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

Levi’s jeans, Zakir immediately ordered him to remove ‘these vile things’, pointing to the beer cans. Hiding his smile, Mansoor took the remains of the night to the kitchen. When he came back, he asked Zakir where he was staying.

‘I am staying at the Hilton,’ he replied.

‘So how are things in Pakistan?’

‘I don’t know. I have been out of the country . . . I’ve been travelling for the last two months.’ Then he bragged about his group of preachers and their success around the world.

Mansoor remembered the apt name Haider had given them, the Pyjama Dheela Topi Tight Party, and smiled. ‘How is your family?’ he asked.

‘Alhamdolillah, praise be to Allah.’

The conversation limped along awkwardly, with Zakir replying only when Mansoor asked something. It was as if he was sitting in a Civil Service interview, making sure to provide to-the-point answers, nothing more nothing less. The silent interludes cumbered the air. Zakir’s eyes kept shifting, as if he was searching for something in the room. He never asked Mansoor anything. With the conversation going nowhere, Mansoor invited him to stay for breakfast, but he refused. And when Lisa came back into the room, dressed in a white blouse and a black skirt, looking fresh and pretty, Zakir resolutely gazed at the floor again, ignoring her altogether. Mansoor thought of formally introducing her to him, but then Zakir looked at his wristwatch and abruptly decided to leave.

‘Please tell Yousef that I am staying at the Hilton and that he should get in touch with me,’ he said on his way out.

‘What a rude man!’ Lisa exclaimed after he left. ‘All this time, he never made any eye contact with me!’

Mansoor explained to her, over a cup of black coffee and buttered toast, that the new Zakir considered making eye contact with women a grievous sin, while the old Zakir entertained them on his lap.

Twenty-Six

Joseph had invited all his benefactors out of a sense of duty, but he had excluded his mother, which seemed rather odd to Mansoor. The one who sacrificed so much to raise him, who scrubbed toilets in bungalows so that her son could eat two meals a day, was altogether forgotten, banished to Lethe. To Joseph, Pyaro had committed the indefensible sin of marrying his father’s supposed enemy. And for this reason, she was not invited to what was surely the biggest day in his life. He never forgave her, and one day, in a state of double-distilled-drunkenness, he dispatched a telegram to his mother, using an assumed name, announcing his own death.

But then he felt compelled to invite Zakir, who viewed Joseph as his success story, for it was because of his prayers and blessings that the bhangi was experiencing prosperity in his life now. Zakir still believed that Joseph had actually converted to Islam. In his self-aggrandizing mind, it was he, Zakir Hassan, who had brought this man into the folds of Islam and given him his Muslim identity: Yousef Suleiman. Joseph, of course, played along, making Zakir feel like he had earned thousands of extra brownie points in heaven. When Mansoor told him about Zakir’s visit that morning, Joseph became a bit agitated. He telephoned Zakir at the Hilton and invited the preacher-slash-ex-diplomat to come and stay with him in his apartment. But after an awkward silence, Zakir turned down his invitation, without any explanations whatsoever, and then hung up the phone.

*

Two days after Christmas, Mansoor and Lisa went to a shopping mall in the city, where he impulsively bought a bracelet with a heart charm for her while she was busy trying on some dresses in the fitting room. She hugged and kissed him when he surprised her with it in the car. Back at the apartment, Lisa was still admiring the bracelet when the doorbell rang. Mansoor went to the front door and looked through the peephole. The concave lens revealed Zakir’s face. Mansoor frowned when he saw him. After he opened the door, he saw that Zakir was accompanied by an entire entourage of men, all dressed in shalwar-kameez. He knew right away that the entire born-again coalition had come to work on him, the ‘aimless, lost Muslim’.

‘We have come to talk with you, beta,’ Zakir said.

‘You didn’t have to come all this way to talk to me, Uncle Zakir. You could have telephoned me, and I would have come to your hotel,’ he replied, pretending ignorance about the purpose of their visit.

‘No, I had this yearning to come and chat with you personally.’

‘Okay, but about what?’ Mansoor continued his pretence.

Without answering him, Zakir gently pushed him aside and walked into the apartment, the rest of the entourage barging in after him. Some found a chair, some sat cross-legged on the floor and some stood, leaving one chair for Mansoor. There were eight of them. Once seated, Mansoor spotted Sher Khan, the former cricketer. Clean-shaven again and dressed smartly in a cream-coloured shalwar-kameez, he looked a little out of place amidst those scraggly bearded men. After a brief pause, Mansoor asked if he could get drinks for them.

‘No, son, thank you,’ Zakir said. ‘We are not going to waste too much of your time.’ He paused and pursed his lips. Then, suddenly switching to his posh accented English, he said, ‘Son, we get so busy in our lives, we get so embroiled in our mundane affairs that we forget our real purpose on this God-gifted earth.’

And I suppose you have come to remind me of that, Mansoor thought.

‘We have been sent by God to this earth to serve Him. We are His servants and the way to serve Him is exquisitely prescribed in our holy book. If you read it carefully, the holy Qur’an has the answers to all our problems. Those who follow the dictates of our holy book will pass through the Pull Sirat, the bridge that leads to Paradise, without any difficulty. For this bridge is thin like a needle and sharp like a sword. The righteous