Heart Echoes | ✔︎

(2) Secret Drawers | Miraculous Nanis

Has anyone ever told you what a tightly-knit scroll means?

The type you find in a drawer, the very drawer they tell you never to open?

Under the grey, sunlit window, I found myself in a cold, lonely room, with pillars arching in all the four corners of it.

The drawer holds your name. I don't know what it means, either, that's why I'm stepping closer to it.

It had been about a week staying at my Uncle's, dark, cold mansion in Islamabad.

The thing about Islamabad is that it's less cooler than Murree. Murree makes you feel a bit more closer to the skies, and Islamabad a lot less closer to the skies, and nearer the ground.

Slow steps.

You couldn't have expected me to go faster, could you?

First of all, I was in a room I wasn't supposed to be.

At least, Karim, my 12-year-old cousin told me.

Salih, his brother, whose a further more three years older, (seven in total: 16 years old), added that the study was haunted, so I better not go snooping around. But since I did, and I was in the middle of it, there was no jolly turning back was there?

By now you might have this thought at the back of your head: what a fine, mischievous, snoopy boy I was behaving as.

But tell me, (this is no way a justification for my barging in Uncle's study room) if you just knew that scroll in the drawer was yours- if you just caught your uncle placing it in the drawer three days ago, and then closing the drawer with a hefty hit, and if you just knew that it was that very scroll your father gave to your uncle before sending you off to this sinister-looking mansion of fantasies and dragons (not really but the idea of 'sinister-ness' may be not far from reality!) then what would you do as a nine-year-old boy, huh?

Exactly. Either you'd ignore grab some salan and roti lunch with your cousin, Bilal, who is just about your age (with a bigger appetite and energy, mind you) or, you'd move for the drawer.

Thus, all the warnings of my cousins fell deaf to my ears. My grubby hand reached out for the brass handle. It was cool to the touch. My eyes stared blankly as I pulled it out, half of my soul ached, as if maybe, that paper held the answer to why I was sent here.

Appa always said 'books' give answers while paper is used to 'imprint' answers on them. I think that's true.

We should appreciate paper much often, shouldn't we? Without a page, we wouldn't get a book. Thus, without a droplet, we wouldn't get an ocean. Little by little, a simple little atom can turn to a huge change of things.

Therefore, the little padded steps and thoughts that took me from the doorway of the study to my Uncle's bronze drawer, did in fact, turn to a huge change of things for me.

"Ahmm."

"Ah!" I had jumped slightly, pulling back my hand from the handlebar, swiveling around on spot.

Uncle Junaid stood at the door in his usual, dark coat and suspenders. His brown beard neatly groomed, and his darting dark eyes clashing with my grey, dumb ones.

Did I say I wasn't allowed in that study room?

From that hour onward, I wasn't even allowed out of the provided bedroom.

Bilal had to step in, tell me wild stories of how furious my Uncle was that I would be eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the room, and that I wasn't allowed to be told bedtime stories by Ghazala Auntie who was the working maid here.