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

head. The soft call of a mynah bird lured her out to their dew-covered backyard. The crisp morning air mesmerized Farhat, softening the memory of the nightmare.

Four

Mansoor had a normal childhood, and much to Kaneez’s amazement, he had no visible markers of a djinn. The boy’s eyes seemed ordinary: the iris a bright brown, and the sclera as white as Tibet Snow’s skin-whitening cream. Although, when Kaneez had touched his forehead a few times, much to his annoyance, it did feel hot to her.

A shy, quiet boy, Mansoor studied at the prestigious Karachi Grammar School. His early life had been so ordinary that the rumour about his djinn-hood began to dissipate as the years passed. Even Kaneez had started to doubt herself. But for Farhat, the very word ‘rumour’ was infuriating, not to mention that horrible churail Kaneez. She couldn’t even make herself say the word ‘djinn’. She couldn’t risk any evil befalling her son.

‘Why don’t you send Mansoor to the Madrassa-e-Ifrit? They teach you how to control the evil djinns,’ Sarwat had advised. To which Farhat had replied, ‘Do you want my husband to divorce me?’

But now Mansoor had reached that age when formal learning about religion and its rituals became obligatory. Of course, Noor, the godless barrister that he was, did not believe in any of this and vehemently opposed the idea of a traditional religious education when Farhat broached the topic one night. It was terrible timing, too, since he had just poured himself a glass of whisky.

‘What nonsense! I don’t want my son to become a mullah,’ he replied as he dropped a couple of ice cubes into the crystal glass.

‘Who is saying he has to become a mullah? I just want him to learn to read the Qur’an and to offer the namaz,’ Farhat protested.

Ever since Mansoor’s birth, she had become more disciplined about offering the five daily prayers, and she wanted to instil the same sense of religiosity in her son. To her, Mansoor was a miracle baby, and she had promised Allah that she would thank Him in her prayers every day. Sometimes, she even woke up at night to offer the special prayers of tahajjud.

‘I don’t want a mullah to drill the Qur’an into Mansoor’s head in Arabic, without teaching him its deeper meanings. What will he learn from a mullah? Rocking back and forth? When he is slightly older, I will teach him about religion.’

‘You and religion! May Allah shield my son,’ Farhat laughed.

‘Farhat Begum, I am the son of a religious scholar,’ Noor replied and took a gulp of the whisky.

The fact was that despite his secular bend, Noor was well-versed in Islamic theology. His father, Mashood ul Haq, a well-regarded Islamic scholar and author of The Philosophical Traditions in Islam, had schooled him personally. By the age of fourteen, Noor had memorized the entire Qur’an and was on his way to following in his father’s footsteps. But then he went to Aligarh Muslim University. There he met a few left-leaning intellectuals and Marxists, got exposed to the Muslim heretics—the Zindiques—learned about Western philosophers of the Enlightenment, studied the British empiricists, and his entire perspective changed.

‘Aligarh was where I had my baptism, and Oxford was where I had my awakening.’

‘Aligarh university was your bhool-bhulaiyan, your labyrinth. You never got out of it,’ Farhat shot back.

‘In Aligarh, the light of my being became a pest to all my darkness,’ Noor replied, blurting out a well-known Farsi saying. He then continued, ‘Once the seed of doubt gets sown, Farhat Begum, dogma withers. And then, what they did to Abba Jaan . . .’

Farhat firmly believed that it was this unburied memory of his father’s murder during the Partition riots that gnawed at Noor’s entrails. She had suspected all along that whatever lingering faith he had in a higher deity died on that ghastly day. She was there when strangers had brought Mashood ul Haq’s bloodied body to their house.

‘Abba Jaan’s death was a shocking tragedy, but maybe God was testing you . . . He puts everyone to test,’ Farhat replied. She noticed then that the whisky bottle by Noor’s side was half-empty.

‘My jaanum, I put your god to test and he flunked miserably. Don’t talk about religion or god or his tests to me again.’

Realizing that the discussion had slowly veered towards blasphemy, Farhat changed the subject. She could tolerate his harangues against the politics of Pakistan, but she did not like his diatribe against God. As his rants became more regular, more impassioned, Farhat grew more resolute. She would give her son the religious education that she herself had received from her father, even if she had to do it covertly. Farhat did not want her son to follow in Noor’s deviant footsteps. So, to keep off the infidel influence of her husband, she secretly hired a maulvi and set his visitation hours for well after Noor had left home for work following his lunch break. This was her first act of defiance, her first rebellion. In all these years of marriage, neither Noor nor Farhat had declared their love for each other; and now she did not need to assert her defiance.

To keep it a secret, she warned Mansoor as well, ‘Don’t ever mention Maulvi Nazir in front of your father, otherwise he will be very angry with both of us.’

Although they both showered their love on him, Mansoor remained afraid of both his parents. He was terrified of their relationship. Their usual iciness, their frequent sarcasm, their constant bickering, everything frightened him. Early on in his life, he witnessed his father’s resentment of his mother’s lack of formal education; he saw his mother’s revulsion towards his father’s drinking and his heretical bent. The word sharab was never mentioned in their house, and while nobody dared to tell Mansoor that his Muslim father drank the forbidden drink, he guessed it, realizing that his father was unlike the other fathers of his cousins and friends, devout men who he