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

go to his mother’s house in Punjab, he replied, ‘Sahib, my mother got married to my father’s worst enemy. I have cut all ties with her.’

Jumman, however, was reluctant to share his quarters with a bhangi, albeit a vilayat-palat, a foreign-returned bhangi.

‘But Jumman Chacha, I am not a bhangi any more!’ Joseph protested.

Joseph had called him chacha many times before, and Jumman had never cared about it. After all, everyone else in his old neighbourhood had started calling him chacha after his beard turned prematurely white.

‘Abey harami, bloody harami, even if you bathe in the Ganga a thousand and one times, you will still remain a bhangi. Your grandfather was a bhangi, your father was a bhangi and you are a bhangi. You will always remain a bhangi, saley,’ replied Jumman.

‘But, Chacha, I have become a Muslim,’ Joseph deflected Jumman’s insults and tried to hide the blot of his being a bhangi by lying about his conversion to Islam. But that did not work either. So Joseph tried the only fail-proof strategy he could think of: bribery. He offered to pay Jumman a rent of twenty-five rupees a month, which Jumman gladly accepted. And with the stigma of untouchability thus laundered by lucre, Joseph became a sub-tenant of Jumman, unbeknownst to Noor or Farhat.

Every day, Joseph waited impatiently for the postman, but the letter from Peter Dawber remained elusive. The money he had saved from working in the oil refinery would sustain him for a few months. He had faith that Dawber would eventually come through with his promise. And soon enough, just like old times, he began his weekly pilgrimage to Sona Mandi and the cinema halls. Jumman and Budhoo were puzzled about his sudden interest in English movies, but Joseph convinced them that it was purely educational.

‘I want to talk like a motherfucking firangi, like a foreigner,’ he declared.

Of course, it was not his love of the English language alone that drove him to those tantalizing cinema halls. His disorderly hormones shoved him equally hard. Deprived of sex and porn flicks since his return from Iran, Joseph checked out his former purlieu, Premier Talkies, where the movie Samson and Delilah was doing roaring business with a sell-out crowd. Before he left for Iran, he had become good friends with one of the ticket clerks, who, for two rupees, would reveal to Joseph the days when they were going to embed longer pornographic clips in the featured film.

Although he had seen the movie three times already, Joseph went again. The last two times, the management had inserted bits of hardcore pornography between the scenes, and Joseph was sure of scoring a hat-trick this time. But it did not happen. For some reason, the cinema hall bosses did not play any pornographic scenes that day, thus disappointing Joseph severely. Not only did they not include the totay, but as if to send Joseph’s hormones into a complete tailspin, they also censored the kissing scenes that were there in the movie. Joseph seethed in anger.

‘These haramis did not even show a single kiss!’ he vented his rage to the guy next to him and continued, ‘What do they expect me to do with this?’ he pointed towards his crotch. ‘Cut it off and throw it in the fucking gutter?’ His neighbour was equally disappointed. ‘I wasted five rupees on this motherfucking movie for nothing!’ But he suggested another cinema hall to Joseph where they showed doctored movies with nude clips of a flop Pakistani actress. That seemed to pacify Joseph and he decided to try his luck there the next day.

As he came out of the cinema hall, he noticed a motley crowd demonstrating and yelling slogans outside. Within seconds, even as he stood there watching the scene, the angry mob began pelting stones at the theatre. The demonstrators shattered the newly installed windows of the cinema. At first, Joseph thought that they, too, were protesting against the management for not showing any pornographic bits, but he soon realized that they were inveighing against Samson and Delilah. With the possibility of a riot looming large, he quickly turned around and sneaked out of the back door, but his curiosity brought him back to the crowd. He came and stood next to a man with a placard that said, ‘Don’t Ensult Our Riligion! No Samsung No Dilaala!’

‘What’s going on?’ Joseph asked.

‘They have not only shown one of our prophets; they have also shown him kissing!’

‘Which prophet is that?’

‘Hazrat Shamoon, peace be upon him.’

‘But there is no Hazrat Shamoon in the movie!’

‘You idiot, Samsung is Hazrat Shamoon. I have seen the movie, but I didn’t know it then,’ the man said.

After hundreds of showings of the movie going unnoticed, somebody had informed the public that the hero of the story was not just a Judea-Christian prophet, but also an Islamic prophet mentioned in the Qur’an. And that incensed the public since it was a grave sin to show images of prophets, kissing prophets no less.

Having had his curiosity satisfied, Joseph left the scene in a hurry on a motor rickshaw, knowing that it would get ugly there, and he was right. A little after he left, the angry crowd beat up the staff and the manager and then torched the cinema hall. The G.O.D.s exploited the situation and tried to destabilize the government, which, in turn, promptly banned the movie. The movie that had been shown hundreds of times was now declared insulting to religion.

*

Two and a half months passed by, but Joseph heard nothing from Dawber. Idleness and boredom made him a pest, and he began getting on everybody’s nerves. In the meantime, Farhat made his life difficult by constantly encouraging him to move out of the servants’ quarters. Just as Noor had done the last time, he had not consulted her again about letting Joseph stay, and she felt slighted.

‘Why can’t he stay with his relatives in Bhangi Para?’ she asked Jumman.

‘Begum Sahiba, he says all his relatives are dead and