LIST OF CONTENTS

Ser	Contents	Pages
	Preface	3-6
	The Mystery of the Bald Spot	7-11
	Out of Darkness	12-17
	Just a Child	18-24
	The Crucifixion	25-28
	The Epitaph	29-33
	Transfiguration	34-38
	Bingo	39-51
	Finis	52-55
	Friend	56-61
	The Olive Branch	62-67
	The Philosopher King	68-74
	Saint Satan	75-80
	Snail	81-85
	The Burden of Sisyphus	86-90
	The Computer	91-94
	Salvation	95-99
	Babu	100-105
	Charity	106-111
	The Legacy	112-118
	The Physician	119-123
	Thanks	124-134
	The Lead Gatherer	135-140
	The Dove of Peace	141-145
	The Dance of the Beards	146-150
	Eid Shopping	151-156
	The Heart’s Desire	157-164
	The Choice	165-173
	The Folly	174-190
	The Professor	191-199
	The Third Leg	200-211
	Apples	212-219
	Eid Milad un Nabi	220-226
	Hore	227-242
	The Moustache	243-251
	Ugh	252-259
	Inquisitors	260-265
	Animals	266-273
	The Doll	274-279
	Game	280-283
	Deaf Dark Walls	284-288
	Mai Baap	289-297
	Mamoon Ji	298-308
	Papa	309-314
	The Patient	315-319
	The Sweepress	320-324
	The Toy	325-330
	Crying Baby	331-334
	Kid	335-343
	The Lover	344-349
	Rapists	350-355
	The Dying Wish	356-361
	Glossary	362-365

Preface

I wrote my first short story---actually more of a humorous anecdote than a short story proper---in 1968 when I was nineteen years old. This piece ‘The Mystery of the Bald Spot’ was published in a student magazine and I was encouraged to write. At the same time I read Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) the great French master of the short story. I also read Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and developed a taste for the clever twist in the end (a la Maupassant) and a penchant for colourful language and exotic remanticism (a la Wilde). Thus the stories written in 1969 and 1970, both years of intense creativity, are influenced by these two writers.

Gradually these influences wore off and I veered towards the school of social realism. I did not know much of Urdu literature nor had I read Premchand (1880-1936) and the fiction of the Progressive Writers Movement of the 1930s in South Asia. However, I became concerned with the real problems of people, especially poor people, in Pakistan. The settings of my stories were no more exotic nor were names of characters borrowed from the West. Instead, I started writing of people in Pakistan.

From 1970 till 1978 I was a cadet and then an officer in the Pakistan Army. I was commissioned in the armoured corps and, when I resigned my commission in 1978, it too was from the same corps. In between, however, I spent two years and a few months in the Army Education Corps. My next phase of intense creativity occurred when I was posted as a captain to the Pakistan Military Academy and Military College Jhelum between 1974 and upto the first half of 1976. these stories were both realistic, and of the ‘Progressive’ kind, as well as symbolic. Incidentally these were also the years when I read some Urdu fiction, especially the classics of the early part of the twentieth century.

I must point out that none of my stories, barring one or two in student magazines, had been published. Indeed, I never sent them for publication nor, indeed, did I show them to my colleagues in the army. Upto this time of my life I was contented merely with expressing myself on paper and reading the product from time to time. I had never experienced the kind of working class life I described in my stories but I had real feeling and compassion for the poor. I knew what kind of life they had because I could observe oppression, poverty and suffering---my perennial themes---all around me. There was also fiction and, of course, my own imagination to guide me.

I wanted to leave the army because I had been in considerable anguish during the 1971 war between Pakistan and India. I was against the military action of the army in Dhaka in March 1971 and I felt that this war could have been avoided. To kill or get killed---and especially to kill---in a war which appeared so unnecessary in my eyes was a painful experience. I expressed my sympathy for the Bengali victims of the military action in my short story ‘Bingo’ but I never went to Dhaka till much later in 1994 when I was conducting research to write my book Language and Politics in Pakistan (OUP, 1996).

My resignation came through and I said goodbye to arms in Arpril 1978. In 1979 my childhood friend Tariq Ahsan took me to the office of The Muslim, a fashionable English daily from Islamabad, to meet Mr. Cyprian. I did not know who Mr. Cyprian was but Tariq assured me he had been a great leftist leader of his day. He turned out to be a remarkable man with great understanding and compassion. He published my story ‘Charity’ in Muslim and this, so to speak, launched me in the world of publication. After this, almost every other week, my short story would appear in the Sunday Magazine and this by itself set me off writing new short stories. This third period of intense creativity lasted throughout 1979 and 1980 when it was interrupted as I went to England for higher studies.

The fourth period of activity started in 1986 and lasted till 1993 or 1994. As I was doing many other things during this period, I wrote in fits and starts not writing fiction for months on end and then suddenly writing a story in hours of concentrated scribbling which left me satisfied but exhausted and made my fingers ache. It was very much like Ghalib’s experience of receiving ideas from the mysterious Great Unknowable:

Aate hain ghaib se ye mazameen khiyal mein

Ghalib sareer-e-khama nawa-e-sarosh hai

(Ideas come to my mind from the mysterious Great Unknowable;

Ghalib the sound of the writing of my pen is like the sound of the angel’s wings)

The stories of this period are a continuation of the social realist and the symbolist modes. They are generally longer than the earlier works.

One aspect of my work, which the Pakistani puritan might disapprove of, is that they do not ignore the aesthetic and erotic aspects of life. I believe it is the duty of an artist to present life as it is and not to create purged versions of reality. Puritanism has made us shamefaced and taken away our innocence and sense of balance so that our young people are incapable of reading the classical literature of Persian, Arabic and Urdu (even such masterpieces as the Gulistan and Bostan) or that of modern Europe and America without feeling guilty. This state of affairs is calculated to make people morbidly interested in sex; it is not calculated to make them treat it as a normal part of life. Such an attitude is unhealthy.. My work treats life as an organic whole and does not shy away from any aspect of it. At the same time it does not dwell upon the erotic for the sake of it. It simply takes it as a part of life.

As for my language, I started with literary, ornate, difficult English. It was perhaps the expression of pride in an idiom which I found myself competent in even at school. Later, I started believing in simplicity of diction and often deleted unfamiliar words which came to my mind to make my expression clear and simple. However, as I find myself possessed by a highly charged, emotion-ridden voice when I am scribbling away at a furious pace, I do use words and constructions which may not be as simple as I would wish---such, I feel, are the constraints of creativity.

After 1993, or maybe 1994, I have not written any stories though I have had occasion to revise some. I do not know if the creative impulse has died for ever in me or whether there will be a revival. I do not also know whether my preoccupation with research has left me no time for creative writing. All I know is that it could hardly have been a very strong impulse if research killed it. It is also possible that my creativity, such as it was, was limited and has dried up. I do not know.

My work has been collected in three anthologies The Legacy (New Delhi: Commonweath Publishers, 1989), Work (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 1991) and The Third Leg (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 1999). I thank the publishers for allowing me to reprint some of these short stories, with minor corrections whenever required, in this edition. In addition to these short stories in books, a few other published, or written and not published, stories have also been collected here. Out of nearly one hundred short stories only some have been selected here. I have enjoyed writing these stories which prejudices me in their favour. The reader, who is not prejudiced for this reason, should be in a better position to judge whether they repay reading or not.

I thank Mr. Shafique Naz of the Alhamra Publications and his colleagues for publishing this book. I only hope he does not live to regret this decision.

Tariq Rahman

Quaid-i-Azam University

Islamabad

The Mystery of the Bald Spot

AN EPIC on that legendary figure, the infamous Jamadarji, a living proof of nature’s distorted sense of humour, would be the proper medium of adducing his manysided personality. I, however, being not as favoured by the Muse as William Cowper, will humbly but truly try to illuminate the reader on the subject of the equestrian adventures of the Jamadarji.

The Jamadarji, our hero, was prone to delusions of grandeur. He fancied himself to be an equestrian champion with a philosophical bent of mind. To propagate his Aristotelian image he wore an ancient pair of horn-rimmed glasses, which were inclined to slip down to the parrot-like perpetually red nose at all critical moments. To remove all doubts about his horsemanship, the Jamadarji exhibited an unusually rickety pair of bandy legs, which, coupled with his remarkably pugnacious nature and erudite views, always made people keep their ideas to themselves if they did not see eye to eye with this mighty colossus in the field of equitation. The Jamadarji had a peculiar mud-fish-like complexion, remained perpetually pie-face, and had the habit of twisting his moustache to the same angle at all critical moments. In more peaceful times, however, the moustache would again resume its parallel handle bar position.

No description of the Jamadarji can be complete without a mention of his huge bulging belly. This was well looked after, and the Jamadarji would not tolerate any non-sense about it. Making passing reference to his mathematically square shoulders, and many-chinned face, I will elaborately describe the peculiar smile of our hero. Most writers describe the smile of their hero as a ‘disarming one’. I have, alas, no other choice than to call it an ‘arming one’. Whenever the Jamadarji smiled, his right eye, which never exceeded a slit, would close completely, making him one-eyed from one-and-a-half eyed. Then his nose would start twitching, the pincenez would slip down to the broken nose, and the fat lips would part baring all the black irregular teeth into such a wicked smile, that everybody’s state of mind would become rather similar to that of Shakespeare’s character who said,

“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes”

(Macbeth, IV, 1)

After the smile one comes to his equine laughter, the dreads of which are inconceivable for one unfamiliar with it, but which rang in the worst nightmares of our worthy hero’s unfortunate subordinates. The last, but perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the Jamadarji, a sore point for him, was a large absolutely hairless, shining spot on his head. It is the mystery of this bald spot which this story is about.

Whenever I pass near the stables, I increase my pace to avoid being trapped by the Jamadarji, whose favourite hobby unfortunately is, to be on the lookout for anyone who has even once committed the folly of showing even the remotest interest in his horses. On that day, however, a painful cry, rather a shriek like that of a soul in agony, startled me. I ran to the main building of the stables, a fovourite haunt of the Jamadarji. The sight which met me there, however, was enough to make even the most cool headed person jump out of his skin. I jumped at the sudden shock of seeing the highly ridiculous sight of a corpulent man, on the wrong side of forty, with wild hair, parallel moustache and the pincenez entangled in the collar, perching twenty feet above the ground on a pile of grass. I politely congratulated the Jamadarji on that manoeuvure but remarked that it was rather odd at his age. However, before I could grasp the situation, a shriek escaped the Jamadarji and he pointed a shaky finger at a big black mustang which stood with an air of sarcasm and feral malevolence around it. I looked at the horse, and finding nothing wrong, lifted questioning eyes towards the Jamadarji “That, th-th-that, thats-s-s-see-eeee---,” “stammered the old fellow, and then words failed him. “Yes, I see its a horse”.

“A horse!” wailed the Jamadarji, “You call it a horse, as if haven’t seen horses all my life--that I tell you is the ‘Deceased’.

“Now it was my turn to convert myself into a question mark. “Deceased!” I said incredulously. “What do you mean, Jamadarji Sahib”?

“For heaven’s sake get me down from here, and I will tell you what I mean.”

I put a ladder on the other side of the pile, and with shaking steps and trembling hands the poor old Jamadarji got down. The with a sine-curve-like gait he waddled to a chair and dropped himself on it. Later with a hundred gasps s and exclamations he told me his story. I was able to gather the following from the incoherent speech of the much shaken gentleman. That he had the misfortune of going in the ‘Deceased’s’ pen and closing the gate after him. Then as he was in the process of establishing good relations between himself and the horse, the horse suddently started taking an unhealthy interest in his bulging stomach. The Jamadarji was least tolerant of any playing with this cherished part of his body, and hit the deceased on the head. This knock on the head had such an animating effect on the horse that very soon the poor Jamadarji was sprawling on the ground. Even after all these proofs of the horse being allergic to his moustached contenance, the Jamadarji, being rather slow of imagination, failed to realise the gravity of situation and pushed the horse aside to open the gate and go away.

“This,” I remarked, “wasn’t a very clever move”.

“It was a stupid one,” he snapped, “but I am no politician”.

Anyway this fatal blunder was a red rag to the bull, and that really unleashed the fury of the mustang. It fetched the Jamadarji a couple of kicks and some nasty bites by which he was compelled to forfeit the backside of his breeches, and made him seek refuge on the top of the pile of grass. After this painful introduction with the black stallion, nobody could ever convince the Jamadarji that it was just a horse. He would swear that it was an evil spirit of something exceptionally nasty which had come in the form of a horse. He always referred to the black stallion as “The Deceased.”

The day drew near when the ‘Deceased’ had to be taken for the maiden ride, and with it increased the Jamadarji’s emphasis on delegation of authority. Throughout this period people avoided their superior lest they should be roped into riding the black horse. Seeing their superior successfully contracting a dysentary, they also played the Jamadarjiish trick of finding their way to the C.M.H. A junior subordinate, however, before he got the chance of contracting some useful malady, found himself uncomfortably perched on the notorious stallion. The Jamadarji had returned form the C.M.H. to prove his interest in the new horse, but had wisely taken the precaution of being in civilian clothes. However, his cheerful remarks about how he would have loved to ride such a horse himself had he been well, (he emphasised well) fetched two snorts from the ghastly pale subordinate. The as the Jamadarji sang aloud the bad habits of the horse: ‘bucks, kicks, shies, rears, pulls’ etc. and his Cheshire cat-like grin got longer and longer. The climax came when the Jamadarji, grinning from ear to ear, but unsuccessfully trying to conceal his smile in his moustache, concluded with the words, “and bites”. The poor subordinate, having no other alternative, braced himself to take the horse outside the closed riding school. The Jamadarji, quite contrary to his nature , was so courteous that he accompanied him till the gate on his white mare, and with a wicked twinkle and an apologetic giggle, unbarred the gate.

The horse took a plunge forward, as if finding it incredible that anybody should have the audacity to ride him. Then grunting and belching, his hoofs pounding the earth, the ‘Deceased’ bucked out high in the air, and landed stiff-legged with a shock that shook the earth. Then looked up in the air at the bewildered ‘ex-rider’ who was by then on his way down to the earth. The Jamadarji, now definitely pleased and chuckling to himself, urged the white mare he was riding, although in civvies, forward at a brisk trot and reached the place of the incident. Then a miracle happened---a shout rang in the air, followed by a wild neigh. The next instant the people saw a white mare, galloping off at top speed. Sorry, not a white mare, the white mare, with the Jamadarji clinging to the saddle. To make the poor Jamadarji a perfect incarnation of Sancho Panza, the ‘Deceased’ suddenly decided to join the white mare. The groans and shouts issuing from the poor fellow, changed to shrieks and yowls by the fact that the Jamadarji’s virbating belly had, as usual, succeeded in attracting the attention of the ‘Deceased’. The horse now seemed satisfied in investigating it’s dimensions, and having occasional snaps for a change. The violent protests of the Jamadarji in the form of heart-rending shrieks, however, made the mustang lose both his patience and anger, and he settled old accounts with the poor man by giving him a few kicks. The white mare suddenly bucked, and the Jamadarji got dislodged from the saddle. He went soaring up in the air and frantically grabbed and hauled himself on---the ‘Deceased’. The wild shouts of the Jamadarji, were a source of great amusement to his subordinate, who kept on muttering something about “out of the frying pan, into the fire,” and about his superior’s horsemanship. The ‘Deceased’, meanwhile by one kick brought the Jamadarji on his neck. However, as the deceased was well versed in the art of throwing away adhesive Jamadarjis, he violently jolted his neck back and managed to throw the poor Jamadarji back onto the saddle. Then collecting himself, he suddenly bucked, and the rider got dislocated from the seat. Then executing a parabola he landed a little away from the subordinate, and after taking a few somersaults, with astonishing agility for his age and weight, came to rest right at the subordinate’s feet. The over-pleased man fussed over the bruised and bleeding head of his superior, a hoof mark being obviously the source of the blood. There is little more to add, except that this very spot became the famous, or notorious, whatever one chooses to call it, ‘bald spot’ on the Jamadarji’s head, which remained his characteristic ever after.

There remains just one more thing to explain, the unusual conduct of the otherwise quiet white mare, which the poor Jamadarji was unfortunately riding. It indeed seems to be a mystery that the Jamadarji should have been the second John Gilpin even after so many precautions, and far more unlucky than William Cowper’s character. However, if you want the cat out of the bag, you should know what the subordinate did when his groaning superior was carried to the C.M.H. With an evil smile on his face he took out a thorn from the saddle of the white mare.

Written 1968; published in The Frontier Post 14 March 1986.

Out of Darkness

Away away in the salt marshes lived a hermit. There the groaning of the sea came clear like the voice of a tortured soul writhing in agony in the depths of hell, and the air wept or sang a doleful note. The hermit was a holy man who cared not a damn for the world but lived a life secluded in a corner of God’s earth where the adders bowed their venormous heads in deep reverence to him, and huge loathsome tortoises rolled all day in the hot mud. And thistles and rushes any thorns grew there, and many a wild-flower bush. And a bitter smelling vapour hung heavily all day, and all night hung a mist. It was a strange land of mystery and the sun peeped but reluctantly there, and the virgin snow never whitened it. But day in day out a voice pierced through the torpid pall which formed a halo around it, and rose to the heavens---from intangible mists to azure clearness. It was the voice of the hermit.

This hermit the sinner sought, and left his abominable city of the seven deadly sins to see past the gaudy veil of painted sin, where the angels tread but lightly. ‘For he shall absolve me of my sins’ he murmured and sighed, for to remember his abominations was an anguish unparalleled, as were his sins unprecedented in their enormity. He prayed for pardon from the heavens to fall on his dark soul as a cracked land with withered grass looks with despair-laden eyes at the burning sky, dry as dust, with never a life-giving drop of moisture. He prayed but the prayers stuck in his throat, and out came a wicked curse which startled the innocent birds of the air and made the rabbit flee. And, his face bore the sign of every sin of the world. It was indeed a hideous countenance. The expression filled the passerby with disgust and loathing. The sodden eyes might once have been blue, had anyone mustered courage enough to peer into them. When he looked at the clear pool, his blood recoiled and seemed to change from devilish fire to a more devilish, sluggish pulse. Then he gave out a groan. Ah! Indeed he was turpitude incarnate. It was in iniquity that he was shaped, and to a thousand others had he given his terrible iniquity. Yes, verily it was he who was a monster of depravity. And no one gave him food lest he should bring a curse on the household, so revoluting was his appearance. And never a villager gave him water, but stones they gladly gave him, and drove him out of the gates. So he shared his bread with the mongrels, and he shared his bed with the fox. For he troubled them not, and they loathed him not, but man and beast each passed the night and went its way in the morning.

But it so happened on a clear day, when the East glowed with beauty, and the cool morning breeze fanned the land and the rushes sang in harmony with it, that he spied a cottage in the wild marshes. So he hied himself quickly to it, and let out a wail of such heartrending agony that he jumped himself and grew silent, wondering much at the pain that had made his voice so very appealing, nay, so very pathetic. From the crypts of his being that cry came, and he strained his ears for the sound. As he listened it came. Like sweet music made by the angels on a clear Christmas morn, when the snow glistened outside his window, and he gazed at it with childish wonder and childlike glee. Was it many many years ago? Was it a dream? Was he, even he, ever a child? He had not known, but the hideous weight of sinful hours had bent his back and had etched its own abominable mark on his face. And his eyes closed, but his confused brain could no more recall his angel infancy. Then he groaned and his wistful sigh mingled itself in the sweet music. For a moment he felt the bliss of Elysium wrapping his being all round, and he felt he could cry, but his hands mocked him, and he knew that his eyes were dry. And the hermit’s honeydew voice came clear to his ears:

‘Except ye become as little children,

Kingdom of Heaven’.

And he cried, and the music stopped.

‘Shrive me, shrive me, holy man,’ he faltered, ‘For I have sinned and it eateth inside the soul like cancer, for I HAVE SINNED. The sin it hath darkened mine heart, hath veil upon heavy veil put on my eyes. Neither see I, nor hear, nor can wish nor pray the Lord to show His mercy unto me. The eyes He gave me, I have indeed used for nought but eyeing the most abominable of things and the most forbidden of actions. The ears He gave me I abused by hearing the vile talking lwedness; and I drew near nought, save what was lewd and wicked. The hands He blessed me with I used to harm His creation on the earth. They never sought but what was cursed by Him and what was wicked and terrible. And I wrought evil upon the innocents, snatched the bread out of a dying mouth to hoard the fake glittering pelf in my own coffers. And with mine hands did the blood of man I shed, and dyed them crimson. And with Tarquin’s lust I sinned till the earth and the heavens shook, and the angels whispered ‘Verily, is this man to whom we bowed!’ But the ways of the Lord none can venture to fully follow. For He doeth as He willeth, and He knoweth all, Whatsoever is there in the heavens and on the earth’. And I wallowed in ill gotten pelf, while below me the thirsty cried ‘water’ and the orphan pleaded with sorrowful eyes for bread. But I lived in my own vile universe of carnal pleasure, unappeasable greed and insatiable lust. And even Sodom and Gomorrha I shamed, for I exceeded even them in perverseness and debauchery---till my prodigous strength sapped out of my hollow body, and they drove me away being over-tired of my tyranny and infamy, for indeed I was a Lord there in a large country.

“And under a wanning moon, three nights and three days, I walked like one distracted, in a dark forest, where ominous silhouettes played hide and seek behind the gaunt trees and a thousand creeping things went hissing on before me. And I tied stones on my belly, for verily it became a dreadful hollow, and pained much. My throat was patched, and my bloodshot eyes stood out of their dark sockets like those of a man who is hanged. And like a beaten mongrel slinking away in some corner to die of thirst, with its tongue hanging out, did I feverishly press on in the wood with my tongue, dry and parched, handing out of an equally parched mouth. So shrive me, shrive me, holy man, for the devil laughed his heinous laughter and with eyes like glowing coals, and hooves on feet, he came right before me. And he said my soul was his, but he would buy it still for a loaf of bread. Yes, for a load, for a paltry loaf of bread, he would buy my soul. And, I felt right glad, for to me my soul was an unwanted burden, and one to be best discarded. So I sank on the ground, and the terrible phantom with evil turmph in those eyes in which burned lurid hell fires stood and mocked me above. And my trembling fingers touched a cold something---a cold something---and my fingers moved on it. Ah! It was a cross! “O! God! I cried, yes even I, holy man, desecrated that holy name with my gross iniquitous tongue. But, methinks, His mercy on saint and sinner, king and beggar high and low alike raineth for no sooner had I said it there was a dreadful shriek, and the devil disappeared. And the dawn broke with all its’ lovely splendour from the east, and I, even I, felt it’s pure beauty and directed my step towards thee. So shrive me, shrive me holy man, for thou canst drive sin awy from my soul, and purge my soul of turpitude.”

‘Verily, I can but pray. For thy sin is astounding in its very enomity, and thou must of necessity minister to thyself that which will absolve thee of thy sin. Go and pray, night and day, for that it is which can eat thy sin. And count thy beads, and every breath thou countest with the Holy Mother’s name shall wash a sin away. Thus thy sins, like leaves in autumn, shall fall away from thee. But go, for time is fleet-footed, and life is short indeed. Go, my son, go before death extendeth its’ chilly paws towards thy black heart, and the worms eat thy body in the grave, and this soul of thine is after all the Evil Ones.’ This said the hermit, and he drew away. And the sinner stood amazed, and he knew not how to tell the holy man of his gratitude. Then he bent down, and picked up the beads, and with steps slow and heavy but a heart somewhat lighter plodded over the marshes out of the hermit’s domain.

And, he sat in the mountains, in the bitter winter and the sweer spring, knowing nought of either. The snows fell and melted away. The trees wore garlands of pretty flowers, and life stirred itself in the pond. The narcissi waved in the refreshing breeze, and the rose blushed to see itself in the water. Swallows flew, and the murmuring brooks became their haunts as they twisted and curved themselves in the lush green valleys, and among enchanting swarms of swans and parrots and pigeons and doves. But the sinner rejoiced not with the season, and counted his beads---ate the wild fruit and counted the beads.

And a woman with fawn-like eyes, spread wide with terror came to him one day. ‘O Father take this child of mind, for he is shaped in iniquity, and surely I will face ignominy and he perdition, should he stay with me’. She implored.

‘Ah nay’, he cried, ‘thou wretch! To tempt a man of God away from Him. This child is born in sin, and what may I have to do with him. Take him away, take him away. Can I rear a baby, who is counting beads all day’. And the woman walked away with a face drawn with sorrow.

And a year passed, so the sinner went again to the holy hermit. And he cried once again ‘Shrive me, shrive me, holy man’ but the hermit looked away with eyes dim with tears and said, ‘Nay, but I cannot do it. Thy soul is still unclean, so worship more.’ And the sinner waked back in deep dejection to his solitary cave in the mountains.

And a man came to his cave one day and said ‘O! Father, I have lost a horse, pray search it here with me. For I am all alone’. And he lifted not his head from the beads, but prayed even more earnestly. Thrice the man did entreat him, and he looked up and said, ‘Away, away, I lose time even now. Thou searcheth the world’s wealth, and I the hereafter. My time is precious. Away, away’. And the man wrung his hands, and he implored the sinner again and again, but the latter paid no heed, so he slowly walked away.

And now it was bleak winter again. The trees stood like bony and bare bands creeping out of a brown earth, which had a layer of ghastly white snow to hide its hideous visage. A doleful wind howled outside the cave in which a figure sat counting beads, and a dimly burning lamp caused colossal and weird looking shadows to fill the uncouth cave. Again and again the hermit’s lips moved, as his eyes scanned the holy words of the book, and bead upon bead dropped down.

Then suddenly another shadow merged itself in the sinner’s, and the awareness of a dazzling brilliance made him look up. There at the mouth of the cage stood a child wrapped in a little cloak and shivering with cold. And a marvellous beauty had he, which filled the man with wonder. He was white and delicate as sawn ivory, and his curls were of the purest gold. And his eyes shone like sapphires. They had the azure colour of the summer skies and the far-away ocean. And his innocence made a halo all around him, and from his came a radiance which filled the cave with a mystic light. And the sinner felt his heart softened, and the beads dropped down. ‘O! angel! Angel!’ he whispered; ‘surely it is all right to leave the beads and give thee shelter. For God made thee the symbol of all that is innocent and good and holy’. Thus murmuring the sinner laid the child on his own bed of hay, and hobbled about in the wretched cave, foregtting his beads and all, to get some wood for a fire. And he felt an undescribe ecstasy,an ineffable relish, as he made the fire, and laid down his crumbs before the innocent creature. The little child picked up his beads, and played with them. His innocent laughter rang again and again in the air and the mildew dropped off, and the birds gathered around and chirped as if it were spring. And the sinner felt his heart becoming better, and he could cry like a baby, and his childhood all swam before his eyes in all its wonderful innocence and vivid glory. And he laughed with the child, and he played. Then the child fell asleep, clutching the beads. And he watched him enraptured, for he did not dare indeed to snatch the beads away or disturb the innocent slumber of the child. And as he left praying to get food the voice of the Hermit came clear and loud:

‘Thou hast come out of darkness. For there is no worship but that of compassion’.

Written 1969; published in 01 May 1981

Just A Child

A BANDAGED left leg made the centre of attraction in the hotel. One heard such a great deal about the dark trenches and the deadly rat-a-tat of the enemy machine guns, that the sight, authenticating, as it were, the reality of that night marish warfare, drew considerable attention.

One look, at least, I could boast of gettin from every newcomer. Old women could hardly dissemble their consternation. “How dreadful”, I heard one of them shreiking, “But all the invalids do find this very restaurant. What did he do, I wonder”.

I smiled. They reminded me of my own grandmother whose belongings I delighted to throw down the window in to the streets.

But the old lady wasn’t unaccompanied. An unusually stiff, mask-faced young lady, wearing the stern air of a governess followed dragging a reluctant young child. A young lady of langurous, oriental beauty and dreamy dark brown eyes came next. The entourage was completed by an elegantly dressed gentleman with an aura of quiet dignity around him. He looked like a consummate advertisement of the conservative landed aristocracy of British India. But even he, though just for a fleeting moment, gave me a look. A look long enough to manifest inquisitiveness, but not so long so to enter into the sphere of vulgar couriosity.

The reluctant little child stared at me with wide-eyed interest. Not me, but novelty had reiveted his gaze. But when I looked at him and smiled encouragingly, he blushed crimson and averted his eyes. He was a shy little boy with large, dark brown eyes and a thatch of shining black locks on his head. The frankness on his face gave him a winsome, innocent air. He couldn’t be more than seven and had the liveliness of his age stragely contrasted by the wisdom in his eyes. It stamped him with precocity; but the impressions were not so discordant as to be jarring.

I busied myself in an English delicacy, the boast of the restaurant, and surveyed the whole room for acquaintances till my eyes came back to the child. He was still watching me. In fact his nurse was upbraiding him for having spoiled his clothes with the ice cream, but he wasn’t even listening to her. This time he smiled warmly when I saw him. I raised my hand. He brightened up, stood on his chair and waved his handkerchief to me.

This startled the family. His sister---for so she seemed to be---got him down. His father turned to survey the room, forced a wellbred smile on his face, and in measured imperious steps crossed over to me. We greeted each other politely, but the steely remoteness of his blue eyes checked my bonhomie. Howqever, we shook hands purfunctorily.

“May I have the honour of your acquaintance, sir?” He continued in a perfect Oxford accent.

“My name is Major Jahanzeb Khan”.

“Is it” his steely eyes sparkled, “Major Khan Jahanzeb Khan, the brother of Ali Quli Khan I have the honour of speaking to?”

The eyes thawed into glowing warmth. He extended his hand which I shook warmly, saying.

“It is indeed a great pleasure, sir. I am an old acquaintance of your brother, Dr. Wasiq Khan”.

May I have the honour of your acquaintance, sir? “I asked.

“I am Sardar Hamayoun”

“O I see, I am so glad to have met you. My brother often mentioned you, Sardar Sahib. You are a good horseman, he said”.

“O did he? Very kind of him, I’m flattered”.

Sardar Sahib then took me over to his table. After the usual greetings, I settled down on a chair, ensconcing myself between Sardar Humayoun and the governess. After a lively conversation, a pause followed. I was thinking of something to say when I felt pressure on my arm. It made my turn. Two reproachful eyes started into mine. It was the child.

“O hello, my little friend”, I said, breaking into a smile.

“Hello” he said, seeming still a little displeased, perhaps about having been neglected before. He kept on looking at my leg intently. It was a source of magnetic fascination for him.

“What happened to you, uncle? “He said, pointing at it. Just then the old woman look at him disapprovingly. The poor child witlted under that glance. His face, all excitrement draining away from it, looked disappointed. He gave my leg another look, and his eyes lighted up again. Then he resigned himself to the solicitous care of his governess. I was sorry for him. He looked so quiet and hurt.

We sat together for quite a long time. I discovered that my new house was next to the old Sardar’s. There had been rumours of someone having occupied the house adjacent to mine but no one had told me it was him. I was glad to have met him. At least I’d have some company. Solitude has its pleasures’ but too much of it results in ennui, and nothing is more conducive to depression and morbid thinking than that. I had always led an active life. And now when nothing but reading was possible for me, conversation was a welcome diversion.

The next day while I sat reading in my invalid chair, I thought someone had crept near and stood watching me. I put the book down and looked up. It was Sardar Humayouns’ little son. He stood gazing at my leg. The disability fascimated him. It inflamed his childish imagination. It surrounded me with a nimbus of heroism; painted me as a war her, one of the sort he heard so much about.

“Hello, my little friend”, I called out cheerfully. I knew he was conversant with English, his governess being an Anglo-Indian lady.

He brightened up, and smiled at me, but he didn’t come near. He looked at me a little suspiciously, like one who is too afraid to draw near one’s ideal. I called him again. Then he came diffidently; drawn magnetically by the leg but still inhibited and shy. He came slowly, like an inquisitive sniffing little rabbit---timid and yet curious.

I offered to shake hands with him when he came near. He beamed and thrust out a dirty, wilting little paw. I took it in mock sokemnity, assuming an air of grave importance. He seemed impressed and a bit more at ease.

“What is your name sir”, he asked me with childlike couriosity.

“You may call me Uncle Jahanzeb”, I told him.

“I don’t like it. There was a king called Aurangzeb but there never was a Jahanzeb in the books”.

“Oh, I see. But I am not a king so why should I have a king’s name”.

He considered this awhile. Then toosed his head petulantly.

“I still don’t like it”, he declared emphatically.

“Well, then you may call me Uncle Khan”.

He shook his head violently: “No. that’s no name.”.

“Well then I give up. You must give me a new name”.

“No”, he smiled at this characteristically gown-up bit of folly.

“What were you in the war?” And his eyes lit up as curiosity again pulsated whildly in him.

“Oh, I was a Major”.

“When?” he cried, “That’s great!” He studied me deeply from top to toe letting his eyes linger at the leg.

“I’ll call you Major Uncle, may I?”, he asked.

“Yes, of course”, I said. He seemed delighted. He had a real flesh and blood warrior for himself. He touched the plaster of my leg tentatively with soft, eager caressing fingers. The touch worked wonders for him. I was a symbol of the First World War which had fired his imagination. He touched my leg fondly again, like a little girl fondling her pet doll.

“And what may I call you?” I asked.

That didn’t interest him much. He shrugged his head “The governess calls me Aatif but she does it the Gnglish way. Can you do it?”

I assured him I could, and did so, too. He was pleased.

“Agreed”, I said.

“But”, he lifted his eye-brows warningly, “always”.

“Always”, I promised solemnly. His eyes lit up with unbounded pleasure.

“It’s so very good of you. Thank you, Uncle”, he said overwhelmed. Then he inspected my leg closely, yet again.

“I never saw anyone with a real broken leg”, he spoke dreamily, “I like you already”.

“Or is it my leg you like, Aatif”, I goaded him.

He lifted large, wondering eyes to my face.

“Yes”, he said. I smiled.

We used to see each other every day. He insisted on serving me. It gave him a feeling of being important and indispensable. He’d go around on small errands with a zest the servants never could emulate---got me my books, sandwiches, drinks, and my pipe.

He’d handle my leg, when shifting position, with infinite tenderness, as if it were fragile and asked me with solicitous eyes whether I was comfortable. I found I had become quite a legned among his playmates. They’s all huddle around him in the lawn, and he would tell them intriguing secrets of the little war I had been through.

The war wasn’t horrifying for them. They imagined it as if we were the dragons of a fairy tale. We were the knights and an aura of mystery and romance surrounded our war time herosism. Each story invested me with fresh honours. My leg, of course, was sufficient to authenticate every tale Aatif’s imagination weaved.

And often while I disported myself with hand machines, I was conscious of several pairs of shining blue, green, brown and hazel eyes fixed upon me. They would stand with aprted lips; motionless; oblivious of the world; far away in some dreamland of toy-wars. Subtle influences whould be at work. For children wars are not hideous. There are no morbid strings of thought attached to simple facts.

It was fun being the pivot of their dreamy, fairyland world. Their fancy had elevated me to a level almost mythical. Through the talismanic glass of glorious childhood they viewed me. They almost worshipped my broken leg. It was the symbol of all that they valued in life.

“Aatif”, I said one day while he sat by me reading an illustrated little book about the war, “Do you want to know how I broke my leg?”

“Oh, he jumped up with sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks.

Oh! I’d love to, I’d just love to. O shy didn’t you tell me before, uncle, Whew”.

“You never asked me”.

“Love uncle”, he said complaintingly, “this isn’t fair”.

“Why”?

“Granny told me it was wicked to ask people what happened to them in the war. Granny says the war was wicked. Of course, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t even know how to play hide and seek and marbles and well anthing. I know she wrong”.

“Grandmothers are always wrong”, I said flippantly.

“Yes so they are. So they are. Grandfather, grandmothers, they are all wrong. Always wrong. But tell me about your leg”.

“Well Aatif, one night when it was very cold and there was snow and the wind was blowing, I was working in my office”.

“Weren’t you fighting?” He asked, disappointment creeping in his voice.

“I was fighting, I was planning. You see after that we...”

“Yes, he said still unconvinced, “but you weren’t shooting with a machine-gun as they do in the cinema”.

“Oh yes”, I lied, seeing his grieved face, I had wiped out a large body of the enemy soldiers”.

“Bravo!” He shouted. “You’re great, Uncle! “Well, suddenly I heard a muffled sound outside and saw that the enemy commandos had killed one of our sentries. One of them saw me and fired. The bullet whistled past my ear. I rushed in and dynamite charge in my room”.

“Why”? He interrupted.

“To destroy the imprtant documents”.

“What is documents?”

“Papers. The enemy wanted to get them”.

He seemed satisfied I went on and when I rushed out, firing started. I had my pistol, and taking cover, started wiping them out...

“Oh! He exclaimed happily.

“And then the room burst, but I wasn’t far away. Something hit my leg and I fainted away. When I came to, I was in a hospital. They told me about me leg”.

“Oh, that’s great. Will you write this story somewhere?”

“Well, no...

“Don’t do it. I told my friends a different story. It was great. I made it terrible”.

“You lied”, I pretended to look grave.

He looked at me whith innocent eyes. “It’s your fault, Uncle. Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

“All right”, I said, “I shant get it published .”

One day I told him that they had decided to take the plaster off my leg. I would then be all right.

“All right”, he said in a small voice.

The next day he took me for our customary walk---I on the wheelchair and he pushing me importantly with his nose high in the air. But that day he insisted on watching the sunset and and for this we went to the small rising piece of ground we had christened ‘The hill’. I was surprised at his choice because he normally took me where there were other people---people he pretended not to notice at all. Today, however, we stood watching the sun descend behind the far off cliffs. It was a huge ball of flaming red and I was fascinated by it.

‘Won’t you keep the bandage on’, he said in a small, wheedling voice.

‘Why?’

‘It is so new. So great. So...’ he groped for words. ‘Nobody has a white plaster leg like a statue’.

‘Of course not’ I replied ‘I want to walk on my own’.

‘But I like pushing you. Don’t I do it well?’

‘Nothing like one’s own two feet’ I said emphatically.

Suddenly I felt a strong push and was jolted backwards. The chair plunged down the slope and gathered speed as it went. I cried out in fear as I found myself plunging down the slope...When I woke up both my legs were in plaster.

Written 1973; published in The Muslim 01 January 1982

The Crucifixion

Simion was my friend. We called him a Nazaene though his father had come from Nazareth and settled down here for some time before this imp was born. And I’m sure it was a good thing too. We wouldn’t have known the pleasure of his company. He had a look of merriment on his face and he was good-natured. His eyes danced like marbles and shone like gems. Even at the age of seven he knew how to win in every game and I envied him secretly. But we always quarelled because I couldn’t let him get away with things so easily. There was that time, for instance, when he played at being eagles. Well I placed my figs on the ground and hovered around. There were three of us, Barabbus myself and Simion. Then Simion gave the signal and we swooped down on the ghing and the bloody biggest falcon of us all got it! Simion got it! He never let anybody win till I found out how he did it. He gave the signal just when his hand happened to be near the treasure. Now just you see! Wasn’t that rascal a born leader of men and to be the governor of Judaea.

Years we spent on the streets and learned all about them. The Rabbis who were hard like the stones and went about preaching the words of Jehovah and holy Moses. Well, they never gave us much money. Perhaps they weren’t rich after all. Then the hawk-faced merchants who came from across rich lands with camel caravans. They would give you something if you looked miserable enough. The Arabs in flowing gown with the sand of the desert looking for women. They gave you coins if you met them when they were drunk. And at night Simion found an opportunity to lose money out of the wine bibbing roman and the relaxed merchants. He knew how to talk that rascal!

At sixteen Simion told me about a black-eyed Arab girl. He was ecastatic and he had got a green shining stone for her from somewhere. Maidens always value useless stones and gold and silver. As usual Simion knew how to win her heart. He was angry and thundered like Jehovah himself in his fire. The girl’s father was a pagan and went buying well-cut images of the Assyrian deities in the bazaar. The girl succumbed to the magnetic spell of good old Simion’s sighs and poems and he had his will of her. Perhaps the deserts or the oasis saw Simionn’s breed later because the father moved away.

But then for some time Simion turned a pimp. And all the pinchfaced old tarts said they’d never seen anyone as clever as Simion at the business. He sold more girls to more men than anyone ever heard of. He even spoke the strange dialects of the Roman soldiers. He knew the art of pleasing people and his smile never waned when he met those fat greasy looking merchants who looked lasciviously at nymphets of thirteen who frisked in and out of tents. O those hoary men of safe reputation who came to Simion and me were a joke. Who could think of a man who talked of Holy Man’s great commandments come to Simion with a shy glint in his bleary eyes and billy-goat beard going up and down as he salivated like a dog.

Then Barbbas gave him religion and Simion thought pimping was below him. He became a thief and, sometimes he robbed the merchants outside the city. Simion knew how to do everything. In this too he was fair and unselfish. He fave me, Barabbas, Joseph and Lukas “an equal share always. It didn’t matter how much we had actually stolen. He kept his friends happy. And old women came to him for help and blessed him. I don’t know what the ragamuffin ever did except smile at them and speak sweet words, but they went back always blessing him. Young girls moved to him and we all knew he had made them such strumpets but they were all so pleased to see him. All whores and pimps were his closest friends and he grinned at all of them like a real jackass.

He would’t ever have been caught but for folly. Well, it was evil chance and not really his fault really but it did happen because of him. One day we were going through the colourful bazaar when I saw a camel laden with all that the heart could desire. There were plates of silver and gold and frankincense and myrrh’. There was silk in generous bales and leather goods. It was a sight which made your fingers itch and your mouth water. And I suggested to Barabbas and Simion that this was a treasure for the kings and could be all ours if we used our commonsense. Barabbas jumped up as if the thing was ours and gave throaty gurgles. He was a precious idiot really and we had to nudge him in the ribs hard enough to knock out his breath, and only then did he desist.

When Lukas was told he was also enthusiastic about the venture. So we met outside the city and we waited in the bushes. It was becoming hot and the sun was up in the sky about the size of many spears when the caravan arrived. And Simion chuckled as if it were a meeting with relatives and we shouted and let loose our arrows. Then with swords we ran and found the merchants running away like children with their-heads cut off.

And Simion laughed and took off the cloth which bid his mouth and taunted the remaining merchants. But he had a kind heart and did’nt beat the white-eyed merchants.

In fact the felt them some of their wealth and said kind words to console them for their loss. Then we came back as if we had been to a fair and we all came back to the city.

It was strange to find my neighbour Timothy shaking me at dawn.

“What has happened” I said still drowned in sleep.

“Thy friend Simion sends word that thou shouldn’t disappear with the goods”.

“Why” I was now awake and felt the blood-going made in my templets.

“They are in the hands of the Roman governor.”

“How?”

“The merchants described the face of Simion and soldiers came and caught them”.

“And everyone else.”

“Simion told them all to disperse.”

“But the Romans knew we were four”

“Yes” the face before me was that of a man who had seen the mystery of forces he couldn’t understand. He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “They have beaten him till he had lost his senses but he won’t betray his friends. He tells you to go.”

So I went and they couldn’t catch me. And for many days they beat Simion and the old men and women cried. Then another Barabbas was also caught and he was suspected to foul crimes including this one. Then the day came to crucify them. O’I prayed in a synagogue for my soul was heavily laden with the burden of sin. Indeed I was very very sad and my eyes thirsted for the face of Simion. I never saw a merry laughter like his and that impish twinkling of the eyes. I missed him.

A shout came to my ears from outside and I went. They told me that the Governor had decided to crucify Simion along with others.

I saw him on the crucifix. His face was still twisted in a way which was rather merry. But there was agony on it too. He had given up the ghost and his legs were red with blood. In his waists there were nails and they were red with blood too. O! that grown-up boy who bad never killed a dog was high above the ground and blood dripped from him drop by drop.

I knew the thief on the crucifix next to an unknown man.

“Who is the man in the centre”

I asked.

“O! he is Jesus from Nazareth” he replied.

“And what did he do.”

“He was a heretic. He went against the Rabbis”

I didn’t think it was quite fair to crucify poor Simion who was a religious man when you looked down deep into his soul, next to a man who went against the holy religion of prophet Moses. I was sad and tears came into my eyes and I walked away with heavy footsteps.

Written 1973; published in The Muslims 30 January 1981; in The Legacy (pp. 115-118).

The Epitaph

It was a strange epitaph near a dilapidated old inn in an obscure village near the country of S---. It read “Man never IS but always to be blest”. The line of Pope struck me by its incongruity. I wondered who could have chosen Pope, say a hundred years ago, in this far-flung bucolic elysium.

I asked the inn-keeper. A lantern-jawed, good-natured old man, typical of his profession. He told me a gripping tale about the Eqpitaph which savours so much of romance as to be hardly credible. In the dingy, ill-lightened inn with colossal shadows flickering on the walls, it struck me powerfully. It had a weird haunting appeal and illustrated human dissatisfaction so touchingly that I decided to preserve it in writing.

The Inn-keeper told me, then, that Simon was the name of the wretched person whose body had been interred a hundred and twenty years ago. He had been a farmer; a very greedy and luckless one at that. Nothing prospered well on his farm, but he had enough to eat, drink, and be merry, which he did with gusto, but when sober, he’d curse his luck for having spent a farthing and got a splitting headache in the bargain. When the Lord passed by in his splendid chariot of four milk white steeds (Arabian it was rumoured) he’d stand and watch like any honest rustic. But as soon as the dust settled down he’d blaspheme and curse the rich. And the only piece of scripture he ever quoted was to prove that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And this he used to do with a wicked twinkle which made the parson cross himself as if the very devil was leering him in the face.

And when everybody danced in festival he’d dance with the prettiest wench; and when grown too tired or drunk he’d preach how sinful it was and bring blushes to the rosy cheeks of buxom maids and make the youths stand awed and trembling. And such an uncanny, awesome voice he had that it would, kill all joy and send the young ones away in false penitence.

He’d hoard up gold (they said) and counted it all night so that he emerged with lurid flames in his eyes in the morning. But this, some maintained, was due to drinking all night. Women would hide lusty-looking children from his lest he should harm them with his smouldering, envious looks. No maiden would have him for husband though he had asked all three times over like priests and devils always do.

HIS OWN GHOST

Well, one day, the Parson came looking like his own ghost; all white; hoary hair disevelled, clothes in disorder; to the tavern were honest folk gathered to have a rejuvenating drink.

“What’s it” everybody cried ou seeing his awe-striken looks; and he let himself collapse into a creaking chair and was made to drain to the dregs two brimful mugs of strong ale by common consent before he could stop crossing himself. Then he told everybody a story which sent the strongest man ordering another sustaining drink. It was that he had seen a well groomed-up young man with a queer black bag turn up the ride to the house of old Simon. The Parson too was going there, and being curious about the young gentleman in black with such a polished, cokey air about him, hurried as fast as his rickety legs could carry him. when he reached the door, it was locked, and the young man had apparently been let in. The Parson, of course, peeped through the glass which was excusable for evry Tom, Dick and Harry in such exceptional circumstances and always is for Parsons. And he saw, he said with a shudder, that the young man was the Evil one himself. Satan complete, with a set of little horn on the head and a tail curling out. And the Parson’s eyes popped out and his blood froze, but he kept on watching.

Simon and his guest drank a giant mug of good ale together, and the evil one talked fast like he were an Oxford Don. Son suave and persuasive he was, and Simon listened like a boy. The terms were drawn up. Simon was given a suspicious-looking contraption with a button on it, and told that when ever he thought he wanted nothing more, was most satisfied and happy and healthy, he had only to press button. That moment would stay for ever. His fortune would become permanent and time would stop. Even death wouldn’t come. In return the devil asked for Simon’s soul after death. Simon gave it gracefully, smilingly as if he were given a boiled potato. Then the Evil One said something which sounded like ‘Au Revoir’ which neither the Parson nor Simon could make head or tail of and turned to go.

‘Mr. Eh. –Eh-Ah-‘ began Simon, for he didn’t want to go in the bottomless pit.

‘At your service., said the Evil One with a grin showing his hsarp, ivory-white teeth.

I understand that whenever I feel absolutely satisfied if I press this button, time shall stand still for ever’.

‘For ever for you’.

‘Death will not come then I shall not go to hell’.

‘Provided you do’.

‘Well then ‘Ow Bout the question o’ the soul’.

‘Oh, that’s my problem’.

Touching his hat with a sickening smile the devil walked off. The Parson wriggled himself behind a tree or else he’d be preaching to young devils in hell instead of quaffing off ale on everybody’s account.

Well after that Simon’s ways took a more mysterious turn. His fields turned into gold mines. His hens and geese could hardly find time to eat, they laid eggs round the clock. He got more by smoking a piple fresh from hell, all whispered, then honestfolk ever did by breaking their backs from morn to eve. His oxen who looked like skinawkwardly hung on sticks, grew fatter than the lord’s’ And it was murmured that his gold was so heavy that it had sunk in the ground. And that was nothing serious, all averred, for a certain gentleman could dig it out. He never came to the church now, not even to abuse the Parson, and the Parson knew it boded no good.

As he prospered he became greedier and greedier. So when he bought a bigger farm everybody thought he’d press the button and time would stand still. He did’t Old man Raffa had fever and cried it would never go if Simon pressed the button. But the Parson said he wouldn’t. He told everybody that Simon had caught him spying upon him one dismal night, and after giving him a knowking had confessed his heinous sin. He had told the shaking Parson to go to the devil. He also said that he thought the farm a most miserable moor, rotten, little graveyard and would not press the button to perpetuate such exceptional ill luck as to be it’s poor owner.

BAD DAYS

Simon grew richer and richer every day. At last the squire, fallen into bad days, had to mortagage his large estate to him but even then he didn’t seem very happy. Instead he wished the squire dead and thought it a confounded nuisance to have such pests of squires crawling about in honest England. At length the squire died and the estate came to Simon. The Parson wished he wouldn’t press the button because his wife had given birth to the thirteenth child, and the Parson had had a little too much of good God’s plenty in that direction. So he went with faltering steps to the white house of the squire and found Simon sore vexed at the miserable condition of the house. He came back relieved.

Years passed and some wished Simmon would press the button while most wished he wouldn’t. And Simon became the most poweful man around and married another squire’s daughter who did not know his humble origin. He lived in great style, and everyone thought he was happy, But Parson brought news of his being greedier than ever. He said Simon thought he was the most wronged man in England having no title, no children and countless parasites gobbling up his hard earned wealth. The legend goes that whatever he touched turned into gold. And he could buy His Majestry the King-God forgive us if it be treason to say that but that’s what they said. And the Parson swore on the holy book it was so.

‘Get out’ thundered Simon, ‘Can’t you see I have no title to give him. ‘what will become of him. He’ll be with this measly lot of poor gentry. Ah! Cursed be the King, the peers The Parson closed his ears and ran away.

But then came the final stroke. Simon went to London and rendered some service to his soveriegn. Or, as some swore, bought and bribed the officials of the state, and came back with a Baronetcy. The old Lord’s grandeur was eclipsed and he had to leave the country. Lord Simon became the most feared man of the day.

But even then he was far from satisfied. He said he had seen such fabulous riches in London as had taken away his peace of mind. He became unbelievabely cruel. His servants could starve; his tenants could just as well sell themselves to fill up his coffers, but his greed was without limits.

He’d go to London and with the devil’s apt assistance cheat the lords of their money in gambling. He drank like a fish. He flung himself into reckless dissipation and debauchery. But it gave him no bliss not satisfaction. He became more blasphemous and more dissatisfied. The button, of course, he never pressed.

One day as he was passing through the village cursing like a blacksmith in his handsome coach. The hourses fell and the coach collapsed. Simon’s head struck the ground and he blasphemed heaven and earth as the blood gushed out wild and warm. The Parson and the others rushed there and everyone wishpered he had the shadow of death in his eyes. Then Simon drew the contraption and meaning to keep life in himself, just life; so dear was it to him; he began to press the button. But his strength had deserted him. A wild and haggard look came into his eyes. His frame shook with a final violent effort. It was the spasm of death. Terrible was his agony. His body threshed and writhed with pain. His distorted face turned black and unrecognizeable with mauseating pain, and on his lips an oath trembled. Just then his fingers cleanched clenched themselves spasmodically and with snap the button went down. It had finally been pressed; but too late.

The Parson shrieked and everyone crossed himself and wathced with wild looks as Simon groaned hideously and his body writhed in the agony of death. The moment had become eternity for him. And that was how they decided to bury him in the grave. The doctor said he was cold and dead and an evil spirit was in him; and the Parson said he was the living-dead and was to be buried. So buried he was and the button with him.

And the Parson wrote for his Epitaph pet Pope’s line:-

‘Man never IS but always TO BE blest!.

Written 1973; published in The Muslims 09 May 1980; in The Legacy (pp. 62-67).

Transfiguration

The priest came out of the church feeling sanctimonious. He had just conducted the Sunday service and had preached against the sins of the flesh. He had fulminated from the pulpit against music and love and had threatened the young lovers of the village with hell fire. Here in this valley they did not follow the principles of the religion as the priest desired. There was a spirit of gaiety which left him disgusted. In spite of all he had done, young maidens hodnobbed with youths under the nocturnal shades of the sighing larches. They listened to him and felt sorry. But as soon as they left the Church, they forgot all about him. And the Priest was left to contemplate the morbid wretchedness of sin stalking the happy valley.

It is said that an angel or may be a demon-contrived an igenious way of ridiculing the priest. He made a mirror and gave it to the old, irascible priest. The mirror was designed to show the old man his soul’s face. When he saw it first, he didn’t really like the face which stared back at him. It was rather grim and hard. The impish being who had brought the gift told the priest that the soul could change its expression. If the priest did good deeds, the face would become better and vice versa. Well, that cheered the old man. He resolved to live for the faith of his God ever after and become as angelic of soul as he could.

As he walked through the village, he saw some women singing in the fields. Out of sheer animal vivaciousness, they would even take to dancing. It was the season when the crops were harvested and spirit of joy pervaded the villager’s minds. He had seldom actually taken much notice of such unholy deeds. The poverty-stricken people of the village had no pleasures at all. If sometime, during a good harvest, they sang and danced; he had not had the heart to stop them. Now, being in a frenzy of ascetic sentiment, he shouted at them. The women stopped and lowered their eyes. Slowly the animation died out of their eyes and with sombre faces, they slunk off like whipped puppies. The priest felt a thrill of fierce joy. He was the champion of the faith and he lived for Holiness.

The people soon found his wrath descending on them. He lectured them when they sat exchanging bawdy tales in the apricot orchards, and they had to promise to behave better in the future. He admonished the children when they preferred to play instead of saying their prayers. He even advocated beating the children to force them to say their prayers. In the smiling valley where all was geniality and good-nature, the priest was the only one who came with news of hell and destruction. He had lurid flames in his eyes and he was creed intoxicated. But, above all, a sorrow haunted him night and day. It prayed on his feverish mind and gave him no peace. The Mirror relected a soul which had become worse-looking than before. The expression had hardened. It had cruelty in it too, and it was becoming repulsive.

JINGLING COINS

Johnnie had just turned ninteen and had come home from the town. He had jingling conins in his pocket and a song on his lips. Ruth would be there to welcome him home. He had gone soldiering only to collect enough money to marry her. The maiden sang with pure joy and as she cleaned her house her body swayed in rhythm to the melody which pulsed in her young body. She would be walking out with young Johnnie in the evening. Her mother knew and smiled with pleasure. Johnnie was a good catch. Time was slow and torturing but the sun did go down after all.

She went out in a world which had put out flowers for her and seemed adolescent in it’s bloom. The dogs careered about barking at her teasingly. Then the horizon was red and Johnnies’ arm was round her waist and they were whispering. She felt as if she were flying and he felt he could really do anything for her. And the rose bush canopied them invitingly. Their lips beckoned them to intoxicating joys. And this priest’s soul writhed like a serpent. He wans’t against wooking as God was his witness but... passion racked them like saplings under a storm. They kissed with the intense insanity of pleasure. The priest groaned and he felt a simmering lava of disgust and hatred and impotence choking his throat. The couple was in a world of it’s own and the priest’s taboos were being transcended. He shrieked and the taboos of a thousand years stung the young ones like scorpions. They were jolted out of their oblivion and they were thrown back years to a regressive stage of abject terror and servile dependence. The cannonade of the holy clerick’s tirade sank into their paralysed minds and whipped up demons of guilt and remorse. They were miserable, The priest panted and his face twisted itself into unknown shapes which sent them shuddering and recoiling from it’s bitter loathsomeness. Thev slunk back with tears of ____________ eyes and fires of ignominy in their minds.

And the priest was pleased he was triumphant over the devil once again. Even he had felt weak when he had first seen that deceptively innocent look of rapture on the young couple’s features. How beautiful and blessed they had looked. Thus deceiveth Satan! His own visage would now be stamped with the sweet cham of the Holy Child.

‘Except if ye become like little children

Ye shall no wise enter the Kingdom of heaven”

He chanted; but it struck in his throat as if it were full of soot. And the twisted trees looked like a forest of vile serpents. ‘In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost’ he said crossing himself. But the words came like sepulchral groan and a doleful note came out of those grotesque-shaped branches as the wind went upto it’s impish dynamism between them. The cottage was dark and he looked at the mirror after lighting a candle.

He shrieked because the face of the devil leered at him. And he shook in every limb as the owls said Too-Whit, Too. Who and far off the Jackal howled as if singing the dirge of a departed spirit.

He began the Ave-Maria and it hurt him so that he couldn’t go on. He implored the Madonna and met the stare of a woman whom he didn’t know. He looked at the saviour on the cross and the sight of undraped limbs on wood made him think of the flesh. Why wasn’t the image in a cassock. It was unseemly. But his arms were weak as he took up the mirror again. The face was such that he couldn’t look at for long without his heart contracting and becoming ashes. It hurt the eyes. It wounded the mind. It stung the heart. He put the mirror away and there was bitterness and pagan despair in his breast.

The village was reduced to a state of idiocy. He preached hellfire like a madman. He condemned everything the people did till they wrung their hands in despair. There was sin everywhere. It loomed large and strong and black and stalked over the earth and devoured all hearts. Not even the newborn babe escaped his chastisement---for it might have been conceived in sin. His eyes noted iniquity everywhere, and what was beauty but a Mephistophelian ruse to trap the godly. So he shunned fair faces and he decried lovely eyes. He hated comeliness and young age itself.

His was a voice crying out in an habitation to reduce it to wilderness. But the mirror didn’t relent in in it’s diabolical mocking. It showed him the face of the devil every time he dared to look at it.

One day a woman with a child in her womb came to him. He had always sent such traps of old Nick away to their just deserts. But now he was indifferent to everything. He pitied the look of a haunted doe in her large brown eyes and allowed her to stay with him. She told him about the child in her womb’ the product of sinful pleasure and he remembered a text from the gospel which he had never remembered before---“judge not least ye be judged’ he said softly. Then he brought her milk and bread to eat and she smiled gratefully. He was sad because, he knew, he was doing a great sin. He had quoted the gospel to ease the woman’s conscience but he knew he was a reprobate and would never he fogiven. But now he no longer cared. The mirror said he was worse than he could now fear to become already. And men and women whispered against him to be sure.

LOWERED VISAGE

He was a subject of scandal, but he went about with a lowered visage and gave up his crusade against sin. Who wouldn’t love to snigger at him now that he was keeping a young woman in his house.

One evening he found Johanie and Ruth meeting under the same rose-bush. The night was cool and the air was fragrant. The moon shone gently and blanched the green rolling countryside. He found himself looking on. The magic and the moment made him go soft somewhere in his heart. He sighed wistfully and said ‘God bless you my children’ so that they couldn’t hear him. Then he returned with melancholy in his heart and his footsteps were slow and lazy.

The woman was breast-feeding her bonny little boy. She welcomed him with a smile and his rueful face smiled back. Now he was really sunk into depravity, he thought; now he had acquiesced to the triumph of sinfulness; now he was a hardened sinner. And with wistful yearning and disappointment he brought out the mirror again to see his final defeat. The mirror mocked him again. He cried out in astonishment. A peaceful, smiling benign face looked sanctimoniously at him. The woman came running to him.

“What’s it, Father”, she inquired.

“Is that”, he pointed at the morror with his shaking finger.

“Is that image like my face”.

“You father” she said calmly and with much relief “Of course father. You have the face of a saint.”

Written 1973; published in The Legacy (pp. 110-114).

Bingo

It was miserable in the first term at the Pakistan Military Academy. It was. They made us stand in the snow in underwears at night and I was given a cold shower and frong-jumps too. The battalion-sergeant major was a sadist. He made me hop around catching my ankles till I fell down and my legs ached like hell. But the cadets of my platoon were idiots. Each one of them broke the orders once and lo and behold we were all up to our neck in the soup. When I was the senior gentleman cadet---the ‘bloody SGC’ as I was termed---I made them fall-in ten minutes before time. It’s idiotic to be late I made them double around as the seniors told me. Why should a chap be lousy when the staffs and the seniors are all around to nab him by the neck and do the dirty on him. So during my days the sergeant was pleased and the CSM ragged us only twice.

“You bloody Jitter,” said my cadet corporal to me, “you will be a good soldier”

“Yes sir,” I shouted as he liked us to do.

The fellow beamed on me and omitted to make me front-roll when he left.

Tajassur, on the contrary, was such a fool that the whole army spat on its hands and got down to the onerous task of making a soldier out of him. He didn’t care. He let the cadets get late and stood like a statue who has had its behind kicked. He chatted around from room to room and didn’t do his class work. He let us walk if he could help it. Naturally, whenever we were caught, Tajassur was the one who never heard the last of it. He gave away some of the articles of his FSMO and was the first one to be on restrictions. But he always walked around casually and smiled. It was foolish. The funniest thing was that he was my room-mate. It gave me creeps to see him sleeping in the morning when I was almost in my shirt for the PT or the drill. He was a sub-human creature and knew no discipline.

Yet Tajassur had soft baby-looks and large black eyes. If one talked to him he smiled and spoke nicely. The seniors called him a sissy and said he was fit to be a heroine in a Filipino movie. He often had one or two sadistic senior slave-drivers who delighted in punishing him or feeding him on sweets in the canteen. It was awful to be his room-mate. The seniors came into our room just to enjoy themselves by punishing him or talking to him---he was witty. “Hey you heroine,: one would say, “have you got firl-friends?”

“No sir,” Tajassur would reply standing to attention.

“Why, you bloody goof?”

“I don’t know sir.”

“Get on your hands down, idiot,” and Tajassur would fall to the ground on his hands and feet.

“And you too, you priceless imbecile.”

So I, cursing the bastards, went into the same position. And the ragging would go on at my expense. Had Tajassur been less popular nobody would have bothered us so much.

I was good in drill and P.T. and Tajassur was lousy at both. Yet he managed to pass. In the map reading the platoon mates often did his work. They enlarged the map for him and even found the grid reference of his own position. In exchange all the fellow did was only tell them jokes. And in spite of his innocent looks Tajassur knew jokes which could send the angels running after the chaste houris in paradise. I like jokes but I detest stupidity. Of what use are jokes when the officiers are just around the corner. All these immature things did make Tajassur popular but at the expense of his marks and position.

He was a cadet platoon commander once and, at the end of the exercise, he brought us back in a truck. It was a big risk. We were supposed to have walked back 20 miles and there was a competition with the other paltoons. And yet this grinning baby brought us back on this truck. Natually we reached before midnight. So what does he do? He takes us to a hotel of all things and there makes us dance all night and eat and drink and have a rollicking good time. O boy. It was fun; but he could have been withdrawn if anyone had noticed. Well, we reached the Academy gates and were told that we were third. Tajassur seemed so tired that the cadet sergeant sent us to rest after the rifle cleaning the fraud!

He passed out twentieth in the course. And, I bet, it was all because of his wonderful oral expression in English and wit. He read his lesson half an hour before the model discussion and gave cogent arguments. Besides, he was liked by our immature platoon-mates and they thought he was a good sort. He had given his water-bottle to thirsty people who had been foolish enough to have wasted their supply in the exercise. He had cheerfully carried the light machine-gun---the most goddamnest pain in the arse---in the ‘initiative exercise’. He had a smile for most of us and, in the Academy, chaps are nit-wits enough to get impressed by these kind of trivialities.

But just before our passing out, things were against him. He was a Bingo, you see. He belonged to Dacca itself and East Pakistan had begun kicking up one hell of row to get separated from West Pakistan. We called him a ‘Bingo’ and a ‘traitor’ and Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s ADC. I went a step further and called him the ‘Marshaland minion’. I told him, he would be the minion of old Mujib and since all his land was marshaland so---the title!

But Tajassur kept quiet about these things. He was quite a kid and kids can’t get serious about politics and such like grown-up things. So came the D-Day and we passed out. Tajassur had got many badges of rank, cap and stuff even from juniors. I thought it a shame to accept things from juniors and said so. He smiled sheepishly and told me that presents could not be denied. I told him he would bring shame to the army by being so unprincipled.

“I have my own principles, Safeer,” he replied gravely.

“And what damned lousy Bingo principles may those be sweetie,” I taunted. I was getting angry.

“Look, Safeer. They are not reasoned out. I just do what makes me happy and what makes people happy. And ‘Bingo’ has nothing to do with it.”

“Happy,” I cried. “That’s a fatheaded thing to say and I will let you know it is. The sergeant would excuse us drill to make us happy. The soliders should not kill the rebel Mukti Bahinis to make them happy. And girls should get laid in order to please grinning morons. Happy---oh now you know that’s ungentlemanly and unofficer-like.”

“I am not much of an officer,” he rejoined.

“So much the worse for the army,” I replied.

Just then our bearer came in and Tajassur started telling him what to do with his shoes once he left. The bearer goggled like a fish and seemed to relish the idea of laying his vile paws on those good shoes, coats and shirts.

I went into the infantry and so did Tajassur. We got our regiments in the main dining-hall of the battalion mess. Whenever someone was assigned to Headquarters Eastern Command a sibilant half-deriding sound came from the cadets. The adjutant was terribly annoyed and threatened us with restrictions but the sound still didn’t stop entirely.

“Sher Nawaz Khan,” called the adjutant, “36 Cavalry, Kharian Cantt.”

We all clapped. Sher got red in the face and sat down.

“Mohammad Adil Siddiqui, Daedaulus’s Horse. Report to Multan Cantt.”

This time the clapping was thunderous. Daedalus’s was a much-coveted armoured regiment with aristocratic traditions.

“Ali Ahmed,” continued the adjutant, 20 Baluch – Quetta.” Applause greeted him also.

“Safeer Ahmed – 15 Punjab, report to HQ Eastern Command.”

I sat down amidst a low hissing and the fellow on my right laughed mirthlessly. Then some people clapped. The adjustant went red in the face. “What’s wrong with you buggers. Are you all yellow. I’ll kick the whole lot out of here if I hear that damned hissing.” Then he went on with the names.

Some people congratulated me on getting the infantry. It was my choice.

“Tajassur Ullah,” said the adjutant with a smile. The applause was thundering as he stood up shyly. He was blushing, the sissy. “For the course favourite the GHQ decrees-report to HQ Eastern Command-15Punjab.”

The hall went wild. There was loud hissing mixed with clapping. The adjutant looked down and fumbled with the papers. I thought everyone made a fool of himself because Tajassur was treated like a baby not like a grown-up man. I would have been ashamed to be in his shoes. But he sat down cheerfully and thanked the people around him with a bright smile.

We got only three days to report to the stations of duty. On the plane I met some of my coursemates. The rank of 2/lieutenant was new on our shoulders. It was fun to wear it. Very few people have the honour of being class-I officers of the government at the age of 19 or 20. We were among such lucky ones and I felt proud of myself and happy.

When we reached the unit there was an atmosphere of tension and hurry. The adjutant was a certain Capt. Maqsood Hussain. He told me to look sharp in my battle dress and to be 15 minutes early for all parades. Tajassur also reported late that evening and Capt. Maqsood ragged him a great deal for grinning like an ape. He seemed to be a strict adjutant. In the evening we went to the mess on bikes.

An old bearer served us soft drinks and we sat listening to the conversation. Then the C.O came and everyone stood up. He was a middle-aged man with a balding head, bushy eye-brows and a very serious grim face.

“Let me introduce 2/Lt Safeer to you sir,” said Capt. Maqsood presenting me first since I was senior by number to Tajassur.

“How do you do,” said the C.O. “ What was your passingout number?”

“Fifth, sir,” I replied.

“Good. The Punjab Regiment likes bright youngsters. Good.”

Then Tajassur was presented. The clown smiled even at the commandant though the colonel was as serious as church as he took his paw in his big hand.

“And what is your passing-out number?”

“Twentieth, sir,” he replied.

“Well, well. Work hard in the regiment. Your professional life begins here,” said the C.O. I could see that I had given a good first impression.

The C.O. talked to the senior officers and we kept listening. Nobody addressed us again. Then the supper was announced and we moved to the table. The C.O. began talking about history.

“I admire the courage of John Nicholson and Sir Hugh Rose in 1857,” he said.

“Yes sir, the battle account is inspiring,” said Major Dost Muhammad, the Second-in-Command.

“Sir the Vietcong too are brave,” said Maj. Azhar Khan, one of the Company Commanders.

“Yes, Yes, that is wonderful,” replied the C.O. “Though they are short-statured people. They don’t seem to be a martial race.”

“I think there are no martial races,”---Tajassur’s voice startled me. Everyone turned to look at him. The adjutant was scowling darkly. Everyone seemed to have been struck by a bolt from the blue.

“People are forced to fight when they are exploited and transgressed against.: and bravery is good only if its is used in a just cause. If it is used to oppress it is evil.” There was a pin-drop silence in the room. The C.O looked as if he would have a fit. His face was red with anger. He didn’t reply at all. Then the silence reigned in an ominous way and the meal came to an end. The C.O. left for his room and the adjutant took us aside. He struck a cigarette and slowly turned to Tajassur.

“How dare you,” he hissed between cleanched teeth. “Talk so insolently to the C.O.”

“But I merely expressed my opinion, sir,” said Tajassur with genuine surprise.

“But your damned idiotic opinion you bloody tit of a second lieutenant. Don’t you dare utter a squeak when your seniors are talking O.K. Do I make myself clear.”

“Yes sir.”

The adjutant kept glaring at us. We kept standing at attention. Tajassur looked down.

“Seven days orderly officer duty for you Tajassur. You will check the guard and report to me thrice every night.” “Yes sir,” said Tajassur in a muffled voice. Captain Maqsood turned and stalked off. His boots crunched the loose shingles. Tajassur stood completely humiliated. They had petted him and spoiled him at PMA. I always had told him athat the army was no place for suave young juniors who didn’t know how to respect seniors. Now he was crying.

O God! I couldn’t believe it. He had tears in his eyes. “Don’t be a sissy Tajassur,” I said to him. It was most exasperating to see him disgracing our course like that. A most effeminate thing to do. He didn’t reply me. When I reached the room I found him asleep.

Soon enough Tajassur was in everybody’s bad books. He got late for parades. He was too chummy with the other ranks and addressed the non-commissioned officers as if they were officers. He had, strangely so, no respect for the seniors. He contradicted them and thrust his opinion as if he knew more than all those who had put in so much service. Everyone told me that PMA was not training even the regular courses well. Even I was given long lectures when he did something wrong. As I had expected, Tajassur was a very poor specimen of an officer.

Then one day the C.O. called a conference and apprised us of the enemy situation. The Mukti Bahini, i.e., rebet Bingo troops---had started playing havoc with our supply line. Since January Sheikh Mujeeb had become even more absurdly adamant about his “six points”. I never knew what the damned six points were but anything coming from a loony like Mujeeb must have been crap. Tajassur kept sitting like a stooge throughout the conference. That evening we were supposed to crack down on a village where the bastards were in hiding. I was in the room when Tajassur came in. He wasn’t smiling. In fact he had become glum. “Hwy Safeer ready, he said amiably. “Yeah what about you” “O.K.”

He sat down and started playing with my watch. It annoyed me. Goodness, wasn’t he grown up enough to stop fooling with other peoples’ things. It made a man sick to have such a kiddish roomate.

“Stop playing with it,” said I,

“What does it matter,” he replied,” what does anything matter.”

“What matters now partner is that we better roast your Bingo friends alive?” I said wearily.

“Why?”

“Why? What the hell do your mean why. Because they are Pakistan’s enemies. Because they want to divide our country. Because they are Indian agents and anti-Pakistan. That’s what we are being paid for.

The C.O. orders us and we go. That’s loyalty.”

“But where is your conscience?”

“My conscience tells me to rid Pakistan of its enemies”

“Listen Safeer,” he said sitting on my bed. “This is propaganda.”

Pakistan was not created to be a slave colony. Bengal was treated as a colony by the C.S.P. officers. The army officers made fun of our men and beat them. “Everyone took our wealth...” as usual his voice became choked with gushy tears. He clenched his hand.” And now that we have risen against this exploitation, this tyranny, they are telling the army to shoot our people. The army has entered villages before and shot our innocent people. They’ve raped our girls. It’s monstrous and unjust. “Can’t you feel it Safeer,” he caught my hands and his lips twiched and trembled.

“Can’t you see that this lovely lusht-green land is under hobnailed boots.

“Can’t you hear the foul orders of hate-filled fat men in Islamabad who are sending poor innocent boys to kill people they have never even met before. Come on Safeer where’s your conscience...”

I shook him off. He was mad. I had never seen him so passionate. I was a little scared of him. these Bengalis were a treacherous race. Batmen had been known to have murdered their officers. This vile race knew of no loyalty nor even unit spirit. Nothing noble appealed to their conscience.

“Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Don’t talk like that or you’ll be caught you fool,” I muttered. In the evening the news shook everybody. 2/Lt. Tajassur had deliberately become a deserter. They called his absence desertion straightway because his pistol was missing too and it was well known that Bingos took to their heels to join the enemy treacherously. I was surprised. He was too much of a sissy, I thought, to have dared to run away. It is risky after all.

We did roast the traitors in that village. First the troops surrounded it and then the machine-guns blazed away. The vermin came out and ever so happily the crackshots took them on. It must have taught them a lesson not to hide the traitors anymore. They took prisoners too who were handed on to the Intelligence Units. These Intelligence chaps knew how to get the truth out of stubborn Bingos for sure.

Days passed and I became a responsible subaltern. In March I did so well that I got recommended for the Commander-in-Chief’s commendation letter. The GOC, Eastern Command shook hands with me. In the Unit the C.O. called me ‘hot-rod Commando’ and was very proud of me. Major Ali Ahmed was an expert in bringing in Bingos as a net brings in fish. We would shoot them slowly one by one. It improved my target practice a good deal. The bastards cried for pity and whimpered like dogs. I think this is a race of slaves. They look up at a person as if he were a god and then they are so treacherous that they stab you in the back. We used to kill them whenever we got news that our brethren had been killed anywhere. It didn’t compensate for our losses, but it made one take out one’s anger at someone. Some officers delighted in torturing the Bingos to extract information from them. In the beginning I thought it was excessive but soon enough I found out that these stubborn people didn’t talk as long as you treated them humanely. Besides everything is fair once your national integrity is at stake.

One day we were ordered to clear a village of the Muktees. I was incharge of a platoon and we moved off at first-light on jeeps. It was very early dawn when we struck. The scene was rather like some Second World War movie film’s, except that brown-skinned people ran out like chikkens with the heads cut off. The Bingos are such cowards infront of soldiers I thought as I turned the machine-guns on the main exit. The rush of the women stopped as many rolled in blood and confusion. Then hell broke loose. Our Jeeps were hit by bullets and they swooshed and whistled past my ears. I heard the Company Commander yell the order to retreat. I jumped into a tree. But I managed to rush off behind another jeep and got bogged down into their blasted flooded paddy fields. Frightful shapes advanced towards me and I was hauled out of the jeep. The pistol was yawnked out of my hands and I was given a blow on the head which made everything go dark infront of me.

When I regained consciousness I was in a little dark room. There was a window but, blast their treacherous brains, they had barred it with steel bars. I went around it once. Twice. This didn’t happen. Officers of the Pakistan Army couldn’t abe caught like this by the Bingos. As I sat down trying to think some way out of it all, the door opened and a small mean-looking Bingo beckoned me to follow him. I did and was brought to a room in which a number of ragged illclothed men were sitting on cots. One of them was in uniform and he was sitting on a chair.

“Lieutenant Safeer of the 15the Punjab,” he said in English, “I am Major Saif-ur-Rehman of the Bangladesh Army” he replied getting up to shake my hand. I was stunned. There was no bloody Bangladesh and no damned Bangladesh Army I was about to burst out. But then I remembered where I was and kept my mouth shut.

“Yes” I said

“Yes,” sir, Lieutenant,” replied the Major fmiling impishly. I wanted to bash his ugly black Bingo mug in. But I had to be tactful.

“Yes sir,” I said

“That’s better,” he replied.

The other Bingos shouted. Their faces were angry. They looked like animals. I had never seen men like that. Their animal faces scared me. This was not like war against a civilised army. These apes knew no Geneva Convention nor did they know what an officer was. But this Major was more of a fellow officer. At least he knew these things.

He must have been in the Academy.

“You will be tried,” said the Major

“What for sir,” I asked him

“For killing innocent civilians. For butchering exactly twenty two women, ninetten children and seven men of Bangladesh.”

“I did my duty.”

“Which code of morals asks you to kill people at the orders of an unscrupulous government.”

At this the people raised a shout. They seemed to be under standing what was going on. I found out why this was so. An interpreter kept up a constant chatter conveying what was going on to the avid audience. My heart sank within me. It was terrible. Those people were mad.” I am defending my country against Indian insurgents and rebels. When the people hide them we have to take action. Thats’ all,” I replied. “And why do they hide them?” the major’s eyes were hard and glittering.” Have you ever tried to get out of your propaganda and use your mind and eyes. They hide them because they love them. Because they are their own people. Because they hate you. That’s why they kill you when you stray out of your lttle fortresses. But one day all your fortresses will vanish and we will be free---then you will be pushed out into the Bay of Bengal and the lotus will be out of your reach. You are colonists, like the French in Algeria and the Belgians in the Congo. Had you been as sensible as the British you would have withdrawn gracefully. But no. You’ll get innocent youths fresh from PMA and open-mouthed recruits butchered first before your generals see any sense. You will have to be pushed out. You won’t go.” The room jeered at me. Their voice rose to a hysterical crescendo and the walls reverberated. Their voice had a ravenous hunger in it and the hope of life seemed to fuse in me. The bodies were brown and lean and naked, yet they were not in a cage where I could shoot them. They were not being kicked or raped. They were not pleading. There was a maniacal confidence in their eyes. They were not slaves it seemed. And looking around felt my feet go cold. My throat was parched and I felt very weak. My heart was beating like mad.

“You will be shot in the morning” said the Major. I was taken back to my room. Its walls closed upon me and seemed to move physically. The light showed a star in the sky and I looked at it. The thought came and struck me like a blow in boxing---I wouldn’t see it again. I wouldn’t feel the wind on my face too. How wonderful was the mess with the waiter bringing Coca-Cola for you. How lovely the feel of the beer as it makes one light-limed and heavy-lidded. And never would I feel that rising intoxication. Nor even would the black sky have silver stars again. I turned around and the hard damp ground resisted me. The soft skin of the girls was no more. I remembered the evenings of PMA when we sat on the terrace of the cafetaria and looked at the green vally. Tajassur often treated me. He was so lively and soft-spoken. And tomorrow I would be dead. Waht was the use of it all. I would die and Bengal would live on. I don’t know how many would die and then something would happen. But who was in the right?...And was there a right at all? I didn’t know anything. I didn’t want to think. It was agony to be alive.

I didn’t know what time it was when I heard a knock. I was going to abuse the man so much that he would run away. It was bursting in me like a tidal wave. All the dirty words of Urdu, Punjabi and English were coming to my lips. I hated these Bengali Bastards. I hated them all. I hated the army. I hated...” Safeer, Safeer” came a low soft voice. “Yes,” I replied. It was a familiar voice. My ears were strained out for its melody. There was hope in its music. I liked that voice at that moment. I was Tajassur. I put my arms around his neck and almost stifled him. He was trembling. I too was trembling. I kissed him on the cheeks.

“Come with me,” he said in a low voice.

We stole out like shadows. The Bangali soldiers saluted him. He wore a Captain’s rank and the same uniform I had seen on the Major. There was a jeep outside and in it we sped away from that loathsome house. We didn’t talk. He took me to a house where a woman with soft eyes like Tajassur’s gave me food. A girl brought me rice and cooked fish. I was excellent and I enjoyed it.

“This is my family Safeer,” said Tajassur “You’ll have to stay here till I can send you back to where you belong.”

“But Tajassur why don’t you send me soon. Now in fact.”

“Its’ impossible,” he smiled. “Actually, this area is now under the joint command of the Indian and the Bangladesh Army. The Pakistan Army is surrendering.”

“No!”

“Yes Safeer,” he said and his voice was gentle and tired. “The war is coming to an end.”

I lived there for three days and that soft-spoken family wafted me to states of mind I have never known before. A langurous peace filled my up as I drank milk and ate my rice. Tajassur’s sister Amina had a charming langour in her eyes which made me eat my rice ever so softly. There was no hurry, no protocol and no friction. They had soft, cute, childlike smiles. They spoke a bit of Urdu and Amina knew a little English too. There was a English too. There was a warmth in their house which made me melt. It was lovely.

So when Tajassur came to take me to Dacca I was feeling sad at the parting. His mother put a talisman around my neck and his sister gave me chocolates, money and---a lovely smile! He took me out tenderly to a jeep. And I was about to get in when the defening burst of a machine-gun rocked us violently out of it. We stretched out on the ground and I saw Pakistani Commandos enter the house. Tajassur leapt up like lightning but before he could shoot, he was bayoneted. I saw the bayonet go into his stomach and with a cry he fell back and the blood ran all over his belly and legs. The commandos were in the house. I got up forgetting caution. “Hay wait wat I am Lieutenant Safeer of 15 Punjab” I shouted like a madman. “Thank God you are safe,” said an officer embracing me. “We’ll have to get away to Dacca. They’ve surrendered.”

I heard the meaningless words. What was surrender? It was all meaningless. There were commando soldiers. And inside the house were Amina and Tajassur’s mother. And Tajassur lay dead in a puddle of blood and his guts had come out and sprawled on his thighs like snakes. And he looked so boyish and lovely and young.

“What are they doing sir, your soldiers,” I cried shaking the Captain.

“Lets,” go in and see” he said clamly, loading his stengun again.

We went in. the world broke into mad patterns, Amina was naked, raped---dead? Stabbed! And Tajassur’s mother was wild. She tore her hair. She flung things all around. She was frantic. I couldn’t meet her eyes. I couldn’t stand her grief. She was living in the agony of death. Her husband had died much earlier. I took the Captains’ sten-gun and shot her---to end her agony with pity in my heart. She looked at me as if unable to believe the depth of himan ingratitude. Then she fell down dead. I emptied the sten-gun on the ground. On the mud of free Bangladesh.

“Bloody Bingos,” commented the Captain of the SSG.

“Lets’ go,” sir,” I said. I felt like crying.

And we sat in the jeep and went away. Nothing mattered anymore. Tajassur and his mother were no longer alive to accuse me. Bangladesh was free and the Pakistan Army had surrendered.

Written 1975; published in The Frontier Post 06 June and 30 May 1986; in Work (pp. 33-47).

Finis

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God”... The earth seemed desolate but there was a man in a flying machine. He stepped out gingerly and blinked as the sun rose in splendour behind the fangled hills. The cool fresh freeze wafted an aroma of coffee-nuts burning somewhere. The beautiful sea of undulating grass stretched out in front of him. A sense of complete isolation swamped him. Between the heavens and the earth he was alone. The mantle of human civilisation had fallen upon him. He looked at the grass and the trees with rising nostaglgia. Animal life seemed to be missing. But, suddenly a flying machine loomed large on the horizon, opened it’s macabre metallic wings and in a bat-like gestute of complete mastery landed near him. He felt the atavistic tears stinging in his eyes. He came forward to greet the pilot who was beckoning him to the cockpit. So---another human being was alive! The World War had not killed everybody after all. Almost chortling with joy he rushed towards the pilot:

“So, here you are...here you are---they said everyone had died. I am glad, O so glad...”

He would have gushed on had a metallic door not invited him inside the cockpit. He jumped boyishly into his seat. A surge of elation made his lips ripple with irrepressible lighteartedness. The earth did look so fresh and virginal.

“You are being taken home,” said the pilot in matter of fact tones.

The man had a revulsion for this modern phenomenon of draining your voice of all feelings when on duty. In any case, for years, everyone had been perpetually on nothing but duty anyway. The cuphoria of an earlier era had been replaced by a cynical discontment. Then came the revolution of the machines. Slowly but inexorably an apathy followed. This was the time of cosmic travel and he had left the earth for long time. The tones of antiquty had been his inseparable companions for long. Now he was saturated in culture---culture of the past. But, then, it was all so misty!

He looked out of the window. It was India. The Ganges was a silver snake stretching it’s reptilian length across baked plains and verdant forests. In the mists of the past, he knew, a man had renounced his wealth and palaces and taken to wearing yellow robes. A prince had turned pauper and Buddhist monks in flowing robes spread a culture of love and selflessness.

“Flying over X.IL.362...”said the pilot.

“It is beautiful isn’t it”, he murmured. The pilot made no reply.

The land where man had matched his strength against the elephants and the mighty beast hand slaved for him and marched with him to glory was vanishing slowly. The oceans were before them. They had seemed very important to men. But no fragile ships defied the waves. Under the blue skies rolled the blue sea.

“Y.IX.313..” said the pilot as they saw an unending stretch of sand dunes and shifting sands below.

He looked our of the window. It was Arabia. The place where lines of camels walked towards the setting sun while the call of the Minaret urged them on. In the dim beginning, of culture, he remembered, they said man had spoken words of wisdom in the oases below. A new culture had emerged. A wonderfully fascinating medley of human values had been created. And he recalled Baghdad of the fairy tales with its fabulous splendour and its cool nights spent in listening to literature. In the silent vastness of the wastes below there was no hint of the kaleidorcopic colour of the past.

And how over Greece. He sat up with interest. He had sentimentalised long hours over the works of the Greeks. One has such a memory. O!What was the name of the man who wrote that book about an old man taking poison and not running away from the law. He was, they seemed to say, a wise man. Why did he ever take poison. “What was the name of the Greek fellow who took poison” he asked the pilot.

There was a moment of eerie silence. Then the voice of he pilot came as calmly as before---

“We are over T.X.119---I do not know what you asked me”

He simmered with impotent rage. He found these modern ignoramuses absolutely insufferable. But down below the giants fought no more---only Medusa existed.

Rome---The Romans---Ah now what about them. All he could remember was a mention of the might of Rome. And closing his eyes he tried to visualise the people of the Caesars and the defiant cry of gladiators---men challenging the beasts to a trial of strength. But then wasn’t a man’s cry from the wilderness of Galilee reverberating through the palaces of the Caesars. A structure stood in Rome harking back to the triumph of another way of life. It was probably St. Peter’s cathedral---or was it? And, though he racked his brain, he couldn’t remember who they worshipped there. There was an idea in men’s minds, he had read, which had given them solace. He was born when it had been forgotten. His brain couldn’t grasp it. His tongue couldn’t name it. And what was the name of one who began it all? O yes, Judas betrayed him. But who was he---? His brain contained that name in one of its numerous computer---like cells, but he couldn’t read it.

They went on till they reached the frozen arctic cap. The last race to settle down were the Eskimos in this part of the world. But the Neutron bombs had done away with men, he had been told. And now he was to meet men once again. It had been two years that he had been in society. And soceity was rather boring but he was an anachronism. He loved company. The machine stopped. Yawning with satisfaction he got down. They entered an underground passage. Bulbs flickered and glowed. Wires hummed with silent, irrefutable, formidable power. The manchines, as always, were perfectly obedient. They said the war would be a failure of machines. It was, as he had always said, a failure of the human mind.

The pilot did not seem to be willing to make any conversation. The man too was quiet. A vague premonition disturbed him. Why was it so lonesome? How many men had survived the nuclear holocaust? The grey steel door slid open. On the desks sat computers and robots.

‘Man from enemy zone’ said the pilot quietly.

‘Kill’ came the weirdly metallic voice of the computer. Panic seized the man. He turned about to run away. The strong hands of the pilot caught him in a vicelike grip. ‘Leave me’ He cried ‘Can’t you see these computers are obeying old olders. We are the only survivours of the himan race, amn, let’s run away. Maybe there are other men remember. These machines are obeying the orders of the human brain. Hatred has fed them. They don’t know they can’t feel? But if we die, thousands of years of human civilisation dies with us. Would plants inherit our great legacy. Can you let is opon...’

He stopped for breath. The pilot’s expression was inscrutable. He was looking at the computer.

“Let’s go” he cried in anguish “These machines don’t know what they are doing. They can’t kill man. Man is the greatest. He inherits the earth.”

And he hit the pilot on the face and took off his vizor. A complicated arrangement of instruments stored him in the face. The pilot was a machine!

And the last member of the human race died. The machines didn’t have to kill him. He died of betrayal and of the bitter disillutionment following it. And the earth went on, as ever, around a yellowing star in a galaxy which Man once ethnocentrically called His.

‘And the Word was with God and man was no more!

Written 1975; published in The Frontier Post 11 April 1986; in The Legacy (pp. 88-91).

Friend

I WAS a second lieutenant when I met Soniya. She was merely nineteen then, and I considered myself grown-up because I happened to be six months older. She, too, of course, put on as many lady-like airs as I let her, because she said boys were kids at nineteen. We had a row about our maturity almost everyday. She was a very soft-spoken, cheerful sort of a girl, and we loved to pass messages to each other on the sly about nocturnal rendezvous. The Station Club was an excellent place for arranging such adventures. The spice of secretiveness lent them a piquancy we both loved. Whenever possible we took off in my car an ancient austin of dark blue colour, which still purred perfectly on the roads of the cantonment.

‘Hey, where are you nipping off little girl? I cried one evening as I entered the club. She stopped dead in her tracks. For a moment I thought she had turned into a statue.

‘Been stealing?’ I smiled mischievously. ‘You look ghastly!’

‘Shut up, lad!’ she retorted as spiritedly as ever. ‘It’s just that you haven’t grown out of your teenage habit of booing in people’s ears. Gave me a fright, almost .’

‘Almost!’ I shrieked with laughter. ‘Girl, you had turned into one of Madame Tussaud’s statues.’

‘Madam what’s what?’

‘Ignoramus, that’s a place in London where they have wax statues.’

‘Oh Yeah, I know ugly, I know. It’s just that your pronunciation is too beastly for human ears.’

‘Oh Yeah?’ I snickered with as much cynicism as I could. ‘Oh yeah, look who’s talking! I, after all, speak the King’s English. ‘O.K., O.K., smoke the peacepipe boy and take me home.’

‘Come on.’

That evening I got fooled into having more whisky than was good for me. It was old Mati with his, ‘But this is plain Coke Tamim, and ‘Aw now, this is water’ when he offered me almost pure gin so that I soaked myself to the gills. After driving the car into a shrubbery twice and twirling Mati’s tie instead of mine on the fingers, I finally started off towards the Mess.

After putting Mats to bed I was going towards my room when I saw a female form outside the building. With a whoop which couldn’t but make its way to my lips I accosted her, lurching terribly.

The girl gasped sharply, as if punched on the face. Then she pounched at me and I found myself staring at the blanched features of Soniya.

‘Who made you drunk, you idiot?’ she demanded angrily.

‘Oh,’ I said guiltily, feeling myself blushing, ‘Oh it’s ... Mats, you know, well it’s once in a blue moon.’

‘What an ass you are making of yourself!’

‘Always was one’, I piped, feeling very foolish all the same.

‘Tamim, you better learn how to drink,” she said with kindness.

‘Let me go, Soniya’ I said, feeling as if I would sink into the ground.

For some days I felt abashed in her presence. It somehow didn’t vex me to feel that she treated me like a child. I liked her as a friends so much that I didn’t mind.

Another evening Mats roped me into whoring. He was the devil himself for leading a copmplete greenhom like myself into a scrape.

‘She is a beauty!’ said Mats, seeing me still reluctant.

‘Aw come, off it, Mats. They are diseased aren’t they?’

‘You are a sissy! What do you mean diseased?’

‘I mean, you moron, they ahve syphilis, non-cocatoo and concyclic gonorrhea---whatever that may be.’

‘Tommy rot! There is no such thing as that.’

‘There is!’

‘Mats, of course, didn’t know that I had invented these grandiose names, but he cared little.

‘OK,’ said Mati in despair, ‘I’ll take your car.’

So Mati took my car and brought the young lady he fancied so much. My saving of a paltry Rs. 50 went into the colourful adventure. A complete bottle of Old Smuggler’s found its way into the stomach of Mati and Adil, and the revels continued far into the night. I, having still preserved my pristine purity, was excluded unceremonisouly from the company of the intitiated. However, once the esoteric orgy was over, Mati awakened me by the simple process of throwing a bucket of cold water over me. As I got up searching my mind for some sufficiently obscene name to call him, he said cattily, Now go and leave the girl at her place’.

‘I managed to call him by some gloriously derogatory epithet, but he didn’t even bother to notice.

‘We are too drunk to drive anyway’, he told me wearily, ‘and you don’t want to have a mude girl saying hello to the batman in the morning.

‘You are the scum of the earth!’ I said in conclusion as I went to change.

The girl, wearing a black shawl, hurriedly walked down. I brought my car. Seh seemed to hesitate and then swiftly turne to go. I ran after her---why was she being so goddamned eel-like?---and caught her arm. She tried to struggle herself free and, suddenly, in the light of a far-off lamp, I saw her face. It was Soniya.

‘You!’ I hissed as if a snake had touched me. She went limp. She almost seemed to shrink and wither away palpably as she stood there. Then she lifted her eyes, alive with pain, to my face.

‘Let’s go to your car, Tamim,’ she said quitely.

‘We walked back with the heavy footstep of a nightmare.

She seemed to have put on the burden of years of anguish and desperation and guilt. She was a girl no more.

‘I am a call-girl. I have no friends. We wer e rich once, I studied in a convent where they taught me my English. It is cash now...It and my beauty...I am too lazy to do anything else and this pays better than washing dishes and sewing clothes.’ Her face was drawn. Behind her quiet, tense looks, there was desperation and tears. I thought of a all the stories I had heard of self-sacrificing prostitutes. I was touched.

‘Soniya,’ I said softly, ‘I don’t mind. You should have told me. It was all so sudden, you know. But dammit, I still don’t care!’

She slipped her hand into mine and I pressed it with genuine emotion.

Time passed. I and Soniya kept meeting. In fact, she was often brought to what we facetiously alluded to as her ‘vocational preoccupations’ by myself. I never formed a sexual relationship with her in the beginning, because I had an idea that we were platonic lovers and good friends and that we shouldn’t have sex. When she heard about these notions she laughed at me.

‘Platonic! Don’t be a kid! Socrates was a hormy old goat. Read the dialogues of Plato.’

‘But what about friendship? I piped.

‘Nonsense. What makes you think friends have to be chaste if they desire each other sexually. I tell you, romance is just another name for sexual attraction. The rest is tommy rot-rot which angelic little boys like you believe.’

‘Soon, however, she showed me a health certificate which proved that she didn’t have any sexual disease. This,’ she said, ‘is the only important thing.’

When we finally did drift into a sexual relationship, it was an explosion of mutual passion. We loved being in bed together and our conversation was as wittily saucy as ever. Often, as the night hours flew, we turned to each other in the fullness of our pleasure. Our bodies tingled with the warmeth of loving touches. The deepest communication human beings can have with one another was ours. The infinite possibilities of pleasure the body can give were ours to be explored. It was bliss to be alive.

When that month came to an end, I asked Mats for some money.

‘Want top buy a plane?’ he scoffed

‘No, you imbecile, it’s a girl.’

‘Girl! Gosh! Since when have you grown up?’

‘I have,’ I said proudly. ‘And what shall I give ger for a month?’

‘A lot.’

‘What?’

‘At least five hundred.

That evening I took six hundred rupees worth of crisp banknotes to give her. It was a cool, starry evening. We had had a very nice time and Soniya was ecstatically dellghted. We has promised to study together.

‘And don’t your rut, you dog,’ she cried ‘when I am studying.’

‘Dont’t you provoke me!’ I replied, just as mischievously.

And then I stopped the car. She was about to get down. I was fumbling furtively with the bank notes in my pocket. It was more embarrassing to give her the money than I had imagined. In any case, I thought she wouldn’t accept money. She would probably throw it back at my face and give me a slap too. It would be like a scene in the romances. Then I would beg her to accept it as a present with tears in my eyes and we would hold hands. I was furious with people who said all that prostitutes cared for was money. Soniya didn’t.

With the romantic scene in my mind and moisture in my eyes I said: ‘May I say something?’

‘What’s it now, boy?’ she said brightly. ‘You’ve never stopped talking since I’ve met you and now you seek my permission, much like a trappist monk, to say a word! She folded her hands regally. ‘You may, my slave, you may, reverend monk of the order of the prehensile toes, you may.’ She looked so mischievous. And before I could begin she added with an irrepressible giggle: ‘Unless it is too obscene to be uttered.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I want to give you a present.’

‘Look, don’t be an idiot. I don’t need silly trifles. If there is anything worth taking it is money---something which romatic kids like you don’t seem to appreciate, mainly because you have always had enough to eat.’

‘Well, I have money here.’ I said. ‘Five hundred to be exact.’

I put my hands in my pockets. I was feeling as if Soniya was too...I searched for words...words sufficiently descriptive but not brutal...grasping, acquisitive, materialistic. I couldn’t get the right word and felt ineffably sad. She stopped laughing when she actually saw the banknotes in my hands.

‘You are serious!’ she said with a low whistle. ‘But as usual you are off the mark.’

I found myself tapping the driving wheel. She gave me the money back with a smile.

‘You are the weekend, not the week,’ she said with great seriousness and a strange, sad smile. ‘You are the weekend; holiday, not work,’ She came near and almost whispered, ‘And one doesn’t get paid for holidays in my job.’ And she vanished into the darkness, leaving me holding the money in my hands. The worlds of stereotype and romance were falling apart. I felt I would grow up if kept meeting her.

Written 1975; published in The Frontier Post 21 November 1986; in Work (pp. 130-135).

The Olive Branch

ONCE upon a time there was a farmer who lived by a river and owned enough smiling fields to make him happy and contented, if not prosperous. He grew corn and wheat and loved to sit by the river and watch it flow through the lovely land. He would have been a very happy man indeed had not he married a shrewish wife. She had a bitter tongue and a hasty temper and both their children and the farmer himself were often given a tongue lashing.

To escape her sharp tongue he went out with his dog and spent his time catching fish and killing brids for a good meal. As the river sang to him and the flowers made the air fragrant, he lay down on the cool grass and dozed for hours. His wife was right in scolding him because he was easy-going and rather a lazy man, but he ploughed the fields with his team of oxen diligently and merrily in the mornings and reaped the corn too without sulking. But often in the evening he longed to have peace and quiet in the house and prayed for the same with all sincerity.

One day, the farmer was very sad and sat fishing by the river. His wife had driven him away from the house and the children sat like wide---eyed scared does in the orchard. More than ever he prayed for a magical transformation in his wife’s temperament, though indeed, he loved her dearly and she, in spite of her bitterness, loved him with simple and deep devotion.

As he sat brooding he became aware of a white dove with a branch in its beak. The bird came towards him without fear or hesitation and put the branch down. The farmer took it up and watched the bird as it flew away to a nearby tree. He took up the branch and noted that it was of olive. It was green and seemed to have been broken just then. He decided to put it in a bottle in his bedroom. It was a strange thing that a bird should have brought such a branch to him. In fact, he had never heard of anything so incredible. For a moment he thought there was black magic in the event and put the branch down as if it burned his hand. Then he looked at the bird perched on the tree. So innocent and pure did the dove look that he was encouraged to take it up again as a good omen. He decided to ask the wise man of the village too about the branch. After all, he decided, it was but a branch of olive but still, came the thought, why had the bird hopped up to him without fear? It was wonderful, it was strange.

He couldn’t fish anymore. He wanted to put the branch in his bottle and hurried back to his hut. His wife frowned at him and started scolding him.

“Good woman,” said the farmer, “I have brought a beautiful olive branch. I got it by the river.”

And so saying he gave her the green branch. Suddenly his wife’s dark scowl cleared up and a smile spread itself on her features lighting them with becoming radiance.

“O how did you get it?” For olives don’t grow nearby, husband.”

“Yes it’s strange. It is very strange,” he replied. “A white dove brought it in its blessed beak.”

“Let’s plant it outside over the window,” said the woman.

“Yes. But what do you say about putting it in a jar of water in our room?” The farmer suggested this hesitantly for his wife never listened to him after she had suggested something. But now the miracle of all miracles came about. The wife smiled indulgently, shaking off ten years from her countenance, and she went in to fetch a jar of water. Gladly indeed the farmer and his spouse put the branch into the jar and placed it on the mantelpiece of the cottage. The farmer was all the more elated because for once she had not wrangled about putting the jar at the place which he had chosen for it.

Then came the miraculous change he had always prayed for. His wife became as peaceful as a dove. It was like the time he had wooed her when she had been a maid and cooed to him with the lovelight in her eyes. Now once again all the bitter years which had transformed her into a cantankerous old woman were cast off as if they had never existed. Their love blossomed anew and it was wonderful to behold. The village saw it and marvelled at it. The olive branch neither withered nor changed. It seemed to have the gift of perpetual greenness. The farmer thanked all the saints for the peaceful life which had been vouchsafed to him and loved every moment of it.

Quarrels were not common in the village but sometimes they broke out with a wild fury and men cursed each other roundly and wouldn’t talk to one another. One day the farmer was saddened when some of his neighbours who were friends had a violent quarrel. They heaped invective on each other at the village inn and vowed never to speak to each other. It was such a trivial matter too. The village blacksmith and the baker were the antagonists. Both of them were honest men who practised their trade and lived peacefully. But then the blacksmith didn’t like the bread baked for him by the baker and went to return it. The baker had had a quarrel with his wife and told he smith to go and boil his head. The smith had a bald dome of a head and was very ashamed of its egg---like baldness. He took offence at this slur and they parted with hot words.

Now when our farmer heard of this mishap he was truly sorry. Then he thought of the olive branch. Perhaps, he thought, there is something in that legend which the village school teacher had told them at the inn---that the dove of peace bore an olive branch in its beak. Perhaps that was why his wife had become to sweet nature.

The farmer was delighted when he got this idea. Yes! He would go to the inn when his neighbours were there and see what would happen. Presently both the men wished to be on friendly terms with each other. They regretted their hasty words and wished they were unspoken. So one evening he went to the inn. The blacksmith and the baker were there; sitting on different tables and looking morose. The farmer took the branch of olive and sat down next to the blacksmith. After some time his moroseness disappeared and he became sorry and full of regret for the words he had spoken.

“By my soul,” said the blacksmith thumping the table, “I was a loud-mouthed fool to have abused him in such a way.”

“Ay ay,” croaked the innkeeper, “you ever were hasty of temper since you were a little chit of a lad and had to climb up to the stool here.”

“So I was, so I was,” said the blacksmith. “Remember how thre the drinks once when I was a child.”

“Ha ha,” laughed the old innkeeper, “I remember very well, very well indeed.”

“And I was no less,” cried the baker also, addressing the innkeeper. “I was a fool in my rage and it came as it went for I keep no grudges, as some folks should know,” said the smith.

“Come and sit down here, neighbours,” said the farmer.

The baker hesitated for a moment but then he drew near as if attracted against his will by a magnet. The three men sat at the table and the innkeeper responded to the farmer’s broad grin and horrid winks by bringing in three huge tankards of good ale. The olive branch seemed to look greener than ever. Its green leaves pleased the eye and it seemed to have a strange hypnotic glow and pulsating life in it. Both the men grew soft towards each other as they remembered their boyhood when they had played traunt from the little school. When they had gone about stealing fruits from the farmer’s orchard, they had foreged bond of friendship which made their eyes smart now. Averting their eyes the old briends shook hands on a heart-warming impulse and ordered a fresh tankard of ale to celebrate the occasion.

After this success the farmer took the olive branch wherever there was discord and bitterness. When husband and wife quarrelled and longed to be at harmony he took the talisman, and happiness and harmony prevailed. When the schoolmaster and the bailiff disagreed and went about with scowling faces and sour looks the little branch made them accommodative and amicable once again. Even firey and hot---headed youths became inseparable companions when the white magic of the olve branch charmed their souls.

The fame of the talishman spread even beyond the village. A wicked lord who lived many miles away in a castle also heard of this wonder of all wonders. Now this lord had a scheming brain and had a vendetta going on with other lords as well. When he heard that the olive branch turned quarrels into friendships he thought it would make his enemies turn back from his castle if ever they attacked it. No sooner was this thought of than he sent some thieves to steal the coveted object. Thus the poor famer was robbed of his treasure and the Lord got it into his vile clutches. He placed it in an iron trunk and locked it. Now he feared no enemies. The magic of the olive branch gave him a feeling of security.

The Lord went out of the castle with his horsemen and made forays into the enemy territories. His confidence grew as he found that none of the enemies dared attack him. He plundered the lands of the neighbouring princes and grew richer, more reckless and greedy. In his own land he oppressed the poor and lived a life of debauchery and evil. Everyone grew weary of his increasing turpitude. Even his knights turned against him and grumbled.

One day the famine stricken peasants refused to give taxes to his men. Then there was an uprising and the hungry mob attacked the castle. The lord ordered his knights to cut them down.

“Hack these knaves to pieces,” he cried, putting his armour on. The knights lieft to obey him but a miracle occurred. Not even one of the knights could wield his sowrd as an offensive weapon. They laid down their sowrds and waved white flags of tuce. The mob shook hands with the knights and the lord was left blaspheming the heavens and the earth.

With oaths on his lips, the lord ran towards the box which contained the branch of olive. But when he took it, his twisted features relaxed into a smile. As they watched he started moving as if he had a great weight in his hands. His teeth were clenched and his face was covered with sweat. His eyes seemed to stare into some far off vision of life, a vision which was in the throes of birth. And then they noticed that he was moving towards the great roaring fire and the little branch was a burden which seemed to tax him even beyond his prodigious strength. And then with superhuman effort he stopped smiling and the thousand names of Satan once again stuttered out of his mouth. And the fire in his eyes which had almost stopped smouldering glowed and he staggered with his teeth bared like fangs near the fire. It was then that the ragged villagers moved forward as if of one accord. But they could just manage to catch him by the legs for they could not hit him or stop his slow, agonishing crawl towards the fire which burned hot and roared, and out of which the flames leapt threatening to singe the hair of the struggling men. At last the Lord did manage to speak coherently again and he shouted to the knights to kill the villagers. But they stood like stone statues. And like a snail, lie a great wounded beast he drew inch by inch near the fire. The desperate men shouted to their comrades for help. Some men darted forward but with a swing of the arm, a superhuman effort of will, the Lord threw the branch into the flaming centre of the fire. And it went right in where only red embers glowed like so many eyes in the darkness of the darkest of nights in the wildest of jungles. And there was nothing but the roar of flames and the bint crackling of wood buming. And jo voice was heard.

Then the Lord roared to the knights, but before the order was out of his mouth the men who held him let out a shout which came from the most feral part of the human heart. And they tore him and dug their teeth deep into his body and their shrieks were worse than those of wolves after a kill. And the knights pounced upon the killers of the Lord and swords cut necks clean through. But some of the knights were with the killers and they fought with the other knights. And the battle raged on and on....!

Written 1975; published in The Frontier Post 22 March 1987; in The Legacy (pp. 156-161).

The Philosopher King

Plato didn’t like the idea of having to command armed men but Socrates told him not to lose his beauty sleep on it. In fact a man had been squared with some gold and silver and he knew his business like the back of his hand,

“But you said you didn’t have any gold and silver, Socrates” said Plato querulously. He had argued with the old sage for the best part of the morning and Socrates had proved conclusively that he didn’t require any. Only when Alcibiades came along and, like a spoilt brat which he was, tried to relieve Socrates of some silver, did the truth came out of Socrates’ lips that he didn’t have anything on him. Plato was incenced. And he had argued incessantly for hours!

Socrates gave a frightful leer and a wink which was enough to curdle anyone’s blood and walked away. He was still chattering to himself and would have kept doing so, had not a handsome youth come along. Seeing the slender youth, understandably, Socrates started whistling an amorous note and Plato walked away.

The evening had already changed into a moonlit night when Plato remembered that it was the night of Agathons’ triumph as a dramatic tragic poet. Now Agathon was a very comely youth and Socrates would be sure to cadge an invitation somehow, he knew. He had been invited too, so he got ready and was on his way. Socrates too was hurrying like the dickens and confessed as much when he met Aristodemus to whom he said---

“One must look one’s best when one is going to visit a good-looking youth”.

But he had to attitudinize to attract more attention. Sure enough, just before Agathon’s house Socrates stood mute deaf and dumb for some time. When everyone was bursting with curiosity, he made his theatrical entry. As everyone suspected, he sat down next to Agathon and flattered him as few Parisian beaus would knew how to flatter society ladies in the Eighteenth Century. Plato started taking his notes. He would call this article ‘The SYMPOSIUM’ and it almost made him want to kick Socrates to see him gulping down wine as if it were water. Everyone spoke on love and Socrates illustrated his lecture, which poor Plato had to bowdlerize with a practical demonstration of kissing youg Alcibiades rather passionately. It set Plato’s teeth on edge to have to white-wash the horny old satyr and put all kinds of improbable tales of having tried to seduce Old Socrates to sleep with him, in Alcibiades’ mouth. With a sigh, he cooked up a stupid story and made Alcibiades tell it Naturally, it wasn’t the lad who had tried to ‘catch’ the old goat Socrates. It was the reverend philosopher himself with his unerring technique for charming young people, who had taken Alcibiades into his entourage.

When everyone was dead drunk, the coup d’etat occurred and Plato’s mercenaries took over the city-state of Athens Alcibiades, being himself of a military bent of mind, was raised to the rank of a general. Socrates himself signed the order. Eryximachies was made the greatest doctor in the state and Aristodemus was given the charge of all the written material. Agathon was crowned everyday with laurels; though Pausanias, his old lover, was sent as an ambassedor to Sparta. All the children were sent to academies where they would be trained by the state. The officers of the state, the guardians, were deprived of property and had to live in barracks. The women, too, were herded together in another barrack and were declared to be the common property of all the guardians. In the beginning some people grumbled at having to part with their riches but Plato gave them a speech proving to them that they would merely be free of the trouble to create wealth. The fruits of wealth would be theirs.

Soon enough the guardians were pleased with the way the state looked after them. They had plenty of meat on their tables and everything else which they wanted. All they had to do was to order the goods and they reached them. If any tradesman was heedless enough to be late, he could be punished. The poor merchants, farmers and tradesmen trembled and turned white with fear when they heard the footsteps of one of the soldier-guardians. They also wore the best possible clothes. In fact they had taken to changing their clothes seven times a day. Socrates, of course, was the sole exception. He was too busy talking in the market place to care about the formalities of sartorial propriety. In fact, the only time he ever did bath and change clothes was, as he confessed unabashedly, when he wanted to impress a new boyfriend.

Plato didn’t have any gold and silver, true to the principles of his ‘Republic’ but, as he often said, what earthly use are metals. He had the best of the world. He lived off the fat of the land. He also had immense power. All the guardians krew that Plato’s system of having philosopher-kings would fail if they failed to co-operate with him. their class interests were, of course, with the genius who had made this life of leisure possible for them. They went about, therefore, giving speeches that they lived simple socialistic lives for the state. The called themselves ‘dogs’ and said that their duty as a soldier was to own nothing: to wag their tails when a friend approached them and to bite and bash if an enemy came by. But, unfortunately, the cynics wouldn’t let Plato live in peace. A false follower of Diogenes came out of nowhere and clapping a torch near his face shrieked out ‘Ah I see a fox’. Another one did the same and cried out even more stentorianly ‘Nay, I see a wolf’. A third one, being more conciliatory, had the audacity to declare ‘No, he’s a compound of fox-wolf-snake and hyena all rolled into one’.

At this there was an irreverant guffaw from a member of the proletariat which Plato instinctively abhorred. Then the cynics argued about this and many common people raised slogans of protest against the benevolent rule of Plato. The Philosopher-king was digusted.

But he had a sage to seek guidance from. He went bawling to Socrates who gave him singularly good advice---

“Tell them” said the sage “that some have gold in their souls and are predestined to be rulers. Those with silver are the military personnel and those with iron and bronze are the farmers and the rest”.

“Bath” replied Plato with disgust. ‘Who the hell is going to believe that balderdash”.

Socrates smiled an inscrutable smile. The kind that made fat headed lads go into raptures, thought Plato.

“I tell you young Plato, propaganda can work wonders. Go and spread this foundation myth and people will believe it”.

Having thought of nothing better yet, Plato did as his teacher advised. Much to his credulous amazement, most of the proletariat went into religious ecstacies about the myth and sung it three times a day so as to keep in mind that they were congenitally, irredeemably inferior to the powers that be.

The young boys and girls gambolled about learning gymnastics and music. Plato was somewhat partial to the beauty of young girls contrary to the fasion for boys; he therefore ordered all the maidens to do gymnastics in the nude. The boys used to be in the nude already to gratify the wishes of the elders. This reform, too, was hailed as highly progresssive by the gaurdians and the philosophers. They made the longest possible faces at the suggestion of deriving any carnal gratification at this spectacle of nudity. It was, they argued, a logical necessity and, of course, very advantageous for the maidens. Thus it was ordered. Purely out of public spirit and an exacting sense of duty, all the guardians and the philosophers chose to watch while the naked boys and girls practised gymnastics.

Years passed and fashions changed. Somehow too many children were being produced. Sure enough the wives belonged to the community but, unaccountably, they all remained perpectually pregnant. Socrates shook his head and blamed Plato for having popularised female beauty contrary to his suggestion. Plato bared his fangs at that, and pointed out that the boys too were in more demand than they had ever been. The cynics blamed it all on too much wine and roasted meat. They really incenced Plato and he chopped their heads off.

Suddenly there was a cacophony. The guardians had a meeting and Socrates himself spoke against the act. He said liberty of speech was sacrosanct. He talked a lot and made everyone enthusiastic. Unfortunately no one could make head nor tail of what he had been saying, so they marched away without knowing what to do. However, incenced and excited as they were, they met Plato. Now Plato was a clever man. He knew that it was either him or someone else. The mob would have blood. He told them in two words what to do---

“Stories, Sceptics” he shouted at the top of his voice. And the mob suddenly knew what to do. In theclear intensity of hatred, they resolved to eradicate the dissidents, the anti-revolutionaries. They marched to the houses of the two dissident philosopic coteries and killed every one of them. The children and women were taken slaves. And suddenly, Plato discovered, he had done away with the whole of the scheming, dissatisfied intelligentsia. Now he was secure. Secure---but for Socrates!

Plato was fond of Socrates. A number of other people were fond of him too. And then the man had the annoying habit of pottering about telling everyone that the oracle at Delphi told him tales about his own wisdom. Plato knew how Socrates made them hide a girl there to take out that eerie voice. But everyone did believe Socrates of course. So Plato went about the whole thing in a circumspect way. The next day he put a taboo on boy-love. A concise bureaucratic order stated:

‘Paedophilia, being degrading to boys and youths, is stopped with immediate effect’.

This shook them up. A number of people were ready to make compromises. After all the game was easy to play. One could keep doing anything in private as long as Plato wasn’t told about it. It was easy. But Socrates had become a bit pigheaded by now. In any case he had always been adept at being theatrical. A debate was triggered off.

“And how is it degrading” asked Socrates, “when in your book SYMPOSIUM you say that it is ennobling?”

“I didn’t say that, you did.” Replied Plato tartly.

This was too much. It was a tacit understanding that Plato would borrow his name off and on but to deny saying a thing altogether was incredible.

“You have forgotten the path of virtue” said Socrates slowly,

“And I don’t want to discover it the way you do”. Said Plato making indecent insinuations.

“Philosophy cannot exist if thought is not free” said Socrates.

“And the state cannot exist if it is”.

“You banned the musicians, I didn’t mind. You banned the theatres, I didn’t protest. You exiled the poets, I didn’t make a row about it. And poor Agathon has had to pretend since then that he is a dull school teacher and hides all his rolls away, and I endured the humiliation and the agony of it all...”

“Tut, tut Socrates, you always did talk a lot. Now run along and let me not hear that you were found with any other youth the way,---the way....”.

“I know” shot out Aristotle.

“I bet you do.” Said Plato with a merry twinkle.

But Socrates couldn’t help his propensities. He was heard trying to convince a beautiful country lad by sound logical reasoning that virginity was quite an impediment in the path of gaining virtue. The spies reported him to the authorities, and soldiers took him to the jail. Since Socrates never left an argument mid-way they let the lad walk along with them to the prison. Right at the prison gate, ironically enough, the lad’s last argument failed in front of the wisest mind in Greece. But alas, Socrates was shut up all alone. Socrates didn’t mind becoming a martyr. In fact he waxed lyrical about his fancied death scene and said he wouldn’t want to have his old nag of a wife to see him die. It would be the old man’s last drama and an impressively moving one at that. Plato wrote out the thing and Socrates was in raptures about it. But, oh perfidy, Plato got him murdered by the lad and made it seem as if Socrates was, even in hoary old age, trying to take advantage of a poor youth who killed him. Even his best admirers were shocked. Plato never got the story of his imprisonment around. He flatly denied the fact that Socrates had argued with the lad. The lad was rewarded and Socrates failed to becomes a martyr. In Plato’s secret books the imaginary ‘Apology’ and CRITO were added. He cried a lot too and Athens had to mourn for Socrates though they were rather embarrassed about it.

But now the guardians had become arrogant brutes and the proletariat was servile and base. There were no subtle intellectual pleasures. Music, drama and poetry were banned. After banquets, no one discussed philosophy since Plato had ended all arguments by giving out official books of infallible wisdom. People shirked the intellectual pursuits anyway since they led to dissent and execution. The pleasures were purely militaristic or carnal. They went on hunting trips and raided the neighbours. They loved to have wars too because martial virtues were the only ones anyone could be really proud about. Socrates had told them that sex was a part of love and people must not be too preoccupied with it. Now of course, they had to hide their true feelings. Love and soft feelings were frowned upon. Sex orgies were common. Naturally they had to be concealed, but that was easy. Hypocricy was common and bribery was rampant. The inflated, population had dwindled on account of perpetual starvation. In each eye was a hungry, savage look. There was abject misery all over the land. A low mutinous growl seemed to fill the air. It came from the dirty hovels of the farmers. It came from the whole countryside around Athens. But Plato couldn’t hear it. He was tried, confused, unhappy. There were plots against him. His guardians were philistines and boors. He thought nostalgically of the day when he had sat down after Agathon’s feast and listened to speeches on love. It seemed to be a long, long way off. Where had he gone wrong? It was all so logically argued, of course!

He went out when he heard shouts of anger. One of his officers came running to him.

“The mob is killing the guardians.”

“Why”

“Oh...” The man told him a tale of no significance. He fancied a farmer’s boy and had brought him out of poverty and made him his minion. Instead of being grateful that the boy had silver in his soul and wasn’t fit to be with the farmers, the boy as well as his parents had kicked up a devilish fuss about it. In Socrates’ halcyon days the lad would have been cursed the spirit proud and it wouldn’t have created any problem. But Plato of Socrates. He had created this new morality to trap Socrates and now he was its victim. He groaned and then lashed out at the guardian---

“So kill them. Kill the mob. Call the cavalry.”

The officer ran away. The noise rose to a crescendo. Plato climbed a building to watch it all. The city was burning. Men were fighting. They demanded his blood. They wanted to kill him. they were looking for him. His ideal state ruled by the philosopher-kings was perishing in flames. He had taken twenty years to build it and there it was---being annihilated!

They came towards him. He calmly presented them rolls of paper---the ‘DIALOGUES’.

“Burn it” said Plato quietly.

But, instead, they burned him!

Written 1975; in The Legacy (pp. 162-169).

Saint Satan

The poor devil had been working really hard at his cases. In fact he had gone about his business with a gusto few insurance agents could equal. He had hoped about from place to place with his absurd looking lutes and flutes and incited people to dance and have a good time. He was really pleased when they invented wine. It did such a lot of good work. Men really went wild and broke all the commandments. He tried to have a go at the bottle himself but had to desist. It was bitter and had an offensive odour; he wondered what people saw in that foul thing. He opposed the church and the mosque and the synagogue; he discredited the temple and the pagoda---he created atheistic communist states and secular welfare states. He had done a lot. He was happy. He gloated over all the gathered hosts of mankind. There were his heroes---Bertrand Russell the atheist. Lenin the Communist; the heretics, the intellectuals who doubted about God Himself. There they were. He tried to talk to them but they only laughed at him. He was exasperated. He was the Prince of Hell and there they stood calmly telling him that there was no Hell and no Satan. Goodness gracious what had the world come to. The devil was really disappointed.

“Even the devil has his feelings, same as other peoples’” he muttered, not caring about his grammer, and walked away.

Aha---there stood another host. Morose, long faced men wearing drab gowns. He turned away from them. He knew who they were. The priests and the puritans. They had never listened to him, and had even tried to stop people from enjoying themselves. If they had always succeeded, there wouldn’t have been all those clubs, dancing houses, music centres and fun. But now, he reflected they would laugh at him and go to the heavens. They were not ungrateful. They talked of God. And his people, they just stood there and denied his very existence. Shamelessly, brazenly, openly---on his face they denied him. It was bitter, bitter. He was going away to Beelzebub to cry over his shoulder. Even the angels patted him on the shoulder and said ‘cheer up’. He almost failed to return a Houris’ wink and smiled at himself. That would be a scandal in the heavens as well as hell. They’d think Old Nick had thrown in the towel!

Just then one of the worst frights in the long gown came over and accosted Satan as an old accomplice. He though, in fact that Satan was a Pope. Now, even a devil has some breeding. Satan was terribly embarassed.

“My dear Sir,” he said earnestly, “I’m not his holiness Bishop....It’s all a mistake actually.”

“It sure is,” cried a reverend bearded gentleman in oriental robes. “Don’t you see he is a great divine must be elsewhere.”

Well you resemble him a grat deal,” said the Muslim. “He resembles the Pope too.”

“That’s blasphemy really,” cried Satan with courage. “You see, you see,” and then with a final effort, “I’m Satan, gentlemen.”

“What,” cried the holy men, “Abracadabra Satan. Away.” And they drove him away with stones and curses. Satan ran away laughing. It was like old times. At least these men knew him, believed in him. They hated him but they didn’t deny him. He could have games with him. It was heartening.

And then they all came to the throne. Satan was in high spirits. He winked at Archangel Gabriel and the latter beamed at him.

“Hey, Old Nich seems to be pleased as a punch, “said Archangel Michael.

“Yeah, Yep, Oui, Yes, Si, Baley, Gee haan,” cried the devil facetiously, “And why shouldn’t I? I’ve got my people all over the place.”

“Oh Yeah,” said Michael knowingly, “I wonder.”

“Don’t you ‘oh yeah’ about it Mike,” said Satan incenced, “I’m one helluva devilsih fellow you know when I’m angry.”

“Oh you, “replied the Archangel laughing, “You are really a saint. A goofish saint. A very spoilt, brat of a saint, but a real saint. I wonder what gave you the impression that you’re any good as the devil.”

“I”, thundered the Satan, “am the authentic, original Satan himself. The one who defied the Lord.”

“And a particularly fatheaded thing to do, that---“interrupted Gabriel. “The arch rebel,” thundered Satan, drowning all the voices, “the Eternal Enemy. The prince of Darkness. The...”.

“Now don’t be a pompous snob,” said Rafael in Satan’s ear. Here’s God Almighty.”

Satan had to desist. It was such a pity too. He was in the middle of a theatrical speech. He had even rehearsed it. Good old Milton had supplied him with some impressive lines in free verse too to make it all sound magnificent. He had forgotten most of the lines but some still lingered in the memory. What intrigued him was how Milton imagined him to be such a hero as he was shown in Paradise Lost. The thing was pure fiction. But after repeating it too often he half believed it too. In fact, he never told anybody, he got all those high sounding titles sand grandiose phrases from Milton and the devines. He pored over their tomes to find what new titles and phrases were being used for him. The divines never forgot hi, but they credited him with too much power. He wished he was half as good as they wrote. But, after all, he had done a good job. The Archangels had always pooh-poohed him away. They’d see. God was just. That he knew.

“Where’s the Devil?” asked God.

“Here, Your Eminence,” said Satan humbly and curtsied low.

“Stop grovelling,” whispered Michael, “You’re supposed to be a rebel.

“Shut up,” whispered Satan back, “I am not an uncultured boor.”

“Give the Devil his due,” came the calm voice of God, “he is very well behaved.” The devil would have protested. It seemed almost to be an engelic attribute but, after all, God always did understand him best.

“Thank you Sire.” Said Satan.

“Has he got a strong case?” asked God in a kind voice.

“So he says,” said Archangel Raphael.

“Whow us,” replied the Almight. A number of files were put up to the Almighty. God looked at them carefully but didn’t seem to be impressed. The Archangel gave an indulgent smile.

“Do you have anything to say Satan?” he asked.

“I have, I have Sire,” began Satan passionately. “I’ve turned men away from the true religion.”

“Which one:”

“Why...” And Satan was flustered. There had been many religions in the world. He had even lost count.

“All religions are mine. All are true. You made them believe less in some doctrines. That was very nice of you. They fought less about which was true religion ever after. When they were more religious, they were more fanatical. Have you forgotton the Spanish Inquisition. And, above all, have you forgotten your pet poet Byron’s:

“Christians have burnt each other quite persuaded

That all the apostles would have done as they did”.

And God smiled benighly.

Poor Satan blushed to the roots of his hair. He thought everyone was laughing at him. And no one had ever told him this point of view before. All the books of religion he read said it was GOOD to be religious and now this---O Blast, O Damn, O hang!!

But it was no good to moon about ones bad luck. He crused all his other devils.

“What else?”

“I turned men away from prayers. “He said it in an unconvinced tone. It sounded rather foolish even when he said it. God would probably say ‘Big Deal’ and not even bother to reply. But God was very generous.

“But you didn’t. You couldn’t. You turned men away from rituals. Prayers are expressed in good actions. When the child lisps to his mother, and the mother kisses him, that’s prayer. When a man helps another, it is prayer. All that is innocent and joyful and beautiful is prayer. And, can you deny it, man always sought the best there was to seek?” He had to nod. But---what the hell---he thought it was wrong to seek the best of secular things, and now God said it was prayer. Prayer of all things. And he had done so much to get the Churches and the Mosques closed. It just didn’t mather to God.

“I gave them wine, song, sex, dancing, games and, and all that,” cried Satan.

“Gently, my troubled creature,” replied God, “Gently. Most of them were good. I wanted my creatures to be happy. So you think sent man into the world not to eat and drink and to be happy. Do you think I created the loveliness of youth and love itself and made it pleasure and then denied men the name. Who gave you that absurd notion?”

“Why, all the priests did,” said Satan aghast.

“But didn’t you see they were punished?” said God.

“No”.

“They never smiled in their lives. They were angry, envious, and malicious. They were fanatical and mankind hated them. Wasn’t that punishment?”

“And I suppose, my Lord” said Satan cynically, “that the atheists and the merry-makers were rewarded. There stand the poets, painters, itellectuals---Russel, Mao, Mansur, Plato, Socrates---who never even believed in you and kept up their hedonistic ways. Were they rewarded?”

“I am above people’s opinions,” said the Lord Patiently, “Whether they believed in me or not cannot bother me. If they did well for their fellowmen, they must have been liked. Men must have found comfort in what they did. Thousands of lives must have been improved by their good actions. Do you think it is unfair if I had rewarded them?”

And Satan had nothing to say. He was more hurt than angry. “Well then my Lord,” he said choking back his tears, “I’ll go to the Other Place then. I couldn’t even defy you.”

“Which other place?” asked the Lord, “waht is the man ranting about?”

“Possibly Lord,” explained Michael, “Mr. Satan in his abysmal ignorance takes the presence of Hell quite literally and is alluding to his sojourn there.”

“Tut, tut, you Old Fool,” said God testily, “you’ve always been in hell. You’ve never known the bliss of doing a good deed. Now don’t be so dramatically patetic. You’ll feel you’re in heaven as soon as you start seeing things right and feel you have actually done a lot og good. For Hell and Heaven, Nick, are states of mind. You have to do good and know it is good. Be happy and spread happiness and you’re in heaven,”

And God left his throne and vanished. The Archangel told everyone to go to their houses. Only the priests and the fanatics were held back to give them a re-orientation lecture since they couldn’t be allowed into the state of heavans hating each other so much. Satan still stood confounded. Sunddenly a hand patted him on the shoulder---it was God himself.

“Run along Archangel, Satan,” said God, “and don’t take things too seriously---especially religious books.”

With Hallelujah on his lips, Satan ran along!

Written 1975; published in The Frontier Post 19 September 1986; in The Legacy (pp. 177-182).

The Snail

THERE was a snail once who looked, apparently, like an ordinary specimen of that innocuous species. This snail, however, was an exception. It was blessed with a brain which was tucked away in the remote extremity of its tail.

Early in its infancy the snail reached the morbid conclusion that ‘all was vanity’ and the pond where it lived was something of a pool of tears. It wasn’t that the snail had reached this conclusion by any logical process of reasoning. Well, yes, it had seen some creatures die, but that was like seeing creatures being born. One was not necessarily wrose than the other but the snail came to the fatuous conclusion that death was a calamity to be avoided at all costs.

One day, after he had dined on whatever snails dine upon, he found his feelers telling him that an unfamiliar tactile object was nearby. He immediately sensed danger and withdrew himself into the protective shell around the middle. As he lay tucked up in the safety of the portable house, he felt himself rolled over by a clammy warm skin. Nothing stirred. The cricket had stopped its melody and the frogs were staring out of the pond with vulgar curiosity. It was after quite some time that the snail dared to poke his head out and see the world once again. He saw the creature which had touched him. It was a small animal on two legs and its skin was fair and hairless. It seemed to be a peculiarly frail and defenceless creature. Yet it pottered about with tremendous self-confidence amongst the proudest of the pond kingdom. The hearts of the proudest quailed before the majestic awe of this intruder. Even the conceited swan looked apprehensively at the beckoning animal and swam away with ungraceful promtitude. The crows cawed on the trees and flew away. The stamp of authority impressed everyone. The frogs waited in the water and their eyes popped out with fear. And as for the snails---he felt disgraced and mortified---all of them lay hushed in ignominious seclusion. Whole lines of snails with the greatest boasters lay dormant like so many inanimate shells. It was a moment of searing pain. So this was the most pusillanimous of all creatures. There in cowardly seclusion the creature had tucked itself away. In unbecoming escapism it had failed to display even the beauty of its glorious body to the intruder. The snail felt angry and humiliated till the intruder went away and life became normal once more.

After that the society of snails was irksome for the snail. He failed to listen reverently to the senile bravado of the oldest member of the clan. When asked by his youthful contemporaties he replied that a sight of that fellow’s blackened shell lying inert in a row of others was a sight after which there was no room, in his mind, for respect for the oldest member. He had grown very cynical and argued that the cowardly shell was responsible for all the cant and the hypocrisy of the snail kingdom. He tolerated no mention of the great names now:

“Did he have a shell, pray?” he asked with suave cynicism. “Oh, yes,” replied the listeners. And then he made the irreverent sounds which so annoyed everybody else.

Now this ‘shell’ had become an obsession for him and a fulcrum of value-judgement. All those who reasoned that it was a blessing the snails had were considered contemptible by him. Some even agree with him, but even these dissidents followed a new fashion to show off a bit; they were not in the least really serious about losing their shells. When it came to blows, both parties retreated into their shells and only the snail was left lamenting. It was a great tragedy for one who was prepared to spread a new faith even by the inexorable force of arms. He thought of all the animals he knew and not one of them had a shell. One could do something to them. One could intimidate them since their bodies were exposed, but what in the world could you do to a fellow who ducked into a castle when he lost or won an argument? It was preposterous! It made the snail the kind of creature which wouldn’t change. The one and only species which would stay eternally in abysmal ignorance. He wept when he saw this.

One day he decided to quit being a talker. He set off in quest of the formula for attaining bliss. He went to the frogs and watched an ugly thing with a feeling of revulsion. At last he decided to address a toad:

:Dear Mr. Toad,” he said.

“Yes, Snail”---It was a grating, offensively arrogant reply.

“Well, you don’t have a shell I perceive,” he went on.

“And what of it, Snail? What of it? Does it do any earthly good to have a bloody shell? The damn thing hangs on you like a...like a ---well, like a bloody shell. Besides, it makes one look loathsome. So ugly in the middle you know. If you ask me, you’d be better off without it.”

“Yes, yes,” he agree sadly and went away.

This aesthetic aspersion really made him wince. And to imagine that snails were such morons that they had hidden their slim beautiful bodies in these repulsive shells for so long. It was unthinkable.

The snail talked to butterflies and moths and they thought it was childish to have such encumbrances. They had shaken off theirs in early infancy. They laughed at the puerile feeling of insecurity which seemed to be an irrational legacy of the snail-world alone. The snail was not as much mortified by these views as ashamed of himself for clinging on to the atrophied anachronism of the shell. Now he had resolved to take the momentous initiative of taking it off once and for all.

Somehow, through the services of a sharp rock and his will-power, the snail cracked his shell. But the shell was made of hard material and wouldn’t come off easily. He hurt himself badly in taking it off. Finally, however, he took it off. His body felt raw and he felt as if he had been born again. For a moment of mad panic he almost went wild with anxiety. He felt naked and helpless as he had never felt before. But slowly he intoxicated himself by the ritual repetition of phrases, proving the greatness of his scrifice and the state of blessedness he was in. In time his fears were quelled and he was emboldened enough to peep out of his sanctuary.

First of all the old friends---butterflies, moths and worms---fled from him. they said he looked unimaginably repulsive. The place where the shell had been was a festering sore. The snail protested that it was neither a sore nor was it in any way ‘festering’, but nobdoy stayed close enough to listen to his ineffectual arguments. He patiently tried to court the snails, but they ___________ him too. At last he looked in the still puddles and pools and was shocked. The middle of his body looked really like a mass of putrescent flesh. He felt so bad. He felt as if everything was irretrievably lost. For a long time he lay there as if nothing better could happen in th future.

Then he started exerting his fertile mind to console his inconsolable soul. The mind came up with as many arguments as required. After all, what was beauty? It was merely an ephemeral illusion. It was only skin-deep. Besides, he would grow a smooth flesh-like skin and he would outsmart them all. And anyway, he was not a retreating sneaky monk anymore. He didn’t exist ignominiously in that cocoon of oblivion which used to be such an eyesore for him. It was morally a great thing---of this he was convinced.

His moral superiority was now as manifest as the day. But the envious fools---and everyone was envious low couldn’t tolerate his sermons on its own moral elevation. This was his only comfort now, and he enjoyed it even when he found the others shunning his company openly.

But then he started stinking, and insects began their weird dance on his middle. He was in agony and nobody came to help him. He had to leave the niche he lived in and look for cures. There was no cure, and he came back to a place where the whole community was busy in a feast. He crept along slowly, taking neurotic care not to turn over on his back. That had happened once, and the particles of dust which had gone in had never come out. At last he came into full view of the assmbly. He was ill and weak and, above all, he wanted to talk. And today he had resolved not to discuss his progressive moral elevation. He wanted to talk about cures and food and simple things like that. But as soon as he came they all withdrew into their shells, and he stood watching scattered stone-like objects everywhere. To each of these inanimate beings he turned his thirsty eyes, but there was no response. Alone and forsaken, he stood there. And all around him were dead shells. He cried and called and then turned slowly back and crept painfully away. The wind wafted away his rotten smell.

The pain increased beyond endurance. Ants attacked his body and the needles of their sharp stabs made him cry out in maiacal desperation. One day, fearing he would die, he approached the pool. It was full of life. Only he was miserable. He was dying. This thought struck him as irrelevant, but slowly it appeared to be blessing. He couldn’t eat his body being exposed to the callous greed of all these insects. Further, he was morially afraid of a bird flying off in the air with him. But probably his offensive stink kept them away.

Suddenly a creature emerged naked and swam in the pond. All the creatures were afraid and scampered away. This two-legged being was bigger, much bigger, than the one he had seen before. The snail watched it with envy. The creature was naked. It had no shell and yet it had a glossy smooth skin and it had no incurable sores. It didn’t smell offensively. It was a beautiful living thing. The snail remembered his shell with nostalgia. But perhaps his sores would heal and he’d be a proud happy animal like this two-legged being. The possibility seemed so remote.

And then the two-legged creature came out of the pool and slowly, in front of the incredulous snial, put on a shell of grey. It even put shells on the head and the feet and got into a big shell of hard steel which went away very, very fast. The snail despaired and died.

Written 1975; published in The Frontier Post 25 July 1986; in Work (pp. 168-173).

The Burden of Sisyphus

It was the day before Eid. I was wild with joy and went skipping about the home. I thought I wouldn’t sleep but I managed, amidst the wonderful smells of things being cooked in the kitchen. The mother call me, and suddenly it dawned on me that it was Eid. I jumped up and sprang out of bed. There seemed to be a freshness in the air. The sunshines seemed to have broken all dams and flooded in strong and pure and clear. But oh! It was so cold, and mother shouted.

‘Zebi wear your socks.’

‘Yes Ammi,’ I replied.

She came in looking like a servant woman. But she would be magically transformed into an Arabian Nights fairy when I came back from the prayers.

“Have a bath Zebi. The water is hot and your father is waiting for you.”

“Why a bath Ammi?” I said with a shudder.

“Please darling son, everyone has a bath on Eid. Even the beggars was themselves. Go on now. Be quick child. Don’t be late for the prayer.”

‘So with a moan I took myself of into the bathroom. The first mug was an ordeal but I clenched my teeth and went on with the battle, eyes closed. My clothes were silky soft and white with a warm coat of dark serge. I was so dashing . Anjum and Saboohi would be so envious of my new eid clothes, I thought as I changed.

My father smiled as he called me near. Then we went for the prayers. They took place in a big-big ground where the boys played in the evening. There were waves of people bowed low and rose in lines. I kept looking at them, The Maulvi’s beard moved like that of a billy-goat we sacrificed once.

And then we all came back home. Abbu was embraced on the way by all the men who knew him. they also embraced me but not thriced as they did with Abbu, and not too tightly either. At home all was transformed and beautifully arranged. A dish of vermicelli was neatly arranged on the dining table. Around this traditional dish were many goodies. Mother gave me Eidee. This time it was five rupees. It was a fortune. It had been two rupees before but now I was a big boy. I was in class 7 after all and so they gave me five chips. That would be something to tell Anjum about.

So I rushed out of the home and went to Anjum’s house. He was dressed in silken shorts and looked very much like the Jack who went up the hill to fetch a pail of water in our English book of the baby clases. He embraced me thrice and so tightly that I could have cried out. Then we went to bazaar.

It was ablaze with colour and packed with clean-looking people. We entered a shop and I saw a flood of toys. But we were not kids any longer. I didn’t want them. As we were about to leave the shop I saw a beautiful dagger with a strangely glittering handle. It was a real dagger too. One of those Mahsud ones people have in their drawing rooms. It was shining and made the sun shine in the shop.

‘how much for the dagger,’ I asked the shopkeeper.

‘Fifty rupees,’ he replied.

It was as if someone had thrown cold water on my face.

‘What will you do with a dagger?’ asked Anjum. ‘O, but it’s such a lovely dagger,’ I said. I felt extinguished. But then we bought chocolates and stamps and marbles and were happy. At night, though, I remembered that dagger. It was a Arabian-Nights dagger such as Caliph Haroon-ul-Rasheed used to wear in Baghdad. Perhaps Alladdin’s genie had presented him just such a dagger or wonder of wonders---the same one. And I was so sure that it was an antique that I asked my teachers about daggers. They didn’t tell me much about oriental daggers but, while rummaging in the school library, I found a book on swords and daggers. This dagger did resemble the once given in the book. I was thrilled with the discovery.

That whole year I hoarded money and had enough to think of the fetish. Well, to be exact, I had thirty rupees. Then I thought I’d part with my comics and took the whole load to the bazaar. It was a very difficult feat. They stuck to me as if they were living beings. The Archie and the Sad Sack ones were very difficult to part with. But Sad looked so funny that I kept just one comic and sold the rest. I got eighteen ruppes. Now two rupees were not difficult to get, I asked Anjum for a loan and he wanted to know why I wanted it. Well...about this we had a quarrel but I had to make up with him. He was so stubborn that he just had to be told. He didn’t laugh as I feared he would.

‘Is that dagger food for Indians?’

‘Which Indians.’

‘Both.’

He gave me the money. Unlike me he had only three rupees, he didn’t save at all.

We set off for the shop and I was laughing all the way. I was cool after a shower and the grass was greener thatn ever I had seen, and the view was more beautiful. Even the bazaar was not as dusty as it usually was. It looked almost clean except where the beggars sat with nasty smells coming out of their clothes. I bounded up the three steps in a leap. I was hot and flushed and breathed heavily. The dagger was there. Perhaps it was a different one. But no---it was the same. After a year it shone just as brightly as it had that Eid day.

‘How much:’ I asked him, clutching the money in my hand.

‘Sixty rupees.’

‘What---but it was fifty.’

‘No. That was a long time back.’

‘That was only last Eid.’

‘That was a long time back.’

I haggled with him as my mother did. And a fear rose up and stuck in my throat and blinded my mind. A wish welled up in stinging moisture in my eyes. I turned away, wanting to kick the glass-shelf. Anjum was subdued. I was very very brave. I was, after all, a grown-up boy of the eighth class and not a babby. But when Anjum went away I cried in my room. I had too. The dagger was so near me and then it slipped away.

But grimly I set to work again. I sold my stamps, the triangular ones too, to Rabia, Anjum and Nadia. I waited for my pocket money. Unfortunately Abbu took me to Murree for two months and I wasted time. It was so tormenting to see all those tempting things arraying in Murree and not be able to by them. But as soon as we came back I rushed towards the shop. I had all the money. This time the dagger was missing. I clenched my hands till I felt the nails hurting me. In a small voice I asked him where it was. He told me that it had been bought. But then came hope. A new dagger would be coming soon.

It took six months for the dagger to come and in these months, breaks found me guiltily hiding away from my class-fellows. Nadia, the witch, called me a miser because I would never meet anyone. But I never would eat or drink anything from anyone. I went straight to the canal for fishing and never heeded the pursuing cries of marble players. Or the fruit-vendor whose mango milk-shake was so famous. Only when my mother got it home in a big thermos did I get to feed on its heavenly sweetness. Thus I waited for the dagger. When I went one day to the shop it was there---There for eighty rupees. Again ten short, I felt hollow and bitter.

Once again I settled down to grasp the heavens so near me, but before ten more days I was set to Ghora Gali. There I had spend some money off and on and I always felt guilty about it. But in a new school one can’t afford to be a let-down.

The canteen and the Sundays took something. Then the path in front of the Jesus and Mary’s Convent for Girls was another rainbow on the sighing pine-shadowed hills. When I came back in the holidays my bank balance was hopelessly deflated. I couldn’t buy the dagger and it kept mocking me like a bad-sweet nightmare. It made me want to steal and rob. In fact, I pinched Ammi’s five-rupee onte but didn’t have the heart to add it to my collection. After tossing about all afternoon I put it back in her purse.

Then my father, who was in Foreign Office, was posted to England. I went to study in a less-known public school and the dagger haunted my mind. I told my best friend about it and on christmas Eve I wished Santa Claus would put it in my sock. It never happened. The ‘age’ of miracles was no more. I had to pay hard cash to get that hard tangible steel object. Years passed, and the dagger receded into the dark crypts of my mind. It took other, less obsessive yet just as fortous forms.

And today, when I passed by that shop with my mind on a business contract, I was jolted back into the naivete of my past. My wife and son had never seen the city of my birth with its crooked streets before. The Mercedez was still a meteoric comet on those roads where brown sweating bodies collided in search of sustenance security. My son pointed at the dagger. It attracted his childish fancy just as, when I was a foolish child, it had lured me so obsessively.

‘Daddy, I want that dagger,’ he said.

‘No darling Kamran it’s not for children,’ said my wife.

‘What does it cost.’ I asked the shopkeeper.

‘200 rupees, Sir,’ he replied ingratiatingly.

‘Oh no, it’s too expensive’ sand my wife. ‘Yes, yes,’ I agreed.

My son looked very sad, but children can get over these passing facies. After all what earthly purpose can a murderous Mahsud dagger serve for a boy of eight? Besides, I had just hit on a wonderful scheme for getting the biggest boom of the century in the car industry. I had to stop thinking of foolish fancies.

Written 1976; published in The Frontier Post 24 April 1987

The Computer

IT WAS considered impossible in the 20^th century but, relatively speaking, that was a very unenlightened age. Now the world was ruled by one government. There was no crime anywhere at all. The system was so fool proof that there was no possibility of crime. To Dr. Rose it was obvious and simplistic---connect all men’s thoughts to the thought-reading computer and-EUREKA! If anyone thought of committing a crime, the computer would locate, isolate and liquidate the criminal in a logical trifle-phased action which was inexorable and inevitable. Thus, for the first time in the history of civilisations, there was no crime at all anywhere on the globe. Then there was no disease and pverty too. The computer could cure all disease and never failed. The computer also looked after the needs of people and currency had come to an end.

The complications of love and marriage tangles had been eliminated because the computer chose one’s mate or mates according to irrefutable logical analysis and not fallible emotional appraisals.

Dr. Rose believed in the perfectness of the establishment and indeed it had been a taxing struggle. First he had to fight for the supremacy of the computer. There were dissidents and passionate unbelievers who had to be physically destroyed. Philosophical schools mushroomed all over the world to protest against the computer. Some protested that excessive central control was suffocating for independent thinkers. Some wanted to crusade for primitive faiths in irrational systems of thought. They differed in ideas but agreed that the computer was not to be connected to the wave-pattern of the mind.

There had been no locks nor shackles on the privacy of human thought, argued the dissidents, and now this was being introducted. Dr. Rose argued that the world didn’t need criminals. After all who would be adversely effected by spying into thoughts---only the criminals, mutineers and those who would break up universal peace by taking up arms against the state. The dissidents agreed that it gave them a pralysting feeling to know that a machine could find out what they were thinking. Dr. Rose promised that he would never abuse the new power the government had acquired. Private opinions would be as free as ever.

The dissidents had to submit and mankind was subjected to the COMPUTER. For some years all went well. The criminals were punished but the government was freely criticised. People called the MACHINE a curse and wrote against it. Dr. Rose waxed lyrical in praise of the new system. He sang poems to the COMPUTER and considered it blasphemous to find fault with the new era. The writers, poets and scientists were asked to teach their students the philosophy of Dr. Rose.

Then Dr. Rose became apprehensive of the tidal wave of intellectual deviation. There were posters against the computer. Some political scientists, to his horror, talked of the atavistic heresy of national states. It shook him to the foundation. The system he had created with his best efforts seemed to be eroding. Then, one day, he decided to act in the enlightened self-interest of the world. He banned all dissident teaching and writing in the world. Thousands of intellectuals went up in flames on the next day. The COMPUTER had been programmed to crush all deviants. They had been warned but had not taken any note of the warnings. They met their horrible fate. A howl of shock and terror swept the earth. The COMPUTER hummed ominousilybut its’ electronic brian had been told to destroy only intellectuals and writers. The rest cowered in their houses like rats but wentunharmed. They hated the COMPUTER now but there was no counter-propaganda against its’ alleged perfection and indisputable supremacy.

The relentless onslaught of pro-COMPUTER propaganda revolutionised people’s ideas. Most people of uncritical minds accepted it as an article of faith. To doubt the COMPUTER was considered intellectual arrogence of the most unpardonable kind and treated with social castigation and official disapproval. However, the faithless decreased in numbers. Only the most active brains doubted the COMPUTER-but remaind silent.

But Dr. Rose became impatient of these faithless, discontented malefactors. One day he programmed the COMPUTER to punish even people’s private thoughts if they were in any way contrary to the philosophy of the infallible perfection of the COMPUTER. Millions of people went up in flames the next day. Some had their necks chopped off. Then it became a common feature to see people develop pains and burn as the heretics were burnt on the stake during the medieval ages. But, now, for the first time---Dr. Rose was absolutely satisfied. His utopia would be purged of the bad elements soon enough.

One fine evening as Dr. Rose sat sipping cool beer and reading a book on the Renaissance; he felt an uncomfortable thought worming it’s way into his consciousness. Where was the gaiety and the laughter which was always there in the books of days goneby. And it occurred to him that there was misery everywhere. It peeped out from fear-sticken eyes. Nobody dared to say a word against the present age. Everday people caught fire and burnt before the horror-struck eyes of the rest. There was insufferable monotony. And then an electric current went through him. the red bulbs near him glowed ominously. The COMPUTER had given him it’s first warning. He was trembling and his lips were parched and dry. The beer turned bitter and tasteless. How could he have done it. He had created a monster and it was permanently, unchangeably programmed and hummed-oh how eerily it hummed-the COMPUTER. He got up with sudden panic in his breast. He tried to sign and force his mind on something else. Everywhere stood the hawk-eyes of electrical gadgets. He rushed as an impulse born in the caves and atavistically human possessed him. It over powered him. It reduced him to a shaking jelly. But he tried to calm himself and asked the machine for liquor. He drank as fast as he could and swallowed fire. But his brain turned soft and a softness lulled him to sleep.

As soon as he got up he asked for alcohol, but this time the COMPUTER refused. There could be no addicts in the perfect world. The COMPUTER had been programmed in the enlightened interest of humanity. For some moments Dr. Rose laughed at his fears. Why he had his faith intact. The warning was nothing. The system was just. You had to commit ten thought crimes before you were annihilated. He had had just one warning. Why even children got one or two warnings. That didn’t count. The present system was the best there could be. There was no crime, no disease and no poverty. Man had conquered nature and created a heavens as one read read people believed in when they were not rational. Dr. Rose even laughed at his fears. The daylight had dispelled his broodings.

Then he got the news. A friend of his – a devotee of the COMPUTER had been burnt. He was shocked!What heterodox opinions could Kombar have held. But, of course, the COMPUTER could make no mistakes. Still the rats gnwed in his subconcious. With a desperate effort of will he tried to shak them off. Once again he was swamped by animal fear. The COMPUTER buzzed and it’s cryptic sound was loathsome to his ears. “OH what tyranny” he shouted. His voice reverberated in hollow chambers and echoed. And then he waited in hushed silence! The heart went wild and then seemed to stand still. His legs were weak and cold. The nemesis came. The COMPUTER flashed him another warning and then the monotony of its’ eternally programmed brain went on. Now he was afraid of himself. He was like a fox at bay. And suddenly it flashed upon him that his government was the very worse mankind had ever imposed upon itself. The warning came again. Yet he was a hero. A fighter. He had created this Frankensteinian monster and he yes – he would destroy it! Mankind had to be free. He would give anything for liberty. O – how idiotic he had been. This time the red light flashed as if with living spite. He cursed it. He blasphemed against his own invention.

He had desperate energy in his limbs and he ran towards the central controlling room. Nobody could have dared to accompany him. None of his orders against the Computer would have been obeyed. He was alone among worms and sheep. Men were no longer men; fear had made them sub-human. Their valour had died a long time age. They were cowardly uncritical fools all of them – and those who dared were chastised, or eliminated.

But Dr. Rose, the architect of this monstrous modern utopia, Dr. Rose the fighter, the hero dared. In a last struggle against the bastard of his brain he strove. He swung a hatchet like a Zulu warrior standing on the ruins of his tribal civilisation. He hit like a madman in demonical fury. He had no weapon-even this one was an ornamental piece. But he used it as no human being had used a hatchet before. For the freedom of the human brain he fought and the machine coolly and arrogantly pursed on. He had once ordered that no madman would be able to destroy the computer-and he was being obeyed.

Warning upon warning. The beads of perspiration ran down like rivulets. He drooled; he cried; he shouted; he wept and he cursed the Computer. But slowly he knew it was the end. His feet had caught fire. He shouted. He cried the cry of the vanquished. Slowly, inexorably, the falmes leapt up and he danced about a weird dance of death on the remains of the corpse of ten thousand years of human civilisation. Then he fell down and his epitaph was the undisturbed bumming of the efficient computer.

Written 1976; published in The Frontier Post 20 February 1987; in The Legacy (pp. 92-96).

Salvation

ON A CERTAIN night when blizzards often raged, an angel visited the land. He didn’t come every year and nobody knew when he would arrive. But if he took a cup of tea with someone and offered to stay, that household would have all the good luck in the world and would be happy. All the farmers prayed for a visit by the angel. They were very poor and their hands were rough with work. The women slaved from the break of the grey dawn till the wolves howled at midnight. The dishes were always to be washed and children wred ill. The wolves often closed round on the village and, when the sky was dark and the earth a lifeless leprous white, they waited with cunning fangs to punce upon some luckless man and deprive his children of food and firewood. The frost made the hands and feet go numb and children’s tears fell down as hard and cold globules of ice. And sometimes even their prayers froze on their lips and their hearts beat slowly and grew cold. Then they yearned for the descent of the angel and the thawing warmth he would bring.

On that Chrismas Eve, the angel did come down. He was just as everyone said he would be---he had wings, lovely silky-soft silver-white wings, and benign, handsome features. There was nothing gross or earhly about his face. It was an expression of abosolute paace and triumphant holiness that he had on his features. Just to see him was to love him. In spite of the cold the people peeped out of their doors to watch the angel and crossed themselves, with tears in their eyes. Even the eternal flakes didn’t seem so sinister. They took on the welcome virginal look of snow-flakes on a Christmas card. The wolves wagged their tails like pet dogs and, after licking his feet shyly, slunk away into the endless desert of snow around the village.

About a century ago people had tried to force the angel into their houses. A lord had actually had him bodily lifted and carried forcibly into his castle. But now the age was not so severe and nobody forced the angel in. He himself chose where he would go. The piest was sure he would first visit him since, after all, he was the only true representative of the Lord. The angel didn’t seem too inclined but the priest waylaid him with an open Bible and he had to go in. A feast lay on the table for the angel. The priest had saved all these goods. His children had remained without food, but he had made sure he had enough for the angel. He had done this every year and now, at last, the angel was there. His coughing wife was told to hurry up, but---alas---the angel merely smiled wistfully and said: “But you must now wrench away the food from the babes, my good man. Feed them and I’ll be pleased.’ And then he went away.

The priest was furious, but Satan, who was lurking around the corner, told him that this time at least he could not be blamed for the mishpa. The priest knew that this was so since the angel could not be deceived by the devil, but he did abuse Satan roundly, nevertheless, and cursed him by the bell, book and candle---much to poor Satan’s just indignation. ‘There is no justice here,’ said Satan, shaking his triple-hooked prong at the priest.

The angel was then lured away by the Baron’s lady. Well, in fact, the butler came over and said: ‘May lord and lady wish to make your Holiness’s acquaintance. Pray, would you be so kind as to follow me, your Holiness.’ The angel looked at this grave apparition and, duly impressed, followed his passive into the castle. The bulldog came over and looked at the angel’s feet and the Baron told his lady that, thanks to her molly-coddling of the dog, it was going so soft that it never even barked at perfect strangers.

‘But he is with Donalbain George,’ said her ladyship huffily.

‘But, bark! Bark he should!’ replied his lordship.

‘And he is an angel’ said the lady.

‘And what does a dog know about that, pray?’ he replied with as much acerbity as he could. Then the angel came into the lighted hall.

The terrified servants brought in piles of hot food---roasted ox, chicken, mashed potatoes, wine and brandy, baked apples, cakes---all kinds of delicacies. For, though he pretended he feasted like that every day, the Baron, too, had been preparing for this special occasion. He had secret ambitions. He wanted to become an earl, at least, if not a duke. It was his grandfather who had committed that social blunder of having the angel abducted. This, he knew, had blotted the family escutcheon quite a bit. The old lord must have been roaring drunk and, undoubtedly, he always was an imbecile.

‘Ah! Your Holiness knows,’ said the Baron fawningly, ‘To err is mortal. You won’t keep grudges, of course, though my grandpa behaved like a cad.’

‘It’s in his blood, really. Pray forgive him,’ said his lady.

The Baron couldn’t ignore this slur on his lineage. He felt his neck go red and he said, ‘saving your holy presence, once could mention things more than temper in some so-called noble families, but Heaven knows everything.’

She wanted to give him a tongue-lashing but kept quiet. The angel was fretting.

‘Ah, Your Holiness is as fresh and youthful as ever since the old lord’s days,’ she said, changing the topic.

‘Well, my good woman,’ replied the angel, ‘there is no old ae in etemity.’

There was a frosty silence. Nobody had ever called her ‘woman’. She was a ‘lady,’ and even angels could not be so appalingly ill-mannered as to indugle in such social faux pas. However, she kept quiet and contented herself by giving only arch looks which the angel didn’t notice. The Baron, regrettably, thought the arch looks were for him and gave her the worst arch looks she had ever had in retaliation. Thus, the couple kept up a zestful competition of exchange of arch looks while their guest went off to gossip with the lady’s maids and grooms and serfs.

As far as refreshment was concerned, the angel again prove to be as a adamant as an army mule. He didn’t touch a morsel and proved to be a teetotaler in the bargain. ‘But, my good man, this food is too good and too much,’ said the angel. ‘Why don’t you give it to all these nice people here?’ he pointed at the kitchen maids, grooms and servants.

‘Yes, yes, certainly,’ replied the Baron.

The angel left and his lordship had a temper tantrum. He threw plates at the lady who passed derogatory remarks about his ancestors. He whipped a groom and kicked the cat. She slapped her maid and declared that some people ought to know better than flirt with her. ‘So, our food sn’t good enough for that creep,’ shouted the lord,---‘and his insufferable “my good man”...’ ‘And “my good woman,” put in the lady. ‘There the voice of heaven spoken in him’ he replied, and a new quarrel began.

The angel went into many houses. Nowhere did he see people who were happy. Everyone blamed everyone else. The women nagged and nagged and had sharp, venomous tongues. The men shouted and broke plates. The children were scared so much that they lied about what they had done. The animals were treated unkindly. The angel was sad and his heart bled for them all. But he couldn’t stop and partake of refreshment in all those houses where misery sat and laughed its demonic laughter. At last, as he was about to go, he came to a cottage the door of which was closed. He knocked and a man came out.

‘Hello, angel!’ he said with a jaunty smile. ‘I didn’t even believe you existed, but it seems I was wrong. Do come in. O,goodness! Isn’t it awfully cold. But you aren’t feeling it. These feathers must be warm enough for such a frail thing as you. My God, is it some gossamer silk you are wearing? Tut, tut! You haven’t been around before it seems. This is no place for oriental robes. O, do come in. It’s so cold.’ And, affably chatting, the freindly young man took the angel in ‘Mabel, look who is here!’ he cried happly when he had his guest seated by the fire.

His wife rushed in and clasped her hands ecstatically after she had got over her initial fright. She was a girl with black hair and black eyes. Her face was open and frank and as friendly as that of her husband.

‘O, hello Mr. Angel---if that’s your name. I’m sorry I was a bit surprised and displayed such awful manners. It isn’t everyday that one comes across what once hears in fairy tales. Pray, do pardon me.’

The angel was touched by their childlike sincerity. He felt like laughing with them. And soon the music of their laughter echoed like silver bells in the house.

‘Hey, wait Angel---you don’t mind being on a first name basis do you?---let’s get something to eat.’

‘Please do, certainly,’ replied the angel.

‘But you and Tom will have to do the dishes then,’ said Mabel teasingly

‘Well, I’ll try.’

‘Come, come, Mabel is only joking. We know you haven’t had any practice. You’ll make a mess of the business. You angels don’t do anything practical, I’ve heard.’

The angel was embarrassed. He shifted on his seat uneasily, but he saw that they were not making fun of him. Gratefully, he started pottering around the kitchen poking his impractical wings into everything.

‘Hey, Angel, baby, you go and sit down and read if you can read. You’ll get your wings burned.’

‘Yes, yes, I’ll read,’ said the angel.

‘Well, all we have are wicked French romances anyway, darling,’ said Mabel, blushing in confusion. ‘But Tom will get you Grandma’s. Bible; you read the Good Book, you’ll like that. It has angels, too, in it---but devils too---, but that shouldn’t scare the pants off you.’ She added the last sentence in a hurry because the angel seemed to have wilted as if under a blow at the mention of devils.

The arrangement worked andthey ate ravenously of simple meal. Then the angel silently stroked his belly and felt it to be full and said, “And now, lucky couple---ask what you want. You are the chosen ones of the Lord. I’ll stay with you and do anything you wish.’ The couple looked at each other and told him that they were satisfied with life. They politely asked him to stay on nevertheless. ‘But if you are a big shot up in the Heavens, see if the Lord can do something about our neighbours. They are envious and quarrel-some and greedy,’ said the husband. ‘yes, yes, and they are so wretched too,’ chimed in the wife.

“No, no, please ask what you want,’ replied the angel sadly.

‘Why, nothing---thank you’ said both of them in unison.

And the angel left, once again sadly, because the only couple with whom he could have stayed and brought all the joys they asked for didn’t need him. they needed no Heavens from above, they had made it themselves. And he returned to the Heavens sighing with pity and remorse, and the blizzard unleashed its pent up fury on the dormant village and the cry of the wolves rose, eerie and spine-chilling and murderous, in the dark depth of the cold winter night.

Written 1976; published in The Frontier Post 14 November 1986

Babu

HE WAS a master-mason, an expert in his work and incredibly dedicated. Everyone called him Babu but his real name was Mohammad Allah Din. At the age of fifteen he had left an obscure village in Sialkot and decided to settle down in Rawalpindi. Whenever he refer to it, even after fifty years, his voice took on a note of disbelieving awe. The halo of grandeur around the name of the big city of his childhood dreams had not dissipated into cynical disillusion. Pindi was still something of an elevated metaphysical concept for him. It had an existence beyond the ordinary temporal one; and in this transcendental plane Babu could “remould it nearer to the hearts’ desire”.

He hadn’t changed much in half a century of breath-taking tempo. He still wore a loose lion-cloth around his middle, a linen shirt and a turban of one too many yards of cloth. Nobody could claim to have seen Babu dressed differently except, of course, for a black coat in the winter. The clothes never seemed to change but they were always clean in spite of manual labour in the stifling heat of the Punjab monsoons. My father used to mention with an indulgent guffaw that Babu cared to shave daily when he was a youth of twenty. Seeing Babu’s incorrigible lethargy, we couldn’t visualise him doing so. The stubble on his face threatened to become an undisciplined bushy growth before Babu ever went to a barber. He also chewed betel-nut and his lips were dark maroon and strangely twisted.

When I was a boy he had been the master-mason in our under-construction house. The fort seemed to be of incalculable significance in his eyes because he bustled about everywhere with unflagging enthusiasm.

“Sahib, don’t trust this contractor. He is giving half-baked bricks,” he would tell my father.

“How do you know, Babu?” my father would ask.

And Babu would give a long and learned lecture on bricks. He actually did a lot of original research on the subjects of his interest. He would bring samples of a dozen different kinds of bricks from all over the district. Huffing and puffing and perspiring profusely, his white shirt stikking to his wet body, Babu would come to my father bowed down with the load of the bricks upon his back.

“Salam Sahib”, he would begin in his uniquely guttural voice.

And then would follow that learned dissertation on building material in the purest of the Punjabi dialect of Sialkot. He would gesticulate with infectious zest. His expression would change from intense loathing as he would look at one sameple of bricks to one of tender appreciation as he would handle another one. Seriously, carefully, lovingly he would inspect all the samples. He was aware of the secrets within them. He felt their surfaces knowingly and they revealed their identities to him. For him it was a supremely sanctimonious ritual. For the children it was, however, a hilariously comic spectacle. They would go into fits of laughter just seeing Babu’s serious preoccupation with bricks, mortar or stones. But Babu never observed them. He never peeped out of his cocoon of preferences.

In the beginning, his passion used to be tiles. Then came “chips”. Babu was slow to convert himself to their cause. But one day he attained the mason’s nirvana. He became the ardent champion of marble chippings. He would just swoon with ecstasy whenever he handled the red, white or black chippings of marble. But the complete ritual eluded our eyes. People told each other how he’d complete the whole elaborate process of mixing them with cement and putting them as slabs on the floor. Then it would be left to dry. Babu would sit down himself as the guard to shoo off all trespassers from this holiest of holies. Children would be scurried off with a wail of anguish coming from the crypts of an apprehensive soul. They were often bribed by Babu, who produced four-anna piece to persuade them to buy sweets for themselves. He hit upon this stratagem when a fastidious little boy condemned his sweets saucily. Babu had put them, understandably, in the chips and they were no longer fit for human consumption. The older people were warned off the premises again and again. Some smart alec once suggested that Babu should use a board reading, DANGER---CHIPS DOWN.

Babu actually brought such a board the next day. It was red and the letters were in black. Babu, of course, didn’t know what was written on the board because he could not even read and write Urdu, let alone English. Visitors enjoyed the fun tremendously and Babu grinned from ear to ear at his ingenuity.

His adoration of having marble floors entered the pale of an obsession. My father had to succumb to his perpetual persuasion.

“Sahib, chipuss looks like a palace of mirrors”, he told my father one day.

“Yes, but it is needless expense, Babu.”

“Sahib, but chipuss is like diamonds. And what is money if it doesn’t please the mind?”

“Yes, but...”

“O, No, Sahib. The money which buys peace is blessed. Chipuss gives peace to the mind and it is cool to walk on. It makes the mind cool.”

There was no answer to that kind of logic. Babu won, and my father paid for the marble floors. When the big day of unveiling came, Babu looked like a boy about to graduate from a professional college or like a cadet about to get his commission as an officer. He effervesced with an incongruously boyish animation. He even took to sleeping near the newly constructed rooms. At last all was ready. When my monther came to inspect the rooms, Babu threw open the doors. The floors shone resplendently. Babu put garlands of flowers around the necks of all the elders of the family. Sensing the monumental importance of the moment, my mother gave Babu a banknote of a hundred rupees. The children clapped and the dog made babu trip and fall again and again on his beloved chipuss.

We kept meeting Babu very infrequently. People didn’t employ him if they could find anyone else. He was very, very slow. He didn’t rest himself and he let none of the labourers waste any time. Of course everybody said he was scrupulously honest, but that was all. He was inordinately opinionated and inflexible. He was very crotchety too. Young people had no patience with his idiosyncracies and Babu, in his turn, had no patience with mocking labourers and highly qualified architects. They had robbed him of his pleasure in being the sole authority on architecture. In the beginning, he brooked no clash of judgment watsoever. He would intimidate the owner by threatening to leave the site immediately. In my father’s day, the deterrent power of that threat was unchallengable. The strongest wills wilted before him. But then, much to his dismay, they took him at his word and he was unceremoniously made to exit. Babu was stunned. He couldn’t really comprehend it.

“Young heads are hot, see,” he said “they’ll call me one day.”

But nobody called him. Babu seemed to be crushed but he didn’t say anything. He became very quiet.

Many years passed. Babu visited me when I got married. He gave my wife fifty rupees when he saw her. It was more than he earned in two days. When my first son was born he came again. This time he was wearing, for the first time since I had seen him, dirty, patched and torn clothes. He had suddenly become an old man. In wthe wrinkles of his face, a crushed load of nostalgia slumbered. But there was still the characteristic burst of energy in his hazy eyes. The shadows of defeat had not killed everything in him. His hair was almost totally white now, and his hands trembled a little. I found out from others that he had been employed by petty employers for such jobs as adding a few steps here or patching up a wall there. In the beginning he had mutinied against this professional degradation. Then his wife’s cadaverous face made him gulp down his pride. Babu accepted all jobs and did everything. He never mentioned chipuss to anyone. The poetry of it lay in a realm apart. It was not to be exposed to the ridicule of the jesting pilate. In the “crystal glass” of a heart where no vulgar eyes peeped, slumbered the visions of endless stretches of shining floors reflecting the smiling rays of the sun and the moon. A nexus seemed to connect cosmic events and chips, and somewhere in this inanimate formula was a distillation of a warmth which was of human love and a passion which could have been of Romeo and Juliet.

It was then that I was constructing a summer villa. The architect was a very able man who also happened to be a personal friend. When Babu saw the walls coming up, his old withered face lit up with delight. I decided to humour the old man, and asked him if he would like to work for me. He sobered down immediately. A suicidal determination steeled his features:

“No, chotte Sahib,” he said wistfully, “I am too old.”

“But Babu,” I said, “you are the best mason we ever met. We must have you here.”

“No, Sahib,” he said with effort. “I am very old. My ways are old. I’ll spoil your house. Jamshed Sahib is a very good architect. I am very old now, Sahib.”

I was touched and I didn’t give up. We had to knock down the walls of his pride. When my wife appealed, he agreed. Babu never said no to one whom he considered to be the daughter of the house.

“Gee acrcha Bahu Bibi (very well daughter-in-law),” he said, bowing his head very low. “I will bring my old hands to give beauty to your house.”

“Very good Babu,” said my wife with perfunctory eagerness.

“But Bahu Bibi my eyes are misty. My hands are old. My head is white. The days of the old Sahib are no more. Only Babu lives on---but who knows, with Allah’s will, he may still make people cry wah, wah! (Well done!)”.

When the crucial time came, I was tense with apprehension. How could anyone tell Babu that we were not as rich as he thought we were? He would insist on putting marble chippings and it was impossible to afford this superfluous embellishment. Finally, jamshed decided to tell him to save me the embarrassment. After all, he too had taken four-anna coins from babu to have sweets when he was a child. Babu listened, with the eagerness slightly ebbing away from his eyes. It made me wince with pain when Jamshed told me about it. He didn’t say a word. He said he would do as the old Sahib’s sould dictated to him.

“Jamshed Sahib, I have to show my face to the old Sahib. I have to go to see him soon. How will I face him?”

“But Babu, he had no such problems. He had money to waster.”

“Waste!” said Babu as if stung by an invective. “Jamshed Sahib, even God loves beauty.”

“But Babu...”

“Excuse me, Sahib, Babu is very old and he is in his dotage. I do not wish to cross your wishes. After all, you know best. The old Sahib has gone away and gone are his ways.”

We were very sorry but we breathed a sigh of relief. The main battle was over. Babu would now acquiesce to cement the floors. Just when the work was about to start, I had to go to Lahore. Then my business losses compelled me to postpone the completion of the house. Jamshed went back to his other vocational commitments and I went temporarily to Lahore, leaving my wife and child behind.

I returned after three month, to my surprises, the chowkidar was missing. I entered the compound and found it decorated with cheap hangings and wall paper. My three-year-old son was busy twisting the ears of an unusually obstinate-looking donkey. Even the servants seemed to be in an infectious holiday mood. My wife met me in the verandah.

“I got your telegram”, she said, “but you have come very late. Babu has been waiting for you all this last one week”.

“But what’s going on?”

“Oh, Babu wants to spring a secret surprise on us. I don’t know what it is. He’s been working incessantly since you left.

“What? And where is Jamshed? How could you spare the money? Why wasn’t I told?”

“Told? Told about what? Which money? I didn’t give anyone anything.”

Just then Babu came with outstretched arms, beaming as if he had swallowed a sunbeam. He hurtled us towards the villa.

A kaleidoscopic image of nostalgic memories swamped me. My mother’s old face rose in the eyes. My brain was framing questions and I had no answers. In the dim vortex of confused intentions there was one which eluded me. The world of commerce made me to blunt to some subtle aspects of motivation. Then my wife opened the door of the house. The marble floors shone with a lustre which contained the lights of the world. She clasped her hands in spontaneous joy. The boy laughed his care-free laughter and clapped his small hands in glee. Everyone clapped and I stood dumb. My wife gave him a banknote of a hundred. Babu bowed his head low in thanks. I didn’t meet his eyes. I stood like a thief. My car, my old house stood as mocking question marks. I knew it before I found out all from Babu’s daughter. He spent his whole life’s savings and his daughter’s dowry on his art. His trembling hands polished the marble chippings himself. He said his daughter get married the next year.

Written 1979; published in The Frontier Post 18 July 1986; in The Legacy (pp. 20-26).

Charity

I and Rabab belonged to the Westernised elite of Pakistan. We wore jeans, listened to pop music, and were totally out of touch with the real life of the country. Her father had remained an ambassador in Europe and was a minister of state, and I too had my schooling at Rugby, Harrow and for some months, in Swtitzerland. It was therefore, strange to hear from her in a girlish voice: “Hey Bobby, let’s see Pakistan.” “What do you mean” I retorted with chagrin “Haven’t you seen enough of it.”

“No, this is Islamabad, you idiot...”

“Big deal, as if that isn’t Pakistan.”

“No it aint, and you know it, Freck!e snout!. We will go to Raja Bazaar.”

“Oh Yeah” I injected as much cyncism in it as possible.

“What are you oh yeahing about. Let’s go now”.

“Who”

“You, who else”.

“Look here Bobby” she drew herself with aloofness “I’m not a kid, get it. I am a full grown girl and...

“That’s the trouble” I groaned, eyeing her voluptous curves mischieviously. She was a very pretty girl and her shapely body was beautifully displayed in hip-huggin jeans.

“Now shut up” she said, giggling, “Let’s go.”

“O.K., O.K.,” said I, getting infected with some of her enthusiasm. “Let’s go.”

“By bus, of course,” she cried clapping her hands in mounting excitment.

“By,? As you so cleverly urge Rabab---bus”.

And we set off as two teen-aged youngsters to look for the novel realities of our country. It was an adventure for us, a cultural exploration. We who were aliens in our own country set out to acquaint ourselves with Pakistan as it really is. The bus was overcroweded and we couldn’t board in though we tried to wedge our way in a number of times. The crowd which had gathered at the bus-stop consisted of students, workmen, ladies in the veil and old men. Everyone was tired, angry and frustrated. Catching a bus for Raja Bazaar seemed to be no adventure for anyone except us. We were the only ones who didn’t mind seeing one packed bus after another rattling past throwing thick dust over the passengers to be.

At last we did manage to get into a bus., Rabab had to go into the ladies’ apartment, and I was standing in the men’s section, An unpleasant odour of human perspiration and stale vegetables hung in the air. The window panes were broken. People hung from the door, catching the door handle precariously. Every now and then the bus came to a groaning halt. There was a rush and the bus was assaulted by mobs of strugging brown bodies. Schooldoys who had not had the opportunity to blossom out but didn’t know it. School-girls, who wished they could be dressed like Rabab who sat enjoying this spectcale of struggling humanity with an innocently happy face. The people inside the bus resented the new-comers and tried to Prevent their indlux. A few obscene words were heard sometimes. An old man with a snowy beard threatened the blasphemer with hell-fire. A man cursed his wife for trying to peep out of her black ‘burqah’. She had large black eyes and my eyes met Rabab and we smiled. She shouldn’t have covered them up, I felt.

Then came the strange medley of the medieval and the modern which is the old city of Pindi. Tongas still moved in the bazaar as they did centuries ago when a Mugal emperor sat on the thorne in Delhi. Japanese cars of the latest make rushed arrogantly past the jogging tongas. The twentieth century collided with the fifteenth. Beggars sat on the footpaths and people bought eatables in the market. I and Rabab wandered all over the bazaar. We even went to the ‘Mandi’ where the farmers who had fed the city from time immemorial sat in small groups smoking their ‘Huqqas’. ‘Rabab’, I said, feeling suddently sobered, “From the days of the Mughals, even before the Mughals, the farmer has ploughed the fields and brought his produce to be sold. Nothing has altered for him. So also these beggars have been sitting here. The kings came and departed. The British came and went. Pakistan was made. Martial laws came, Democracies came. Even socialism, the Bhutto brand, came and went; and yet the farmer sells his goods as in ancient times and the beggar sits holding out his maimed hands for charity. This is our country. Charity. It lives on charity.’

“Bobby” she replied with some annoyance “I hate to give charity. One must give for love. Charity is given to those we pity, we despitse or hate”.

“Yes, but even to that beggar whom you despise”.

“No---he must snatch it away from us.”

“That’s rubbish---but rubbish nevertheless.”

“It ins’t. As long as there is charity, there is no legality No real liberation of the people.”

We argued thus for a while. Rabab was a Marxist in theory. She could, of course, afford to be. She had read the works of radical philosophers available in English and her academic background made her comprehend them easily. The common people of Pakistan could not be revolutionaries. They wanted to become respectable and they had no time for theories. Life was too much of a struggle for them and they could affored to make no mistakes at all.

We went to a restaurant. A dirty, dingy, little place with wooden chairs and an atmosphere of vulgar poverty. The coarse brown faces stared at us with unbelieving eyes as the conversation ceased for a moment of intense embarrassment. I felt myself blushing and getting vaguely angry. There seemed to be a tacit congnisance of an unbridgable gap. The waiter came and leered at Rabab, his little black eyes dancing with suppressed hurt. For an instance I wished I could have used the one invective which would have poured unbounded scorn on him---NATIVE. The word burnt my mind, scorched my lips, expressed itself in the contempt in my eyes; but it never came to my lips. My chin stopped me! And the vision of an old woman chewing betel nuts, my grandmother, mocked me. They were my own people!

We ordered ‘Kababs’ and ‘Nans’. The Kababs were hot, but not very tasty. The ‘nans’ were good. Rabab had a revenous appetite but somehow the food tasted bitter in my mouth. I was guiltily glacing at the men who sat watching us unabashedly. Every time I felt someone’s eyes on us. I felt restless. And then I saw him” he was a reedy looking man of twenty five or thereabouts and he wore shabby clothes intended by the tailor to be a pair of trousers and a bush-shirt. He had an intensely absurd look on his face and his eyes were full of naked longing as he devoured every inch of Rabab’s voluptuous body, When his eyes met mine, he pretended to look down. But oh, how brazen he was. As soon as I looked away he started leering at Rabab, his mouth drooling I bet.

“What is itching you, Bobby” asked Rabab curiously.

“Nothing.”

“Oh yes, there’s something” she said and looked around. Her eyes met the reedy nervous-looking man’s and he smiled. He positively smiled. Rabab averted her eyes. I could see anger in her eyes. “That lecherous man is eyeing me” she pronounced grimly. “Yeh. Been at it for quite sometime,” I rejoined.

“Just you wait Bobby” she said icily and went to the reedy man’s table. A hush descended over the restaurant. I was petrifed and found myself becoming tense for a fight. Then Rabab sat down at the table and wonder of all wonders---the man was all smiles in a moment. ‘The iron hand in the velvet glove’ said I to myself, managing to breathe once again. Then they got up to go, the man seemed to be electrified, Rabab came to back to me and said:

“Now stop gaping and come with me.”

“What did you say” I asked her with surprise.

“That I’d stay with him for a hundred chips.”

I was staggered and I don’t know what I’d have done if Rabab had not innocently slipped away to the grinning half starved ape who was now leaving the hotel. I followed them of course. The man hailed a taxi and they got in. Rabab called me in and I sat down on the front seat. Passing along the crowded roads, we entered a slum were the sun could never have peeped even once in a day. The very air seemed to be petrified and stagnant. Then we walked in narrow street with lanes on both sides and gutters running along. A mass of impoverished humanity assemed jailed within those towering walls. Up above, the sky seemed dark and remote and indifferent. Even God seemed to be much too far from these wretched members of the globe. And the gutters stank and wives shouted with shrill and bitter voices at numerous children. And children fought and cried and mongerls barked at each other. I was the very house of squalor. It was the heart of wretchedness.

The clerk’s---for he was a clerk---house was towards the end of the street. When he opened it for us, we were assaulted by a wave of offensive odour. There was a heap of rotten vegetables on the floor. The gloomy light of the bulb showed us some dirty plates and the remains of a meal on the floor. His bed was untidily made. The pillow was almost black with soot. The bedsheets were staned yellow and black. It was fifthy---that was the word Rabab whispered out of clenched teeth. It sounded like a pistol-shot in that dark little hole were this man existed. This reedy creature who had bought Rabab---so he though---for hundred repees. The man was happy. His emaciated, unhealthy face glowed. It’s cadaverous expression seemed transformed. He was ecstatically delighted. He was joking. He wven recited Mir and Ghalib’s couplets with an obscene swagger which made me want to beat his face into a pulp Rabab’s cold eyes expressed more disdain for him then she had ever expressed for a dying fly. He was a non-entity for her. But what was she doing?

Then he said something to her in her ear. In her ear, Oh God, and I bit my teeth in impotent rage. Rabab told him to do something with a smile which set my flesh creeping. It was a cold, ghostly smile I could associate only with Lady Macbeth when she incities her husband to murder. But I was also glad. It was a good omen. Rabab had an ace card up her sleeve. She was famous for her dash and flashing wit.

The clerk disappeared and came back with a hundred rupee note. He was smiling triumphantly, He was intoxicated with the anticipation of a gratification such that innumerable lonely nights had led him never to expect in real life. It was as if a dream had been bought---and for his whole savings. Well, so what, how many men are granted dreams and never the realisation of them.

Rabab took the note. Then she smiled again as if alm,ost regretfully. She took out a Dunhill cigaratte as the clerk stood dumb staring at her fixedly. Then she took out her lighter and set fire to the note and lighted her cigarette with it. Then with an infinite gesture of contempt and the same smile, she took out two hundred rupee notes. Two new crisp notes, and threw them at the face of the pitiful statue in front of her.

“You son of a bitch” she said in English, then continued in Urdu “You, you bastard. I can buy you and your whole family. Don’t dare stare at me again. “I am...” and she told him her father’s name.

And then, in the profound stillness of the room, she spat at the man’s face and turned to walk sway. I turned too. And then it happened. With a startling leap, the clerk was at the door. He was shaking all over. But the man had changed. The man within him had gone berserk in that moment of adject humiliation. His vulgarity, his cheapnesshad fallen off him. He was suddenly dignified. He was no more the reedy clerk. He was an angry man.

“Listen to me” he shouted in Urdu, “Listen ‘Bibi saab’ before you go. I thought you were a prostitute. I was a fool. But you can’t make a fool of me. Can you? Yes...because the name of your father can knock me cold. Because I am a lower division clerk and the laughter of minister has just to say the word and they’d hang me for daring to look at you. And yet you come wearing Jeans and smiling, why, I ask why?”

“She wanted to see how people really lived, you idiot,” I burst out. Then he faced me. Now he was smiling a cold, cynical smile. “So Sahib” you have seen how we live. We live like your dogs would never do, ‘Sahib.’ We live like swine. And we can’t look at ‘Bibi saab’ even when she is playing a practical joke upon us, the inhabitants of the gutter. And she plays cat and mouse with us. Puts on jeans and makes me writhe with desire. Because she can only roll on beds with you. You confirm to a dream of hers. And I, I cannot even imagine such a dream. You are both right to make fun of my whole life’s savings. You are right to throw the notes on my face. They are nothing for you. You can’t be bought. My money is contaminated. I cannot speak in English and I have no smart clothes. My skin is withered like an old mango. And I’m only twenty one. I’ve never known a woman. Only dreamt of her warmth, her contours in this ugly bed of mine. Please go. Laugh at my idiocy and go. Tell your father about me. But don’t ever tempt me again. Don’t wear you tight jeans and come to people who have never seen anyone as pretty as you. Don’t come to our slums if you want to stay pure.”

And Rabab rushed out of the house while the clerk threw the hundred rupee notes at me. We got a taxi and drove back to Islamabad in a daze. Rabab had turned into a pensive statue. I left her at her home and dismissed the taxi. I couldn’t go to sleep. The summer night dragged on and the drone of the air-conditioners irritated me. At last I went out. It was about three in the morning. The air had become cool. I sat down on my wall. Suddenly a car came and turned into Rabab’s house. The sentry didn’t stop it. A vague foreboding made me jump the wall and run towards her house.

“Yes Bobby”, came her voice, cold, sad and formidable. There she stood, pressed against a hedge, small and crestfallen. Her hair was dishevelled, her shirt was torn. Her distraught appearance told me all even before she sopke out in a hiss.

“I’ve been with him, Bobby” she said.

Written 1979; published in The Muslim 25 April 1980; in The Legacy (pp. 13-19).

The Legacy

THE first sounds which had reached her ears were the uncomplimentary epithets ‘Kali Bala’ (Black witch). Like the crack of a whip they had lashed and lacerated her conciousness. The welter of emotions which they excited was like a pot of writhing reptiles---repulsive and intimidating! And she tried to throw it out of the windows of consciousness. She gave up the attempt soon, however, and learnt to crush these loathsome creatures. A tornado of scathing invectives sprung to her lips like a reflex action and she found herself livid with an obliterating rage which left her shaking like a vibrator. Everyone in the house feared her tongue but evryone loved teasing her. Even her parents were not above it. And the truth was that nobody in the servant’s locality was as dark-complexioned as she was. Her parents were brown and so were her three sisters and two brothers. Of course they came in shades of dark brown, the light on the black and white. TV screen flickered to silhouettes in semi-darkness to a dawn-like radiance, but in her case she was left with the sun behind her. She was a black, coal-black, tar-black silhouette in a background which seemed to be illuminated despite her. Her eyes were deep black and wide. In fact they had a magnetic charm in them which lent her face and attractive look. Her hair was luxuriant and cascaded down her shoulders in black shining waves of shimmering abundance.

Allah Rakkhi grew up as a demon child amongst hordes of self-righteous angels. She was at daggers drawn with everybody since that was one of the conditions of existence. Her sisters were her greatest foes. They had leagued up against her because she was so different. For one, she was greedy. She consumed absolutely incredible heaps of potatoes and ‘dal’ (pulses) and her appetite for chappatis (baked loaves of bread) was a well advertised legend. The two older sisters enacted a highly popular pantomine of Allah Rakkhi at her meals. It was greeted with shrieks of irrepresible merriment and encore performances were often requested. Allah Rakkhi knew what to do about these goings-on. She gave severe beatings to her younger sister and the two brothers and actually robbed them of their share of biscuits. This was reported to the mother who shrieked ‘Oh you black witch! Why have you come to torment my house,’ and gave her a deterrent spanking. That evening Allah Rakkhi protested by not having her meals. Nobody noticed it because---though Allah Rakkhi didn’t know it---her mother was ill, and she had to stop sulking and steal something to eat at midnight. She adopted the strategy of ‘bold offense’ from that day onwards.

So they grew up in the cramped quarters of the big bungalow of the Civil Surgeon. Allah Rakkhi’s father was a cook in the house. He enjoyed a very high social position in the hierarchy of the servants. The butler, of course, was at the unapproachable top of the pantheon of the household bumbledom. He was a venerable-looking old man who prided in his meticulous arrangements at the table. His air of polite reserve could become one of supercilious chilliness if, by an ill chance, Allah Rakkhi dared to intrude into the abode of the olympians---the kitchen! Her own father Allah Din, shooed her off unceremoniously. Her presence was tabooed. Even the dish-washer squinted his bleary eyes and said ‘O Allah Din, why do you let this black brat loose. She will break the plates and you know what the Sahib will say,’

‘Yes, yes’ Allah Din would agree acrimoniously. ‘She is an imp. A punishment for our sins.’ She sneaked off, often with a boiled potato or some other exotic delicacy. They overlooked her petty larceny if she removed her undersirable face.

One day the Sahib noticed her. He was talking to a long bodied dog which she often wondered at. It was a strange dog with soft flappy hair and small legs. It seemed to crawl with its ostrich-necked body gliding close to the ground. It didn’t seem to take umbrage at her lustrous eyes gazing at it in animated curiosity. The Sahib, however, seemed to be surprised. Her heart almost failed her. It went berserk in the ribbed cage of the sable hued breast.

‘Who are you, girl?’ asked the Sahib.

‘I---Sahib Ji-I’m Kansamah (cook) Allah Din’s daughter Sahib Ji.’

The old man with the snow white locks smiled kindly.

‘I see, you are Allah Din’s girl. I see. And what is your name.’

‘Sahib I’m called Allah Rakkhi,’ the tumult was ebbing. The Sahib seemed less intimidating. She noticed his grey eyes. He had a hooked nose but it suited his face.

‘Allah Rakkhi do you go to school?’

‘No Sahibji.’

‘Why not?’

She twisted her fingers in reply. The poodle had lost all interest in her. The Sahib’s fingers were all white. Even the blood was visible in them. I was so strange.

‘All right girl, go and play; I’ll send you to the school. Will you like it?’

She nodded her head in assent. Memories of fairy-land inundated her brain. Image of a moss covered building with a big duck sitting on a golden egg. She had seen such a picture in the Sahib’s sons book once. And the blood shone through his clear skin. Kamran was then eight years old.

It was wonderful---the road to the school. But it was not so clean from inside. The girls sat on wooden benches and the teacher had a cane which stung. She was strong and nobody teased her on the first day. Then they explored with the feelers of taunts. The barbs concerned her skin, of course, and went deep inside. They myth had accompanied her and it was bitter. So she steeled herself against the first beginnings of that wonderful friendliness she had felt for her school fellows in the first few days. The jokes dried on her lips, the laughter broke into bravado. And to make it worse they were equipped with knowledge. They said the devil was black and the night was black and she must have sinned before her birth for being born with soot in her skin. When the Maulvi Sahib told her that nobody can sin before being born she was ecstatic at the discovery. The burden of darkness could now be sloughed off. But that awesome suppressive weight refused to get off her back. She made her back big and strong; she made her skin scaly and tought; she covered herself with heavy armour and the shells ricocheted off. She laughed at the abortive shelling. But the armour left her eyes peeping out of the shell. They were still soft and doe-like and changed to langurous wistfulness just after she had yelled at cowering opponents or scratched someone’s fair face.

One day she went to Kamran Sahib’s school. It was very far away. The servents had gone on a wagon and the Sahib and his family went in the car. There were no buzzing flies and blistering waves of heat here. They looked at the swaying pines and larches and her skin loved the play of the cool breeze on it. On a beautiful road they came across the impressive facade of the school. It had rolling green playgrounds and in the middle ran a canal with bluish-grayish water which showed limpid at places. She was delighted with the little fish in the canal and the red ones in the pond. Even the pictures in the books were not as beautiful as the school. And Kamran Sahib looked like a prince. She couldn’t take her eyes off the lads fair face. The blood could be seen rushing about, she thought.

It was when she had done her matriculation that she met Kamran Sahib again. It was then that he noticed some salient facts about her. Certain contours of her body arrested him. then they brought his new motor cycle and its powerful engine also arrested his attention. But when the engine became a familiar god, he met her again one day. Allah Rakkhi’s eyes looked modestly at the ground where black ants hurried to their holes. They deviated neither to the right nor the left and they picked up loads ten times their strength. Kamran was a very handsome youth and his brown hair had a way of tumbling into his eyes in an absolutely irresistible way. He was decent and shy too. He didn’t know what to do. When he picked up the courage to touch her hand, she reacted unpredictably. She shunned him, spurned his trembling hand and left him blushing in confusion. She wans’t angry and she congratulated herself on her victory. She heard the words of the Maulvi Sahib on modesty and smiled triumphant smiles. But somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind a blushing youth of snowwhite purity merged with white-robed angels in the world of radiance.

Her mother was alarmed when even the younger sister was married off and nobody had sent a proposal for her. Even the Sahib had asked the old cook about her and had even offered to contribute a portion of the dowry. Then one day Allah Rakkhi’s younger sister saw a handsome young man of negroid features in her husband’s village. The man had followed her to the village well twice but desisted when he found out that Shadan was married. When Jagga heard that the beautiful berry-brown Shadan had an unmarried sister only one year older than him, his smouldering dark eyes lit up with hope. He was a mechanic in Lahore and was considered a very eligible bachelor, barring his looks. It was the income which was important.

An old aunt brought the proposition for Allah Rakkhi since Jagga’s mother was dead. Allah Rakkhi’s mother even laughed with girlish glee. This was the first time the old lady had not commented upon Allah Rakkhi’s black complexion to gossiping women. In fact it almost went as if it were an ordinary match. Allah Rakkhi had had different experiences before. She also experienced the novel sensation of being the butt of egoboosting raillery. Her girl companions chaffed her about the negroid origin of Jagga. The word ‘black’ was now music to her ears. She had discovered the tonic effects of having fits of uncontrollable laughter. Jagga’s flat nose. Thick lips and dark skin were the ideal symbols of soul-pleasing beauty. She loved all the jokes about black peo;le she had hated once. Her isolated captivity in her black skin would become an elite exclsusiveness in the arms of Jagga. Life was lovely. She wondered why she had never noticed it before.

Marriage came as a confusion of images. Among all the incomprehensibles was the comprehensible fact that she was happy. Among all the intangibles was the tangible rustle of the red bridal dress. Then the words of the Maulvi Sahib made her sing out from some hungry crypt of her being ‘Yes---I do’ and the images blurred with one another. The sounds were pleasing. Money seemed to be in abundance. Her mother was very tender and even her father’s eyes were misty. There was a hush when the Sahib himself came and bless her. Fragrant pieces of paper impinged upon her brooding. The Sahib had given her one thousand rupees in cash! Even the malicious gossipers had to wilt under the solid reality of one thousand rupees. The Sahib was generous.

In the morning they found her stony-eyed and mute. Jagga went away to the city. The gossip-mongers said that he had been deceived about her looks. When he saw her he found a being whom he couldn’t accept as his wife or the sister of sweet Shadan. He went away and opened his heart to only one of his friends. This one friend didn’t want to hurt the new bride’s feelings. He told only one other friend. Allah Rakkhi worked in the house now. Nothing seemed to hurt her. She referred to Jagga as ‘my man’ and didn’t seem to wait for her. Life went on only the armour was back again and it was hard and rusty.

Then she told her parents that Jagga had called her to the city. They wanted him to come himself to take her. After all, argued the old man, Lahore sas not far from Multan; and then---whispered the old woman---whoever heard of calling his wife all alone across two hundred miles of the Punjab. She was adamant and went. Her brother took her to Lahore but she sent him back from the station. She said Jagga knew she was coming and would take her away. The ninth class boy was bitterly scolded by his anxious mother for this lack of responsibility.

‘But sister forced me to go away.’ He moaned.

‘Your sister is as big a fool as you.’ Said the mother.

‘But Jagga knows where she is.’ He cried.

‘And that Jagga is the biggest fool of you all or else the biggest villian. Whoever heard of work holding on to a man’s soul till his wife is not his.’

Allah Rakkhi wrote short notes to her mother about Lahore, Jagga always featured in them. One of the boys had to read the letter for their parents’ benefit since they could neither read nor write. They loved the letters and blessed her. The brothers were told to emulate her---something which they neither understood nor wanted to understand.

Then she had a child and Jagga found her by chance and came to see her. Allah Rakkhi looked at the furious Jagga. He was beside himself with rage. She was calm and looked defiant. In her lap a child, wrapped up in dirty clothes, slept peacefully.

‘Why did you ever do it, why, why?’ said Jagga fuming at the mouth like a caged ape.

‘You want to know that’ she said quietly, ‘well I’ll tell you. You know, perhaps you don’t, but you should---what it is to be black. Everyone mocks you. Everything bad is black. And then you could have made everything good all black. And our child would have lived with us and we wouldn’t have made fun of her. But you spat in my face. You called me a black witch and left me. And I wanted my child to be white. I wanted a child. I wanted one badly. I have never talked to anyone in my whole life. Nobody talked to me and listened to me. And when you didn’t do it either. I had to have a child. But a safe, good, angelic child; a fair skinned, brown eyed, flaxen-curled child. Someone who could live and look down at them all. And when she grows up...’ here Allah Rakkhi displayed a fair faced, brown-haired little girl of a month or two---‘she will have marriage propositions till her mother gets tired with them. She will be a princess---But go away Jagga, you are no-one to me. You are no-one to the girl. Why did you come to this hovel to pester me. I wash clothes and live well. I don’t need you any more Jagga because she could have been balck or brown but she is fair!!’

‘O you fiendish slut.’ Said Jagga, ‘you have heaped ignominies upon me.

‘I’ll divorce you and tell the whole world about it. But who---who is the father? It must be Kamran Sahib. O you must have thrown youself at his feet, you must have.’

She turned her tortured eyes at his hate-filled face. Behind the stony calm was a storm of hatred and weariness and anguish blended into a strangely haunting look on her face.

‘It isn’t Jagga. Why should you know. But if you do want to know---do you remember the Kashmiri dish-washer in the Sahib’s kitchen. This white child is his boy’s legacy, and see, she’s white.’

‘O you---the depth of this final humiliation---It left Jagga speechless. In his eyes came the image of a frail sixteen year old boy whose skin looked as if it were of an albino. It had no blood nor life and it belonged, as it were, to a leprous corpse. And his father was the lowest of the lowliest in the Civil Surgeon Sahib’s kitchen.

Jagga couldn’t talk to her. He left her smiling her inscrutable smile and walked out of that stinking little room into the radiant sunshine of golden October.

Written 1979; published in The Frontier Post 26 September 1986; in The Legacy (pp. 1-8).

The Physician

HE WAS called ‘Hakeem Jee’. The title meant physician, and jee was added to show respect. Nobody knew his real name and everybody suspected that even Hakeem Jee had forgotten it. It must have been at least forty years ago when people who could call him by name had kicked the bucket. Even his eyebrows were white and his head, though very few people had seen it uncovered, was reported to be all silver. He always wore an impressively red Turkish fez with a pendant tassel which shook with mirth-provoking motion. His clothes were white and nobody ever noticed what he wore on his feet. In moments of crisis---and they were many---Hakeem Jee peered out of thick owlish glasses which must have been of great magnifying power. I never met anyone who didn’t quail before that penetrating gaze from bhind the telescope. He was a man of tremendous power.

The street which he had chosen for his abode was narrow, dirty and dark. Nobody seemed to like it very much except Hakeem Jee, who often waxed lyrical in its praise. In spite of the deterrent forces of gutters and heaps of garbage, his patients flocked in to see him every morning. The Hakeem Jee practised the old Arab system of medicine which was called ‘Unani Tib’ (Greek medicine) owing to its origin among the Greeks. He remained one of the last relics of a bygone era. There were, to be sure, other practitioners of the ‘Unani’ system of medicine, but all of them were sorry-lloking specimens of a defeated intellectual order. They were in the trade not because they believed in it, but only because it was a way of earning money and, as it happened, the only one they knew. They were either impressed and overawed by western-style doctors or irrationally envious of them. But, in either case, they would have given much to be doctors rather than ‘hakeems’. Now this was not the case with Hakeem Jee. He would not have liked to be anything but a hakeem. He had let the world slip by him unnoticed. As for himself, he lived in the past. And when someone jolted him to the presence of cars along with the creaking tongas (carriages pulled by a horse) on the Murree Road of Rawalpindi he seemed to be oblivious of this unpleasant fact. In the old carved chair of his office---his clinic---he clutched desperately to the slippng shadows of the middle ages in Mughal India. He felt at ease amidst hand-written manuscripts in Persian and the dirty tomes of Hakeems who believed that diseases were caused by disorders in the bodily humours.

The ritual of his practice began in the morning while patients were still on their way. Hakeem Jee never got up after sunrise. In fact he never missed his morning prayers because, in days which were still fresh in some niche of his brain, as a lad of sixteen his venerable old teacher in a flowing long black gown had told him that no physician who neglected the morning prayers could ever hope to cure his patients. He didn’t say any other prayers, though, till he was about seventy. Then he felt the hereafter approaching more acutely. Well, when the Hakeem Jee sat down a hush descended on the little room. Women wrapped their burgas (veil) around their faces and went into the ante roo. Even babies seemed to snse the presence of an unusual spirit and kept quiet. The Hakeem Jee wishes everyone a hearty good morning ‘Assalam-o-Alaikum!’ he said in clear, grave tones. Everyone murmured ‘Walaikum-Assalam’, and Hakeem Jee asked his assistant to call on the first patient. Then followed a highly amusing series of events.

The experienced patients knew what was coming. From some obscure corner, very shamefacedly, they produced a bottle containing their urine. This was shown to Hakeem Jee so that the light fell on the bottle. The patient avoided the looks of his fellow human beings during this comic spectacle. Some in-solent street urchins even dared to laugh upon during the gave proceedings. Hakeem Jee, however, never knew there was anything amusing in this outdated clinical test. He nodded once or twice and thanked the patient. But for the in-experienced patients was reserved the fate which was worse than death. Generally they went crimson---if they could, that is---and looked as if they had been unched in the noce after being told a shocking tale of virtue being outraged. When this incredible request (or command) was comprehended with the diobolical aid of the assistant who was a polished expert in making people uncomfortable, the poor patient confessed that he had not prepared for this unforeseen contingency. The Hakeem Jee had an unpleasant knack for satirical repartee. He asked the gentlemen politely-icily-vitriolically what he ever imagined a physician could do without seeing specimen of urine. Did he, asked Hakeem Jee, consider him a doctor? This word had such a note of contempt and horror that nobody was ever foolishenough to say that the Hakeem Jee even remotely resembled the pitiable speices of doctors.

Hakeem Jee spent some of his most carefully acidic remarks upon doctors and western medicine and quite politely recommended some other physician to the poor patient. Meanwhile, life flowed on incessantly past his widow. As soon as he thought he heard voices he imagined that someone had wished his good day and replied ‘Walaikum Assalam Bhai’ (brother)---Walaikum bhu...Walaikum assalam bhai...’ The street urchins claimed that he even saluted the baker’s curand the milkman’s goat in the same politely impressive manner. They had fits of laughter when Hakeem Jee ever greeted them by mistake and told and retold the anecdote with all kinds of deatils ADDED FOR DAYS. All This went on during the ritual of seeing the patients, of course. When Hakeem Jee took the pulse of his patients, he liked to tell them how the Greek physicians could tell what one had eaten merely by his pulse. His diagnosis rested on the pulse, he said. Understandably, nobdoy contradicted him, because the Hakeem Jee had never beren contradicted in his whole life.

The Hakeem Jee had a son called Murad whom he loved very much. It was against his oriental tradition to be very demonstrative or talk nostalgically about his dead wife, but he loved the boy more than he could say. When the boy entered the climic, the old man’s face glowed with an animation which had all the intensity of lost youth. Murad was a brilliant boy and the Hakeem Jee wanted to make him a physician. He confessed as much to the old pilgrim who came to see him. Haji Sahib’, he said, ‘I have the recipes of hipporcrates and Galen and Avicenna with me. They are in my breast, you see.’ The Haji gave a look of reverent understanding. Hakeem Jee felt a tender warmth taking the ring of authority from his voice . ‘Haji Sahib, now you and I are just two flickering candles. The world which we knew is no more. I’ve seen Lucknow of the Nawabs, Haji Sahib. And my father---God give him rest in paradise---he gave me these recipes which I carry in my breast. But I’ll pass them on to Murad.’

‘Indeed, Hakeem Jee, he is a very intelligent boy. He will be as good as his father.’

‘O, better, much better. Haji Sahib, the world is losing faith in us. These doctors have ruined things. But they are not physicians. They take money from the patients. We only charge for the medicine and, as God is my witness, not much more than the actual cost. Medicine which is commercial is self-destructive. These doctors will be ruined. The world will be of hakeems, Haji Sahib. Murad will inherit the mantle of medicine from a line of seven distinguished physicians.’ And here he lowered his voice and a look of deep sanctimoniousness made him statuesque as he said: ‘But I have the books of Abu Ali Seena in the original, my friend; perhaps the only treasure the world has now.’

The last word in wisdom had been said. The centuries weighed heavy on these men with misty eyes. In the narrow room, darkness grew somebre and oppressed them. Outside, the geese quacked and weary men shouted at obstreprerous boys flying kites. The splendours of Baghdad and Cordova were in the brains which no longer knew what they thought.

Murad did his Matric in the first division. Hakeem Jee distributed sweets to the whole mohalla (locality). Now Hakeem Jee was quite famous and cars waited on Murree Road while their owners groped through medieval Pakistan to wait for their turn in the old man’s cramped clinic. People came doubting and went back converted. There was a degree of integrity about that bent old man which brooked no scepticism. In genteel poverty there was professional pride, almost bordering on insanity. Hakeem Jee still took no fees from anyone. Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna had said that medicine was not a profession---it was a duty and it was very much like the fine arts. It sought to increase pleasure and to relieve pain.

After intermediate, Mural joined a medical college. For the first time in his life and the living memory of two generations, the physician’s clinic was closed on a Monday. The Hakeem Jee’s expression had changed. Murad was too young to notice the change. Haji Sahib was to wise to discuss it. Hakeem Jee had to endure it alone. But when Murad set out for the King Edward’s Medical College, Lahore, Hakeem Jee went so far as to ask his son to be a hakeem. Hakeem Jee never told anyone what the boy said to this proposition.

Life absorbed the automation of the defunct physician. Five years passed and Murad became a doctor. Then another three years passed and he became known as a good practitioner. He charged---well not too much. Hakeem Jee didn’t condemn doctors openly anymore, but his old hands shook more than usual when he heard that Murad didn’t believe in Hakeem Jee’s most sacred ritual---seeing urine and the pulse. About this, too, he made no comment. Haji Sahib remembered what he had said before Murad’s birth about such modern heresies. ‘Before long they will sell Plato for a copper coin’, he had remarked.

The tongas moved in the bazaar. The cars whizzed by ox-cants on the roads. Children wore jeans and listened to rock music. Hashish was being smoked in English schools as well as on the tombs of the mystics. And in this slow and hectic pace of days and nights, hakeem Jee fell very ill. He tried all his medicines, but to no avail. His friend Haji Sahib still dared not make the suggestion which hovered on everyone’s lips.

‘Why don’t you consult a doctor’, Haji Sahib knew it would be un-acceptable to the proud old man. But one day hakeem Jee was very ill when Murad came to visit him. He talked to everyone about treating him. Naturally, everyone tacitly consented but no one said so in so many words. The old man was unconscious with fever. Murad gave him an injection. After some time the old man stirred. Life had been beaten back into the battered body.

‘Son, don’t mention the injection please.’ Pleaded Haji Sahib ‘But he must have medicine, Uncle Haji!’ said Murad. ‘No, son. Your father will be shocked. Wait for some days. Let him recover and then we will tell him.’

Murad agreed and his medicine was surreptitiously smuggled into the hakeem Jee’s own recipes. Incredibly enough, Hakeem Jee recovered rapidly. One day Haji Sahib was so pleased that he told him all about it. Hakeem Jee turned black with rage. Then he sunk back on the pillows as if broken. When he spoke again it was as if he had travelled all over hell for etemity. ‘Haji Sahib’---his voice shook and his chest heaved---‘in sixty years of friendship you have broken trust today.’

Haji Sahib tried to say something but the effort going on in front of him was the essence of humanity itself. A primeval life force was affot. Hakeem Jee continued. ‘I have lost everything. These medicines almost healed me. But don’t you see---I am a defeated physician. ‘And Haji Sahib ran away to escape from eyes which glowed and lips which shook he didn’t know what would happen. All night he was very disturbed. In the morning they found the old physician dead.

Haji Sahib found the Hakeem Jee’s opium jar empty.

He told everyone, ‘The doctor’ medicines didn’t suit him. There was a reaction hang his head in shame.

Written 1979; published in The Frontier Post 06 March 1987; in The Legacy (pp. 35-41).

Thanks

Being hurtled into space, into utter, unrelieved darkness---that is how I felt for a moment. But the next moment my drowsy eyes opened and I was conscious of the other passengers in the bus. Yes, I was on my way to Lahore, the fabulous Lahore, where I would be a student. That was the reward of a high first division in English literature---admission in the M.A course at the University of the Punjab. I rolled out the full name of the university silently, but oh so sonorously in my imagination, to myself. The bus lurched dangerously to the right and the left overtaking a trotting tonga and then again streaked out in the darkness. But now lights began, the bus showed down and stopped at the Ravi bridge. I felt electrified. I had crossed the Ravi. I was in Lahore. The New Campus was a beautiful but I was sorely disappointed to find that the Department of English Language and Literature---as it was imposingly called---was in the Old Campus somewhere in Anarkali. This Anarkali, despite its romantic name, turned out to be nothing but a crowded bazaar where one always saw a crowd---the teddy girls among the crowd consuming plates upon plates of perfectly foul-looking concoctions called chatsand dahi bhallas. The department itself was unimpressive but the library was fascinating. I had never seen so many books on English literature and I tried to borrow four at once. As I stood before a clerk asking him how to get the books issued I found myself joined by a girl with six books. She stood quietly and I suddenly realized how attractive she was. Dark hair cascading down to her shoulders, dark and large eyes with eyelashes curling upwards and a face which held me spellbound. It was innocent, mysterious and so magnetic.

‘What do you want? Asked the clerk trying to keep his eyes off the girl.

‘I want to borrow these books’, I said.

The clerk was amused. He had probably never encountered such naive greenhorns who actually thought libraries were supposed to lend books to them. ‘Not yet’, he replied. Then, responding to the mute question in the girl’s eyes he added ‘Maybe after a week when all the papers arrive. But only two books at a time are allowed’.

While I protested against this senseless policy, I noticed that she had slipped away as quietly as she had arrived.

I discovered that her name was Raheela. She slipped in and out of class every day ever so silently; as if apologizing for her presence. And she hardly ever spoke to anybody though she smiled in gratitude when someone gave her something. It was a smile which made her face shine with a radiance. Her full, curved lips opened ever so slightly and a strange, powerfully attractive femininity pervaded her---but only for a moment. The next instance the shy reserve, the downcast eyes, the sober bashfulness were back. The boys called her matiar for she had the olive-complexioned body of the legendary Punjabi maiden from the countryside. They called her ‘wheatish complexioned’ but added that in her case the wheat had an admixture of gold. Others called her a ‘saltish’ beauty and the wags translated the Urdu ‘saltish’ by the English word ‘sexy’ though this was only a joke between the best of friends. Before the girls they were on their best manners.

I and Raheela lived close by in Gulberg. This was a posh living area in those days---the late sixties---and Lahore had not expanded like a swarm of locusts till then. But buses were as difficult to catch as they are said to be these days. We had to change two buses. The first took us to the New Campus. The second took us from there to Gulberg. So we stood on the same bus stops waiting for the buses and not saying a word to each other. Raheela did not even appear to notice that I was there. I could do no such thing but I tried not to steal a glance at her too often. When the bus came I would climb in but often I saw her standing unperturbed. If there was too much of a rush she just did not try to squeeze in at all. And I, cursing my impetuousity, lurched forward pressed in from all sides. I would reach Gulberg half an hour earlier than her. Sometimes I saw her walking past the house where I lived as a paying guest not half an hour but even an hour later. She missed two buses if they were too full.

I strolled past the house Raheela lived in with a number of girls, all paying guests. But I never called on her. One day she was absent from the class. Everybody noticed that but nobody knew her very well. A girl told us that she was feverish and someone inappropriately quoted Keats:

O what can ail thee, maid at rest,

So haggard and so woebegone?

She is hardly ‘haggard’ I said. Everybody laughed and shouted in chorus: ‘But surely she is “woebegone”.

‘Since when have you become her champion Sameer’, shrieked Ambar in mischievous glee.

‘I haven’t. You people are sick. Plain sick’, I expostulated. The sick, however, were in a ragging mood and it was only when their mouths were stuffed with samosas that they passed on to other subjects---such as the horrors of Chaucer’s English.

That evening I did go to her house. Access to her was far easier than I had imagined. A jolly, fat, elder-sister type of girl seemed to understand at once that I wanted to see her. She asked none of the standard questions about me being her brother or something. All she did was to dart forward, open the door of a room and push me in saying: ‘Raheela don’t die yet. Here is the doctor’.

Raheela sat up betraying surprise but only for a moment. Then she was back to normal---but so wan, so pale, so languorous. Her face framed by her black tresses looked so ravishingly inviting yet so frail.

‘You have been ill. Are you O.K now’? I asked her in genuine concern.

‘The fever is down’ she said almost in a whisper. ‘I am only weak now’.

‘What was it’?

‘I don’t know’.

‘You did not go to a doctor’?

‘No. But a lady doctor lives here. She came over, Thanks’.

The ‘thanks’ was delivered with a note of finality. I knew I had been dismissed. I turned towards the door. When I turned the handle and was half out I said ‘bye’.

‘Bye. Thanks’.

This time the ‘thanks’ was a scarcely audible whisper but its caressing softness made me blush. The Elder Sister raised her eyebrows in surprise.

‘Bhai nobody comes to see Miss Mona Liza in there and now that you do you will not stay’, she remonstrated. I mumbled something about coming again and walked out.

When Raheela appeared at the University she looked pale and weak. A wag remarked that had she been less beautiful she should have been called ‘anaemic’ but not the mot just was ‘wan’. When we went back that day I deliberately went by the same bus. I did not want her to faint somewhere en route. As we got down the bus stop in Gulberg she seemed to hesitate for a moment and then started walking ahead. I watched the swing and sway of her voluptuous figure and then, feeling somewhat ashamed of myself, strode past her.

‘Listen’ she said.

‘Yes’, I could hardly believe my ears.

‘I have missed all the notes on Milton’. This was addressed to stone near her feet while the ravishingly attractive face blushed and the large eyes fluttered coyly.

‘I can give you the notes’, I responded gallantly. As she did not say anything to this I stopped, not knowing how to proceed.

The dark eyes now lifted themselves up and the full sensual lips parted in the merest ghost of a smile. I did not immediately notice that her left hand had extended itself.

‘Oh’ I gushed apologetically as soon as I became aware of this. Then came a hectic search in my books and notebooks---only three of them---while she stood looking amused.

‘I’ll bring them to you later’, I blurted out feeling my face going hot.

‘Maybe tomorrow’, she replied as if to herself.

This was redemption since I had no notes on Milton. I had spent the classes in the cafeteria laughing at my friend Shaheen’s jokes. The jokes were such riddles that if you didn’t laugh you were proclaimed a fool. Thus, to be on the safe side, everybody laughed out loud and clear. Well, but the notes had to be manufactured somehow. I therefore gulped my food as fast as I could and ventured out on the rickshaws of Lahore. In the hostel at the New Campus Amjad Ali was holding court and notes was what he dealt in. After a treat in the canteen he handed me a wad of papers which I brought home. They proved to be mostly illegible but I prepared notes with the help of all the books on Milton I could skim through. Next day I handed her the notes with a strange triumphant feeling in my heart.

‘Thanks’ said the smile. The eyes mine for a moment of mesmerising magic.

Then she stopped boarding the Gulberg bus. I went mad with frustration waiting for her but she was nowhere in sight. Next day I asked her in the class whether another bus also went to Gulberg.

‘Oh I live in a girls hostel now’.

‘I see. I see’. I could have cursed that girls hostel.

‘Have you finished with the notes,’, I again ventured.

She put them in my hand with a gesture so graceful that it left me speechless.

‘Thanks’ she breathed softly.

I knew Lahore by the end of the term. I had sat in all the wayside little restaurants and heard endless arguments about Marx and Engels. Ayub Khan’s basic democracies were defended and demolished over endless cups of tea. Cokes were a new arrival and a great novelty. The juice of sugarcanes was more our cup of tea by the middle of the month when the pocket money went low. Kites were our greatest diversion in the balmy days of February when Lahore’s sky was decorated with kites of all colours flying high and low. We also cried ‘Bo Kata’ like the Lahori street urchins as we watched the wrangles between the kites in the sky. We ate heaps upon heaps of pakoras. We were always eating out. But never once had I gone out anywhere with Raheela---not even to the canteen. And, for that matter, nobody had gone out with her anywhere. She came; smiled ever so politely; batted her eyelids if an earth shaking event took placel thanked people in a voice which made you want to pinch her to make her speak again more and slid out of our mist. Then came the winter break and I went home.

When I came back Lahore was bathed in golden sunlight all day. The air was fresh and cool. The canal flowed peacefully as fewer boys bathed in it. It was winter. Teddy boys and girls roamed around out of doors all day. The old man who sold hot roasted grams---Chana wala Baba---stood near the campus shouting ‘Chana Jor Garam’. The term would begin in a day or two. As I walked on the Mall near Aitchison it started raining. I had to jump into a rickshaw and by the time I reached Gulberg it was pouring. To my surprise I found Lahore could be cold. I ate early, read ‘Venus and Adonis’ and laughed at the behaviour of Adonis:

‘I know not love’, quoth he, ‘nor will not know it,

Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it:

‘Tis much to borrow, and I will not owe it;

My love to love is love but to disgrace it,

For I have heard it is a life in death,

That laughs, and weeps, and all but with a breath.

At about ten I thought I would go to sleep. It was still raining outside---Adonis still remained unwooed.

Suddenly there was a soft knock. The wind was howling outside and I thought it was the wind. Then there was another knock. I went and opened the door---and there stood Raheela, drenched from top to toe in the rain, her tight clothes revealing the contours of her body. I felt my heart rush to my throat and I said:

‘Come in. Sit down before the heater.

She did so hurriedly explaining that the girls hostel she lived in was only for a few girls and it was supposed to open the next day. The guest rooms in Gulberg were closed for white washing. She had gone home early so she was the only one who did not know that the hostels would be closed. The owner of the Gulberg guest house was there but all alone. Even his wife was not there.

‘I want to go back home. I felt I would fall ill so I came in for a moment’.

‘Where is home’,

‘My father is posted to Kohat. He is in the air force’.

‘But you can’t go to Kohat. It is too far away’, I expostulated.

‘I’ll ring my mother then. I am sure she would know somebody here’.

‘But dry yourself and eat something first’, I said.

‘Let me ring first. It is so late’.

I brought out a rain coat and put it around her. Then locking the door we went out to be greeted by squalls of wind and torrents of rain.

‘But now you are getting wet’, she said ‘I can go on my own’,

‘Forget it’, I said firmly. I knew it could be dangerous for her. A taxi came by and I hailed it. We went to the nearest phone and got a call booked for Group Captain Mirza at Kohat. The call came through soon enough but the family was away. They had gone to a marriage. In those days there were no cell phones nor was it easy to trace numbers. We had to come back; Raheela was nearly in tears. Nobody spoke a word till I stopped the taxi before a Chinese restaurant near Liberty which was at the height of fashion in Lahore at that time.

‘I won’t she protested.

‘Raheela’ I said firmly ‘don’t let us have a scene please. I have to eat too. Just have soup.

‘Come’.

I was aghast at the firmness of my tone. It was as if Raheela was just another human being and not someone who made my heartbeats go wild and face flush whenever she was near me. The firmness produced a strange reaction---a ghost of a smile. But it brought the radiance of dawn on a visage which had been clouded with anxiety since she had arrived drenched and distraught. So I had my first meal with her with the Chinese dragons in crimson and violet celebrating. I drank coke which went like wine to my head. I sat there intoxicated and wathced her eat daintily. But she ate with appetite. She was hungry. The meal became a poem, a symphony, a mystic ritual and regretted that it should come to an end. She meekly accepted my paying for it; eyes fluttered; brief encounter---‘thanks’.

Back to my room to find the address of a girl, someone she had talked to, in my diary. She clutched at this hope but the address was of Multan. Again the anxiety; again the furrowed brow; again the look of mute pain. I was nearly midnight too.

‘Look Raheela’ I said in desperation ‘You sleep and I’ll go try to stay the night with a friend’.

‘There is no need to go. It’s too late anyway. I’ll sit on the chair before the heater’, she said in a low voice but distinctly. Her mind seemed to be made up.

‘Change into my clothes. You’ll catch a cold’, I suggested without looking at her.

When she kept quiet I handed over my clothes and she changed in the attached bath room. When she emerged I could not help staring at her. Her perfectly moulded body filled up my clothes in the most ravishing ways. The hair running wild around her lovely face clearly revealed the sensuality straight combing tried to conceal. The bashfulness heightened the voluptuousness though she tried to look at the rows of books on the shelf as if I was not sitting on the chair.

‘Now go to sleep’, I said steadying my voice.

‘And you’, she asked from the open pages of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander’.

‘I’ll sit before the heater’.

She slid into the bed without a word. I put off the light. The heater glowed red into the little room. It rained incessantly outside and the wind hit out again and again against the windows. Then there was thunder. She sat bold upright on the bed and the heater stopped glowing---the power had failed. It became cold. I got up to warm myself. She moved in the blankets. ‘Sameer’ came her voice as if from clenched teeth ‘Take one of the blankets. I am warm now’. ‘It is only one blanket’, I said perching myself on the edge of the bed. ‘It is doubled just now’. I kept quiet. She too remained quiet. But I did not leave the bed. Then she put the blanket on me. I found her exposed so I edged back and straightened the blanket on her brushing her hair. An electric current passed my body and I kept sitting there all tingling till I heard her teeth chattering. I too was numb with cold. Without a word I put the blanket on both of us and got in the bed turning on my side away from her maddening body. I don’t know when I slept but when I got up I was alone in the bed. It was a fine day. She was nowhere to be seen---no, not in the bathroom. It was maddening. On the table was a paper which mocked me with THANKS!

This term Raheela was back in Gulberg once again. The Girls Hostel had closed down permanently and the newly painted building in Gulberg was back in business. But now she did visit meoccasionally. These visits were unannounced and if she heard voices or saw motorcycles parked outside my room she would turn back. One day, when I was sipping chilled beer, she came in. I tried to hide the tin and the glass with the golden fluid frothing at the rim but she knew.

‘You’ve been drinking Sameer’, she said with gentle amusement.

‘Well, yes’ I replied guiltily ‘but how do you know’.

‘By the smell. It’s all over the room’.

‘But how do you know the smell’, I wanted to kick myself for the question.

‘I know’---gentle laughter this time---‘my father drinks’.

‘Oh’ I said, fishing out the glass. She watched me as I sipped it and talked of so many things.

Slowly I discovered that she could be amusing and even mischievous but always so bashfully, so quietly, so gracefully. She could laugh but almost silently. And when she laughed those large eyes became slits and then opened up so luminously. Her rippling lips lost their composure. She became animated till once again the melancholic languorous look took over. She did not mind my drinking but she never stayed long when I drank. In fact, she never stayed long in my room. She also did not go to restaurants with me nor did she allow me to come to her room. What she did enjoy with me was going to the Shalimar Gardens or having long walks along the canal. She also liked the zoo. Indeed, I was surprised at the way she admired the animals and talked to them in gentle murmurs almost cooing to them at times. She seemed to forget I was with her.

Once again the summer had come---the hot, burning, dry summer of Lahore in May and June. Raheela did not seem to mind. She did not even seem to perspire as the rest of us did. But she wore light colours which made her contours even more maddeningly desirable. I was half crazy with desire but Raheela did not know. She seemed to be above all earthly desire. Then came three months of separation; of torture by fantasy and dreams while it rained and the earth became green and I finished everything from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell and the canals of Lahore ran muddy and semi-naked urchins stood bathing in them till midnight. She returned in September and the final examination would come soon---only after another winter.

I tried everything I knew. I tried what my friends told me for I had told them I loved her. The lovely little cards, bathed in scent, I put in her books seemed never to have reached her. On her birthday, which I found out by the merest chance. I took out. It was a glorious, golden November day and the sun was setting far off in the Ravi. We were in a boat. The boatman, of course, did not know English. I had decided to make a clean breast of it.

‘Look Raheela. How red is the sun as it sinks in the river’, I said.

‘It seems so sad. Beautiful but sad’, she said as if to herself.

‘Sad. You are an year old. It’s not sad. You should be happy’.

She smiled her wan smile not saying anything. Then, when we were coming back with her hair flying in my eyes in a rickety rickshaw she said: ‘Should one be happy as one gets older’? And when I wanted to remonstrate she laughed playfully and said,

‘Oh! But I am happy Sameer. I am happy. We will never be young. And Lahore will not be Lahore if we are not, will it’?

I was dumbfounded. Yes, it was this moment which was precious. We were young and happy. And Lahore was Lahore, the city of enchantment and good eating and fun, only because we were young. I was happy but the unsaid between us remained unsaid. I just could not open my mouth before her---not to talk of love.

In December was my birthday. It was a miserable month because Raheela had hinted she would be married. She never spoke but in monosyllables and hints but I gathered as much. After all the MA was coming to an end. Then came my birthday. A friend of mine had taken care to tell her of it and all my friends, who had given me a party in the morning, announced that nobody would visit me in the evening. I waited for her. I waited first with a smile and an eagerness and then with anger and in the end with sad resignation. The, after nine, I started drinking the Vodka which my friends had presented me. I had finished more than half the bottle when I heard her gentle knock. She came in as if afraid to intrude.

‘I thought you’d never come’, I said with drunken courage.

‘My father had come Sameer’, she said with genuine regret. ‘He went back just now’.

‘Have you had your food’ I said reproachfully.

‘Yes. I’m afraid I had to. But we can go anywhere you like’.

I stood up but I was unsteady. I sat down again. I felt so mellow and soft and mushy inside. I felt I was warm and melting. No, I did not want to go out anywhere. This was paradise. I decided to stay there and brought out some chocolates for her.

‘Happy birthday Sameer’, she said with a smile.

‘Thanks. So you found out I am twenty two. But where is my present’?

‘You refuse to go out with me otherwise you would have got it’, she said with her lustrous eyes smiling at me. Oh how could her lips be made for anything but the madness of kissing I thought helping myself to another drink. ‘So you will deny me my birthday gift’, I said in mock anger. She laughed and offered me cashew nuts. I offered her one back. She brought her full lips near it and the cashew nut went in while my finger touched the delicate skin of the lip. She withdrew at the touch. No more offering of eatables!

I was listening to her. Her mesmerising voice sang in my ears. She was telling me ordinary thintgs. Yet I lived in the charmed world of Coleridge’s ‘damsel with a dulcimer’. Her beauty weaved a circle round her thrice and I could imagine that she had fed on honey dew and drunk the milk of paradise. It was raining again but she sat there unafraid of the howl of the wind and the sound of the rain heralding the setting in of the winter in Lahore. I do not know what I said but at one point I noticed that the bottle was nearly empty. It was a big bottle but it was almost empty. This was surprising. But I was intent upon that book, the one containing Shelley and Byron. Did it make sense to declaim:

I can give not what men call love

But wilt those accept not

The worship the heart lifts above

And the heavens reject not,---

It seemed too theatrical. I desisted. But Raheela bent forward and teased the book out of my hand. Her fingers touched mine and I lay back feeling I was flying.

‘Sameer stop declaiming Shelley’, I heard. I was surprised. There must be some mistake.

I had not said a word---or had I? The world was blurred. Raheela’s voice was like silver bells but the bottle was empty. Who had emptied it? I was sure there was some left. I was sure I had not drunk it---or had I? Then the lights died. The red glow of the heater guided me to the bed or was it Raheela? Raheela was there somewhere. I heard the word ‘love’---was it my voice? I turned to look at the red glow but it too was no more. My boots were not on me. I was in bed and Raheela was with me. Her hair caressed my cheeks. She wore flowers. She smelled so sweet. A sea of passion inundated me. Raheela was next to my skin. She breathed with me. Her voice lylted in the crypts of my being but not a word did she say---only murmurs. I was saying something. I was talking. I don’t know what. My lips met hers; my tongue found hers; and I groaned in ecstasy. Somewhere far far away there was thunder and cloudburst and I had her in my arms. Her voluptuous curves were mine to savour. She was clothed only in her beauty; beauty which could ravish my senses. And then the senses blurred and I knew no more---

The next morning was fresh but my headache was terribel. Raheela---where was she? I looked all around almost shouting her name. She was not there; was she ever there?

So, she had given me her birthday gift---but had she? Then I went to the bed. There was a crumpled white still sweet-smelling motia flower there.

‘Thanks’, I said with a smile picking up the flower tenderly.

Written 1979; Rewritten with changes 2001 – Not published

The Lead Gatherer

The Nowshera firing-rang come to life when some Armoured or Artillery Unit comes there for the annual main-gun firing. This is mostly an autumn-even, but the brokem, semi-hilly area under the blazing sun is often uncomfortably hot. The officers escape as often as possible to the field officers’ mess and order cold drinks to refresh themselves. The firing ends by the evening and the troops clean the guns. Sometimes some poor subalterns get roped into this gun-cleaning drill. The poor youth dawdles sulkily with the enthusiastic troops, not knowing whether exert himself even more than them to prove his intrinsic superiority or to stand aloof with his arms folded on olympian officer-like aloofness. This done, the troops have their meal and the officers get ready to spend a weary social evening in the mess. The lucky ones, however, go to the club to have a good time.

These are good days for the villages around the parched landscape. When the boom of the guns is silenced, like mice from obscure corners, the village boys peep out from their hideouts. They scamper pell-mell to the craters newly pockmarked on the ugly face of this part of the earth. There is keenness in their eyes and zest in their skinny claws. They look for lead and the find is accompanied with a shout of triumphant happiness. This is a merry game but it has the most cryptic import. It means money which buys food and clothes. It means the difference between life and starvation at times. And, of course, on lead depends the social pre-eminence of a man of the joint family.

It happened on one of those October mornings when the weather was beautifully golden. Naik Mohammed was moodily whistling to his goats when the air filled up with the roar of tank engines. He turned about and saw a caterpillar of smoke revealing the iron breast of a tank coming towards the grove of trees on the ranges. His impassive face burst into a grin and he thanked God. This was the great blessing they were all waiting for. The tanks were harbingers of great joy for them. With almost maternal affection he saw the machines go and settle themselves into trees. Men in black clothes jumped down from them and started shouting to each other. Then Naik Mohammed saw the jeeps of the officers. These people had impressed him into mute awe. They had shining stars and half moons on their shoulders and sometimes in the night they shone filling his heart with dumb ecstasy. Once he had even found a star. It was not very bright, but he rubbed it on fine sand till it started shining brightly. Someone stole it from him and he was disappointed.

When Naik Mohammed went back to the village it was brimming with happy expectation. Everyone knew that the tanks had come. There would be firing now in a day or two and then there would be lead galore. The dry bowels of the earth had provided a very precarious sustenance in this area. Most of the grown-up men had left the land to find employment elsewhere. Naik Mohammed’s father had gone soldiering but in the swampy darkness of tropical Bengal, he fell while trying to decide the question whether the name of East Pakistan could painlessly be changed to Bangla Desh or otherwise. Naik was only eight years old then; old enough to comprehend the grim reality of death. His mother had, contrary to village mores, really loved her husband. They had a meteoric interval of genuine pleasure such as most inmates of the mud huts had never known. And when the soldier died, his wife could not even find consolation in the fact of motherhood. For many months emotion seemed to have congealed and frozen into her bitter brain. Then the boy’s bony skeleton revived the flow of life. She began kissing and cuddling him. She began loving him with the obsessive mania of the deprived. She was the only one who didn’t like the arrival of soldiers, on tanks or trucks, on the ranges. Her whole being expressed a revulsion for war and all its manifest symbols. She pursed her lips and fought the black sobs which threatened to wire up to choke her when the tanks come. But she was not a foolShe encouraged Naik Mohammed to go and gather lead. It was the difference, she knew, between one meal a day and two. ‘Mother, Mother’ shouted the boy, ‘The tanks have come. Black men drive them. Mother black men. Mother”.

“Yes, life of my life, where art thou” replied the mother. They chattered on in Pushto in tones of enthusiastic animation. The boy said he would try hard to look for a partially destroyed grenade or other sold as decoration pieces in the bazaar of Nowshera or maybe---O wonder---even in Peshawar itself.

“Thou should not lose thy sleep, my moon” said the mother.

“O mother but night firing takes place only once. Let me go once.”

“O son come now, have thy bread. We’ll talk about all this later.”

In the grove of trees at the ranges, life was far from cheerful. The soldiers ate a wonderful meal of mutton cury and baked bread. The officers’ mess had an impressive menu of fried chicken, boiled peas, mashed potatoes and ice cream. Some of the officers had beer too, but most of them were too busy to enjoy themselves. The shadow of the coming activity hung heavily on their minds. It made them apprehensive and irritable. The prospect of physcial and mental effort made them cheerless. Life was a routine programme and not a journey on a precipice as it was for Naik and his mother.

After a day or two of bootless irrilation, the air started cracking with shell and shot. The officers sat in a shelter with binoculars on their eyes. The young officers climbed the tanks and commanded them. It was hot and stifling in the machines. The officers were often annoyed with each other. Unfortunately they had found their commitments to their squadrons and troops weighing heavily upon them. They listened to the melicious whispers of their NCOs and JCOs and couldn’t brook each other’s guts. Rivalries sprang up to divide them and grated on their nerves. All the squadron officers were huffy and ill-at-ease.

When the tanks went back, the village children rushed up to the place of the newly formed craters. When somebody foound a shell, he cried out in triumph.

“Naika” cried Khalid “come here, come here”

“Yes” replied Naik Mohammed running up to his friend.

The other boy held out a metallic object. It was shiny and smooth. They inspected it with interest. They had never seen such a curiously shaped thing before.

“You take it Khalid” said Naika trying to hide his envy. “It must be valuable”

“But I won’t sell it. I’ll keep in under my pillow. It is beautiful”

“Yes. It is beaufiful. Keep it” said Naika and went towards the yawning holes in the ground.

He found twisted pieces of lead, splinters and pieces of metal. It was heavy in his sheet of white cloth, his ‘chaddar’, and he made trips to his hut laden with this symbol of contentment. His mother fussed over him and tried to get him some good meals. The village shop-keeper gave loans to Naik’s mother after grinding her under his heel as a rule. But now he knew that the loan would be paid. His small eyes shone cunningly as he lavishly dished out dried beans, onions and pulses. He chuckled to himself when he found the woman looking with mute yearning at white cotton cloth. He swooped down like a hawk over the bales of cotton and opened them with an inviting swish in front of the hungry eyes of the woman. He caressed the smooth creamy texture of the cloth. He pointed out the various gaudy designs in a voice of potent promise. The woman’s heart twisted itself in tangles of pure desire. It leaped out almost as an elemental passion in her breast.

“Buy it or it will finish” exhorted the avaricious shopkeeper.

“I want but one little shirt piece” said the woman affecting indifference.

“What! A shirt. No. But I can’t sell less than a complete suit to anyone. Shirt and ‘Shalwar’ (trousers)

She hesitated for a long time. It meant taking credit. Parting with cash. But the demon in her breast wanted the colourful bauble. She took it for her son, not for herself. She could live without new clothes. The greasy face of the shopkeeper expressed infinite pleasure. He rubbed his plams together, welcoming a dirty little girl who had come to buy salf.

Naik knew when the night-firing started. He was very happy and tripped along gaily. The boys had invited him to fly a kite and he had skipped over the broken breast of his mother earth with the wild abandon of youth. The meagre meals were forgotten in those golden moments of flitting like butterflies on the stony crags of the area around the ranges. The kite in the sky provided them rare merriment which was relished even more because it was not an everyday occurrence. The kite and its thread cost money, after all, and only one of the boys could indulge in the luxury of kite-flying. The others merely followed on thin legs the wayward caprices of the paper kite with uproarious glee.

It was after midnight when the tanks stopped firing. The Adjutant was noen too plased with a senior subaltern who had played havoc with the explosives and the grenades. All the five juniormost subalterns had followed this veteran into a real orgy of gratuitious explosions. They had been instructed to come back before the sunest so that all the unexploded grenades etc could be burst or defused. But there these newly trained young people had vied with each other as the aggressive squadron-spirit made the hot blood explode in their brains. Ignoring the dire instructions of the Regimental Headquarters they stayed on and it was dark. Then they panicked. They had to report to duty. With fluttering hearts, transformed to craven sheep from blustering gallants, they rushed back to their squadrons. The senior subaltern dismissed the sharp shooters who could have helped to burst the grenades with a guilty heart. He didn’t even confide his troubles to the old senior JCO whom he regarded as something of a sage although, of course, of an inferior social status.

When all was silent, Naika stepped stealthily into the area marked off with red flag. Sometime there were sentries even where lead and grenades etc could be found. He had been told that they shoot on sight and he wanted to live. The world contained the joys of kite fling and good food and many others. He wanted to enjoy all for them. So he went about hunting for discarded pieces of treasure under the lovely moonlight. He could see as well almost as in the evening. The air was quite cool and his bare feet relished the crisp coolness of the earth. Some of the splinters were hot and he burned his fingers once. But business was brisk. He took many laods home. He didn’t find any sentries so on his third round he brought a torch. Now he would go into the broken ground and around the knolls. These were dark and getting darker every moment. The torch was of invaluable assistance.

As he was picking the sharp splinters of grenades, he came across one which seemed to be whole. He knew it was bound to be splintered on the other side or cracked but he almost shouted with joy. That was what he had been looking for all these years. This bonanza would decorate some house and fetch him enough to make his mother smother him with kisses. He sat down and picked it up. The grenade did not seem to be broken or fractured. He couldn’t believe this incredible miracle. A COMPLETE Grenade! His mind seemed to boggle on its foundations. This never did happen. He contemplated the object in mute amazement. Then came a deafening roar. There was a flash, a cry and then silence gripped the open range.

But far away the dozing sentries had heard the sound. They awakened the guard commander. The NCO sent one of them towards the magazine, another towards the knoll where the sound had come from and the third one to awaken the Adjutant. Even the C.O. was informed because the Adjutant didn’t want to take any initiative without apprising him of the situation. Soon enough almost all the officers were up and ready. After some time---infact it was dawn---they found the boy Naik Mohammed lying in a puddle of caked brown blood. He was alive but his arms had been blown to smithereens by the explosion. His face was a mass of meat. The soldiers were shocked and murmured prayers. The Adjutant got him transported to the hospital.

They would have stopped discussing the event had a strangely attired, completely distracted woman not appeared in the afternoon. She was crazed and incomprensible. She wanted to see the biggest ‘sahib’ and she said it was her son who had died. She was told that he had not died but she wouldn’t listen to reason. She had not gone insane, however. She was only temporarily crazed because she could be seen begging in the bazaars of Nowshera later. With her was a cripple with no arms, only one leg and no eyes either. His face was hideously botched but only his mother remembered how handsome it had been.

Written 1980; published in The Muslim 15 November 1985; in The Legacy (pp. 170-176).

The Dove of Peace

The man turned on his heel and looked straight ahead. White billowy clouds wandered like busy children on jagged serried hills. The magic was veiled. Then the sun’s rays struck the leaders of the smoke-balls like a magician’s wand. They struck a new tune and it was like a painting of the realist school and as the clouds vanished, a lovely panorama appeared. It was a landscape with green groves and silverstreaked streams meandering lazily between them. The mountains were no longer meaningless tumours on a smooth body. They were the high notes of the musical scale. The patches where Turner had given loftness to his paints by emphasis. They were the black tie on a light suit.

He called the woman and she emerged from the dark cave in which the rain had forced her to stop. After all the whimpering child had to have peace and one couldn’t call raindropes whipping your nose and cheeks blue and black and redraw, one of the best things which could happen. Then the other children, a boy and girl, also started crying. The man was indifferent to these things and they never complained to him. No Sir! It was “Ma, this and Ma that and Ma the other things.” Even if she gave them a good beating they came back to her for comfort. Her sweating body gave them some strange solace which no other body could. In an earthy, atavistic way she knew it---that’s why, she knew she could beat them. Her husband quoted some books, saying she was wrong. Well, she felt sure not one of these great wise men had ever brought up children. If they had and the creature who was part of their secret most wonderful self had been whimpering because there was no food they would have done somethings soon to kill those empty hunger pains. The man said he knew these things and would search for a world where no troubles existed. She didn’t believe him, of course. He was such a talker. But it was wonderful when she was a young girl. O!she had magic-filled eyes which were black and vivacious. And he talked of peace on earth and a place where the parched fields no longer waited for rain which never came. He said he could even stop all those men from turning into venomous adders and snow-trapped wolves once a year. That, she knew even then when his words conjured up Utopian visions, was impossible. She had seen packes of steppenwolves descending upon villages and burning them. In pools of blood her father had kicked his heels and slipped and fallen again and again. And it was before she knew the meaning of that strange lack of motion which made her father so unaccountably apathetic to all her entreaties. But the moon had a halo of manyhued radiance around it and the houses slumbered like tombs. She saw the dust at her feet and listened to words which came like the humming of bees. The man was young then. He looked like a boy. And he talked of places where they’d play hide and seek on full stomachs and people could grow old and toss their grandchildren in the air and didn’t fret about death. Often when she left him, the dawn had crept in wearing a shroud of white linen. The parched fields were visible in their cruel, disillusioning truthfulness. The man was not in right. She had work to do. A woman’s work---far more difficult than a man’s.

And than they had got married and she knew that her man was useless. He read books and was awfully clever. But she couldn’t feed the children on books, could she. Then once again she saw the rain drops turning life into a long marriage celebration. There were green fields and the children gambolled about in hectic abandonment. They were no longer timid and sulky, they were boisterous and obstreperous. And, wonder of wonders, toothless smiles made life a rainy day in the ploughing season. She hummed a song and noted with the lazy gratification of a cat in her eyes how her man became strong and buoyant. But so did all the other men too and they thought about things, which filled their minds with gall. They took some implements to cause pain and got intoxicated by war cries and the insistent music of wardrums. Even their foolish women told them to do deeds of valour and they went forth like a could of locusts. Once again there were pools of blackish blood and it came back with the men to the village. The vilalge was pillaged and burned. The woman escaped with her man and three children.

And the man told her that he would search for the dove of peace. There could be no peace without that little bird with its olive branch. She didn’t care. She was too tired to care. The stones were sharp on the mountains and the needles prickly in the stomach. The days were hot and the nights chilly. The children were almost crazed by fear and heat and hunger and they wailed like demented pups. But she followed him with some little hope because everywhere else there was death. The men of the warring tribes had still not donned the masks of men. They prowled about and killed for sounds and words, even children and women like her. The wolf didn’t know any words and it read no books and it killed on an empty stomach either. But then she wasn’t clever. Her man was.

They strated descending the rugged mountain slowly. The children were quiet. Suddenly there was a shout and a whistle. They froze on the spot. On the highest peak in sight stood a savage. His body glistened in the sun as it illuminated him as well as the lovely green spot where he stood.

‘No now, please not now’ she whispered as her hands grabbed the children close to her. There was a storm is her heart. There was a tumult in theirs also. Even the man looked like a trapped dog. Slowly they began to descend again. The rocks got knife-like edges all of a sudden and bit them viciously. The sun revealed their position. A wind sprang up and it was coldly indifferent to their predicament. The savage followed the family of man. His spear, his sword and his shield clanged and cluttered ominously together. It was the only music in that quiet place. Under the clear sky and the neat-looking earth the pursuit was on. It was a very serious matter. Even the baby on the breast looked as timorously quiel as a wet rabbit. Then the martial music waxed louder. A stone was rolling down the hill. It was a huge boulder and it came striking against rocks and trees so that the valley reverberated with its murderous boom.

Far above, the savage leered like an insane creature. His eyes watched with hawk-like hope and pristine glee at his missile’s progress. The man screamed and grabbed the woman under a big rock. The woman pulled the children but one of them was left behind. The agent of death took its excerable title of a child of seven and went its way to static rest at the end of a short journey. The savage was pleased with himself. He had done the job skillfully. He swelled with professional pride. Now it was dark and he could go back to the camp with the smell of fried meat, with a conscience at case. There were men who tried and failed pathetically.

Crying as if she would never see the green fields smile at her, the woman followed her man. He was quiet and his eyes stung with tears. The boy had died and he could hear the music receding from his own life. The valley lying ahead seemed less charming. The dove of peace, yes even the dove of peace seemed less desirable! After all who would inherit that lovely planet with eternal peace and love if his own spirit was dead. But these dark and selfish thoughts plagued his mind for a short time. Hand in hand, they reached the valley. There they lay down with the moon beaming upon them so pleasantly. It was like old times again but there was a strange emptiness in the crypts of her mind. The woman turned away from her daughter to the side where stones lay---not her son. This time her thoughts were of him and no one dried her tears.

In the morning they found some fruit and fish in the stream. The woman almost dared to be happy. Her husband was happy. He had been right. Here there was plenty to eat and no walls, no fences, and no savages with stones. Her children were safe. She looked at her husband with tenderness and he understood. But he told her later when she was calm and resigned that this was a magic land. They would have to go back because the magic of all the wise men of the land they had come from could not help them if they stayed long. The illusion would disappear and they would bring their deserts with them and their parched fields and savages and hungry children. They would have to go back and remember the plan of this lovely land and create it with love and unselfishness. And to end all savageness they would also take away the dove of peace. The wise men had chosen him to fetch it. He was the only one who could end the thousand of years of hatred in the world. The future of the blood pools and useless tears lay on his tender shoulders. She listened as if she were mesmerized. Now that she was not hungry she could focus her mind on words of wisdom.

The three lovely days passed in incredulous awe. The bird just came to them and they put it in a cage which it didn’t seem to mind. It was a fat, sleek-looking dove and it had a tender olive branch in its beak. She couldn’t believe that this bird could prevent all the fighting in the earth but she didn’t say so. After all the wise men must be knowing something---she tought.

So they came back and the fruits gradually finished. The fish also came to an end. It was miserable now once again. Her mind revolted against hunger now. After all, there were places where no misery existed, so why was she renouncing the magic of going about with life in her limbs and a song on her lips. It crushed her and debased her. She again became irritable and stupid. The little girl no longer laughed. She just stuck to her mother like her alter-ego and whined like a beaten cur. The man was still hopeful but his eyes looked out of sunken pits. They were full of mute torture blended with insane hopes. He tried to look around for food. In the morning they had sucked a cactus plant for water. The sap in its stubborn resistant body was bitter but they loved it. Even the dove relished the plant’s succulent body which the woman cut up for it into little bits. She had to care for the dove as she would have for a pet cat or a domestic donkey. And she failed to comprehended the mystique about the bird.

Then came the time which she dreaded. Her milk dried up because she was an emaciated skeleton now. The baby cried and then whimpered as if it were being stifled and then died. She was too numb to cry now. She sat down beneath the stars and let out hoarse yells. Then she buried it like witch-mothers bury stolen children. The dove looked on unruffled. The man’s head hung low in guilt.

After two more nights and days she found her daughter looking like a demented skeleton. She knew it was the macabre apprach of death by stravation. She gave her a piece of green cactus and the gfirl only ollied at it with edpressionaless eyes. Then in a whisper she askedher mothr for food.

It was a demented cry for sustenance. The whole body had collapsed in front of the consuming desire. The will-power andlogic had yielded to that basic necessity. In all her life of six years she had never streched her hands towards a shining stone or a rag-doll as desperately as she did towards her mother now for food. The mother looked far away at the lowlying mountains. The villages were still two days and who knew if they were safe or not. Then she looked at the dove. The peaceful bird was as fat as ever and as serene as if the problem of a hard desert didn’t touch it. The woman toyed with the idea. She hesitated for a long time. Then the little girl seemed to go into a swoon. Her husband was sleeping. The baby was dead. The dove was alive. She knew what to do. She wished those wise men were in her place. But of course, the wise men would talk to her about some hazy future of idyllic peace. The dove was meat-food! She killed it and lit the fire. Then deliberately, calmly, she roasted it and gave it to her daughter. She saw the flame of light come back into her fragile frame. She saw her smile. Then she awakened the man and thrust the roasted flesh in his mouth before he knew what it was. Last of all she ate mouthfuls of it herself...and all over the peaceful earth friends illed friends and the savages picked up their swords and shield and stones again!

Written 1981; published in The Legacy (pp. 104-109).

The Dance of the Beards

It was the best time of the year, the time when the maize was mowed. The rains, which had made the sky a whirling darkness of water and the land a swamp, had slowed down. It did rain once or twice a week but the sun shone too. And when it came out it grew hot. But out in the fields it was intensely green and the grass grew upto my shoulder. It was the magic season.

I would try to run away but the Maulvi Sahib came to teach me the Quran in the afternoon. He had a stick which made my heart stand still and then beat fast. And I went shrinking within myself to where he sat next to my grandfather.

‘Dada Jan Adab. Maulvi Saab Adab,’ I mumbled.

‘Jeete raho (may you live long),’ came the booming response. And then the lesson would begin. Every letter refused to be registered for there was sharp pain and bitter words for mistakes. While my eyes danced on the page hot tears scalded my eyes. And still the lesson went on till the Maulvi sahib said: ‘Enough for today, foo. Now go and learn the verse off by heart otherwise I’ll break every bone in your body’.

I went out cringing and the eyes of the Maulvi Saab drilled holes into me. And once I was inside the hubbub of the Zenana, I forgot all about the lesson. My elder sisters were cooking things and women sat near them telling stories about the wolves. I listened to them and sucked a mango here and a lime there.

Then I escaped into the green world outside. And there boys flew kites. They were the ones I was not to play with: semi-naked, brown and dirty. But they ran from one green field to another and the kites over their heads were so colourful. I did enjoy it all. Among them, as in the Zenana people laughed outright.

One of the boys I knew was Gullu. He was of my age and as tall as I. But there the resemblance ended. For Gullu was dark and dirty and wore a loincloth whereas I was fair, clean and wore a shirt and white pyjamas. I liked Gullu, and though I was told that his father was a shoe-maker, still used to play with him.

Gullu was obviously flattered at my condescension and boasted about his friendship with me to his other companions. One of them, Bansilal by name, came to me once and warned me against Gullu.

‘Chote Lala,’ he replied ‘His touch defiles the likes of you. He is of a low caste,’ ‘I don’t believe in all that’ I replied without conviction.

‘And if Khan Sahib finds out?’

Khan Sahib was my grandfather and his name was enough to blanch my cheeks, ‘I only allow him to show me places,’ I replied evasively. ‘I’ll show you places,’ he replied.

I had no reply and decided to allow him to do so. Bansi Lal was delighted. He looked at the semi-circle of the other boys standing huddled together like sheep with triumph and started running towards a hill. I followed, and soon we were lost between criss-crossing fields and groves of guana trees and huts where thin brown men sat milking goats. The other boys were not visible any more and Gullu wasn’t there. Bansi Lal, the money-lender’s son, took me up the hill and sat down on the summit. The scene below was really fascinating. Far away there wre kites but they were below me. Bansi told me all about the other boys. It seemed that all of them were below him and, of course, not fit to be spoken to by me. Gullu, however, was the most despicable of the lot. He was an untouchable who couldn’t even come into the temple.

‘He eats snakes,’ Bansi shuddered with horror. I too shuddered. How could anyone eat snakes I wondered.

When I came back Bansi led me into mischief. We went into a field and plucked the green maize cobs. I enjoyed doing this though I wasn’t hungry and didn’t even know whose field it was. Just then dogs barked and an old man came shouting at the top of his voice. When he saw me he stopped shouting, tried to twist his face into a smile and said: ‘Sarkar these are unripe. I will send them to your house and you can have as many as you want’. He was whining, that old man, and bending low. The dogs, whom he had beaten with his stick, hid between his legs and growled.

I and Bansi left the field and Bansi told me that the field was mine and the old man was an impudent dotard. I was eating what I had in my pockets so I didn’t reply.

From the next day the maize started pouring in. The smell of the harvest was strong in the vast courtyards. There was hustle and bustle and riotous colour everywhere. Carts full of things were brought and emptied. The bullocks kept munching the green and their bells kept tinkling. I went out and lay down on the fresh smiling maize crop. The air was warm and down below there was warmth too. I could see the stone walls of the house and far away the well with its pulley from where I was. All around me was food.

I went out and found more carts arriving. The men shouted to each other but a hush fell over everyone when my grandfather came out. His clerk, called Munshi Ji by everyone, was with him.

‘Is it all in?’ asked Dada Jan.

‘No Sarkar. Two carts are left,’ replied the munshi in his ingratiating voice.

‘Let those sister-fuckers hurry up,’ said my grandfather.

‘Yes Khan Sahib,’ replied Munshi Ji.

My grandfather turned to go in. Before I could turn to hide myself, he saw me. By his look I knew he was sure that I had heard him abusing the cart-drivers. ‘You donkey why do you come where grown-ups are doing their work,’ he thundered. I cast my eyes down and didn’t lift them till I heard his footsteps pass by.

Then I too went out and found that a shed had been improvised. In this they had poured the maize crop till the cobs had spilled over. Men were assiduously arranging them but they spilled over and spread out. I went behind the huge mound of gram and cobs and flung myself on the mountain of sweet-smelling food. After sometime I heard someone moving cautiously on all fours. I looked around and found several such mounds. And behind one of them was Gullu. And he was hungrily devouring a milky-white cob. At first he hesitated but when I laughed, he also laughed and we both helped ourselves to the sweetness of the maize. There we sat with the grain all brown and green and ivory and golden and spread out all around us. There were mounds and we didn’t imagine it would all end. It was under us and on the left and on the right and when we rolled over it we could smell it. The odour was fresh and even more enticing than that of the wheat which came in April. And above us the first stars were blinking in slowly darkening sky.

I do not know how long we would have stayed there if we had not been caught. The Munshi caught us.

‘Oh Chote Lala mian,’ he said incredulously. And then his face twisted itself into an expression of contempt.

‘And what is this brat of a chamar doing here,’ he shouted.

I was forgotten and some strong men picked up Gullu and dragged him before my grandfather. He was scowling and I saw that the old man who had told me not to pluck the unripe maize-cobs was bending