Heer, Ranjha, and Haroon Khalid’s Infinite Story of Love
Haroon Khalid’s 2024 novel From Waris to Heer (Penguin) is an answer to the refrain of timeless stories—a tale of love and loss, power and rebellion, retold with the lilt of a Sufi melody.
There’s only one story, the story of love. Rest, a retelling.
To quote the song “Chali Kahani” (from the film Tamasha)—a song of timeless stories, of restless truths—“Sarpat dauṛtī hai faqat jubānī / Chhuṭ-puṭ āśiquī meṁ ḍhalī kahānī / Angin sāl se hai vahī purānī / Tere mere ishq kī ye nayī kahānī.” A story runs swiftly, merely through words, one moulded in fleeting love affairs. The same old story for countless years, this new tale of our love.
This refrain, written by Irshad Kamil, is a hymn to timeless stories—their origins unknown, their journeys infinite. Haroon Khalid’s 2024 novel From Waris to Heer (Penguin) feels like an answer to this call, a tale of love and loss, power and rebellion, retold with the lilt of a Sufi melody. Like all great stories, it dances on the edge of resolution but never truly settles; it moves, restless, toward eternity. Or as Khalid writes, “Perhaps the qissa is never meant to be finished. It is meant to be read and revised over and over again, till it got close to the state of perfection, of divinity.” To him, the story is not sacred for its origin but for its evolution. Each addition, each deletion, an act of devotion, a lover’s touch shaping the beloved anew. After all, who knows where a story comes from? Who knows where it goes? Who owns its path, its twists, its turns?
And yet, it’s here. It’s now. It’s tangible—alive, breathing, unclaimed, untamed, ours. As solid as stone, as fleeting as air. It wears the centuries like a second skin, but in its presence, it feels as though it has just been born. Touch it. Feel it. Breathe it.
Across centuries—Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Layla and Majnun, Antony and Cleopatra, Salim and Anarkali, Heloise and Abelard, Nao and Nhan, Nupa and Naipi—love has flickered under the watchful eyes of power. So has intimacy. And dreams. As Arundhati Roy writes in The God of Small Things (1997), “Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much…” Love finds itself, time and again, in shackles.
Love, however, also finds itself pulling and breaking, tugging and tearing, against the said shackles. The characters may change, but the story doesn’t.
From Waris to Heer captures this undying tension, weaving the stories of Heer and Ranjha and of Waris Shah, the poet who immortalized them. Like the banks of a river, their stories move together parallelly, shaping the landscape of the qissa.
From Waris to Heer captures this undying tension, weaving the stories of Heer and Ranjha and of Waris Shah, the poet who immortalized them. Like the banks of a river, their stories move together parallelly, shaping the landscape of the qissa. The novel begins with a young Waris stepping into 18th-century Lahore, a city he’s only heard grand stories of, a boy yet to be whipped by the realities and cruelties of the world, his dreams still tender, unscarred. In his eyes, Lahore is a myth made real, streets pulsing with music, air shimmering with the dreams of scholars.
Waris had dreamed of being a part of the magnificent universe of Lahore, where Sufi poets sang and danced on the streets, where every day was a celebration. The city of scholars, of scribes, of publishers and readers, of madrasahs, dharmsalas and royal patronage, where every night poets gathered, wine flowed and the young eyes of lovers inspired the impromptu composition of verses. (7)
But dreams, no matter how gilded, are brittle things. Even myths falter. Reality strikes like a blade. Waris watches in horror as Bhai Mani Singh, a close companion of Guru Gobind, is prosecuted before the city’s eyes: limbs torn apart, blood soaking the earth. The Lahore of his imagination, once glorious, reeks of betrayal. He flees, disillusioned, unable to reconcile its beauty with its brutality, his soul scarred by the weight of what he has seen.
Amidst the unholiness, Waris stumbles upon the sacred. In surrendering to the creator, in the purity of love, and in the harmony woven through Heer and Ranjha’s tale, he finds peace. Through them, he begins to rebuild his faith, piece by tender piece.
Thus, we arrive at the heart of the qissa: the ‘lowly’ shepherd, Ranjha, and the one to whom he’s bound, the princess Heer. He, who walks as if the earth were moulded for his feet; she, whose soul answers only to the call of love. He, the wellspring of divinity; she, the eternal seeker, her thirst unending. Together, their love moves beyond time, beyond boundaries, towards singularity.
It’s an old story, the very first one.
It’s a coming-of-age tale, a hymn to the sacredness of love, and a piercing critique of the hierarchies that divide us: religious, social, and otherwise. But most importantly, the book is a meditation on stories themselves: how they shift, mould, weave and unweave around each other like threads of sand swirling and colliding under the spell of wind.
Khalid’s writing evokes the cadence of Sufi qawwali—soaring and dipping, winding and restless—a rhythm carrying both divine ecstasy and earthly longing. His prose pulses with timelessness, each word resonating like the refrain of an ancient song, like a melody one can’t help but hum along to.
Khalid’s words hum the truth of singularity: all stories are one. It all has happened before. It all is happening now. It all will happen again. Religions chart the same paths, myths tell the same stories, whether Radha-Krishna or Hussain-Madho. Repeated for centuries, ancient yet alive, forever reshaped in their retelling. As Heer says to Ranjha, “I am yours, forever, in this life and that which is reserved in heaven, in all my other incarnations, those that I have already lived and those that I am yet to experience.”
Like a bard, Khalid shapes his prose with a musician’s ear—each word a note, each sentence a rhythm, mindful of both the tale and the reader’s place within it. His storytelling holds the duality of being both classic and inventive, poetry and prose braided seamlessly, straddling the past and the present. But it’s not just beauty; the prose also carries intention. In his hands, the personal is inseparable from the political, the lyrical another lens to view a rebellion.
In such a space, faced with a marriage she cannot choose, Heer questions the very structures that bind her, crying against her mother, “What ancient grudge do you hold against me? (...) Why do you want to ensure that a custom which once took away your freedom now takes away mine? Is this why mothers have daughters so that they can pass on this legacy upon them as dowry?” (131)
Her voice is not just her own; it’s of women silenced for generations, their desires dismissed, their agency stripped away. Yet the story does not stop to rest, trails of questions left behind, carrying an undercurrent of sensibilities and issues relevant to our world today. What does it mean to be a true believer? Who decides, and why?
Through threads of philosophical inquiry and personal conundrums, Khalid anchors timeless themes in the reality of today. He draws attention to persisting conflicts like religious orthodoxy, the immovable structures of belief, and the alienation of the ‘other’, and breathes into them the relevance of our time. In doing so, he honours the timeless tradition of storytellers, reshaping the eternal to reflect the contemporary and, in turn, making it even more eternal.
Khalid’s characters carry a rare awareness, disarmingly intimate, often stepping out of their roles to address the reader directly. For instance, Chuchak—leader of the Sials, chief of Jhang, father of Heer—introduces himself by saying, “As a two-dimensional character on these pages, being read by a creature, an entity, far more complex than I, how can I possibly elude you?” (81)
Elsewhere, Khalid lends his voice to unexpected narrators:
“You can refer to me as sex, sexual intercourse or even sexual desire, but I am more than each of these epithets. I flow between these definitions, these limitations imposed on me (...) I represent the highest pinnacle of human art, the apogee of human intellect.” (206)
Bulleh Shah, in one of his most resonant poems, draws upon the legend of Heer and Ranjha to speak of unity with the divine. Writing as Heer, he proclaims: “Rānjhā rānjhā kar dī nī maiṁ āpe rānjhā hoī. Saddo nī mainū dhīdo rānjhā, hīr nā ākho koī.” (I kept chanting Raanjha's name until I became Raanjha myself. Call me Dheedho Raanjha, don’t call me Heer anymore.)
This merging of identities—the self-dissolving into the other—finds its echo in the author’s prose. Writing as Ranjha, he declares:
It is in me that West meets East; the Semitic meets the pagan; the believer meets the infidel; Yousuf meets Krishna; monotheism meets monism; the past meets the present and the poet meets the story. I am the sacred and the profane, the masculine and the feminine, the tyrant and the humble. I am Ranjha, but I am also all the lovers that have ever lived. I am Majnun, Farhad, Mirza and Punnun. (...) Ranjha is Punjab and Punjab is Ranjha. (...) Ranjha is Waris and Waris is Ranjha.” (12)
What Khalid achieves through his narrative is a meditation on the act of storytelling itself. His storytelling is an act of defiance—a refusal to let the qissa rest, a reminder that stories, like love, are infinite in their capacity to grow and transform.
What Khalid achieves through his narrative is a meditation on the act of storytelling itself. His storytelling is an act of defiance—a refusal to let the qissa rest, a reminder that stories, like love, are infinite in their capacity to grow and transform. By intertwining Ranjha and Heer, Waris and Lahore, he erases the boundaries of time and identity, creating a tale belonging as much to the present as it does to the past.
Ranjha is more than a lover: he’s a prism, refracting unity in a world splintered by boundaries. Heer, in turn, is the voice of rebellion. Unyielding, insistent, and unwilling to accept anything less than the freedom love demands.
With its animated streets and blood-soaked history, Lahore is the perfect stage for this interplay of opposites, a heartbeat more than a setting. It is a city as restless as the qissa, forever changing yet eternal, a restless witness to centuries of beauty and brutality. Disillusioned by its brutality yet inspired by its beauty, Waris finds comfort in weaving a story that holds both pain and hope, rebuilding faith itself in the process.
For Khalid, this duality is the heart of the qissa: it is as much about resistance as it is about harmony, as much about questioning as it is about surrendering to love. The qissa endures because it dares to challenge and unsettle the very boundaries it inhabits.
And so, to return to Irshad Kamil’s “Chali Kahani”: “Ā tī kahāṁ se hai ye jātī kahāṁ kyā patā” Who knows where [the story] comes from? Who knows where it goes?
There’s only one story, the story of love. Rest, a retelling.
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Amritesh Mukherjee is a writer and editor. He is a content writer at a marketing agency and the long-form lead at Purple Pencil Project, a platform to promote Indian literature (and languages). You can find him on Instagram: @aroomofwords and Twitter: @aroomofwords.
