Rakhail by Riaz Aqib Kohlar

About this novel

Rakhail (Urdu: رکھیل) by Riaz Aqib Kohlar is a dark Urdu social novel about a respectable girl from a poor mohalla and a powerful goon. He has decided she will be his, and the story opens with a mother’s cries as her son is brought home dead.

The novel then explains how it came to this. In a city where the law of the jungle rules, Dilawar Sheikh is the kind of ghunda who can wreck any girl’s life and kill any brother who protests, and he has done exactly that before. He has started stopping the girl in the bazaar and at the street corner, talking filth and declaring, like a film hero, that he will marry her, and that if anyone brings a rishta for her first, he will kill them.

جہاں طاقت ہی قانون ہو، وہاں شرافت کتنی بےبس ہو جاتی ہے۔

The family has no father to protect them. The mother goes to the local police officer, who listens politely and then advises them to leave the area, because Dilawar is backed by an influential man. The writer pauses here to reflect on power: how authority without accountability turns ordinary men into little gods. For a while the mother hides everything from her son Shahzad, the girl’s elder brother. But one day the girl comes home shaking with anger and fear and, without thinking, tells her brother everything. Shahzad holds her and says that as long as he is alive, no one will even look at her. He storms out to Dilawar’s den, and a few hours later a rickshaw brings back his body.

The opening chapters are hard to read in the best way: angry, honest and full of the helplessness of decent people facing zulm. The heroine is left with her grieving mother, her guilt and a hatred strong enough to burn everything. The title hints at the price she may be forced to pay.

You can read Rakhail online here or download the complete PDF for free. More hard-hitting stories by the same writer include Pasheman and Janoon E Ishq, or see all Riaz Aqib Kohlar novels.