THE SHEPHERD
by ASHFAQ AHMED
PART(IV)
I remained standing in silence. This prompted him to say in his sweet, strong voice, “Mian, come on in. What’s this, have you sworn not to speak?”
‘Even when I took a few steps towards him, he didn’t bother to look at me and continued to sit huddled like a new bride. Then, in an authoritative voice, he said, “Barkhurdar, sit down.”
‘I promptly sat down where I was. He said to his friends, “Give me a minute. Let me deal with him first.” He then asked me, again in a commanding voice, “All right, what’s the geometry problem you don’t get?”
‘Timidly I told him. Without changing his postures he reached for his shoulders, pulled his shirt up so that his back was completely exposed, and said, “Come on, use your finger and draw the isosceles triangle on my back.”
‘I went into daze, unable to move. After a minute, he said, “come on, mian, hurry up. I’m blind, so this is my paper and pen.”
‘I took a hesitant step towards him and, shaking all over, started to trace the triangle on his broad back. After I’d drawn the invisible figure, he said, “Now draw a perpendicular line b from point s to point j.”
‘I was completely flustered to begin with. And on top of this, there was nothing there to see. So I took a guess, placed my finger in a spot, and just I was about to draw the perpendicular, he said sharply, “What’re you doing? That isn’t point s!” And then, “well, you’ll get used to it, in time. Six finger-widths below the left shoulder is point s, draw the line from there.”
‘Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! I can’t even begin to tell you how learned he was! What an incredible voice he had! What sharp intelligence! He was explaining while I sat wonderstruck. It seemed that right then, with this last sentence of his, the isosceles triangle was about to appear on his back in lines of pure light.’
By now Dauji had drifted off into a recollection of his time in Delhi. His eyes were wide open. He was looking at me. Then again, he was not. I asked impatiently,
‘What happened then, Dauji?’
Getting up from the chair he said, ‘It’s late. Go to sleep. I’ll tell you some other time.’ But, like an unruly child, I wouldn’t leave him alone. So he said, “All right, but you must first promise not to let despair get the better of you. That you will consider these trifling geometrical propositions to be just like so many batashas.’
‘I’ll consider them pure halva, don’t worry.’
Still standing, he draped the blanket around himself and said, ‘The long and short of it is this: I remained in Hakim Sahib’s attendance for a year and washed my blind eyes with the few drops I could gather from that Ocean of knowledge and learning. When I returned home, I went straight to my aqa and placed my head at this feet. Whereupon he said, “Chinta Ram, I’d pull back my feet if I had the strength to do so.” I broke into tears at this, he said, passing his hand lovingly over my head, “I ‘m not angry with you, but one year is an unbearable long time. Next time when you decide to go away, don’t forget to take me along.”
Tears surged into Dauji’s eyes as he repeated these words. He slipped out of the room, leaving me stupefied and still.
The exams were just around the corner now. The very thought gave me the shivers. But, strangely, my body was getting fatter, which became a source of great consternation for Dauji. He’d often grab my chubby hands and resort, ‘Be a thoroughbred Arabian charger, don’t just sit around like a tethered donkey!’
I’d take great umbrage at this remark and in protest stop speaking to him. Even my constant threats of fasting unto death failed to move him and his worry turned into full-fledge anxiety. One day he woke me up before his morning stroll and, despite me kicks and screams, my pleas and curses, pulled me out of bed and stuffed me into my coat. Grabbing me by the arm he practically dragged me out of the house. It was a winter morning, around four o’clock, not a soul anywhere in sight throughout the alley, completely dark all around, and Dauji was taking me for a stroll! I was talking nonsense. To which he responded, ‘He’s still groggy! The Tanbura’s still tuning up.’ Adding, now and then, ’Come on, Tanbura, play in tune! What’s this strumming off –key!’
Dauji let go of my arm only after we’d gone far outside the village and the ice gales of the morning had my eyes open. We passed the Persian wheel belonging to the Sardars and left it behind, then the river, then even the cemetery, but Dauji kept walking as if possessed, reciting what sounded like Verses from the Quran. When we reached the rubble mound, I practically dropped dead from freight. People avoided walking through that area even in broad daylight, because it was believed to be the site of a city buried long ago, haunted by ghosts who ate the heart of anyone who happened to wander through. When I began to tremble with fear, Dauji carefully wrapped a warm muffler around my neck and ordered, pointing to the two acacia trees up a head, ‘Run around them as fast as you can. Ten times. Then breathe deeply a hundred times, and then come back. I’ll wait for you here.’
To get away from the haunted hill, I took off towards the trees. First I sat down on a rock to catch my breath, and figured I had sat long enough to have run six of the ten rounds. I got up and ran the last four laps around the trees at the slow pace of camel and then sat down on the same rock again, taking deep breaths. Meanwhile, strange animals started howling near the trees, and an excruciating pain shot through my ribs. I thought it best to return to the hill, wake up the drowsing Dauji, and after we had returned home, to let him have it. Filled with anger and shaking with fear, I picked May way to the hill. And what did I see but Dauji kneeling on the rubble, thrashing his head like a madman, loudly reciting his favourite couplet:
Jafa kam kun ken farad roz-e-mehshar
bah pesh-e’ ashiqan sharmindah bashi
(Don’t be so cruel, lest tomorrow at resurrection
you may come to feel small in the company of lovers.)
He’d strike the ground with his palms, look up and wave his index finger in the air, as if saying some body who stood before him, ‘come, think it over. I am telling you . . . I am telling you . . .’ Then he’d lunge and throw him self on the rubble, repeating over and over again, on the verge of tears, ‘Jafa kam kun, Jafa kam kun,
For a while I stood frozen. Then I screamed and, instead of the qasba, ran back towards the acacias, as the realization hit me that Dauji—there can be absolutely no doubt about it—new that ism-e a’zam, the sovereign charm, and was trying to bring a genie under control. What I’d seen with my own eyes was none other then a genie, exactly like the one in the illustrated edition of the thousand and one nights. But Dauji, unable to subdue it with the charm, had himself fallen before it, screaming again and again, ‘Jafa kam kun, ‘Jafa kam kun’. The genie, however, would not let go of him. I said down on the same rock and started to cry.
After some time Dauji appeared, back to his normal self, and said, ‘Come, Tanbure, let’s go’, and I, smitten with fear, meekly followed him. On the way, he seized to two lose ends of his turban, undone and hanging from his neck, and started to sing , rocking his head to and fro: Tere lamme lamme val farida turya turya ja (Walk along briskly, Farida, your long hair streaming behind).
Walking behind this magician, I saw his head change its shape: his serpentine curls began to hang down past his shoulders, his entire body became covered with long, matted hair. After that day no threat, not even that of being hacked to pieces, could induce me to go out with him for a walk again.
Just a few days after this, big clods of earth and pieces of brick began to fall into our courtyard. Bebe raised hell with her yelling and screaming. She stuck to Dauji like a bitch to its pups. She pounced on him, hitting so hard that he fell to the ground. She kept screaming hysterically all the while, ‘you old warlock, look what your spells have done, your Farsi, your black magic! It’s all backfired! The evil spirits you’ve let loose are throwing bricks at my house! They want to destroy it! They want death!
She started to scream even harder. ‘He’s killing me! He’s burnt me alive, people! This old fool has cooked up a plan to take my Amichand’s life! He’s broken every bone in my body!’
Amichand was as dear to Dauji as his very own life. How could he kill him? But it is also true that all that ghostly brick-throwing had been set in motion entirely on account of Dauji. When I backed Bebe on this, Dauji, for the first time in his life, spoke harshly to me. ‘You‘re an idiot. And your Bebe, Umme-e-jahileen in what you’ve started believing in Jihn-bhut? After I’ve been teaching you for a whole year?oh, how you disappoint me! What a pity, instead of placing your trust in knowledge, you’ve come to believe in woman’s superstition. What a pity!’
Leaving Bebe to her screams and Dauji to his moans of regret, I climbed up to the rooftop and sat down in the sun.
That very evening, as I was returning to Dauji from my house, Ranu, squinting as usual, asked me, ’I hear rock are coming down at your pandit’s house. Hope you didn’t get hurt? Did you, Babu?
I didn’t want to tangle with the lowlife, so I quietly steeped into the devrhi. That evening, as Dauji listened to me go over the geometry propositions, he suddenly asked ‘Beta, do you really think that jinn-bhuts and pari-churels are real?’
When I said that I did think so, he chuckled and said, ‘You really are very naïve. I’m sorry I snapped at you today. Why didn’t you tell me before that jinns existed, that they could throw bricks? I wouldn’t have gone through the trouble and expense of having Wali, the mason, and Phatte, the laborer, build the rains portico for us; I could have just as easily asked one of your jinns to do the work and that too for free. But tell me this, do the jinns only throw bricks? Or do they also know how to lay them?’
‘Laugh as much as you want, Dau, but the day a bricks cracks your head open, you will know.’
‘Not in a million years, and certainly not by a bricks one of your jinns hurls. You know why? Because a jinns just doesn’t exist. He can’t pick up a bricks, so there’s no question of it hitting my head, or for that matter yours, or your Bebe’s.