Fire in the Unnameable Country Read Free

to mortgage the shop to her, allowing the old woman to add to her pension and for the family to acquire a means of supporting itself for the foreseeable future.

    After numerous trips to the local doctor, who was not an oncologist but who managed through conversation to prove (without actually proving) that Mamun M’s illness was imaginary, my father decided he had let years of his life slip away into fabulism as he lay in bed regurgitating the past, and began to impose upon the house strict notions of reality, cutting strings of remembrance and loosening events that seemed no longer plausible, including his discovery of his father’s thoughtreel rubbish, he would say, that they can read thoughts with the shortwave, another way of controlling the public imagination with fear, and that jazz orchestra blowing about a windy hallway and the pressing of the body against the wall like a carpet beetle: true to an extent, but remembering the nightmare, my father would say before casting a gaze elsewhere in time.
    Hedayat remains curious of his father’s thoughts those days on the magician Alauddin’s sudden rise to prominence, his opinions of his wife and wife’s sisters’ flight on the magic rug, but at that time infant Hedayat’s vow of silence was absolute, and he would not have revealed his clairaudience and grown-up thoughts for all the curiosity in the world.
    Grip, Mamun M would declare, placing his thumbs and forefingers on his son’s cheeks and pinching paining invoking evolution, is whatdistinguishes our ability, our opposable digits, God bless, to manipulate the world and to make it human.
    Shukriah, he would instruct with wagging finger: Tell this boy no funny stories beyond the grip of normality, and you too, Chaya, samesame, I am warning.
    As an act of protest against the strict conditions of reality and human behaviour set down by his father’s newly stentorian, masculinist voice, Hedayat briefly returned to a non-ambulatory state and acted as if he had forgotten how to walk, and when his mother yelled, see what you have done, Mamun, he showed preference for scuttling sideways, his back arched, on his hands and feet like a crab, or for crawling about like a barbaric example of the canine tribe, until his mother cajoled him to return to his original silent, ambulatory state. Recall from press reports how at that time there lay strange fruit scattered everywhere in La Maga, which would explode out your raspberry insides and reveal the true colour of your hidden organs, you know what I mean: clusters of little fruits on the treebranches and lying fallen on the dusty streets, which they told you in school to avoid at all cost.
    Come along, Niramish tells one lunch hour, his mixed vegetal odour a constant warning to others to stay away, but a friend to Hedayat since at school he is the only one who will tolerate his silence. Niramish’s own two problems: first the smell of mixed curry vegetables stuck to yellow turmeric fingertips, effusing from clothing, detectable from a hundred feet away. Niramish Khaja, loyal companion, smelly child: it never bothered little Hedayat the slightest, and, in fact, he interpreted the constant smell as an augury of the future, as if it were an odour destined to grow thicker in time. Niramish’s second problem: narcolepsy. In a stumbling sentence, halfway through his response to the teacher’s question, sitting or standing up, even poised in his characteristic loping gait, in the schoolyard or in the cracked-mirror streets, anywhere without warning, he would fall into a stertorous nod,his head would slip and his double chin would quadruple, before the snoring sound came out and came out and out until someone pinched his nostrils, wake up, Niramish, wake up, smelly child.
    Hai, did it happen again, he would re-emerge with a loud snort.
    Niramish, good-natured Niramish, a nutritious and well-meaning friend, would one day provide Hedayat with the