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

first of all, don’t ever call me a bhangi. And second, if you ever take money from Mansoor Sahib, I’ll cut these balls off and feed them to my kutiya.’

Khaleel wasn’t sure if Joseph had just called Mehrun a bitch, or if he actually had a bitch and was serious about his threat. He pushed him away and ran towards the house, shouting, ‘That’s it! I’ll tell Farhat khaala that you play with the bhangi and the churail.’

Both Joseph and Mehrun couldn’t stop laughing as they watched the brothers run, but Mansoor smiled awkwardly, not knowing if what had just happened was a flash of victory or a loss of his freedom. Should he run back to his room, or should he try to hide behind the banana tree? If Farhat found out about his afternoon escapades, it would be the end of everything. But it was too late to do anything, for the ratty Khaleel was walking back towards them with a fuming Farhat right behind him, ready to have all of them thrashed.

‘Mansoor!’ Farhat shouted the minute she saw her son. ‘What am I hearing? How dare you play with these two? Don’t you have anyone else to play with besides servants and sweepers? Don’t you have any concern about what people will say? If I catch you playing with them again, I will break your legs.’

She twisted Mansoor’s ear so hard that he squealed. Then she pushed him towards the house and ordered, ‘Now go to your room! And the next time I see you play, it better be with your cousins.’

Finally, Farhat turned her wrath towards the two ‘lowlifes’, berating them until she heard Noor calling her from inside. Throughout, Khaleel and Jaleel stood there, smirking and making faces, feeling triumphant.

Five

Although Mansoor remained a prisoner to his vexing routines, the punishment for his defiance did not last long. It wasn’t that Farhat Begum suddenly became relaxed about class structures or social mores. It was merely that she became more gregarious and left the house more often to visit friends and relatives. Mansoor’s flashes of freedom became more recurrent as his parents became lax in their supervision.

An unusually grey afternoon greeted the inhabitants of the Kashana that March. The clouds toned down the heat a little and made the indoors muggy. Farhat had darkened the rooms of the house by drawing the silk curtains together. Soon after devouring a heavy lunch, Noor and she fell into their usual, deep afternoon sleep. Outside, the fresh smell of moist earth permeated the backyard until one came to where Joseph sat under the guava tree, a bidi sticking out from the corner of his mouth, blowing a thick trickle of circles, the acrid smell filling the air. He seemed engrossed, whittling the stalk of a leaf from a coconut tree with his knife; Mehrun hung upside down from the guava tree, attentive to Joseph’s artistry. The verandah in the backyard, packed with gardenia and rose shrubs in terracotta flowerpots, publicized the start of spring, a season perpetually scarce in Karachi. A cool breeze blew across the neatly manicured lawn. Butterflies played hide-and-seek, and somewhere in a jamun tree, a koel sang a mournful note. Across the verandah, near the boundary wall, a batch of fruit trees, all planted in a straight line, provided thick vegetation. The adjacent wall, blanketed with bougainvillea, was testimony to the care that Mehrun’s father, Jumman, had given this garden. He had lovingly planted banana, mango, guava and coconut trees, and had made himself vital to the garden and to Farhat. By transforming the Kashana into an oasis in the middle of this desert city, he seemed to have gained permanent employment not only for himself, but also for Kaneez. He had convinced Farhat that he would turn the garden into a piece of heaven, and there was no question that he had done this.

As Mansoor’s parents snored, he bounded out of the house, straight towards Joseph, slapping the flowers on his way out.

Mehrun dropped down from the guava tree when she saw him coming.

‘What are you two doing?’ Mansoor asked.

‘Shush,’ said Joseph. He pointed towards a lizard that sat brooding on the boundary wall near the jasmine vine next to them, its head raised up towards the sky and its tongue sticking out.

‘Wait and watch,’ Joseph whispered. His lips tightened and his murderous eyes narrowed into slits. A shiver ran down Mansoor’s spine as he saw Joseph make a slip-knot noose from the coconut tree leaf in his hands and tie it carefully to a dead branch from the guava tree.

‘Why?’ asked Mansoor.

Mehrun answered him with another of her Urdu tuk-bandis:

Aadhi roti, aadha kebab,

Girgit ko marna bara sawab

(One-half roti, one-half kebab,

Killing a lizard is the highest reward)

‘It is our religious duty to kill these girgits, these lizards, because they are always mocking Allah by sticking their tongue out,’ she explained, as if reading out aloud from a textbook.

Joseph, like an expert lizard hunter, practiced tightening and loosening the noose to make sure that it worked perfectly. Then, getting up quietly, he tiptoed towards the lizard, the other two following him. The creature remained motionless, its basilisk-like glare freezing the moment. Joseph carefully lowered the noose in front of it and patiently brought it around the lizard’s neck. As if hypnotized by the knot, the lizard remained catatonic. And then with a sudden jerk, Joseph pulled the loop. The lizard struggled and wriggled and tried to escape as the noose tightened around it, suffocating it. Once it stopped struggling and all movement stopped, Joseph yelled at Mehrun, ‘Go! Quickly!’ Awed and excited, Mehrun scampered towards the kitchen, which was on the other side of the house, and within a few minutes, came back carrying a small kerosene lantern and a matchbox. Joseph handed over the dead branch with the comatose lizard to Mehrun and took the lamp and the matchbox from her. With his eyes still sealed on the limp vertebrate, he quickly removed the