On the 28th of April 2026, I sent a small YouTube reel to my nephew — one of those quiet truths that circulate on social media and occasionally say something real. It observed that in every family there is one odd brother who sacrifices his entire life for the family’s welfare, forgetting his own, and who is ultimately paraded as the devil — precisely to negate any moral claim to payback. My nephew, a sharp young man, sent back not a word of his own but a verse. Behzad Fatima’s verse:

“Kya kijiye jo qadre sharafat nahi rahi,

Shayad kisi ko iski zaroorat nahi rahi.”

“What can one do if the value of decency no longer remains?Perhaps no one feels the need for it anymore.”

He meant it for my condition. But the moment I read it, I knew it was about something far larger than one family’s ingratitude. It was about the world. And like winter rain arriving without announcement, other voices began to fall — Firaq Gorakhpuri first, that couplet I have carried for decades:

“Shaam bhi hai dhuan dhuan, husn bhi hai udaas udaas,Dil ko kai kahaniyan yaad si aa ke reh gayin.”

“The evening, too, is veiled in mist, beauty itself is deeply somber;

And to the heart, many a story came, as if in memory, and then lingered.”

Then Faiz. Then Fortini. Then Umberto Eco. And from that confluence of voices — a family WhatsApp exchange, an Urdu poet’s lament, an Italian partisan’s witness, a Sicilian philosopher’s warning — this piece was born.

Behzad Fatima’s verse does not rage. That restraint is precisely its power. She does not say nobility is dead — she says a measure of it is missing. And worse: that no one seems to need it anymore. The elegy is for demand, not just supply. Her second sher sharpens the wound:

Daman-kashan guzarte hain ek dusre se log,

Pehli si ab woh rasm-e-murawwat nahi rahi.

“People pass one another pulling their robes away (in avoidance),

That former tradition of kindness and courtesy no longer remains.”

Daaman kushaan — the pulled hem, the deliberate non-contact — is not hatred. It is something........

© Greater Kashmir