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

an impossible task. The guilt kept coming back, tearing him apart. He had been cold with his father, a bit stand-offish. Turning down his father’s offer to finance his education must have shredded the man’s heart. On more than one occasion, Noor had repeated that his only goal for the remaining years of his life was to earn money for him and his mother. He had lived in a mental wasteland for far too long to strive for anything else. Mansoor had no right to turn down his offer, and this realization now made him angry with himself. Despite all his failings, he knew that his father was a good man. How many people had he helped? How many lives had he improved? All their servants, his friends in The Unholy Quartet, his relatives and even total strangers had benefited from his magnanimity. When his father gave, he gave unconditionally; when he helped, he helped unreservedly.

Mansoor’s mind wandered to his mother and her religious metamorphosis. Maybe it was a good thing. Perhaps she needed religion to fight loneliness; perhaps she required the retreat that faith provided. But what about his father? Who would be his companion in his solitude? What would be his crutch? Scotch and Pakistani tharra? As tears welled up in his eyes, Mansoor quickly took out his handkerchief and wiped them dry. He did not want anyone to see him crying. At that moment, he just wanted to go home, hug his parents and tell them to be kind to each other, to take care of themselves, but instead, he heard a pleasant voice ask him gently, ‘Are you okay?’

‘What? . . . Yeah, yeah,’ Mansoor replied hurriedly and looked up to find a girl standing in front of him, gazing at him questioningly.

‘I’m sorry, but you seemed to be crying. Are you all right?’ she asked again.

‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing. I’m just a little homesick,’ he hastened to assure her.

The girl nodded her head. ‘I’m Lisa,’ she said after a moment and extended her slender brown hand towards him.

‘I’m Mansoor.’

As Mansoor struggled with the conflicting need to be alone and the desire for some company, Lisa Reid came into his life at the perfect time. Her big, kind brown eyes and soft smiling features drew him instantly to her. Tall and slightly built, with shoulder-length hair, she was an attractive African-American woman of mixed heritage. Mansoor pulled a chair next to him at his table and asked her to sit down, and they went through the banality of a perfunctory chat.

*

Since their chance meeting at the library, Mansoor and Lisa met every day. There was something about Lisa that reminded Mansoor of Mehrun, something that lived in a deserted corner of his consciousness, but exactly what it was he just could not pin down. Not her face, not her voice, maybe it was the way she looked at him. The fact that she was writing her doctoral dissertation on the socio-economic causes of the partition of India and Pakistan made her even more attractive to him. Although Mansoor had read a fair bit about the Partition and had heard the personal stories of loss from his father and mother, he found the American perspective curious and refreshing.

‘My father was involved in the freedom struggle, and he was actually in the Working Committee of the Congress Party. In the first Congress government, he was the political secretary to the education minister of Bihar.’

‘Oh, I must meet him. I would give anything to interview him!’

‘You just missed him. He was here just recently. Too bad I did not know you then; otherwise, I would have definitely introduced you to him.’

‘Well, the next time he is here, be sure to introduce me.’

One night, as they sat on a bench near the university pond, under the starry sky, Lisa said to Mansoor, ‘We have gone out a few times, but I still feel as if I don’t know you . . . you are . . . you are . . . What is the word I am looking for . . . so inscrutable?’

‘But I think I am an open book!’ Mansoor protested. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked rather casually.

‘Like who are you, Mansoor ul Haq?’

In the beginning, she used to pronounce his name as ‘Man-Sooer’, and the way she said it, it sounded like a compound English–Urdu word meaning ‘Man-Pig’. He told her about it, laughing as he tried correcting her pronunciation.

‘It’s Mun-Soor,’ he told her.

‘So, who are you, Mansoor ul Haq?’ A twinkle appeared in her beautiful brown eyes as she pronounced his name correctly.

At that moment, Mansoor had this irresistible urge to kiss her and tell her that he may very well be in love with her, and the next second, he succumbed to that urge. He kissed her, savouring every moment of it, as if he would never get another chance to kiss her again. And then abruptly, he pulled back from her. ‘I am a djinn,’ he said, answering her question.

‘What’s a djinn?’ Lisa asked, not missing a beat.

‘A djinn is a being created by Allah, from smokeless fire; they are airy beings with transparent bodies, who can transform themselves into any form or shape.’

‘Oh well, that explains everything!’

‘Have you read Aladdin and the Magic Lamp?’

‘Oh! You mean you are a genie, like a genie in the bottle?’

‘Something like that! Except that I’m out of the bottle now.’

‘Boy! Can I have my three wishes now?’

He kissed her again. A long, lingering kiss. Her lips, warm and sweet, tasted of mint. Mansoor felt drowned in her exuberant sensuality, but then, without any warning, a trembling fit seized him, a fit that shook his very being. It was early June, but he felt cold, terribly cold. Not knowing what exactly was happening, Lisa wrapped her arms around his body and kissed him again. He had read about sensual kissing and had heard stories about it from Joseph, but what he experienced then, in