This story is dedicated to bibliophile_96 who has been extremely supportive of my own book (& of me, if she remembers a particular PM exchange ;-). As I haven't been able to dedicate a chapter (of my book) to her yet, I'm dedicating this story, which I also find (along with the previous one, Mother) to be one of the most moving ones in the collection—at least it moved me ;-). Thank u so much, Siddhika—hope u enjoy it :-)!
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Mehdi Hasan, professor of philosophy, was dying of brain cancer. He could not be operated upon, for the removal of the malignant tumour would involve the destruction of too much brain-tissue. The news, when the doctor told him, hit him, as they say, like a truck, knocking the vehicle of his life off the highway into a ditch. His reason, on which he had relied heavily all his life, was the first casualty. How could an occasional headache and a stiff neck add up to death? How can one and one make infinity? His emotions fared no better. Fear heaved and sloshed in his whole being with a force that threatened to split the container.
But time is a healer, or at least a deadener. Within a few weeks he had calmed down and his faculties regained a measure of self-control and resumed, at least partly, their ordinary functioning. For example, his reason, though still unable to join a minor cause to a major effect with the straight line of logic, managed to draw the crooked line of paradox between his harmless symptoms and catastrophic diagnosis. His emotional tumult also subsided to a dull quiescence. He became sadly reconciled to the fact that the colourful, noisy show of life would go on merrily but shortly he would no longer be a part of it.
However, the semblance of repose that his resignation had brought him did not last long. It began to be threatened by an image. He would be sitting by himself in a headache-free period or lying awake at night, when an image would appear before his mental vision, the image of a dark wall. He could see himself standing before it, his progress and view completely cut off. He was an intelligent as well as a highly educated man. So he knew immediately what the wall stood for. It was his mind's way of telling him in concrete terms that he had reached the end of his street. Every man's life is a dead-end street, and one day he reaches the point after which there is nowhere else to go. He must accept this finality. Mehdi had done exactly that.
But his imagination would not go along with him. It created difficulties for him. It said: 'This is a wall. A wall has two sides. There must be something on the other side.' Mehdi thought that in his weakened state old religious superstitions that he had successfully driven off were beginning to return. He had been sure—the training of a life-time had taught him so—that death is extinction, a total annihilation. He remembered stepping on insects, sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately. That was death—being rubbed out of existence. But his imagination would not listen. Unreasonably it kept on repeating its demand for the perspective on the other side. What made Mehdi uneasy in the beginning and tense and frustrated later on was the easy erosion of his reasoned conviction and the increasing presence of the illusion of the other side. He could not get the thought out of his mind. His devout Muslim friends tried to come to his aid. They said they knew what was on the other side. First of all there was God. Then there were his angels, and his devils. And that he would be met by an angel in the grave who would ask him for an account of his life. Mehdi, who had been brought up in a Muslim household, was familiar with those beliefs. But they were fictions for him that did not carry conviction. They did not touch his imagination, which stood there obstinately before the dark wall, trying to pierce it with its eyes. What was he to do? He started to fear his headache-free periods. The headache was a pain that he could understand, but the pain of the imagination, the heavy anxiety, the constant but futile spinning of the mind drove him to utter exhaustion, yet made no sense.
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.
With the cruelty of a tiger Abdul combined the cunning of a fox. The police were unable to catch him, and as to any other person capturing or killing him, the question did not arise. His eyes in those days were blood-shot and scorching red. They went into a man's soul and burned up his courage. How many times he had seen the hands of his enemies grow limp and drop their weapons even when they had caught him defenceless. He became known as Abdul-with-Death-in-his-Eyes. The title flattered him. At times he believed he was Death itself. Fear, of course, never touched him.
One evening, as the darkness deepened, his lieutenants assembled as usual at his house to take their orders. He spent some time with them discussing the night's target, and then went into an inner, dimly-lit room to fetch his gun that lay on a shoulder-high shelf. Still thinking of the strategy to be followed that evening, he grabbed at the gun. There was a furious hiss, which made him immediately let go and look up. There had been a cobra lying alongside the gun, which he had inadvertently caught. Now it had raised itself and was poised to strike, barely six inches away from his face. He tried to draw his head back, but the cobra leaned back too, ready to strike: the slightest movement on his part would trigger the spring. He froze. The cobra hissed and hissed furiously. The man without fear was now paralysed with a terror that he had never known before. At each whiplash of a hiss he trembled in his entire being. Eventually there was just an occasional hiss, and the two adversaries were motionless, face to face and peering into each other's eyes. The man felt that something was happening to his very eyeballs. He felt that the fiery vapour that had burned in them for months was fast cooling down. It dawned on him that this, and not the other battles, were the real encounter, in which he was proving to be a poor second. The real eyes of Death were in front of him now. He had only fooled himself when he believed that he was Abdul-with-Death-in-his-Eyes. He had been impertinent. He was only a poor human with life in his eyes.
He did not know how long he stood there. But as the red mist lifted from his eyes, he could see more clearly and with less fear. Before, he had seen a piercing point of light in each of the snake's eyes and shadows of anger crossing the eye-screens. Now he saw a whole world in them. A little sun hung in that universe and flakes of ashen snow dropped from its grey sky. He felt that he was wandering in that desolate landscape. He seemed to sense that countless others were there beside him, in the same plight. But he did not see them as, he felt sure, they did not see him. Everyone, he thought, felt that he was the only one existing in that lonely, silent world. He uttered a cry to break the immense silence, but the sound did not even travel to his ears—the air was dead. He touched himself, but there was no sensation. Desperately, he hit himself a hard blow; he did not feel where it landed. He looked into the stretching vastness before him, and something in him told him that if he penetrated the grey desert the scenery would change, and he would change too. There were distances, both inside and outside, to be explored. But as he started to move forward, the snake lowered itself and glided away.
He let a few minutes elapse; then he came out of the room, shading his eyes from his friends. Without looking at them he told them that he would not be able to accompany them that night. When they left, he left too, leaving the city for good. After that his only interest was in snakes. He travelled with them from place to place and told his story to those whom he considered worthy of hearing it.
The snake-charmer left and Mehdi returned to his study. He did not look at his books, nor even at the rectangle of light with the broken back, which anyway had almost disappeared. He did not turn on the light but sat in the growing darkness, his mind at ease. Something had happened that had taken away the agitation and the uncertainty of his mind. He sat there a long time, thinking of the snake-charmer's story, his eyes, and the world that was in them. When he went to bed he slept easily. As usual he woke up in the middle of the night, but this time there was no gnawing and whirring of the mind. The wall had not gone away. It was still there. But now he was confident that there were two little windows in it, probably as big as pinpoints, but that he should be able to find them. He fell back to sleep.
Next morning he got up, showered, had his breakfast, changed, and got ready to go out. He was acting like a man who knew what he had to do. He headed for the zoo. Once there, he sought out the reptile section and spent the whole morning standing before the glass cages of snakes.
The visit to the zoo became a daily, almost a religious routine for him. He would stand for hours looking at the snakes in the hope that one would lift its head and look into his eyes. Once in a while he was lucky to find a reared cobra behind the glass wall and he would fix his eyes on its eyes. But he did not see much, only a snake and its eyes. But he kept trying harder, concentrating. One day it happened that the snake disappeared and what he saw was a cottony blur in the middle of which was a black bud growing on a black stump.
The zoo-keeper was suspicious of him in the beginning, but seeing that he was a respectable-looking man, he tolerated him as an eccentric with a curious hobby. Then one day while he was sitting in his office he heard the tinkle of breaking glass. He came out. What he saw horrified him. There was that man by the king cobra's cage. He had broken the glass front and the reared cobra was barely six inches away from his face. The man did not move; the cobra did not move. They were frozen in a timeless balance. Then the keeper started running towards the man, his iron-tipped heels clattering on the cement floor. The man's head moved the slightest bit, turning towards the noise. The cobra struck. The man did not move, did not draw back. He stood like a pillar. The cobra struck again, like a velvet-covered hammer hitting his face. This time the man faltered and fell to the ground. The keeper reached him, dragged him away from the cage, and shouted for help. He cradled the wounded man's head in his lap. There were two deep bruises on his cheekbones under the eyes and beads of blood where the fangs had punctured the skin. What surprised the keeper was that the dying man's eyes were peaceful, even smiling.
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If u r of South Asian background, I'm wondering if u agree with my father's view of what caused Hindus & Muslims to treat each other so brutally after partition—see paragraph beginning, "In this intoxicating game of murder ..." I'm not sure I do & am interested in hearing ur views!