The Opium Eater and Other Stories [a potpourri set primarily in India]

4. The Birth of Faith

He devised a distraction for his mind, which went as follows: 'Keep the mind steadily looking at the truth of your death. Tie it firmly to the fact so that it does not stray into the illusion. The wall is not really a wall but a concrete block without end. There is no other side.'

It was this principle that he was practising on that October afternoon when the snake-charmer turned up at his door. He was sitting in his study with two books lying open before him. One was on palmistry; the other was a medical book. He was examining his palm and comparing it to a diagram in the palmistry book. His vanishing life line was like a river that had dried up in the desert of his palm. In the medical book he looked at the pictures of darkening brains, the darkness increasing till nothing was left except the darkness. Beside the two books there lay on the desk a golden rectangle of light that the sun had cast through the room's only window. Half of the rectangle lay on top of the desk, half hung down along one side of it, as if its back had been broken by the edge of the upper surface.

He was thus preoccupied when his little son came running into the room.

'Dad,' he said, 'give me four annas, for the snake-charmer. He got up to find some change, but by the time he had it the child was gone. So he went out to pay the man himself.

The snake-charmer was sitting in the verandah by himself. His young audience had dispersed and he was putting back the covers on the wicker baskets in which the snakes were carried. He was a young man, dressed in the customary saffron garb of his profession. His face was drawn like an ascetic's, with a straggling Mongol beard on his chin. He did not see the approaching man. So Mehdi said, 'Here!' extending his hand to give him the money. As he stood up, the eyes of the two men met and a shock went through Mehdi's frame as if someone had dashed a bucketful of icy water on his face. Transfixed, he gazed into the snake-charmer's eyes in birdlike fascination. The eyes were half open and completely motionless. There was an icy glitter in them. Inside those frozen pools Mehdi could see two pinpoints of light held still and unwavering, which made the eyes all the more unnerving. Yet one could not describe them as cruel eyes in the ordinary sense of the word 'cruel'. They were not the eyes of the feline species. Their pitilessness belonged to a higher order. They were angerless, aloof, and lordly.

Mehdi was thinking that the dark nature of his profession had given them that unnatural look, when the man said, 'You are wondering about my eyes. In my travels with my snakes from city to city I come across people who remark upon how unusual they are. Some even ask me what I have done to them. Of course, I don't bother to satisfy their idle curiosity. But sometimes in the audience I notice troubled faces like yours, who deserve to be told—brothers in need of help, so to say. I catch them at the end of the show and tell them my story. So you see, I must tell my story to you too.' And he told him his story. In a way Mehdi was a willing listener, and yet in another, he knew he had no choice in the matter.

The snake-charmer's name was Abdul and his story went back a couple of years to the politically stormy days of 1947, when the British, after terminating their rule, were withdrawing from India, and the country was delirious with the fever of freedom. The energy of the nation, penned up in slavery for centuries and now suddenly released, went on a rampage. The joy of freedom lay in killing. Unable to vent their fury on their erstwhile masters, the two major religious communities, the Hindus and the Muslims, flew at each other's throats with a ferocity that staggered comprehension, and freedom was celebrated with the spilling of the blood of hundreds of thousands.

In this intoxicating game of murder Abdul found himself to be a masterful player. He planned and carried out his raids on the enemy territory with the efficiency of a military commander, systematically burning down one Hindu mohalla after another in the city. When the flames leapt high in scarlet joy against the night sky and the terror-stricken people fled in panic, he would be waiting for them with his men at the escape routes. The men were cut down, the children slaughtered, the young women were rounded up and raped in a mass orgy. Some of them had their breasts cut off and turned into fountains of blood.