The Cursed Bloodline

It was a sultry summer evening when Durayd came to see his sick uncle, who had just got his pelvis fractured, and the whole house seemed effected by it.

Outside, the streets still hold the day’s leftover heat. Inside, the air felt heavier. The heat clung to the walls, making the whole house struggle to inhale and turning every breath arduous.

Above him, the ceiling fan creaked in slow, tired circles, throwing the packets of warm air across the room that smelled of medicine, sweat, and old dust.

Iqbal has two daughters, both with the songs ready to be sung, and it has now become his foremost responsibility to steer their melodies into harmony with people who will appreciate and cherish their symphony. Their youth and silenced desires of belonging, all of it awaits, like the music kept in the throat just before the first note is released.

But for now, the air is all against them. For what feels like forever, the daughters have been waiting for someone to sweep in and claim them. For what feels like forever, they have been paraded before the potential

(though none truly are) suitors. For what feels like forever, they have been bruised by a thousand noes.

It was the fear of their futures, and the weight of every collapsed proposal gathered in his chest until, at last, it get Iqbal down in a paralytic attack. Now, as he lies helpless, his body half- defeated by the stroke, the weight of those unwritten futures presses even harder on the house, and an uneasy silence settles on every room and every soul in the house.

All the whispers, the rejections, and the silent closing of the doors, is because of their brothers, who suffer from Hemophilia, a noncontagious disease.

People talk about it in hushed tones, as if a mere visit, and a shared cup of tea could make it seep into their bloods. To them, it is not only an illness; it is a curse, an evil and a stain that spreads from one generation to the next.

The family has already lost one of his four sons to Hemophilia, taken from them at the tender age of two.

Under such fears, the very idea of a marriage contract with this family is unthinkable.

As a matter of fact, Hemophilia is an X-chromosomal disease. Daughters, from their fathers, become the carrier,

and then in turn it is only their sons who are vulnerable to its grasp. Only The Sons.

In this family, Iqbal himself is healthy, and the evil runs through the veins of the queen of the house, Shabana, to the three of her four sons. People fear that tying the knot here would blemish their own bloodlines, and their children’s children would be in the same dark shadow. Science has little voice here; rumors and superstitions speak louder. 1900s.

At that very instant, the house, already on fire, caught a second blaze. The fate tore open the wound and rubbed the salt deep into it. Naveed, thirty-two years old and unmarried, the first of six siblings, a hemophilia sufferer, whose joints ache from repeated bleeds: a constant reminder of the fragile threads holding his life together. For him, a simple cut could become a life- threatening ordeal, as his blood stubbornly refused to clot.

Yet, it was not a simple cut that claimed him, but a brutal accident on one of the busy roads of Peshawar. In the chaos of honking horns, rushing rickshaws, and impatient buses, metal collided with metal, glass shattered, and his body was thrown down on the asphalt road.

By the time, strangers gathered around him, his clothes were already soaked, and the road beneath him was stained with his blood. There was no doctor near

enough, no hospital fast enough to draw him back from the edge.

Naveed bled to the death under the open sky, while the city around him continued to move indifferently and loud.

That day, it felt as though all eight of them had died, yet only Naveed was laid down to rest in the grave.

Iqbal, not strong enough to bear this, got a severe brain hemorrhage.

Fate bore no tolerance for Iqbal all his life. Both of his parents separated their paths, when Iqbal was in the cradle, and moved on in no time. He grew under the shade of his grandmother, living very harsh days of his life; far from the tender concept of childhood.

And now seeing his children in pain is a thorn stabbed is his undemanding heart.

He lay on the low, sagging charpoy in the middle of the room, his left side stiff and useless, his tongue heavy as stone. Only his eyes still moved freely, darting from face to face as if trying to memorize them all before fate snatched them away.

Durayd sat quietly at the foot of the bed, hands clasped between his knees, feeling as if he, too, were pinned to the mattress by the same invisible weight that held his uncle down. The ceiling fan above them groaned and circled, throwing the same dull heat back on their faces, as tired of this house as everyone else.

Another proposal.

In the next room, the two girls sat side by side, hands folded in their laps, eyes lowered.

The elder, Zainab, with the shy curve of mehndi-stained fingers that had never touched a husband’s hand.

The younger, Maryam, with eyes still soft with unspent laughter, already learning how to muffle it.

They had been dressed in their best, the same few outfits worn and washed and worn again for years of such visits, the colors fading with every rejection. The once-bright crimson dupatta on Zainab’s head had dulled to something between rust and dried blood.

Across from them, Durayd’s mother sipped her tea, her gold bangles making little chiming noises as she moved. Her eyes were not on the girls. They were on the picture on the wall, Naveed’s framed photograph, a cheap studio portrait with a blue background and a smile that had taken effort.

“Who is he?” she asked, though everyone in the lane already knew.

“Our… our eldest,” Shabana replied, her voice catching. “He… he passed away.”

“How?” the woman asked, her eyebrows lifting with polite cruelty.

“Accident,” Shabana said quickly. “On the road. Hit by a bus.”

“Ah,” the woman said, drawing out the word. “And the others?”

“The others?” Shabana swallowed. “Three sons at home. The youngest is healthy, mashallah. The other two are… just a little weak. Bleeding problem. Nothing contagious. Doctors say, ”

“The whole mohalla says something else,” the woman cut in, putting her cup down. “They say it is in the blood. Your boys bleed and bleed. Your girls will carry it into any house they enter. We have only one son. Do you expect us to gamble his children on your fate?”

Maryam’s fingers tightened on the edge of her dupatta. Zainab’s knuckles turned white.

In the next room, Iqbal heard everything. Every word floated to him as clearly as if they had been spoken at his bedside.

His good hand trembled on the sheet. He tried to raise it, to call out, to at least say, “They are good girls. Take them, and if your child is ever ill, I will put my own blood in his veins.” But his tongue refused to move, his throat filled with thick, useless sound.

“We have spoken to the doctors,” Shabana said, her voice breaking into little pieces. “They say it is in the X… in the… in the women. But my daughters are fine. Allah is witness; they are fine.”

“Maybe,” the woman said, standing. “But when neighbors point at a child and say, ‘He came from that cursed house,’ will your Allah come down and stop their tongues?”

Her sandals slapped hard against the floor as she left. The front gate screeched. Then there was only the sound of Shabana’s sobbing, hollow and tired; someone who has cried too much to cry like a young woman anymore.

Zainab and Maryam did not weep loudly. They sat there, shoulders touching, their cheeks dry and hot. A rejection is easier to bear when it is the first, or the fifth, or even the tenth. After the hundredth, the heart learns a quieter, more dangerous way to break.

On the charpoy, Iqbal’s breath turned shallow. Something inside his chest clenched, then clenched again, as if a fist were closing around his heart.

By the time Shabana and the girls rushed in, Iqbal’s right hand was clawing at the sheet, his eyes wide with panic. His lips moved, but the only sound that came out was a gurgle, a low, drowning noise.

“Abba, I’m here,” Zainab cried, dropping to her knees beside him. “Abba, I’m here. Don’t be afraid.”

He looked at her with such desperate intensity that for a moment she felt naked, as if all her unspoken dreams and humiliations lay open on her face. In that gaze was apology, helplessness, and a love so fierce it almost looked like anger.

The right side of Iqbal’s face twisted, then sagged. His breathing turned harsh, like someone filing rough wood. In his chest, another vein broke quietly, the second flood inside a body that had never bled from the skin.

By the time they rushed him to the hospital, the doctors were shaking their heads before they even laid him properly on the stretcher.

“So much bleed in the brain,” one of them muttered to another, pointing at the shadow on the X-ray film. “If he had come earlier…”

As if grief and shock followed the clock.

He did not die that night.

He lingered, eyes half open, limbs slack, trapped in a bed that had once been a place of rest and was now a cage.

For weeks, the house learned to move around his silence.

The girls fed him with a spoon, one drop of watery porridge at a time, wiping the corner of his mouth with the edge of their dupattas. Shabana massaged his stiff legs with mustard oil, the way she had once massaged her toddlers after baths, except now there was no laughter, no tiny feet kicking at her hands.

The months blurred. Time began to be counted not in festivals or seasons, but in bleeds and funerals.

Hamid, who had inherited the worst of the disease and the best of his mother’s smile. A fall from the steps. A bruise on the back of his head that grew hard and then softer and then nothing at all.

Again, the road to the hospital, again the white sheet, again the stinging smell of spirit and disappointment.

This time, Iqbal did not go. He could not.

He lay in his room as they washed the small, still body in the courtyard, the sound of water sloshing in basins mixing with the recitation of Surah Yaseen. He stared at the ceiling fan and saw Hamid’s little fingers trying to catch its spinning blades.

The men lifted the tiny janazah onto their shoulders. Invisible hands seemed to pull at Iqbal’s heart, begging it to follow.

When they returned, the house had grown smaller. One less mat on the floor. One less voice.

The neighbors’ whispers grew louder.

“Do you see? Another boy gone.”

“Allah has written something on that family.”

“Don’t drink their water. Don’t let your daughters visit too much. These things spread, you know.”

Science had no language here. Only superstition wore a loud enough voice to be heard over the clatter of tea cups.

The proposals stopped completely.

No one even pretended anymore.

The next winter was harsher than usual. The cold crept into joints and walls and lungs.

Salman’s bleeds came more often and lasted longer. The joints in his knees froze into crooked shapes, and he began to move like an old man long before his beard had even thought of appearing.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, the pain would drag a long, animal cry from him before he could stop it. Those cries did what blood and grief could not: they broke what was left of Iqbal’s heart.

One dawn, as the first grey light slipped into the sky and the muezzin called for fajr, Iqbal’s chest rose, then did not fall again.

It was very quiet.

No great struggle, no dramatic exhale. Just the silence of a man whose lungs had finally grown tired of moving when nothing in his life moved with them.

When Maryam entered with a cup of tea and found him like that, his eyes half open, looking at nothing for the first time, she did not scream. Her hands simply began to shake so violently that the tea spilled all over the floor and burned her bare feet.

Shabana sat down beside the bed and leaned her forehead against his cold hand.

“You were always afraid of their futures,” she whispered, her voice hoarse. “Now you have run ahead of them. Who will be afraid for them in your place?”

There were more tears that day, more visitors than they had expected. Death always gathers a crowd, even when life could not.

But crowds disperse. Condolences end. The earth settles over graves.

In the months that followed, the house shrank further still.

Durayd moved away for work. His visits grew fewer, then stopped. Not because he forgot, but because sometimes remembering is a pain a man cannot carry into his new life where people talk of promotions and not funerals.

Years later, when he finally returned, a middle-aged man with grey in his beard, he walked down the narrow lane toward his uncle’s house and almost missed it.

The walls were the same, but the blue paint had peeled completely, exposing the raw, pitted brick beneath. The iron gate hung crooked on one hinge, squeaking a protest as he pushed it open.

Inside, weeds had taken the place of the mehndi plants that had once lined the courtyard. The familiar smell of cooking, of chai, of medicine and sweat, was gone. In its place was the dry, dusty scent of places abandoned by people but not yet claimed by time.

The front door stood half open. He stepped in.

The charpoy was still there, in the same spot, its ropes sagging, a thin layer of dust on the sheet. Above it, the ceiling fan hung motionless, thick with cobwebs.

In the corner, folded neatly on a stool, lay a crimson dupatta, its once-deep color now the dull brown of dried blood.

A neighbor’s voice came from the doorway behind him.

“You’re too late,” she said, not unkindly. “Shabana died two winters after your uncle. The girls… they stayed. Both of them. Looking after the last boy until he, too, went. Some infection in the leg. It would not stop bleeding. After that, what was there for them? They grew old here. One by one, they went into the ground beside their brothers and parents. No children. No in-laws. Just graves.”

She sighed, adjusting her shawl.

Durayd swallowed, his throat thick.

He stepped to the center of the room and looked up at the fan. In his mind, it began to move again, creaking in tired circles, pushing warm air over Naveed’s laughing face, over Zainab’s bent head, over Maryam’s thin shoulders, over Iqbal’s closed eyes.

He saw Zainab tearing a corner from her bridal dupatta to bind Salman’s bleeding arm. He saw Maryam spoon-feeding her father as if each mouthful could drag him back from that unreachable shore. He saw Shabana washing another small, cold body with the same hands that had once bathed it warm and wailing.

So much love, trapped in a house the world refused to touch.

He walked back out into the courtyard and stood there for a long time, listening.

There was no laughter, no crying, no call for tea, no clatter of pots. Only the distant horns of the traffic, the call of a street vendor, the ordinary life of a city that had never truly stopped for them.

A drop of something wet hit his hand.

For a second, he thought it was rain. Then he realized it was his own tear.

He wiped it away quickly, as if ashamed, and turned to leave.

Behind him, the empty house stared with blind windows at a world that had called its blood cursed until there was no blood left to curse. Only dust, and silence, and the faint, unheard echoes of songs that had never been allowed to begin.