Harf E Dua By Riaz Aqib Kohlar

About this novelette

Harf E Dua (Urdu: حرفِ دعا) by Riaz Aqib Kohlar is a light, warm cousin story told by a young man about the girl he has known all his life. She is his cousin, six years younger, and he has always called her Zau.

The first scene is a morning like any other in their joint home. Zau pulls the blanket off him and threatens to pour a jug of water over him if he doesn’t get up. He grumbles that she shouldn’t complain about her sleep when she’s the one who woke him; she replies that his late-night phone call woke her first. Their back-and-forth is full of easy teasing, the kind only people who have grown up together can manage.

ساتھ پلے بڑھے، روز لڑے، پھر بھی ایک دوسرے کے بغیر ادھورے۔

Then the narrator tells us who she is. Both of them are their parents’ only children. Zau arrived “as a gift” when he was six, and she grew up in his lap as much as in her mother’s. They have fought since childhood and they still do. Grown up now, she still answers his anger with a stone for every brick. But she also irons his clothes, keeps his cupboard in order, makes his breakfast, and treats all of it as her responsibility. Both sets of parents love the two of them so equally that it feels as if each has two mothers and two fathers. Strangely, he says, he has never once looked at her as a beautiful young woman. To him she is simply his most trusted friend, someone he can tell anything.

The morning carries on over fried eggs, an argument about the weather, and a Pakistan cricket match on TV that Zau has no interest in letting him watch in peace. Riaz Aqib Kohlar keeps it simple and sweet, and the title, a word of prayer, hints that this friendship is about to turn into something he hasn’t noticed yet.

You can read Harf E Dua online here or download the complete PDF for free. For another cousin story on the site, read Jani Dushman, browse Cousin Romance novels, or see all Riaz Aqib Kohlar novels.