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

Noor’s blood alcohol level dropped quickly. Shocked and jolted, he was caught completely off guard. There in front of him was his wife, her head covered in a hijab, her mouth full of insults, her hands out of control; she pushed him so hard that he fell and hit his head on the edge of the bedside table. Blood trickled from his forehead. Was this a new sort of a welcome? Who was that woman? Had he somehow come to a different house? He took out his handkerchief. Pressed it against his forehead and surveyed his surroundings. But he found nothing bizarre, nothing odd. Before he could say anything, Farhat shoved him out of her bedroom and locked the door. Jet-lagged and confused, Noor staggered to the men’s quarter and slept fitfully, still dressed in his travel clothes.

The next day when he woke up, it was high noon. His head throbbed with intense pain as he went to his bedroom to check on his wife. But Budhoo told him that she had already left for the sermon. Noor tried recalling the events of the previous night, but all he could remember were the incoherent curses of this woman who had stood gesticulating wildly in a hijab, and the banging of his head on the edge of his bedside table. He checked his forehead; the blood had congealed, but his head still hurt. Ashamed and confused, Noor dragged himself to take a shower in an attempt to revive himself. It didn’t help. Feeling hungry, he called Budhoo to bring his lunch. Noor had eaten alone in the past, but he had never felt so lonely and miserable. He thought about his increasingly frayed relationship with his wife. What had got him to this point?

Farhat came home that evening, her eyes red and swollen.

‘What happened to you? Why were you shouting at me last night?’ Noor asked her somewhat fearfully, but she remained silent.

‘Won’t you even ask me how your son is? What have I done to deserve this?’

‘You were drunk last night, weren’t you?’ she asked at last.

‘So what’s new about that? It was a twenty-three-hour flight and I drank a little more than usual to fight the fatigue and the boredom.’

‘Well, now you won’t be able to drink at all because I have flushed all your bottles down the toilet.’

At first, Noor did not understand what she was talking about, but then as she went on and on about Satan’s urine being flushed down the toilet, he went to check on her bluff. And the next thing Farhat saw was his red, contorted face bursting with anger. But Noor restrained himself. Calmly, he approached her and asked, ‘Do you know the value of all the bottles that were in that liquor cabinet?’

‘Yes, equal to an eternity in dozakh.’

‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that. Don’t you dare talk to me like I am a child or a . . . I have been very patient with your nonsense,’ Noor paused and took a long deep breath, and then he continued, ‘and get rid of this . . . this . . . this thing off your head; you look like a bloody nun.’

His temper had returned, but Farhat remained defiant and said, ‘I don’t tell you what to do, and I don’t want you to tell me what to do from now on.’

‘You don’t tell me what to do? You just broke all my bottles. Listen to me, and listen with your ears open: I am the master of this house, and you are going to do whatever I tell you to do,’ he growled.

‘I am not going to blindly jump into a well if you tell me to.’

‘Do not talk like an illiterate woman. I have never put any undue pressures on you. You can do anything as long as it is within reason, but wearing a hijab is against everything I stand for.’

As Farhat stormed out of the bedroom, Noor felt that he was standing face-to-face with irrationality and bafflement. He did not know what had come over his wife. Was it a new-found fervency? Or was it that she was in love with Zakir? The first possibility seemed likely, and it made him anxious. The second possibility, no longer remote, seemed a little irrational to him. But then there was no love between Noor and his wife to lose, and that realization made him anxious.

*

That night, even though she did not want to confront him any more, Farhat’s head swirled with uncertainty and her heart sank with fear. The word ‘zina’ and Zakir’s explicit pronouncement echoed in her mind: ‘Your nikah with him is null and void. Your nikah with him is null and void.’ One of these days, she would have to put the question about Noor’s true beliefs before him; she could not live the life of a fornicator.

Twenty-Two

Farhat rejoiced when The People’s Leader, who relished his Royal Salute, banned alcohol to appease the religious parties. Earlier on, when he had stoked latent hostilities between the muhajirs and the Sindhis, the sons of the soil, she had called him ullu ka patha, literally the son of an owl, a mild imprecation. Unlike her husband, she called Pakistan her watan, her homeland. So why was religion no longer a binding force? Did Pakistan, as a metaphor for the greater religious community, suddenly lose its meaning? Why was she still called an immigrant after having lived almost half her life in Pakistan? And what about Mansoor, who was born in Sindh?

But now The People’s Leader was in Farhat’s good books again—the alcohol prohibition trumping the sectarian controversy. At last, her prayers were answered, or so she thought. Now the whole country would be free of the curse of alcohol. If the Shaitan’s drink was banned from the country, it would automatically be removed from her house. But Farhat had seriously underestimated her husband’s resourcefulness. A few days after the prohibition, Noor bought half a dozen bottles of Scotch to replenish his stock, from God