People continue to come and go in this house and this boy keeps me informed about it. But he purposely gives me only incomplete information so that I will continue to ask him question after question, and he can continue to give me incomplete answers.
One day he ran over to me and said, ‘Your guest has arrived.’
‘My guest?’
‘Now this portico will be taken away from you.’
‘Will the guest take it away?’
‘No, the patient, not the guest.’
‘A patient? What illness does he have?’
I saw that a man had, in fact, entered the compound and had already walked up as far as the tree, with the owner and some other members of the household following behind. They stopped and stood under the tree. The owner was explaining something to the man. Then, taking slow steps, all of them came towards the portico. The guest’s eyes were scanning the ground, as if he was searching for something. He was moving with deliberate slowness, but he didn’t appear sick at all. He stopped a short distance away from me. Even now he was looking at the ground with half-closed eyes. The owner drew near him and said, ‘Just this portico.’ The man opened his eyes wide, lifted his head and twisted his neck glancing just once at the compound, the tree, the side door, the portico and me, and then he turned around to leave. It seemed to me that everything he had glanced at disappeared into his eyes and then came back out within the space of a single second.
Now they were entering the side door. His eyes hadn’t tarried on my face at all; still I was feeling as if I had just walked straight out of some maze.
6
I was bound to be curious about the patient. The boy visited me now and then and brought up the subject on his own, but since I knew he would never give a straight answer to any of my questions, I asked him about other things instead. Finally he stopped mentioning the patient altogether. But this only increased my dilemma further until one day I myself asked him, ‘How is your patient faring?’
‘Why don’t you ask the girl who comes to look after him?’ he said. ‘She comes here into this area too.’
‘Here?’
‘She just sits for a long time under the tree,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you don’t see well these days.’
It occurred to me that on certain days I had, indeed, seen a girl under the tree, but I had thought of her as a guest.
‘So she’s his nurse?’
‘No, she’s your nurse,’ he said, feeling bored, and got up and went back into the house.
That same day, when the girl arrived and sat down under the tree, I came out of the portico. She saw me and greeted me. I approached her. She quickly stood up and I hurled one question after another at her about the sick man. However, I couldn’t get much information out of her. She knew very little herself, but she did tell me as much as she knew.
What I found out from her was just this: for generations the relations between the families of the people who lived in this house and the family of the sick man had been very close. He had gone away somewhere. When the people of this house found him, none of his family except this girl remained alive. He didn’t tell anyone where he had been, but he was willing to live in this house now.
‘And what ailment does he have?’ I inquired.
‘He doesn’t talk,’ the girl replied.
‘Something wrong with his throat?’
‘No, he’s chosen on his own to give up talking.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Didn’t you ask him?’
‘What’s the point? He’s given up talking, hasn’t he?’
I realized that my question was absurd.
After that, whenever she came into the compound, I would come out of the portico. She would greet me and I would spend a long time telling her all kinds of interesting stories. I had taken it upon myself to amuse her. Sometimes I also asked her about the sick man, invariably adding at the end, ‘I want to meet him at least once.’
One day she told me that everybody in the house had gone out to some wedding and, if I wanted, I could meet with the sick man now.
The people here hadn’t invited me inside the house up to now. Perhaps I really shouldn’t go. I thought for a while and then followed the nurse through the side door. After passing through several sections of the house, we entered a section, the greater part of which looked unoccupied. Coming to the open door of a room, she asked me to wait there and went in herself.
I saw the patient from the door. He was sitting on his bed and his eyes were apparently searching for something on the floor. After a while he lifted his head and looked at the girl, who beckoned me to come in. After some hesitation I entered. The patient’s eyes had again started to search for something on the floor but I somehow felt that he was, in reality, observing me. Finally, he lifted his head and turned his face towards me.
We kept looking at each other, in silence, for the longest time ever. Our faces didn’t betray any kind of curiosity. His eyes had an intensity, a brightness, but throughout this time, never for a moment did they seem to be devoid of feeling. I could not tell if his eyes were trying to say something or were merely observing me, but I felt we were coming to some silent understanding. All of a sudden a terrible feeling of despair came over me. I was experiencing it for the first time since I’d come to this house. Just then his nurse placed her hand on my arm and led me out of the room.
Outside, as I spoke with her, I realized that my speech was a shortcoming and that the patient was travelling far ahead of me on a road I knew nothing about.
7
Bouts of despair strike me; still I let my curiosity grow as much as, or even more than, before. The people who live here still become flustered by my questions. I continue to tell the nurse all kinds of interesting stories and inquire after the patient’s condition. But when I’m seized by an attack of despair, I feel as if tiny yellow leaves are coming down in a shower between the nurse and myself. The boy who must own this house one day begins to seem like a vanishing shadow. And the ceiling of my resting place feels as though it’s right on top of my chest.
Naiyer Masud has been described as “one of the foremost short story writers in Urdu”. He has published a number of scholarly books and translations, including Urdu versions of Kafka, and was awarded the Urdu Prize of the Sahitya Akademi in 2001. Until his retirement, he worked as a Professor of Persian in Lucknow University.
Muhammad Umar Memon is Professor Emeritus of Urdu literature and Islamic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a critic, short-story writer, and has translated and edited half a dozen anthologies of Urdu fictional writing.
