On the morning of her wedding, Ayesha woke to the sound of her mother arguing with a saucepan.
The saucepan was innocent, just sitting on the hob, but her mother’s voice bounced off its metal sides as if it were responsible for everything.
“The caterer says he needs final numbers by eleven o’clock,” Ammi was saying, half into the phone, half into the kitchen air. “What does he mean, ‘rough estimate’? How can a wedding have rough estimate? Either people are coming or they are not coming. Ektu serious ho.”
The phone call cut through the flat like a knife.
From her bedroom, Ayesha stared at the ceiling and counted the shadows. Somewhere in the living room, her father flicked between news channels, looking for something to be outraged about that wasn’t this wedding. Her little brother was shouting at his PlayStation. Downstairs, the neighbour’s dog decided to participate with random, unhelpful barking.
Six hundred guests, the spreadsheet said.
Six hundred people with names, diets, grudges, and opinions.
Ayesha lay very still.
It took a moment for her to remember that all six hundred of them were supposed to be coming to see her.
The Guest List of Two Worlds
The guest list had begun months earlier on the dining table, with good intentions and bad handwriting.
Ammi had spread out three old address books, one new notebook, and the family’s collective memory. “We don’t want to leave anyone out,” she had said. “People remember these things. They count who you invite and who you forget. Then they count against you later.”
Abbu had grunted from the sofa. “People have too much time,” he muttered. “Let them count their own sins.”
But even he was drawn into the ritual, leaning over to suggest names.
“What about your cousin in Luton?” he asked. “The one with the car wash?”
“He never invited us to his son’s wedding,” Ammi responded, making a firm cross in the notebook. “See? People think we forget. We don’t forget. Just keep it in the back for a special day.”
Ayesha had watched this quiet pettiness unfold with a strange mixture of amusement and exhaustion. The list grew like something with its own life. Every name added seemed to drag two more behind it.
“Write Salam Miah,” Dadi had said, shuffling in from the bedroom with her shawl dragging. “He helped your grandfather when he first came to London. In Brick Lane, oi time.”
Ammi hesitated. “Ma, he… passed away. Ten years ago.”
Dadi frowned, tapping a finger on the table. “Did he? Achha. Then write his wife. Poor thing. She still walks like his shadow.”
She dictated more names. Some were alive. Some were not. In Dadi’s mind, all of them still sat on charpais in Beanibazar, drinking tea, gossiping about who had moved abroad and who had not.
Ayesha took over the spreadsheet later, transcribing from the chaotic notebook. She moved between two columns—UK and Bangladesh—as if dragging people gently across continents.
Somewhere between line 423 and 424, she realised she was listing more ghosts than guests.
There was Mamun chacha in Sylhet, who had promised to attend every important event in her life and then died of a quiet heart attack in his sleep. There was Khala Jahan, whose wedding saree they’d borrowed once for a photo shoot and never returned. There was Nanu, who would have scolded everyone for not bringing proper gifts.
Their names did not end up on the official list, of course. Only in Ayesha’s private one. The one she kept in her head, heavy and invisible.
The Groom and the Gap
The groom, Rafi, existed in a separate tab of the spreadsheet, like furniture quotes and cake options.
He was kind, sensible, with a laugh that didn’t need an audience. They had met in the most unromantic way possible—in a group project at university where everyone else slacked off. He had carried his share quietly. She had noticed.
Three years later, after degrees and internships and the endless waiting room of adulthood, their parents had met over tea.
“At least he’s not from too far,” Ammi had said approvingly the first time she met him. “Bromley. It’s practically neighbour borough.”
“He’s not Sylheti,” Dadi had muttered, suspicious. “People from Dhaka say ‘fush’ instead of ‘fish.’ I don’t trust that.”
“He’s from Mirpur, Ma, not Mars,” Ayesha had replied.
Rafi’s family was smaller. No sprawling village behind them, no endless chain of cousins pouring out of WhatsApp groups. His mother, father, one younger sister with streaks of purple in her hair. Their guest list was modest.
“Fifty people maximum,” his mother had said, almost apologetically. “We don’t know many.”
Ammi had inhaled sharply, as if someone had suggested a nikah in McDonald’s.
“A wedding must have crowd,” she said. “Otherwise people will think we have no one. That we are lonely.”
“It’s not a popularity contest,” Ayesha had said.
But sometimes, late at night, when she scrolled through Instagram wedding reels full of halls packed with people and money, she wondered if her mother was right.
The Journey to the Hall
On the day itself, East London woke up under a strange kind of silence.
It wasn’t that there was no noise—there were always sirens, buses, bin lorries—but something felt slightly off. The usual rush seemed to move slower, as if the city was tired and didn’t want to get out of bed.
Ayesha watched from the back seat of the white Mercedes as they drove from their block of flats in Stepney to the wedding hall in Ilford. Her hennaed hands rested in her lap, fingers stitched together with gold rings and nerves.
Beside her, Dadi muttered prayers under her breath. In the front, Ammi barked directions that the driver didn’t really need. The car was a small bubble moving through a world that looked familiar but slightly blurred at the edges.
Through the window, Ayesha saw empty bus stops and half-closed shop shutters. The sky pressed down with a grey that promised rain but couldn’t commit.
“Why is the road so… light?” she asked at one point. “Where is everyone?”
“It’s Sunday,” Abbu said from the other car, over speakerphone. “Maybe people are sleeping. Or at Westfield. Or both.”
Something about the emptiness made her stomach twist.
She remembered weddings from her childhood—queues of traffic outside community centres, aunties hurrying in with glittering handbags, kids in uncomfortable clothes chasing each other between parked cars. The world outside the hall had always mirrored the world inside: noisy, crowded, alive.
Today, the streets looked like they hadn’t been told there was a wedding happening.
“Maybe we’re just early,” Ayesha murmured to herself.
The hall, when they arrived, stood in a row of buildings that all seemed to be pretending not to look at one another. A red-brick shell, big glass doors, the name Imperial Banqueting Suite written in a font that tried very hard to sound grand.
Inside, the lights were on. The white tablecloths were laid. The gold chairs sat obediently around round tables, napkins folded into little peaks. The stage at the front was draped in ivory fabric and fake flowers, with a sofa in the centre that looked like a throne for people who weren’t sure they wanted kingdoms.
On the big digital clock near the kitchen doorway, the numbers glowed:
12:03 p.m.
Nikah at one. Guests from twelve.
No one was there.
Just staff polishing glasses and checking speakers.
The First Hour
At 12:10, Ayesha was in the bridal room with two makeup artists trying to convince her eyelids to be trustworthy.
“Don’t blink,” one of them said, her fingers tipped with glitter. “If you blink, the eyeliner will run away.”
“Where will it go?” Ayesha asked.
“Somewhere stupid,” the woman replied. “Like your cheek.”
They moved around her with brushes and sprays, building a face that felt half borrowed.
Every so often, one of her cousins poked their head in.
“Anything yet?” Ayesha would ask.
“Some people,” they would say. “Family. Don’t worry. Guests always come late. It’s the law.”
At 12:30, she heard her father’s voice in the corridor, strained with politeness.
“Yes, yes, inshaAllah they are on the way… yes, traffic… yes, some problem on the main road… no, no, don’t worry, we kept extra food…”
She checked her phone. The cousins’ WhatsApp group—which usually exploded with memes on such occasions—was sluggish. A few “omw” messages. One “my mum’s still in the shower ffs” from a younger cousin. Someone complaining about a delayed bus.
On the Bride’s Side family group, Ammi had written hours earlier:
“Event starts 12. Please be on time. Pls don’t embarrass us.”
Blue ticks had appeared. No replies.
At 12:45, the makeup artist declared, “Perfect,” and stepped back.
Ayesha looked at herself in the tall mirror. A bride stared back—eyes lined, lips softened in a colour that didn’t entirely belong to her, jewellery framing her face like an apology for something.
She placed her hand on her chest and tried to feel excitement.
Mostly, she felt like a painting waiting to be hung.
At 1:05, the nikah was done in a side room with hardly anyone watching.
The imam, an uncle who had known her since she was a child, recited the Arabic with the practiced ease of someone who had married hundreds of couples, some of whom had lasted and some of whom had not. Her consent was taken behind a screen, her voice shaking as she said “Qubool” three times.
Rafi’s voice had sounded steady when he said it.
There had been parents. Siblings. A few uncles. A photographer who clicked quietly like an insect.
And still, outside, the hall was mostly empty.
The Wedding Guests Who Never Arrived
By 2:00 p.m., something had shifted from “they’re just late” to “this is very strange”.
The tables near the front were occupied by immediate family, some of Rafi’s relatives who had come early from Bromley, and a few stray cousins who were never on time for anything except gossip.
The back half of the hall was a sea of empty chairs.
The caterer came over, his towel draped over his shoulder like a reluctant flag.
“Sister,” he said to Ammi, “should we delay serving? The food is ready. If we leave it too long…” He made a face suggesting universal truths about rice and time.
“People are coming,” Ammi insisted, though her voice had lost its firmness. “Maybe there is traffic. Or some… big accident.”
Ayesha watched her mother’s certainty crumble cell by cell.
Her phone buzzed occasionally.
“Train cancelled, we’re trying to get Uber.”
“Road closed near Bow. Diverted. Will be late.”
“Mum’s not well, we might not make it, so sorry.”
One message from a friend simply said:
“Tube chaos. Feels like the whole city glitched.”
On Twitter, people were complaining about a “signal failure” affecting multiple lines, buses diverted, something about a power outage near Stratford. In a different tab, someone joked about it being “the quietest Sunday ever.”
The empty chairs stared at her like a challenge.
Rafi came to sit beside her on the stage. His smile was apologetic.
“Well,” he said softly, “on the bright side, we’ll have lots of leftovers.”
She gave a small, brittle laugh.
“We invited six hundred people,” she said. “How many are here?”
“Maybe… seventy?” he guessed.
“Do you think it’s a sign?” she asked.
“Of what?”
“That no one wants to see us get married.”
He turned to her properly.
“That is not true,” he said. “The fact that people have train problems today doesn’t cancel the last three years.”
She nodded, not entirely convinced.
She felt stretched between two worlds—the one her parents believed in, where a wedding was a public performance scored by attendance, and another quieter one where marriage was two people standing side by side, even if the chairs behind them were empty.
As the photographer adjusted his lens and relatives shuffled, trying to fill gaps near the front so the pictures wouldn’t show the absence, Ayesha began to feel very far away from her own wedding.
Then she saw the first guest.
And everything shifted again.
The Guests She Did See
At first, Ayesha thought it was a trick of the lights.
Halfway down the hall, near table 12—the one reserved for extended family from Luton—she saw a man sitting alone.
He wore a pale kurta and a waistcoat, his hair combed back with effort, his glasses thick and slightly crooked. His posture was familiar in a way that punched something open in her.
She blinked.
He raised a hand and wiggled his fingers at her, a small, shy wave.
“Abbu,” she whispered. “Do you see… that man?”
Her father squinted. “Which one? Rafi’s chacha? I think he’s moved to table 3.”
“No,” she said. “Back. Near the middle. Table 12.”
She looked again.
He was still there.
It was Mamun chacha.
He looked exactly as he had the last time she saw him in Sylhet—sitting on a plastic chair in their courtyard, telling her she had grown too tall to be fed by hand, then feeding her anyway.
He took a sip from an invisible cup, made a face, and seemed to say, “Too much sugar, as usual.”
Her breath caught.
More people appeared as she scanned the hall.
Near the entrance, adjusting her sari, was Khala Jahan, the one with the borrowed wedding saree. She turned, caught Ayesha’s eye, and gave a wink that somehow said both “I forgive you” and “I remember”.
By the far wall stood Nanu, leaning on her cane, arguing with someone about the placement of tissues on the table. Ayesha didn’t need to hear her to know the tone.
Scattered among the empty chairs, like forget-me-nots in wasteland, sat faces she hadn’t seen in years but dreamed of often. Old men with walking sticks. Women with their hair tied tightly. Cousins who had died young. An uncle whose name was always followed by “Allah yar hum”.
They were not ghostly in the horror-film sense. No floating. No transparent bones. They simply looked… real. Solid. Wearing clothes that didn’t quite match the fashion of anyone alive.
But no one else seemed to notice.
Children ran between tables, slipping through legs that, in Ayesha’s vision, did not belong to the living. Her little brother chased a toddler straight through where Mamun chacha’s chair should have blocked him.
A chill crawled up her spine.
Rafi followed her gaze. “You okay?” he whispered.
“Please tell me,” she said, “that you see them too.”
He frowned gently. “See who?”
She looked at him, then back at the hall.
The crowd was still there.
A hall full of guests layered over a hall half-empty.
Dead over living.
Memory over absence.
A Conversation at Table 5
After a while, the strangeness settled into a kind of rhythm.
People came up to the stage to take photos. Small clusters of guests formed, dissolving and reforming like clouds. The buffet was eventually opened because the food had given up waiting for human feelings.
Ayesha smiled for pictures, accepted compliments, tucked away unsolicited advice.
And between each performance, she watched her other guests.
They weren’t doing anything particularly dramatic. No one floated through walls or dropped chandeliers. They simply existed—eating food she knew they couldn’t taste, talking to one another in silent conversations she somehow understood.
At one point, she saw Nanu standing near Table 5, looking at her with a mixture of pride and mischief.
On impulse, Ayesha excused herself from a photo and walked down the steps of the stage, her bride’s dress trailing behind her like a resigned pet.
“Ayesha!” Ammi hissed. “Where are you going? People are taking pictures.”
“I need water,” she lied.
She walked slowly toward Table 5.
As she approached, some of the living guests moved around her, their conversations like muffled radio. The dead ones sharpened in focus.
Nanu stood by an empty chair, hands on her cane.
“You are late,” Ayesha said automatically.
Nanu snorted. “You’re lucky I came at all,” she replied. “I was resting nicely.”
Her voice sounded exactly as it did in Ayesha’s memories—sharp Sylheti wrapped around Bangla, wrapped around old songs.
“You’re not real,” Ayesha said, her throat tight.
“Then why are you talking to me?” Nanu shot back.
Ayesha’s eyes stung.
“Why are you here?” she whispered.
Nanu tilted her head.
“Your Dadi has been praying for a wedding like this,” she said. “Big hall. Big food. Big stress. She got it. But she forgot something.”
“What?”
“That weddings are not for the guests,” Nanu said. “They are for the bride and groom. Everyone else is scenery. We came to remind you.”
“We?” Ayesha repeated.
Nanu gestured around.
All the faces—Mamun chacha, Khala Jahan, the grandparents, the great-uncles who died before she was born—seemed to turn toward her at once.
“We came,” Nanu said, “because the others didn’t. They are stuck in traffic. In trains. In their own lives. They wanted to come. Some of them. Some of them only wanted photos. Doesn’t matter. We had more practice at arriving late.”
Ayesha gave a watery laugh.
“I’m going mad,” she murmured.
“Madness and memory,” Nanu said, “are cousins. Why are you afraid? We were always here. In your head. Today, the line between worlds is thin. Rain, electricity problem, wedding food. Everything mixes.”
Ayesha glanced at the stage. Rafi was talking to one of his uncles, nodding politely.
“You approve?” she asked softly.
“Of the boy?” Nanu chuckled. “He looks at you properly. Not just at your face. This is rare. Keep that. Don’t give it away because chairs are empty.”
A tear slipped down Ayesha’s cheek.
“I wanted it to be full,” she admitted.
“It is full,” Nanu replied. “Just… not the way your mother wanted.”
A Wedding That Almost Didn’t Happen
Later, in a quiet corner near the fire exit, Ayesha found Dadi sitting on a chair that wasn’t actually there.
Her grandmother’s shawl was wrapped tightly around her shoulders, though she wasn’t shivering.
“You look like film star,” Dadi said, without turning. “Too much makeup. But still nice.”
Ayesha sat beside her, careful not to overlap with the living guests and their need for fire safety.
“Do you remember your wedding?” she asked.
Dadi smiled with half her mouth.
“My wedding?” she said. “Which one?”
Ayesha blinked. “You… had more than one?”
“Only one that counted,” Dadi said. “But there was another. The one that never happened.”
She leaned back, the lines on her face deepening with the effort of remembering.
“I was sixteen,” she began. “Your great-grandfather promised me to his friend’s son. Big family. Good land. People said, ‘Yeh match is perfect.’ They set a date. Made lists. Collected gold. Just like your mother did.”
Ayesha could picture it in her mind—another village, another courtyard, another girl sitting still while the world buzzed around her making plans.
“Two days before the wedding,” Dadi continued, “his family sent message. They found someone else. Someone with more money. They broke it.”
Her voice was matter-of-fact, but Ayesha heard the old crack beneath.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“What could I do?” Dadi shrugged. “I cried until bowl filled. Then your great-grandmother kicked me and said, ‘Enough. You don’t want to marry a house that can sell you so easily.’”
“And then?”
“Then, one year later, your grandfather came,” Dadi said. “With his too-big shirt and nervous eyes. He was not rich. Not special. But he looked at me like I was answer, not question. That’s the one that counted.”
She turned, finally meeting Ayesha’s eyes.
“Sometimes the wedding that doesn’t happen is the one that saves you,” she said. “Sometimes the guests that don’t come are the ones who would have made you small.”
Ayesha wiped her face with the edge of her dupatta.
“People will talk,” she said. “About today. About empty chairs.”
“Let them,” Dadi replied. “People also talked when my first wedding broke. They said I was unlucky. Leftover. Your grandfather didn’t care. Your Rafi will not care either. If he does, I will haunt him specially.”
Ayesha laughed properly then, shoulders shaking.
“You already haunt everyone,” she said.
“Good,” Dadi said. “Keeps them honest.”
The World That Caught Up
By late afternoon, more guests trickled in, damp and flustered.
There had been a signal failure on the District line, a closure on the A13, a fire alarm at someone’s block. One cousin had been stuck in a lift. Another’s Uber driver had got lost and refused to admit he didn’t know East London well.
They arrived in clusters, apologising loudly, their clothes slightly creased, their faces flushed.
“Traffic was mental,” they said. “Wallah, the whole city stopped for your wedding.”
“See?” Ammi whispered triumphantly to Ayesha. “People came. Guests are here. I told you. Who cares if they eat a bit late? They still came.”
She darted away to instruct the caterer to heat more biryani.
On the stage, the photographer took advantage of the fuller hall, organising group photos with military precision.
“Bride’s side only!”
“Now groom’s side!”
“Now mixed!”
“Now cousins pretending they like each other!”
As the living guests filled the front tables, the others—those only Ayesha saw—began to fade like mist in sunlight.
She caught one last glimpse of Nanu arguing with someone about take-home boxes.
“You can’t take biryani across dimensions,” Ayesha whispered.
“Watch me,” Nanu retorted, then dissolved into the air.
Mamun chacha adjusted his invisible glasses, gave her a thumbs-up, and vanished.
Khala Jahan smoothed her sari, nodded once, and disappeared mid-step.
By the time the DJ finally played the wrong song (and was corrected by five aunties at once), the hall looked like any other wedding—busy, bright, slightly chaotic.
If anyone noticed that the back rows still had more empty chairs than usual, they didn’t mention it. Or if they did, it was only in the way people always did, with a little shrug and a “People have no manners. Nowadays, RSVP means nothing.”
For Ayesha, the room pulsed with two truths at once.
Not everyone had come.
And yet, somehow, she had never felt more surrounded.
The Photos No One Else Saw
Weeks later, after the last of the hired jewellery had been returned and the leftover wedding favour chocolates had gone slightly chalky, Ayesha and Rafi sat in their new flat in Bromley scrolling through their wedding photos.
The photographer had done a good job. The lighting softened faces; the angles were kind. In almost every frame, they looked like a couple in a magazine spread about “Modern British Asian Weddings: Tradition Meets Minimalism.”
Ammi appeared in many shots, her mouth half-open as if mid-instruction. Abbu looked proud and slightly confused by the spectacle. Dadi appeared in only two photos, sitting beside Nanu’s empty chair. She had died a month after the wedding, peacefully, as if waiting for that last event to be checked off her list.
In one photo, taken early in the day, the back half of the hall was almost entirely empty.
“Mad,” Rafi said, shaking his head. “Remember how stressed your mum was? She still talks about it like it was a natural disaster.”
Ayesha leaned closer.
In the pixel-perfect emptiness, she saw them.
Not sharply. Not like faces at a table. More like impressions. Shadows where no shadows should have been. The hint of a sari border. The suggestion of a cane. A certain tilt of glasses.
If she hadn’t known to look, she would have missed them.
“What are you squinting at?” Rafi asked.
“Nothing,” she said. Then, after a beat, “Everything.”
He kissed her on the forehead, accepting this as one of her poetic, slightly strange answers.
Later that night, when he had fallen asleep and the flat was quiet in that particular way new places are, she stood at the living room window and looked out at the estate.
Lights blinked on and off across the blocks. A fox trotted along the pavement, king of nothing and everything. Somewhere, faintly, she could hear the distant adhan from a mosque she hadn’t yet found.
She thought of all the people who hadn’t made it to their wedding. The ones who were stuck in traffic. The ones who were stuck in the past. The ones who were stuck six feet under and still somehow had managed to show up.
She thought of Dadi’s almost-wedding, of her own almost-empty hall.
She thought of the version of herself who might have crumpled under the weight of those empty chairs, believing they reflected her worth.
Instead, on that strange day when London itself seemed to glitch, something else had happened.
The sky had bent.
The line between seen and unseen had thinned.
And a hall that looked half-empty in photographs had, for a few hours, been completely full inside her.
The Legend of the Empty Wedding
Years later, the story took on a life of its own.
At family gatherings, people told it in slightly different ways.
“Remember Ayesha’s wedding?” someone would say. “Tube was completely down. We walked from Mile End to Ilford. I nearly died.”
“I heard,” another would add, “that half the guests went to the wrong hall. They ended up at some Nigerian christening. Ate jollof rice and went home.”
“Wallah,” someone else would say, eyes wide, “there was a fire alarm at my block. We stood outside in our wedding clothes for one hour. Smoke everywhere. I said, ‘This is shaitan trying to stop us from going to wedding.’”
No one told it the way Ayesha remembered.
No one mentioned the man at Table 12 who had been dead for a decade but still criticised the tea.
No one mentioned the grandmother who had warned her that weddings were for brides, not for crowds.
She did not correct them.
Some stories are too delicate to hand over to people who only want to laugh.
When her younger cousins started getting married, they came to her for advice.
“What if no one comes?” one of them asked, panic in her eyes.
“They will,” Ayesha said.
“And if they don’t?” the cousin insisted.
She thought of the empty chairs. The full spaces between.
“Then you still will,” she said. “You and him. That’s enough. Everyone else is extra.”
The Guests Who Matter
On their fifth anniversary, Rafi took Ayesha back to the Imperial Banqueting Suite.
It had been rebranded in the way halls often are, new name in a new font, but the bones were the same. They didn’t go inside, just stood on the pavement across the road, watching another wedding’s guests arrive in waves of colour and car horns.
“Look,” he said quietly. “Full house.”
Ayesha watched the stream of people in glittering outfits. The aunties adjusting each other’s dupattas. The kids tugging at bow ties. The men pretending not to care how they looked and failing.
She smiled.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“You’re okay it wasn’t like that for us?” he asked, only half-joking.
“We had different guests,” she replied.
He put his arm around her shoulders.
As they walked away, the wind carried faint music from inside the hall—someone’s choice of Bollywood song, someone’s idea of perfect.
In her mind, over that music, she heard something else.
The clink of a cup placed firmly on a table.
The soft thud of a cane.
The familiar, impatient voice of someone from another world saying, “Aren’t you going to eat? They didn’t cook all this for decoration.”
She laughed to herself.
Some weddings are remembered for how many people came.
Hers, she knew, would always be the one the guests never arrived for.
Except the ones who mattered—
the living,
the dead,
and the two of them,
sitting on a stage in a half-empty hall,
saying “yes” so quietly to each other
that even a city that had paused for a day couldn’t drown it out.
The Hall That Stayed
In the years that followed, Ayesha found herself returning—not physically, but in memory—to that strange, half-empty hall more often than she expected.
Sometimes it happened when she was stirring rice on a quiet afternoon, watching steam curl upward like the ghosts of old stories. Sometimes it happened when she and Rafi hosted small dinners where ten guests felt like a crowd and laughter bounced off the walls like it had somewhere important to go. Sometimes it happened during the stillness after Fajr, when London was barely awake and she felt the whole city listening.
In those moments, the image of the hall would rise:
the empty chairs,
the living guests,
the dead ones sitting just beyond the edges of understanding.
She had learned something that day that no one else had—
something her mother with her spreadsheets and her father with his cautious pride had not understood,
something even Rafi, kind as he was, could only half-grasp.
A wedding is not an audience.
It is a doorway.
A doorway between families.
Between worlds.
Between past and future.
Between the living and the remembered.
And on the day she had stepped through hers, the ones who mattered had shown up—some in flesh, some in memory, some in ways no one could describe without sounding like they had inhaled too much incense.
It had become her secret truth.
The Child Who Saw What She Saw
Two years later, when their daughter was old enough to say “light” and “flower” and “no” with great commitment, Ayesha caught her standing in the middle of their small living room, staring at nothing.
No—not staring.
Smiling.
The kind of smile a child gives someone familiar.
“Who are you looking at, jaan?” Ayesha asked gently.
The little girl pointed at a corner near the bookshelf.
“Dadi,” she said simply.
Rafi looked up from the sofa, startled.
“My mum’s not here,” he said. “She’s at work.”
Ayesha felt something warm ripple through her.
“Which Dadi?” she asked softly.
Her daughter pointed again.
The air in that corner felt heavier.
Not frightening.
Just… inhabited.
“Old Dadi,” the child added, as if clarifying something obvious.
And Ayesha, without fear, without surprise, nodded once.
“Make sure you smile nicely,” she whispered to her daughter. “She notices everything.”
The Mother Who Finally Understood
A wedding wasn’t the only thing that had been unfinished.
Months later, Ayesha’s mother—Ammi—unexpectedly brought up the wedding during dinner.
“You know,” she began cautiously, “I used to feel embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?” Ayesha asked. “About what?”
“That so many people didn’t come,” Ammi said, picking at her rice. “People in our community talk. You know how they are. I thought they would say we are small family. That no one cares for us.”
Ayesha waited.
“But then,” Ammi continued, “I started going through the photos again. I saw… I saw something strange.”
Ayesha’s heart paused.
“What did you see?”
“Not clearly,” Ammi said quickly. “Don’t think I’ve gone mad. But sometimes… the hall doesn’t look so empty. It’s like… shadows where shadows shouldn’t be.”
She laughed shakily.
“Maybe it was the light. Or maybe people did come and left before we saw. I don’t know.”
Ayesha touched her mother’s hand.
“People came,” she said softly. “The ones who needed to.”
Ammi nodded slowly, as if finally accepting a truth she had never believed in.
The Wedding That Became a Story
As the years passed, the story spread into the community in ways Ayesha couldn’t have predicted.
It became the kind of story aunties told to calm anxious brides:
“You think it’s bad? My cousin’s daughter’s wedding—nobody came! Wallah, nobody! But now? Happy like anything. Three children. Husband worships her.”
Teenagers repeated a scarier version:
“Ilford hall ghosts, bro. My mum said empty chairs started moving by themselves.”
Uncles retold it dramatically:
“The weather was supernatural that day. Even Google Maps broke down. Whole East London paused.”
But only a handful of people knew the truth—
that when the living did not arrive,
the dead filled their seats,
politely,
quietly,
as if honouring a promise the living had forgotten.
What Stays, What Leaves
One night, on their tenth anniversary, Ayesha and Rafi stood outside the old hall again.
It had changed owners twice.
The sign was different.
The paint was fresh.
London had built new buildings around it like a protective circle.
And yet—
When Ayesha closed her eyes, she could still hear it.
A chair scraping.
A cane tapping.
A voice from another world insisting she eat properly.
She took Rafi’s hand.
“Do you regret that our wedding wasn’t full?” she asked softly.
He squeezed her hand.
“It was full,” he said. “Just not in the way we expected.”
She opened her eyes.
Lights from inside flickered faintly.
Cars hissed past in the rain.
Somewhere, far off, someone laughed—the warm, unbothered laugh of a grandmother who always knew more than she said.
Ayesha smiled into the night.
Some weddings are remembered for their abundance.
Some for their extravagance.
Some for their noise.
But hers—
hers would forever be remembered as the wedding the guests never arrived for…
and the one where love arrived anyway,
carrying with it a whole world that refused to stay dead.
Disclaimer
This story, published on mujiburrahman.com is a purely fictional work. All characters, places, communities, and events described are products of imagination or used in a fictional context. Any resemblance to actual individuals or real-world events is entirely coincidental. The purpose of this content is storytelling and entertainment only and should not be taken as factual or representative of any real person or community.
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