Of Smokeless Fire by A.A. Jafri (i wanna iguana read aloud TXT) 📕

Spreading gossip like this, first through his immediate family and then through all their relatives and neighbours, Athanni tried to turn everyone against his cousin; and all this, just to seize Kashana-e-Haq. It was a plan that he had concocted a while ago. To accomplish this goal, he had fake property papers prepared by a crooked attorney, transferring the legal ownership of the house in his name. The illiterate Farhat had signed the papers, thinking that she was only granting temporary power of attorney to her nephew to protect her son from the ‘scheming churail’ who had clearly ensnared him.

With time, Athanni had developed a nasty plenitude, a serpentine completeness. Extortion, thievery, bombing, animal killing, blackmailing—he had done it all. But his latest plot was a chapter taken right out of the book of nefarious accomplishments. Mansoor had never fully imagined the extent of his devilry. He had misread him, grossly underestimating the lengths that Khaleel Khan would go to in order to destroy him. He was unprepared to deal with the measures his cousin would take to satisfy his cretinous revenge fantasies. Khaleel Khan ‘Athanni’ was, in Mansoor’s mind, always an idiot who needed to be taught the occasional lesson. He was dead wrong.

At Farhat’s funeral, Haider asked Athanni if Mansoor knew about his mother’s death. Athanni lied to him too, saying he had sent two telegrams and tried making trunk calls multiple times, but he could not locate him. Feeling a sense of lingering loyalty to Noor, Haider launched his own search for Mansoor. From Jumman, he got Mehrun’s telephone number in London. It was she who informed him that Mansoor might be at Joseph’s apartment and gave him the latter’s telephone number. And that was how Haider was able to call Joseph and inform Mansoor about the tragedy.

*

Mansoor arrived in Pakistan five days after his mother’s death. Although he had sent a telegram to his home address to inform the residents of his arrival date, no one came to receive him at the airport, making him feel like an alien in his own country. It was early morning when he landed in Karachi, and the January sun tried to sneak out through the clouds to heat up the cold air. Mansoor took a taxi and went straight to the Kashana. He expected to see Changez Gul at the gate, but the man had been replaced by a new chowkidar, who was reluctant to let him in. But when Mansoor told him that he was Sarwat’s nephew, he relented. There was no sign of any of the other servants. The backyard garden where he, Mehrun and Joseph used to play was utterly barren—the grass had died out, and the trees, once lush and green even in winter, stood in complete nakedness.

When he went inside, a fusillade of accusations, taunts and insults greeted him. With equal opportunities and matching eagerness, as if they had rehearsed it all, everyone in Nawab Khan Namaqul’s family participated in this verbal assault. Sarwat accused Mansoor of causing her sister’s death. Athanni and his father called him a shameless swine. Chowwani showed him the five fingers—the sign of shame. And before Mansoor had even realized what was happening, they ordered him to leave his own house. At first, Mansoor refused, and then he, in turn, ordered all of them to leave the house. But Athanni came back brandishing a copy of the title to the house.

‘Your mother, my pious aunt, may Allah rest her soul in paradise, cut you off because of your kafir tendencies,’ he shouted.

‘Where were you the day your father died?’ Sarwat asked.

Before Mansoor could answer, Athanni retorted, ‘I will refresh your memory, you thankless son. You were whoring around with that churail. Weren’t you?’

‘And where were you when your mother died?’ Chowwani jumped in, and then answered his own question, ‘Whoring with some gori bitch!’

Insomnia and jet lag made Mansoor’s head spin; the vicious, verbal shoving gave him a throbbing headache. Athanni and Chowwani loomed large like Munkar and Nakir, the twin angels of the grave, while Nawab Khan Namaqul and Sarwat fluttered their wings like Azrael, the angel of death. At that moment, Mansoor really wanted to become a djinn—exhaling smokeless fire and destroying these people with his blazing flames, incinerating them completely. Instead, he thundered, ‘You are a bunch of vultures, and I will get back what is lawfully mine. I will see you all in court.’

‘And we will see you in the sharia court,’ Athanni replied.

*

As the mist inside his mind cleared, Mansoor found himself outside the Kashana. He heard strange whispers and murmurs; he saw Mehrun, Joseph and Chaos. And then, like the phantasm of a dreadful dream, the Kashana loomed up in front of him like a decrepit house, its paint peeling off, the flowers wilting and the huge jasmine vine dying out, the serenity of this beautiful bungalow that his father had so lovingly built usurped by this pack of bloodthirsty scavengers. Mansoor noticed a lizard on the boundary wall of the house, its tongue stuck out, not towards the sky, but towards him. It was as if the reptile had also joined the vulgarians in their derision.

Biting his lip, Mansoor turned around and dragged himself towards the house next door—the house that had always reminded him of a fortress. He wanted to use the neighbour’s phone to call Haider Rizvi, the only person Mansoor trusted in this city of teeming millions. If his Uncle Zahid were alive, none of this would have happened. But Zahid seemed like a fabricated vision, a surreal character existing only in his mind.

He had never been inside the neighbour’s compound, never played with their children, never even knew their names. Growing up, he was discouraged from playing outside the Kashana’s walls, as if his parents wanted to protect him from the outside world. Mansoor rang the bell and waited, peering through the wrought-iron gate of his neighbour’s house. When no one came out, he rang the bell