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

around Farhat every time she had a miscarriage: quod erat demonstrandum; she was a certified churail.

Sarwat prayed softly to Allah to protect her younger sister from this churail. She saw Kaneez in front of Farhat’s open legs, simpering inanely, gloating over her victory, an authentic necromancer, their worst nightmare come true at that hour, but there was no time to challenge her presence, for Farhat was howling in pain.

‘The baby is ready to come out. Now when I say push, you give a big push. Okay . . . PUSH!’ the doctor instructed.

Farhat pushed, and her scream ripped through the muggy air in the room.

‘Push again.’

Farhat pushed with all her strength and then lay back against the pillows behind her, moaning.

‘Come on, Farhat Begum, push harder!’ the doctor ordered.

‘I can’t. I’m going to die!’

‘Doesn’t matter, just push,’ Dr Minwalla laughed at her own joke.

After half a dozen more pushes, Farhat finally delivered a healthy baby boy. Dr Minwalla, instead of putting the baby in Farhat’s arms first, handed him to a shell-shocked Kaneez to clean him up. As she held the baby, Kaneez’s face changed colour. Turning pale, she let out a loud piercing scream, ‘Djinn, djinn! Oh Allah, he’s a djinn! Take him away from me. Take him away from me; he will get inside me!’ she blurted hysterically and almost threw the baby back at Dr Minwalla.

She must have been high on ganja, for she saw the baby boy vanish into thin air, out of her hands, only to then reappear in the arms of the doctor a split second later. But how could that happen? To Kaneez, it was unmistakable, no question about it. Instead of a boy, her mistress had given birth to a spirit—one of Allah’s creatures made of smokeless fire and mentioned in the Qur’an, the ones she had heard about countless times from her mother, one that had once invaded her neighbour’s body. Disguised as a baby boy, this djinn had now come out of Farhat’s body to torment her after devouring the hearts of all her other eleven children.

In Kaneez’s opinion, therefore, it was humanly impossible for Farhat to have a child. Then how could she have been proven wrong after all this time? A live birth! A crying and kicking baby! Well, there was only one explanation for this live birth: the djinn had come out of Farhat’s womb in the form of an infant, in the guise of a boy! Ganja or no ganja, that fateful October in 1951, Kaneez stood in the birthing room in the Kashana, utterly convinced that this baby boy was a djinn.

The minute Sarwat heard Kaneez utter all this nonsense, she screamed in rage. ‘I will kill you, churail! I will kill you!’

Dr Minwalla ordered both of them to be quiet.

‘You clean the baby, now,’ she told Sarwat.

Usually, that task fell to Kaneez, but the doctor couldn’t take any more chances.

Cleaning the soft baby skin had a calming effect on Sarwat. When she was done, Sarwat reminded Farhat about the need for the azan, the religious custom of whispering the call for prayer in the baby’s ear.

‘Is Noor Bhai going to offer the azan in the baby’s ear?’ she asked her sister.

‘No, he is not well enough.’

Sarwat knew what these coded words ‘not well enough’ meant: Noor was too drunk to perform this solemn ceremony.

‘Why don’t you do it?’ Dr Minwalla suggested.

‘No, Allah forbid . . . women are not allowed to do so.’

‘What about Budhoo? He is a man,’ Kaneez ventured hesitatingly.

‘If you keep spitting filth, I’ll hit you with my shoes,’ said Sarwat.

The sisters began panicking, for nothing else was permissible without the azan being recited to the baby. Farhat wished her brother Zahid were there to perform the ceremony, but he was in Lahore, studying engineering. As for their father, Javed Sultan, he was out visiting friends.

‘What’s wrong with Budhoo doing the azan?’ Kaneez persisted.

Sarwat turned and threw her shoe at the woman, but it missed her and hit the framed photograph of Noor and Farhat’s wedding, kept on the side table. The picture frame fell and broke.

‘Look, what you made me do!’

But there was no time to have another go at Kaneez; the azan had to be performed soon because the baby needed to be fed. Budhoo, a servant, was not the ideal solution to the crisis, but he was perfectly acceptable from the theological point of view. Farhat’s head began spinning at the thought of Budhoo performing the azan for her child instead of her husband. She was furious. What would people say? Her only son and the first voice he hears is the voice of a servant!

Reluctantly, however, she agreed and told Kaneez to summon Budhoo, who completed this first rite of religion in his accented and garbled Arabic; and Sarwat Khan thought, this is not auspicious. May Allah have mercy on this child.

All this while, a radio had been playing somewhere in the house. Now, a mere second after Budhoo finished the azan, the song stopped abruptly and in a solemn voice, the broadcaster announced:

We interrupt this programme to bring you news of a supreme tragedy. Our beloved prime minister, the Leader of the Nation, Liaquat Ali Khan, was mercilessly assassinated by a cowardly deranged man while he was speaking to a crowd in Rawalpindi’s Company Bagh. We are God’s creation, and unto Him, we return.

The evening darkened; the sky heaved as the sun plunged into the Arabian Sea. From a nearby mosque, the muezzin called the faithful for the evening prayers.

And Sarwat Khan muttered to herself, ‘This is not auspicious. May Allah have mercy on this child!’

Three

Farhat did not forgive her husband for not performing the azan, but the joy of giving birth to a son made her forget his transgression. Noor named the baby Mansoor ul Haq.

‘What does this name mean?’ Farhat asked.

‘It means the protector of truth. I have named him after Manṣūr al-Hallaj.’

‘Who?’

‘The great Sufi mystic who spent his life in search of