Two Short Novels Read Free Page A

and tickled to laughter . . .
    ‘Oh mother, oh mother, where are younow?’
    Beyond the corpse in the darkness of the grave she had become a ghost. In the silence of his doom he wondered whether through the barriers of all these years, her heart could still beat with a piteous sound for him, whether it could still bleed with warm love and anguish at the sound of his tears. ‘In the name of the merciful and the compassionate God,’ she used to say, and gather him into her arms if he woke up in the night, gather him with a surging agony of warmth, answered only by his cries, and still patient when his father heaped all the curses and all the abuse, all the complaints of the mortal wrongs he had suffered to be awakened by the row
. . . . Ebbing with time, receding into thin air, remote she was now, buried under the mound of earth in the cemetery outside Lohgarh gate, which was surrounded by the aura of fear in the night, of suspense in the still whiteness of the noon, except on Fridays when people went to visit the Pir who kept guard on the graves and muttered charms to keep the ghosts away, in return for the gifts and for the pice tendered to him. He remembered the horror of a moment when his grandmother had taken him there and he had seen a skull beside a crumbling mound in the empty sockets of which millions of ants were crawling. He had wondered whether his mother had become an ugly demon with a malevolent steady stare in the pits of her head and a terrible changeless grin on the thrusted teethexposed from hard, indrawn lips.
    But surely she wasn’t eaten by the worms . . . . No, no, not his mother . . . though why not?
    He jerked his body and compressed his lips tight so that he shouldn’t moan, shouldn’t even sigh, and he took the fingers of his right hand to his left to feel the pulse, though he didn’t listen to the verdict, only mechanically registering the pumping of the blood.
    Far off from this dawn, remote, half forgotten, ages before now, before the high school and college, there was a queer impatience, in the feel of early mornings, the fear of being late at school, the violent motion in the belly even as he had gulped hot tea and swallowed mouthfuls of fried parathasdipped in mutton gravy. Thank God, one was rid of that, though it had taken him a long time, for he was seldom ill even though he had prayed in secret to be ill . . . . As he had hurried on his way to school, the dizzy vision of the Master’s perpendicular rod had blotted outspace and time, while the clothes stuck to the flesh in the clammy heat and perspiration ofsummer mornings. His grandmother had no sense of time and did not start cooking his meal until she had said her prayers and swept the rooms of the house from the top storey to the ground floor. He had begged his father to buy him a watch, one of those nice shiny watches with a chain which he could carry in the pocket of his waistcoat to school, as all the other boys had watches and wouldn’t show them to him except from a distance, affecting to be superior Sahibs like Mercado Sahib, the Headmaster. But his father had said that he ought to get up by the muezzin’s call at dawn and say prayers every morning. And then this additional trouble had been added to his difficulties as a kind of reward for his attempt to be happy and fashionable. For, as the fat mullah in the mosque at the end of the narrow lane, in which the flies buzzed over the children’s yellow excretions in the drain, sounded the muezzin’s call, he had to shake himself out of the bed lest his father might beat him for disobeying. And, although he did not know how to say the prayers, he had to run to the mosque to do the wuzu , wash himself, join the congregation and follow it in the various postures: sit, stand, kneel, rub his forehead on the ground and murmur the verses in Arabic which the mullah had taught him by rote during the special lessons he gave him in the evenings, in return for the rich meals, the new