Khaak - Mahdi

Janat Gul transfuses her life into what is unreal by standing outside the school gates every day in hopes of finding her son. She borrows just enough reality from the breathing world to make her dead son insensibly seem alive. Within seconds, Zufash's life was torn away (along with those like him), in the hands of Bahadur alias Khaakzad; a Waziri terrorist who deemed this pursuit futile. Bahadur's peculiar journey from the time-hallowed shrine of the past, of being an innocent seven-year-old shepherd boy to a heartless terrorist Khaakzad (Dust-clad) lay almost wholly in the narrative. It mirrors the struggles, the rapture and the gloom within his own heart; the subplot is the crucible in which his thoughts and emotions are fused and molded into words. But will it be an ideal personage for him to powerfully drive the readers' imagination into a conceivable awakening and hold them accountable for their immediate judgment without appealing to their primal sympathies for Zufash?

Khaak is inspired by the heinous attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan that devoured the lives of more than 144 children and teachers by the Terrorist organization called TTP(Tehrik-i-Taliban) on December 16, 2014.