Tahira Parveen Poet Narrative

Notes About The Poem

The Flute That Opened Hell

The Flute That Opened Hell
The rain pounded against the rotting wood of the door, matching the furious rhythm of the landlord’s fists. Inside, Manzoor cowered alongside Suraya, Khalida and Shamim, the crushing weight of their debts finally breaking them.
When Manzoor threw open the door, the rent man stood there like an executioner, demanding every last penny. Terrified and desperate, Manzoor smiled a sickening, desperate smile. He invited the man inside and offered a horrific bargain: his own twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Shamim, as payment. Shamim, who had fought so hard to escape his shadow and move out, could only watch in absolute horror as her own father tried to barter her life away.
The rent man recoiled in disgust. "I want my money, not your flesh and blood," he spat.
Faced with ruin, madness took hold of Manzoor. From his coat, he pulled a twisted, ancient magical flute. He pressed it to his lips and blew a piercing, discordant note. The floorboards split apart, tearing open the literal fabric of the earth to reveal the roaring, fiery abyss of Hell itself. Before they could scream, Manzoor violently shoved both the disgusted rent man and his own terrified daughter into the fiery chasm. As they plunged into the depths, Manzoor sealed the floor shut and slipped away into the night, abandoning them to damnation.
The rent man and Shamim awoke in a suffocating, pitch-black void. The heat was blinding, and the air tasted of ash. Surrounded by the torment of the underworld, the rent man looked at the innocent woman beside him and vowed to protect her.
"We are trapped in the ultimate debt," he whispered, helping her to her feet. "But we must pay our own way out."
Day by brutal day, the unlikely pair fought side-by-side through the trials of the abyss. They learned the true, agonizing cost of survival, earning their freedom coin by coin, torment by torment. Manzoor had thrown them into Hell to pay his rent, but together, they were buying their way back to the land of the living and they were coming for revenge.

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