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

the corruption of his predecessor and made a promise to the people that he would restore the real Islamic democracy within ninety days. The G.O.D.s applauded his actions, and Zakir Hassan gave him the title of Mard Momin, the Man of Faith. Haider Rizvi wrote a glowing tribute as the managing editor of the Gazette the next day. But Noor remained silent.

The barrister had lost his mordant wit. The critic of Pakistani politics watched another coup brought on by another military dictator unfold in front of his eyes, and yet, he said nothing. Mansoor read Faiz’s new poem to him, but nothing stirred him. The gridlock in his marriage and the breakdown of communication with his wife made Noor distant from his son as well. He stopped drinking altogether, but that did not impress Farhat at all. After begging Zakir’s forgiveness, she had got back in his good graces and heard his lectures more intently now. Noor was duly informed about this, but he showed no reaction.

*

Mansoor and Lisa regularly wrote to each other. Several days before that night at the university pond, Mansoor and Lisa had gone to a party together. It was there that a mutual friend of theirs had taken their picture. It was a picture of love in all its simplicity. Lisa mailed a copy of that picture to Mansoor with her letter. When the airmail envelope arrived in the post, it made Farhat suspicious. As Mansoor opened it, the photograph fell out. Farhat quickly picked it up and began an intensive interrogation: ‘Who is this girl? Why has your picture been taken with her? What exactly is your relationship with her?’ Her rapid-fire questions made Mansoor stutter.

‘She is . . . Lisa Reid . . . A friend of mine, Amma,’ he replied with a bumbling hesitancy. ‘The picture was taken at a university party that I went to. There is nothing more to it.’

‘Don’t you know it’s a sin to be with girls who are not related to you?’ she fulminated.

Realizing that the rod of fervency would now fall on him, he frowned. Mansoor regained his composure and replied, ‘Amma, please don’t start this with me now. I am not living in the fourteenth century. And I can’t live in America without mixing with women.’

‘Don’t talk to me like your father! I have suffered enough from him, and I don’t have the energy to suffer from you, too.’

‘Amma, please,’ he pleaded.

‘Don’t “Amma please” me. If you marry a non-Muslim girl, I will never forgive you. NEVER!’ She then started to weep. ‘My kismet is so bad; I am so unlucky.’

Mansoor knew that she had deployed her ultimate weapon, emotional blackmail, but not wanting to aggravate the situation any further, he remained quiet. He knew he would never forgive himself if he picked a fight with his mother before leaving for America.

With the high court closed for summer vacations, Noor quit going to work altogether, never telephoning his office and refusing to accept his clients’ calls at home. All day he stayed in his bed and slept for long hours, waking up just to eat. His missing work like this worried Mansoor, but the two-day-old stubble on his father’s face concerned him more, for Noor had never skipped shaving for as long as Mansoor could remember. The son offered to shave his father’s stubble, or have the barber come home, but Noor refused. So with great trepidation, he asked, ‘Abba, why have you taken a vow of silence?’

Instead of replying to the question, Noor gazed blankly at the window and then, after a long moment of silence, recited one of Ghalib’s couplets:

Rahey na taqate guftar aur agar ho bhi

To kis umeed pey kahiye kay arzoo kya hai

(When the power of discourse is gone, but even if it hasn’t

With what hope shall I say what desires I still possess)

Finally, he had said something without stuttering, without faltering. Every word of that beautiful couplet was enunciated distinctly; the pathos of Ghalib’s deflated hope and the state of Noor’s existence fading in perfect unity. For Mansoor, the return to normality in his father’s speech was a good sign. Even though Noor had not picked up a book of poems in a long time, his ability to retrieve relevant couplets from memory, that too at will, still amazed him. After Sadiq’s murder, poetry had lost all meaning for his father. There was no one with whom he could talk about Mir or Ghalib or Faiz any more. Was his father coming back from the dead now? He was not dead, but he did not seem alive either. Mansoor had read about the concept of death-in-life in literature. Eros is the desire for life; Thanatos, the wish to die. But when a man is neither alive nor dead, his being is a zinda laash, a living corpse. Was this the state his father was in now?

Mansoor remembered Sadiq Mirza once discussing Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ with his father, and how a part of one particular stanza summed up the conditions of Pakistan. His memory of the discussion was a bit hazy, but he did remember Sadiq giving him his copy of the book, nicely bound in cloth. Mansoor suddenly realized that he had never returned the book. Feeling guilty, he went to his room and rummaged through his disorganized bookshelf. And there it was: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: In Seven Parts.’ When he opened it, he saw the name M. Sadiq Mirza embossed on the title page. He wasn’t sure which line or stanza Sadiq had been referring to that day, but as he read Part II, he came upon some lines and wondered if this was what his father and Sadiq had talked about:

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion,

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

He closed Sadiq’s book, promising himself that he would treasure it for the rest of his life.

*

On that fateful day in August, when