Of Smokeless Fire A.A. Jafri (books to read to improve english TXT) 📖

again and was about to leave when he saw an elderly man, dressed in a kurta and pyjama, and with a prayer cap on his head, limply lugging himself towards him.

‘What is it?’ he asked as he opened the gate.

‘I don’t know if you know me, but I am your next-door neighbour, Mansoor ul Haq. Perhaps you knew my father, Noor ul Haq?

‘I know you very well, you are that djinn,’ the man replied. ‘What do you want?’

‘I am not a djinn, sir. I am a human being, and at this time, I just need to make one telephone call,’ Mansoor replied.

‘Get lost! I don’t even want your evil shadow on my house.’ He slammed shut the wrought-iron gate on Mansoor’s face and walked away. The toxic falsehood spewed by Athanni had reached his door. Old rumours had been given a fresh lease of life.

Disappointed, his hopes dashed, Mansoor decided to take a taxi to the Morning Gazette.

*

When Haider heard about Mansoor’s tribulations, he felt sorry for him. As a journalist, he had witnessed greed first-hand and had written about it. But for it to trek such a distance, and with such wickedness, seemed incredible even to him. Athanni’s intrigues shocked him. Haider took Mansoor to his house and told him that he could stay there for as long as he wanted since his house was practically empty, now that his daughter was married and living in England. Haider’s wife, a gem of a woman, made Mansoor feel at home. She had always been very fond of Mansoor and had secretly hoped that one day he might marry her daughter, Nikhat.

Since his return, each passing moment had felt like a non-stop low-voltage electric shock hitting his body. It took Mansoor a week to restore his sense of self as he slowly reflected on the recent events. As far as he could remember, he was sitting there with Lisa that night, asking her to marry him. The proposal had just come out on its own—no pressure, no push, no nothing—and then suddenly, the telephone had rung, shattering the serenity of the moment, sundering the life he was planning. He had taken an airplane directly from Houston to fly back to Karachi. Hoping to be comforted by his relatives, he had instead been jolted by their pre-emptive strike. But now it was time to get over the inertia, to regroup his thoughts, to plan out a strategy and to get back the Kashana-e-Haq, the Abode of Truth. To him, his house had become the Kashana-e-Jhoot, the Abode of Lies—a name Mehrun had said she would choose for her home in Defence Society. That is what the Kashana was now—the Abode of Lies, the House of Hatred, the Refuge of Scoundrels. He had to cleanse his parents’ home and also his family’s name.

*

Once his sanity returned and he cooled off, he wrote a letter to Lisa. If he remembered correctly, he did propose to her in the wee hours of that morning in Joseph’s apartment. In his letter, he explained the latest complication in his life. Sadly, he would be stuck in Pakistan for several months. He asked her to move his things from his apartment to hers. She wouldn’t have too many things to shift since his had been a furnished apartment, and his most prized possessions were his stereo and his books. He still wanted to marry her and repeated his proposal. Once he was back in America, they could get married.

After a nerve-racking, month-long wait, he got a terse reply from Lisa. She had moved all his things to her apartment and was busy with her final semester. After she was done, she was probably going to settle in Connecticut, near her mother. As a postscript, she wrote, ‘What can I say about your marriage proposal . . . Call me when you’re back in the States.’

In Houston, she had indicated that she would like to try living in Pakistan. Would she still do that? A keen student of Pakistani politics, she knew that living in a country that was fast veering in a dangerous direction would be foolhardy. Settling near her mother in Connecticut made more sense.

*

With intemperate zeal, General Behroopia got busy inverting the clock of progress at a bewildering speed. After executing The People’s Leader, he felt free to corrupt and mangle the Constitution. But with no legal grounds to govern and with no constituency of his own, he began bending the political and legal institutions to suit his own myopic view. Implementing an anger-filled version, he nurtured hate disguised as belief, focusing on the harshest sets of punishments for criminal offences. It was the handiest tool of deception, easily reconditioned and smoothly refurbished as the only true doctrine. In the past, the Doctrine of Necessity had been the ready excuse for military rule. But this general did not feel the necessity of this doctrine at all. He sideswiped the traditional courts and unleashed his terror through religious courts, the likes of which this unfortunate nation had never seen. With obsessive zeal, he focused his wrath on minorities, women and everyone else who did not follow his repugnant belief system.

The general introduced the Hudood Ordinance, sanctioning stoning for adultery, a hundred lashes for fornication, death for apostasy, eighty lashes for drinking and chopping off of the right hand for robbery. Thousands of women were imprisoned for honour crimes under this ordinance. Paving the way for his regressive brand of ideology, which was replete with bigotry and intolerance, he gave a free licence to his vigilantes to do as they wished. These thugs torched cinemas that showed ‘immoral’ movies, destroyed nightclubs that allowed ‘lewd’ dancing and attacked every public entertainment place that involved the mixing of sexes. The religious intelligentsia that replaced the ‘corrupt Western intelligentsia’, commended them and the general on their diligence. The Daily Jadal commented thus:

We need punishments like these and a disciplinarian like him to show the corrupt the true path. The general is