Two Short Novels Read Free Page B

turban, the shirt, the shalwar, the shawl, the shoes and other ‘presents’ which he received for looking after the spiritual welfare of the Chaudhri’s son. ‘God gives man gifts to obtain his own ends.’ He muttered the proverb ironically.
    What was the use of all those prayers, he had never been able to discover in his life. He had never been able to learn Arabic well enough to understand the Koran, though he had repeated the Surasfrom the first page to the last hundreds of times. What was the use of cleaning and purifying oneself, for instance, if the clothes one wore when saying prayers were soiled by all the dirt of the streets and the sweat of the body at night. And though he had never told anyone, while he was saying prayers on a constipated belly he had involuntarily discharged a stinking wind which had fairly resounded back from the walls of the mosque to his own ears, so that it had made him burst out with an embarrassed laugh, though the elders in the congregation who were themselves used to letting loose wind had carried on with their prayers, only turning their eyes a little. He had been afraid that God must have heard it, but then he had reassured himself that since he discharged wind because of the exercise involved in kneeling, bending, standing, sitting and kneeling again, which was the prescribed method of saying prayers, surely God would forgive him for his sin. ‘Thus is the word of thy Lord verified against those who commit abomination!’ What a fool he had been to grieve over the wrath of that impotent oracle of blind vision, ‘the merciful and the compassionate God, to whom all praise belongs, who is the Lord of all worlds, the ruler of the Day of Judgement, whom all humanity serves and whom it asks for aid and to whom the fat mullah calls out in deafening cries every morning, noon, afternoon, evening and night!’
    ‘In the face of the falsehood and lure of the world, I could laugh,’ he said to himself.
    And yet he felt cheated to be fading away imprisoned in this room with his allotted hours and days, how many he did not know, being conscious only of his heart beating, pounding at his chest in the silence of the morning, mingling with the hum of a long-drawn wail, far off like the din of his soul in strife, and near, as near as where the cock crowed on the roof of someone’s house in the gulley.
    The illness seemed to have deafened his ears as if the burnt-up tissue in his body had risen in the haze and clogged that sense, but otherwise he felt lighter, more transparent. He applied his ears and listened attentively, his gaze fluttering as though he were looking for something which he had lost in this room or was trying to remember something which he had forgotten.
    ‘ Allah-ho-Akbar ,’ came the voice of the mullah.
    ‘ Dur, dur , dog,’ Nur murmured rising out of his resignation, angered by the groans of a dry as dust formalist fed by the food of charity.
    ‘Call the faithful to prayer, call them to prayer, you dog. I hate you and I hate your God. I hate you all! To incur your wrath I spit on your face and I spit on the face of your God!’ And he was about to raise himself from his pillow to give his words the confirmation of the act when a choking cough seized him and he was caught in the paroxysms of an agony that seemed as if it would be his last.
    ‘Nur, Nur, my child, what is it my son? What is it, my darling son?’ his grandmother called, coming down the stairs.
    She had the lines of her seventy-odd years written on her face and hobbled miserably, shaking her head as if she were drunk.
    He coughed and the effort seemed to stir each fibre of his being, the scourge of that uncertainty which had possessed him for months.
    His grandmother bent her twisted, wrinkled face, straining to touch his forehead with her lips, but unable to do so as the salt tide of tears dimmed her sight. Her hands shook convulsively with the effort of bending.
    ‘What is it, my child? What is it, my