In the hushed halls of Belgravia, beneath the measured chime of antique clocks and the rustle of silk-lined drapery, two worlds—rival by nation, but united in soul—collided under the pale London sun.
It was at a diplomatic soirée, held in an Edwardian townhouse whose chandeliers were older than the nations they represented, that Haider Shah, a man of imposing intellect and brooding gravitas, encountered Meher Varma—she, with the bearing of a Delhi princess and the voice of muted sonatas, he, a lion from Lahore, whose stride bore the weight of political storms and whose gaze seemed to perceive beyond the veil of words.
“You speak of liberty,” she had said, her fingers cradling a coupe of Champagne, “but tell me—does it ever arrive unshackled from consequence?”
He had not expected such philosophy in a drawing room where most spoke in pleasantries and champagne-bubble repartee. He admired her forthrightness, the symmetry of her thought, her refusal to bend to the vacuous charm of cocktail politics. Their exchanges became duels, then dances, then something else altogether.
But love—or what passed for it in the walled gardens of the powerful—did not unfold gently. Their chemistry, elemental and undeniable, erupted into what the poets might call fate and what history would record as scandal. Fireworks were lit, not by celebration, but by the friction of two tectonic identities, anciently estranged and diplomatically disinclined to reconcile.
From this union, secret and searing, was born a boy.
He was named Aaryan—not Hindu nor Muslim, not Delhi nor Lahore, not entirely of this world nor the next. A son raised in a white-stucco Kensington house surrounded by books in multiple languages and silence in all of them.
Meher, having been ostracised by her own, wore her exile with dignity. She taught her son Sanskrit verses and Ayahs of the Qur’an. Her salons hosted violinists, exiled intellectuals, and occasionally, the disgraced—but never Haider. Never the father.
The boy, growing in silence, was told that his father was “a man much occupied with affairs of state.” It was not until his fifteenth year, while rummaging through his mother’s writing desk, that he found the letter—never posted—where she had scribbled, “He said a child born of such union would never be welcome in his Lahore, or in his life.”
No amount of ancestral velvet could pad the fall of that truth.
Years passed. Aaryan grew into a man whom strangers listened to without knowing why. His speech was precise, his carriage calm, his mind a fortress of empathy and introspection. He studied political philosophy at Cambridge, published anonymously in journals of dissent, and quietly took up his father’s mantle—but with soul rather than strategy.
Then, one October evening, a headline unfurled like a dagger on the breakfast table:
“Pakistani Politician Assassinated by Own Bodyguard: Motive ‘Religious Betrayal’”
A footnote at the article’s end read: “The attacker, a member of an extremist sect, accused the deceased of harbouring secular leanings and ‘personal impropriety’ deemed un-Islamic.”
The man had been unmade by his own hypocrisy.
But Meher, whose balance once seemed invincible, began to shift. Perhaps out of grief, or rage, or a deep-seated longing for order in a disordered world, she aligned herself with a right-wing movement in India. Their rhetoric, cloaked in civility, promised “restoration of Indian values” and “moral rejuvenation.” But Aaryan recognised the perfume of propaganda no matter how delicately bottled.
“I sought tolerance, Mummy,” he said one evening, voice laced with pain. “You found theatre.”
“You sought a father in a ghost,” she replied, “I found meaning where I could.”
And thus, the house once united in exile fractured anew—this time, not by borders, but beliefs.
The young man—no longer quite young—stood alone amidst the ruins of conflicting ideals. The world had given him nothing it promised, and everything it threatened. His lineage denied him, his country confused him, and his family now spoke in the tongues of populism and betrayal.
But Aaryan, whose name meant noble, chose not bitterness, but brilliance.
He became a quiet storm in think tanks, a ghost-writer for both sides of the aisle, a man whom no nation could own because he was born of all their errors. When his memoir, “Son of a Borderless Wound”, was published under his true name, it was less a confession than a benediction.
The chapters moved with punctilious poise: childhood in quiet grandeur; adolescence in intellectual rebellion; the letter; the refusal; the assassination; his mother’s alignment with those who might have lynched her son had his parentage been exposed. There were no lies. There was no venom. Just the truth, dressed in language so elegant, even its torment became beautiful.
And here I sit now, the book open before me, his words echoing like cathedral bells through my conscience.
Is it he who must be shamed, I ask myself, for being born of chemistry mistaken for courage? Or is it those who swore oaths of love yet fled when the terrain grew inconvenient? Is it he who must answer for the sins of longing, or they who traded the sacred for the strategic?
As Locke said, why do they complain of bitter streams, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain?
And yet, he drinks no poison. He distils wisdom from chaos, and turns rage into refuge. He walks the world with the stillness of someone who has walked through every fire and come out forged, not burnt.
But society, in its endless smallness, still dares to whisper the word: “Bastard.”
To which I reply—
Bastards?
No. Saints, perhaps. For saints are but bastards that God claimed.
