of it all, belongs not to the boy who walked away, but to everyone who watched him go and still let the day continue as if nothing had happened.