Two Short Novels Read Free

he lifted his head and looked at the bars of light which shone like the silvery spokes of the day through the chinks of the closed windows. ‘Grandmother will be coming down from the kitchen to see me,’ he said to himself.
    She always came down first thing in the morning, the poor old woman, and again the last thing at night. And when he was a child, she had told him lots of fairy stories. He remembered that one which she had told him after his mother had died and which he had retold her with several variations during the holidays.
    ‘How did it run?’

    Once upon a time there was a little boy whose father was a confectioner in the bazaar and whose mother was a beautiful houri. And he had an old grandmother who loved him very much and who used to take him to his father’s shop to eat a sweet pancake and semolina every morning. And he used to toddle and walk holding the hand of his father among the grease and the grime, among the soot of steaming cauldrons and deep black-bottomed pans, full of treacle and clarified butter, and the mud of coolies’ feet bearing sacks of sugar, fruit and flour. And then he had learnt to speak. And when he spoke it was such a pretty speech that they said to his father: ‘He ought to be sent to the Government school when he grows up, for he will surely become a babu with his pretty speech.’ And because he had a lovely pink face, with dark brown eyes and sleek brown hair, they said: ‘He will surely pass his M.A. and become a deputy collector sahib.’ And he had been so happy to hear their prophecies, and he had become so naughty and enthusiastic, that he would smack anybody who did not give him a pice just as if he were already a deputy collector. But when he was five, the cruel angel Izrael had come and taken away his mother. And he had cried when his mother, who was a houri, did not come back from the heaven where she had gone visiting. And another woman had come into their house instead, who, his father had said, was his new mother. But she was only a little bigger than he and he could not call her mother as she quarrelled with him over the toys when they played together. And he had been sad as he had never been sad before. But his grandmother loved him and doted upon him just like his mother, and she laid him in her arms as she made garlands for sale in the bazaar. And then, one day, his father had come to him and said to him that he was grown up now and must go to school to learn to be a big babu and get an M.A. pass, and that he would receive a pice a day for his pocket if he did his lessons well, and that if in addition he came home and learnt the Koran and said the five prayers prescribed by religion, he would get two pice. And that was the day he had started to be a ‘Master of Arts’.

    ‘But, oh, why did they drag me into the dust by making me a Master of Arts?’ he wearily protested, falling back exhausted, the words trailing like a long pain though they had emerged quite casually in a spontaneous new rhythm.
    There was the glow of revelation about them, about the ordinary but natural and expressive sequence into which they had flowed, even though they were born of the doom which sat on him. And the memories of his past seemed to come back to him in their track as if they were an ‘open sesame’; with the force and vivacity of rapiers thrust in the raw wounds of his heart. For from the first cry at birth his life had been pain-marred.
    ‘Sh, sh,’ his mother had warned the world and consoled him, the inconsolable: ‘What is it?’ then, ‘didums, di, di, mother’s darling, di, didi, dum . . . ’ then ‘he is hungry . . . don’t cry’, then, ‘mother’s dearest, loveliest darling . . . he has been neglected’, then . . . ‘my pet . . . my darling . . . don’t cry then . . . . ’ And she had swayed him in her arms, cheek to cheek, flesh to flesh in tenderness . . . slow glory of touch crept into the rapture of smiles, bubbling with the joy of being borne