Author’s note: ‘The Last Whistle in the Meadow’ is a richly layered, atmospheric short story that explores memory, isolation, and the ineffable bond between man, land, and beast. Told in a meditative tone with impressionistic detail, the narrative orbits around Rahman Kak, an enigmatic, solitary herder who commands an almost mythic reverence in a Kashmiri village for his uncanny control over cattle and the rhythms of rural life.

At its core, the story is not just about pastoral rituals or rural routines—it’s an elegy for a vanishing world and a meditation on habit, loss, and quiet resistance. Rahman Kak emerges as a figure rooted in the landscape, as gnarled and weathered as the willow trees that surround the meadow. He represents an older order, one in which human and animal instincts are synchronized through unspoken ritual. The recurring motif of his whistle—low, uncanny, almost supernatural—serves as a symbol of this mysterious bond and lends the story an almost magical realist hue.

Violence simmers beneath the surface throughout. The meadow, behind the mosque, becomes a silent arena of ritual combat—not between men, but bulls, whose primal clashes reflect the unvoiced tensions of the community. The villagers, complicit spectators, seem to hunger for spectacle, for distraction, for drama—until it spills over, literally, into blood and broken trees. The story critiques this desensitization through the metaphor of the “orchard bleeding”—a moment where nature suffers because of human indulgence.

Behind the village mosque lay a forgotten wedge of land. To one side, the road curled like a drowsy serpent; to another, the mosque’s whitewashed walls stood sentinel, their peeling paint whispering of decades past. And on the third side, the apple orchard hunched, its gnarled branches heavy with fruit that glowed like stolen embers in the dawn light.  

This was no ordinary patch of earth.  

Every morning, as dew retreated from the blades of grass, the villagers came. They drove their cattle forward—great, snorting beasts with flared nostrils and restless hooves—until the air thickened with dust and the scent of warm hide. Then, the gathering began. Old men with tobacco-stained teeth, wide-eyed children balanced on hips, women with their shawls pulled tight—all lined the road like spectators at some ancient, bloodless coliseum. And the bulls, sensing the audience, obeyed some primal script. They clashed, their horns locking with a crack that echoed off the mosque’s walls. Sometimes, a stray hoof sent a bystander sprawling; sometimes, a furious charge splintered the orchard’s fence, sending apples thudding to the ground.  

And then, just as the chaos threatened to swallow the morning, he appeared. Rahman Kak.  No one knew when he had first begun this ritual, just as no one dared ask why the cattle obeyed him. He emerged from his hut—a crooked silhouette against the rising sun—his face carved into a grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes. In his right hand, a stick, notched and polished by years of use, swung like a pendulum. Some claimed he had whittled it himself, shaping it with the same knife he used to cut meat into small pieces. Others swore it was something older, something found.  

Then came the whistle.  

Not the shrill call of a shepherd, but something lower, stranger—a sound that slithered between the beasts’ ears. The bulls stilled. The cows lowered their heads. Even the dust seemed to settle, as if the earth itself held its breath. And with that, Rahman Kak would turn, his stick tapping against his thigh, and lead the herd away—toward the meadow, toward the mist, toward whatever secrets the grass hid from the rest of them.  

The villagers would scatter then, murmuring. But no one ever followed.  

Rahman Kak was in his early sixties—or so he claimed one evening, as we sat beneath the gnarled arms of the ancient willow nursery that stood like a silent guardian at the edge of the grass meadow. The trees here were old souls, their leaves murmuring secrets in the wind, and it seemed fitting that he would choose this place to occasionally unspool a rare scrap of his past. Not that he ever gave much. Even his age felt like a concession, tossed out carelessly, like a bone to a dog.  

He was a man of rigid uniformity. Through the sweltering summers, he wore the same ash-coloured Salwar Kameez, its fabric daubed with the stains of years—mud, sweat, and something darker, something that might have been blood. On his head perched a discoloured white cap, its edges frayed, its fabric sun-bleached to the pallor of old bones. It never left him. Not in the noonday heat, not in the lashing rains, not even—villagers whispered—in sleep. Had anyone ever seen him without it? No. And those who dared to imagine what lay beneath found their thoughts skittering away, uneasy.  

Time had not been kind to him. It had carved three deep furrows into his forehead, trenches where the dust settled like an old curse. On scorching afternoons, you could see it, the grime mixing with his sweat, trickling down in slow, dirty rivulets, as if the earth itself were weeping through him. His body was a paradox: thin, wiry, yet humming with a restless energy that defied his brittle frame. His eyes, small and perpetually wet, seemed to retreat deeper into their sockets with each passing year, as though they were afraid of what they had seen.  

And his face—ah, his face. If you told me, you had seen him smile, I would call you a liar. His cheeks were barren, his mouth a slash of weathered leather. The villagers knew him for his temper, for the way he would square off against anyone—man, woman, even the imam’s eldest son—over some perceived slight involving the cattle. His shoulders would hitch backward, his drooping head snapping up with sudden, venomous pride. Then came the stick—always the stick—lifted and balanced across his shoulders like the yoke of some invisible burden. His words would follow, a torrent of guttural, spiteful syllables, half-lost in the rasp of his breath. No one could decipher them, not at first. It was only at the end, when his voice would fray into something raw and weary, that the meaning would claw its way to the surface:  

“You think I’m a school-bus driver?” he’d snarl, the stick trembling in his grip. “That I should drop your cattle at your doorstep like spoiled children? You can’t even manage two beasts, and I—I have the whole herd to answer for.”

And just like that, the fight would drain out of him. His shoulders would slump, his head would bow again, and he would turn away—back to the cattle, back to the meadow, back to whatever silent understanding he had with the land that the rest of us could never share.  

Every morning, behind the mosque, the earth remembered violence.

It began with a shift in the air—a restless snort, a hoof scraping dirt like a blade being drawn. Then two bulls would lock eyes, their massive flanks trembling with coiled fury. When they collided, the impact shuddered through the crowd like an electric current. The villagers erupted—curses, whistles, laughter—a cacophony that only fed the beasts’ frenzy. The dust would rise in ochre clouds, the spectators’ faces contorted into masks of glee, their voices raw as the bulls rammed horns, their muscles glistening with sweat and defiance.  

Then came the day the orchard bled.  

The fight spilled beyond the trampled circle, the bulls crashing through the frail fence like it was parchment. Apples rained down, their flesh bursting against the soil. A woman, her hands still caked with earth from tending the saplings, let loose a scream that cut through the chaos. She cursed the crowd, the owners, the very bloodline of the beasts, her voice a serrated edge of grief. But the villagers only grinned wider. What were a few broken trees to them? The spectacle was worth the cost.  

Only Rahman Kak could unravel the madness.  

A single whistle—low, dissonant, more vibration than sound—and the bulls froze as if yanked by invisible chains. Their rage dissolved like smoke in the wind. The herd, moments ago a seething mass, now stood eerily still, ears twitching toward that sound. Even the dust seemed to settle in reverence.  

Then he would emerge—or rather, the dust would release him. Some days, the swirling grit swallowed him whole, leaving only the faint outline of his stick, a scythe cutting through the haze. The stench of dung and heat never seemed to cling to him; it was as if the particles themselves feared to invade his lungs. Had the dust fossilized inside him over the years? I wondered. Did his veins run with silt instead of blood?  

His rituals were unvarying. Under the willow trees, their branches trailing like skeletal fingers, he’d take his lunch—always alone, always in silence. But first, he’d lead the herd to the stream that ribboned the meadow’s edge. The cattle drank with an almost ceremonial slowness, as though the water carried whispers only they could hear.  

And it was there, in the dappled shade of those ancient willows, that I first spoke to him. The air smelled of damp bark and something older—something like patience, or perhaps resignation. He didn’t smile at my greeting. He only stared, his teary eyes reflecting the leaves above, as if he’d already seen this moment, and every moment after, and found them all equally fleeting.  

When the weight of the world grew too heavy, I would slip away to the willow nursery, a book clutched under my arm like a talisman. There, even the most corrosive philosophies—Cioran’s bile against existence, his elegies for a godless universe—softened into something almost tender, as if the land itself whispered counterarguments through the sighing leaves. The meadow became a self-contained cosmos, the distant hills pressing close like protective shoulders. Time dissolved. The breeze was a perpetual murmur, threading through the willows’ restless branches, a sound so constant it seemed the trees were breathing.  

Birds were the only calendar the place acknowledged. Winter’s grip might lock the stream in ice, but never silenced them—their songs simply changed key, trading summer’s bright trills for the sparse, crystalline notes of survival. Over fifteen years, I’d memorized the willows not just by sight, but by touch: the gnarled one near the stream whose bark split like an old man’s knuckles; the young sapling that bent as if listening. When loneliness gnawed at me, I’d recite to them—Lear’s ravings into the storm, Whitman’s barbaric yawps—and their leaves would shiver in response, a standing ovation of shadows.  

Then came the day Rahman Kak spoke.

The sun hung white-hot overhead, the meadow shimmering like a mirage. His wife arrived as always, her spine curved under the wicker basket balanced on her head. She served his lunch beneath the willows—flatbread, a smear of curd, the clay bowl emptied in one practiced tilt of his throat. I watched from my usual perch, a dog-eared copy of German Idealism splayed across my knees (a relic scavenged from Srinagar’s Sunday Market, its pages smelling of damp and disregard). When she retreated to gather firewood, I seized my chance.  

“Do they ever speak back?” I asked, nodding to the willows.  

Rahman Kak’s head snapped up. His bones seemed to shift under his skin, quick as a snake’s musculature. For a man so gaunt, his energy was unnerving—a live wire barely insulated by flesh. He studied me with those sunken, liquid eyes, and for a heartbeat, I feared I’d crossed into some unmarked territory. Then he wiped the curd from his beard with a slow, deliberate swipe.  

“You hear them too,” he said. Not a question. An indictment.  

The air between us thickened. Somewhere in the branches above, a bird let out a cry like a laugh.  

“This place has an amazing ambience.” My voice sounded too loud against the willow’s whispering leaves. “It would be so gratifying to pray here, away from the villagers. Tell me, Rahman Kak—do you ever pray beneath these trees?”

The hookah gurgled between his knees as he leaned back against the willow’s ribs, its bark etching grooves into his spine. “No.” A blunt word, sharp as the snap of a twig. “Too many things crowd my mind. Or perhaps—” he puffed, the tobacco’s ember flaring crimson, “—I’ve simply grown accustomed to absence.” 

Thick smoke unfurled from his lips, curling into the dappled light like phantom prayers. His eyes—small, black, glinting with some indefinable victory—never left the burning bowl. It was as if he’d long ago scorched away all capacity for self-reproach.

“When one knows a thing is good,” I ventured, “shouldn’t he strive to change? Even habits can be unlearned.” The words tasted hollow. The willow above us shuddered, as if amused.

Rahman Kak exhaled slowly. “Prayer is good. Like water. Like air.” His calloused fingers traced the hookah’s stem. “But to make a thing your lifelong companion? That requires habit. And habit—” his teeth flashed in something not quite a smile, “—is the cruellest jailer of all. It takes a catastrophe to break its chains.”

“You mean… only a tragedy could make you pray?”

For the first time, his gaze flickered—not with sorrow, but with the cold precision of a man who’d measured his own abyss. “What greater tragedy remains for me?” The hookah bubbled, a wet sound like distant weeping. “Only her death. My wife. If she goes first, the silence at lunchtime will kill me faster than hunger.” 

He tilted his face toward the branches, where sunlight and shadow waged their eternal war. “Better we die together. Right here. No graves, no separation—just the willows to cover our bones.”

The horror of it should have wrung tears, cries, fists against the earth. But Rahman Kak merely tapped the hookah’s ashes onto the roots, as if feeding the tree his regrets. His tone was that of a man discussing crop rotation. 

Yet in that moment, I understood: his love was fiercer than faith, deeper than devotion. And it terrified him. 

“I heard you had quite the shouting match with Karim Kak last evening,” I said, steering the conversation toward safer ground—if village feuds could ever be called safe. “What sparked it this time?”  

Rahman Kak’s lips curled around the hookah’s mouthpiece, sucking in a long, seething drag before answering. “See, boy, my life is a parade of petty tragedies—none worth changing my habits for. But the greatest tragedy of all?” He exhaled smoke like a dragon dispensing wisdom. “The bottomless stupidity of these villagers. They treat me like some school-bus driver, expecting me to deliver their precious cows to their doorsteps. Yesterday, Karim’s cow trampled his neighbour’s turnips, and who gets the blame? Me. That man’s a gifted idiot. If angels descended to teach him, he’d argue with them about the colour of their wings.” He barked a laugh, the sound rough as a saw on wood. “The calves in my herd have more sense than him.” 

His lampooning was a performance—boisterous, venomous, yet strangely joyful. It was as if he relished the absurdity of his tormentors.  

“But this village stubbornness—it’s a habit too, isn’t it?” I pressed. “Doesn’t it take something catastrophic to break collective stupidity?”  

“Nothing will break them,” he said, waving a gnarled hand. “Their minds are like warped timber—no carpenter could straighten them. You know the saying: A dog’s tail stays crooked, even if you bury it in gold.” Then, with sudden sharpness, he curled his finger into his mouth and let out a piercing whistle. The herd, which had begun to stray, froze as if yanked by invisible reins.  

“But the cattle obey you like soldiers,” I marvelled. “Have you ever… taught them this way?” 

A slow, knowing grin spread across his face—the first real smile I’d ever seen from him. “Ah. Now that’s a story.” He leaned back, the willow’s shadow striping his weathered skin. “But I don’t know if you’ve the patience for old men’s tales.”  

“Try me,” I said, shifting closer. “I’m listening.”  

He nodded toward the far edge of the meadow, where a towering wall of poplars stood sentinel. “See those trees? They weren’t there when I first brought cattle to this meadow decades ago. Beyond them lies another field—larger than this one—where the next village’s herd grazed. A narrow canal marked the boundary, and for years, neither herd crossed it. Their caretaker would bring his animals to our stream at noon to drink, and for years, it was peace. Then one day…”  

His voice dropped, and the air itself seemed to lean in.

“Then came the unlucky day.” Rahman Kak’s voice dropped to a gravelly whisper. “A bull—black as a storm cloud, horns like scimitars—charged into my herd. Not for territory. Not for dominance. For her.”  

His knuckles whitened around the hookah stem. “He’d caught the scent of a cow in heat, and madness took him. My cattle scattered like leaves in a gale. I ran after him, my stick cracking against his spine—thwack! —like striking iron. When I finally drove him off, he turned. Looked at me.”

Rahman Kak’s eyes glazed over, seeing it again. “No animal’s gaze should hold that much hate. It was human. Demonic.”  

“The next morning,” he continued, “he came for me.” 

A dry laugh escaped him. “I was young then—fast as a hare. But that bull? He was vengeance on hooves. I barely reached the willows in time. Clung to the branches like a sinner to prayer as he raged below.” His fingers mimicked the bull’s horns, gouging the air. “Tore up the earth like he wanted to uproot the very tree. And that… that became our ritual.”  

The hookah’s ember pulsed as he inhaled, painting his face in hellish light. “Every. Damned. Day. That caretaker laughed—said the bull had ‘spirit.’ Spirit!” He spat the word like poison. “I stopped sleeping. Lay awake, sharpening sticks, plotting. A noose? Too slow. Poison? Coward’s way. Then—”  

He leaned forward, the willow’s shadow slicing across his face. “—I remembered the old story. The one about the djinn who haunted these meadows long ago. They say he took the form of a bull when the moon was dark.”  

A chill skittered down my spine. “You don’t believe that… do you?”  

Rahman Kak’s smile was a blade. “Belief doesn’t matter. Only survival. So, I made a plan.”  

“That night, the idea came to me—clear and sharp as a knife,” Rahman Kak said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial growl. “The next morning, I enlisted a band of cricket-playing boys to haul a river-smoothed boulder to the willow. It took all of us—grunting, heaving—to wedge it between the branches, a sleeping vengeance waiting to fall.”  

His eyes gleamed with the memory as he mimed the act, fingers splaying open. “When the bull came, I let him rage beneath me, let him gouge the earth like a fool. Then—” He brought his fist down in a swift arc. “The rock fell. A thud like the sky splitting. His horns—those cursed crescents—shattered like clay. For a heartbeat, he swayed, dazed. Then he fled, not like a beast, but like a thing unmoored from this world.” 

A guttural laugh burst from him—short, sharp, more bark than mirth. He seized his stick and drove it into the earth, once, twice, as if hammering the bull’s defeat into the soil. The hookah’s coals flared as he prepared it anew, the smoke twisting into the willow’s leaves like escaping spirits. The gurgle-gurgle of the waterpipe filled the silence, a sound that always made me wonder: How could lungs that breathed such darkness still house such life? 

“The next day?” He exhaled, triumphant. “That demon hid his face in the herd. When I stepped close, he ran—like a coward, like a man.” His grin was a sickle-moon. “Animals learn. But villagers? Their minds are rot.” 

He stood abruptly, hookah still dangling from his lips, his spine unfolding like a rusted hinge.  

“You smoke too much,” I blurted as he turned to leave.  

He paused, glancing back. “Worried about my lungs, eh?” A chuckle. “Every puff of smoke is met by a thousand breaths of this meadow’s air. Balance, boy. Like all things—” He tapped his temple. “—it’s habit.”  Then he was gone, his figure dissolving into the golden haze, an old Kashmiri tune trailing behind him—words half-swallowed by the wind, as if the land itself refused to let them go.  

*********

Years unspooled like a fraying rope. I won admission to university, and the willow forest—with its dappled light and whispering leaves—slipped from my daily rhythm. Occasionally, in the sterile buzz of lecture halls, I’d wonder: Was Rahman Kak still herding cattle beneath those same trees? Did his hookah smoke still curl into the branches like unanswered prayers? A friend assured me he lived, though age had gnawed at him. “Thinner. More bent. But the stick still swings,” he said.  

Then, in my second semester, the call came.  

Autumn had painted the meadows gold when my brother’s voice crackled through the phone: “Rahman Kak is dead. Found in the woods.” The line hissed with static, or perhaps my own held breath. I left campus without a word, the bus ride home a blur of tunnelled vision.  

The village had already gathered. Men washed his body behind the mosque, their hands moving with ritual gentleness over the sunken ribs, the furrowed forehead now smoothed of its storms. But it was the cattle that undid me—their lowing that day was a sound I’d never heard: not hunger, not fear, but grief. Some refused to graze. Others vanished into the forest shadows and didn’t return by moonrise, as if they’d gone to mourn in ways we couldn’t fathom.  

Time, indifferent, marched on. I earned my master’s degree, traded ink-stained notebooks for a teacher’s chalkboard. Meanwhile, Kashmir fractured. The air thickened with rumours—boys crossing borders to clutch rifles, midnight raids dragging sons from their beds, the Ikhwan’s boots kicking in doors. In the schoolyard where I taught, children played hopscotch over cracks shaped like gun barrels. At night, mothers counted heads at dinner tables, their silence louder than the curfew’s sirens.  

And through it all, I’d catch myself staring past the classroom window, toward the distant haze where the willows once stood. Rahman Kak’s stories had died with him, not with a bang, but with the slow suffocation of a people too besieged to listen. His stick, his hookah, his bull’s revenge—all swallowed by an age where even the land seemed to hold its breath, waiting for a deliverance that never came.  

Two more years. The conflict had teeth now.

It gnawed through everything—homes, orchards, the very bones of the village. The Ikhwanis ruled like feral kings, their guns rewriting laws written in the soil for centuries. No one dared approach the willows anymore; their once-sacred shade now sheltered only the click of rifle bolts and the acrid stench of boot-polish and fear.  

Then came the morning they felled them.  

I woke to the news like a gut-punch: The willows—every last one—cut down by Ikhwani saws and axes, sold for lumber or firewood or some petty warlord’s vanity. A witness described the meadow afterwards—naked, shivering, the stumps oozing sap like open wounds. The earth, they said, looked betrayed.  

Years later, the army came. 

They erected a fortress where Rahman Kak once whistled his cattle home—watchtowers of corrugated iron, coils of concertina wire blooming like razor-flowered vines. The meadow, where children once sent cricket balls sailing into the golden light, now bore the tread of combat boots and the sour tang of gun oil.  

Last month, I persuaded a friend to go with me.  

We walked the familiar path, my mind thick with ghosts—the whisper of leaves, Rahman Kak’s hookah bubbling, the thwack of his stick against the bull’s spine. But when we crested the hill, the sight stole my breath: A wasteland.

The land itself seemed to recoil from the barracks’ iron grip. Where the great willow nursery once stood, only hard-packed dirt remained, studded with the pale scars of roots ripped untimely from the earth.  

Then—movement. A soldier burst from a bunker, his beard wild as a thicket, rifle levelled. “No cricket here anymore,” he barked, as if the very idea of joy were contraband.  

We turned back. Behind us, the wind scoured the empty meadow, carrying nothing—no birdsong, no laughter, no stories—just the dull clang of a gate swinging shut on a past that no longer belonged to us.  

Ghulam Mohammad Khan was born and raised in Sonawari (Bandipora); an outlying town located on the wide shores of the beautiful Wullar Lake. Ghulam Mohammad believes that literature is the most original and enduring repository of human memory. He loves the inherent intricacies of language and the endless possibilities of meaning. In his writing, he mainly focuses on mini-narratives, local practices and small-scale events that could otherwise be lost forever to the oblivion of untold histories. Ghulam Mohammad considers his hometown, faith, and family to be the most important things to him. His short stories have appeared in national and international magazines like Out of Print, Kitaab, Indian Literature, Muse India, Indian Review, Inverse Journal, Mountain Ink and more. His short story collection The Cankered Rose is his forthcoming work. Presently, he teaches as an Assistant Professor at HKM Degree College Bandipora, Kashmir.

You can find more of Dr Ghulam’s work here on Ink Pantry.