Two Short Novels Read Online Free Page A

a moment, he lay resigned and apathetic like a corpse which does not care about the soil it is laid on, though his eyelids pressed heavily and his nerves quivered as if his inside had become more acutely sensitive to the fear and sorrow that had crushed him through the last months.
    He felt a hard knot of saliva settling in the passage of his throat.
    He stirred his throat and half opening his eyes, spat into the spittoon. He closed his eyes, afraid to see the dark-red-white flame trailing down from his mouth. He fell back exhausted. It was terrible to be so weak. He sought to rest again, closing his eyes in the warmth through which swirled the noise of sparrows twittering in the lane. He lent himself to the soothing warmth of the pillows beneath his head and accepted his helplessness.
    ‘What was I thinking before Grandma came?’ he asked himself. But there was no answer from the depths of his body which now seemed stretched in a repose morbidly expectant. His heavy heart beat out a refrain; ‘I must get well, I must get well,’ as if it were still drugged with its obstinate belief in existence. And there was a quickening at the back of his head.
    In the dim light of the half-sleep which came over him, beyond the massed clouds of darkness, he was walking by the thick, muddy, sewage stream overflowing with slime, that ran inthe shadow of the town’s red brick wall and into which people emptied rats, live snakes, dead dogs and cats . . . . There was the foul reek of dung and urine from the trolley train which ran from the houses of the sweepers through the town wall past the gate of Lohgarh to the vast valley near the Bhagtanwallah Gate, where the refuse was burnt . . . . He had often wanted to become an engine driver so that he could drive the little engine of this train . . . . But the vision of the black-skinned, white-clad Master with a primly cut, scraggy beard had remained. The Master stood in the classroom, by the shoemakers’ houses, the corners of his eyes shot red with rage as if he were made of some unearthly clay, and he, Nur, had entered late. In one fearful moment he had trembled merely to see the fresh cane which lay on the table; he had known that the accusation in the Master’s eyes was coloured by revenge rather than by the anger at his lateness: the Master had asked him to bring hima basket of sweets from his father’s shop and when he had begged his father to give him the giftto offer to the Master, the Chaudhri had refused, saying, ‘I don’t keep a shop for the purpose of charity, it is hard enough for me to make a living and pay your school fees.’ And, of course, he had never dared to tell this to the Master . . . . The dread of the greedy dog, as he stood there, grimly seeped into his bones. And when the demon actually lifted the cane, he began to shriek in agony, whereupon the Master shouted to him, ‘Be quiet or I will give you one stripe more for everyone after which you howl!’ And as he howled and cried, ‘Oh spare me, oh spare me, Masterji ,’ long before the sweep of every blow from the cane shimmered before his terror-stricken eyes, the ghost of the devil had worked himself up to an even grimmer rage so that his words tumbled over each other as he numbered the blows, while he begged, prayed, supplicated to the cruel tyrant, drifting further and further and shouting the more, though he knew that his protest would increase the sum of his punishment . . .
    In a corner of the room he sat alternately hating his mother, who stood in the chamber of horrors, in the oblivion of her hell raging with fire and water, for not coming to his rescue, and loving her as she stood with tears of despair in her eyes and arms outstretched, appealing to the angel Gabriel to help her son. ‘Oh mother, don’t be silly; don’t whine like a pauper,’ he said as he nursed his smarting limbs, unable to lift his eyes for shame, as the tears welled in them against his will. ‘We have some prestige. The