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

heard her father’s cot, shaking and squeaking. She saw the silhouetted naked body of her father crushing the equally naked body of her mother, both of them oblivious to the rampaging rain outside. Her mother’s faint moaning petrified Mehrun. Jumman regularly took to beating Kaneez, but she had never seen anything like this. Shivering, she pulled the blanket over her face and curled up into the foetal position. Suddenly, Mehrun remembered her teacher’s advice to recite the Ayat-ul-kursi, The Throne Verse, the most powerful of all Qur’anic verses, the warder of all evils, whenever she felt scared. She tried to recall it. But her memory failed her and all she could remember was that silly ditty:

Aadhi roti, aadha kebab

Girgit ko marna bara sawab

As her memory went blank, her mother’s moaning grew louder and the charpoy rocked harder. Then, just as suddenly, it all ended, as if there was an unexpected power failure that shut everything down. All that Mehrun could hear now was the drumming of her own heart. She remained inert, trying not to breathe, suppressing her thoughts, restraining her movement. She wanted to melt away and disappear into the darkness. Then she heard her father mutter: ‘Get the hell out of my bed.’

She heard her mother getting up, then the rustle of a shalwar being pulled up, the crunch of a bamboo mat, a dry cough—denouements of a play poorly produced. Mehrun squeezed her eyes tightly, yearning to sleep promptly. Beside her, she heard her mother lie down and snore loudly the minute her body hit the bamboo mat.

*

Jumman’s hovel was mostly made of concrete, except for the tin roof. It escaped significant devastation from the flood, but Joseph was not that lucky. His rat trap jhuggi, a mixture of mud, cardboard and corrugated metal, crumbled swiftly, just like his collapsed desires. The torrential rain flooded the open gutters and disgorged rancid sewage. Granted, Joseph had lived all his life amidst the stench of human and animal waste, but that night, the odour became more revolting, the air more putrid. Pyaro had woken him up when she heard the commotion outside. People were shouting and running to safety as everything around them began to crash. And when their shack began to crumble, Joseph and Pyaro quickly gathered their meagre belongings and ran out.

Joseph held on to his mother’s hand tightly, pulling her up as they waded through the turgid water and made their way towards higher ground, the rain drenching them all over. Once they reached safety, Pyaro turned around to see what she had left behind—a hope, a promise—but all she saw was the raging flash flood. Then suddenly, Pyaro saw the body of what appeared to be a dead child floating right past them, arms spread out. ‘Joseph!’ she screamed, and Joseph pushed her face away from the horrific scene with his steady hand. Pyaro’s eyes kept returning to the place where she had spotted the child’s body, but now she only saw the dead branch of a tree, swept away by the strong current.

Joseph wanted to cross the railway line that lay up ahead of them, but then he saw a concrete shed nearby whose open door kept banging in the wind, as if inviting them to enter. They quickly went inside the shed and were knocked out by the musty metallic stench that hit them immediately. Bunged up with rusted iron bars, hooks and heavy chains, the dank railway shed was, nevertheless, a gift from heaven. Joseph examined the shelter and saw a narrow bench in the centre, laden with heavy paint cans. He cleared them one at a time and then asked his mother to sit there.

Pyaro, instead of sitting, kneeled on the floor, made a cross and prayed, ‘Thank you, Jesus Christ, for providing us with this temporary abode. Please, Lord, don’t abandon us. You did not abandon us when our cattle died, you did not abandon us when Joseph’s Babuji died. Don’t abandon us now.’ Choking with sobs of anguish, she repeated the same prayer again and again even as Joseph clasped his strong arms around her shoulders and tried to comfort her.

They spent the whole night in that shed, shivering and huddling together, inhaling the noxious air. But at that moment, when their world had sunk deep underwater, the dank smell of rusted iron felt better than the fragrance of attar. Pyaro prayed all night, and in between remembered her dead husband, Samson.

She remembered the day when he had smoked his hookah for the last time. It had been his after-dinner routine ever since he earned his first rupee, cleaning other people’s toilets. He had asked her to prepare the hookah, and Pyaro remembered filling the tube with water and the container with cheap tobacco. She had almost burnt her hand, putting the red-hot charcoal on the bowl above it. When the hookah was ready to be used, she had taken it to Samson. The water inside the pipe had gurgled as he took that first deep drag, but when the smoke began to fill his lungs, he started to hack uncontrollably. He continued to cough while pounding his chest and fighting to breathe. It was probably hours before his coughing subsided. And all this time, Pyaro and Joseph sat there, feeling helpless and petrified. The next day, Samson contracted a cold. After that, his condition got worse with each passing day. And then he began vomiting blood. Samson coughed up so much blood that his shirt got soaked. Pyaro became concerned now. They took him to the local hospital, but the doctors there would not touch him, giving them every excuse they could think of to turn them away. Pyaro went from doctor to doctor, and every single one refused to even look at Samson.

At last, she found a young physician who was kind enough to examine him. But the prognosis was gloomy. Samson had advanced tuberculosis, and since he had received no treatment for a long time, it