Excerpt from Novel 𝒃𝒚 Khalid Jawed

Excerpt from Novel “Mautki Kitab” (The Book of Death), by Khalid Jawed

That what haunts me now is the electric current. My arms and legs are tied. I am seated probably in the executioner’s chair, my head and ears covered with a blemished cap. I am going be meted out the capital punishment — it was recorded in my Death Book as many births ago as I can’t reckon. My name, mentioned in it due to deeds beyond my control, has now been spotted with the help of a magnifying glass. I have a confession — I have been enticed into the evil deeds and sins from time immemorial. 

Well, the day has come for the decision to be implemented. I am destined to be burnt to a cinder. So it makes no difference whether the current flows in a straight line or snakes its way like the crooked ones. I am not sure whether it is hydroelectricity or the power generated by coal, ebbs and tides or by wind. But I wish the power had been produced by the wind.

The electric shocks flowing through my body are very strong. They convulse my whole body, even intestines. It seems like I am hit by a seismic wave, my bones dislocated, eyes popped out of their sockets and urine let out involuntarily. Though my lips are tied with a wide piece of plastic, the acute attacks of pain caused by them make me let out loud cries. The body convulses and the soul sags. Unable to bear the electric shocks, the soul wants to escape, leaving the boy in the lurch.

I don’t know whether I am alive or dead. But I am not in the chair now. The electric shock no longer flows through my body. My father has probably untied me from the electric pole in the street. And I am lying in a narrow and dark cell like a sick and worn out animal with my tongue lolling out. There lie a few loaves of chapattis and a small bowl of pulses or curry in a corner. But I am not able to bite my morsel. Devoid of hunger pangs, my body requires no food now.

Ages have passed since I entered this state. Sometimes, a bright day dawns with the sun scowling for ages and sometimes everything remains plunged into darkness. Be it a day or a night, it is all meaningless to me. What haunts me is an ominous feeling — my old age has mounted the high black walls to stay with me. I am no longer a stranger to the executioner’s chair and the death sentence. I sit in it every day. Similarly, I love the familiarity of the electric shocks. That is why I do not writhe in agony nor do I scream in pain. Like blood addicted to some powerful illegal drugs, my blood is also used to the fatal shocks. They have sapped my blood of its heat. So the blood coursing through my veins is no more the same. All alone to itself, the heart hangs from a washing line like a wrung out towel, waving and fluttering in the wind. Isn’t it a baleful and sinister situation?

The building sprawling across miles is fenced by black and sinister-looking high walls overgrown with weeds. Beyond the walls there is probably a pathway buzzing with a constant roar of lorries and trucks. During the nights the roar gets distinctly louder, stirring the creepy and eerie feelings. The tall eucalyptus trees standing in rows peer ominously at the desolate area fenced by the walls, and the monkeys go on jumping onto the walls from trees and then up on the trees throughout the day. The stray cats climb the dreary walls to let out whimpers.   

The forlorn building is surrounded by long corridors — inhabited by the ghosts and witches resembling human beings. Sometimes, they let out piercing shrieks in unison without rhyme or reason, and sometimes they roar with laughter rending the air. At times, the narrow black cells covered with seepage patches, as also the corridors are as silent and lonely as the graveyard. The shadows of the inhabitants visible by virtue of one or two lights are mixed up. Then the dim scary figures dance on the walls. Quite frequently, the eerie and lonely lanes echo with the sound of some unseen footsteps. The place is also inhabited by a few human beings deployed as guards for the security of the ghosts and witches. At a little distance from there a long row of discolored and dilapidated small shanties flickering with dim light appears in sight. The jarring sound of a burning kerosene stove echoes deepens the weirdness of the silence. In the still of the night, some hyenas are heard roaring with laughter somewhere in the distance. And perched on a hidden branch is an owl hooting ominously while adding uncanny mysteriousness to the looming silence. The lonely road reverberates with such a terrifying roar of trucks that other sounds die down. 

It so happens. Sometimes, the by-lanes are piled up with thin chapattis and faded buckets with runny yellow pulses. They rush to gorge themselves on the food, and also throw chapattis and pulses at one another. But sometimes, they do not even bother to look at the food. The ghosts resembling human beings are made to stand in a state of undress and are lashed ruthlessly almost every day. Booted hard, their heads are also trampled on.

No one from the other side of the wall comes to meet and interact with them. Whosoever happens to enter the dirty and miserably lousy and dark cells comes with an intention to thrash them. Strangely, while being thrashed, they dissolve into loud laughter and then roll over the earth with yet other peals of laughter. After a while they are as silent as corpses wrapped in shrouds. Then they stick out their heads to peep through the toilets under the black walls. They catch sight of nothing but the old branches of trees, as also the black rolling wheels of the trucks.

Though strangers to me, they are like me. Now all of them are my companions, my close friends. I firmly believe that one day or the other we chance to meet the people of our kind. It is rightly said that what is ordained comes to pass. Here everyone’s suicide is in his hand. He walks here and there accompanied by his shadow. Quite often, prompted by the suicide, he walks down to the black high wall, climbs it and jumps off from there. But his dead body lies there decaying and decomposing unattended. No one comes to claim it, not even kites and crows. Thus the decomposed body disappears with the suicide from the surface of the earth forever. The Suicide settled inside my threadbare pocket looks at me triumphantly at this particular moment. Unable to look it in the eyes, I sit on the executioner’s chair on my own and make confessions, accept my sins. While sitting in my confession chair I enter the whip waved by the executioner. I normally feel drowsy after the electric shocks. But this drowsiness is not natural. It seems to me that it has been thrust on me. It is like a filthy anesthetic injection or like a malevolent and foul hanky soaked in chloroform.

Then I lurch to my feet from the chair and stagger towards my cell, my head carrying a heavy rusted box containing sleep. Several nails jutting out from the bottom of the box pierce my head, exactly at the spot where my memory lies buried. I pass water in my deep sleep. The water passed in sleep is exactly like water passed in dreams. It makes the floor stink of the urine and also reek of sleep. In the habit of passing through the footboards of the desolate houses, my dreams have always been like this.

The constant electric shocks telling on my endurance render me silent. With the passage of time, the seed of silence lying inert inside me sprouts and grows into a shady tree. It seems to me that I am back from the soil of an unknown planet. I am struck dumb and my tongue is shrunk. It is so small now that I can’t stick it out to pass it on my dry and cracked lips. I have frozen jaws, palate and throat. Neither words flow nor sound emanates from my speech organs. I can’t even clear my throat. Besides, an awfully terrible silence reigns over my intestines and throat. But the silence has begun to unlock its mysteries to me. The silence is like some music inscribed on a piece of paper. What does the music inscribed on a piece of paper mean? The music should emanate from my head and float in the air or it should pierce the underworld through the sole of my shoes. But the silent symphony inscribed on a piece of paper sticks on my back like a false face of my memory.

I feel some lumps of soil erode in a distant inhabited island and fall on my heart with thuds. I think my island immersed deep in waters has gradually started to resurface, though after I have passed the golden period of my life. Overtaken by an old sleep, I fall in its fold like a child. I pull a dirty and damp sheet over my face. Gripped by irrepressible sleep, I lie prostrate on the floor. Though I am asleep, some light penetrates my eyes. There is a wall with rift through which there stream in dirty beams of light resembling the glow produced by the garbage set on fire. It seems that the sun in the distant sky is eclipsed. Needless to say, every light is streaked with a black shade. But the part of the sun unaffected by solar eclipse is more dangerous than the gloomy and eclipsed part of it. If one chances to look at the bright part of the sun with naked eyes, one will go blind because the black part of the sun comes to sit in his eyes forever. The eclipsed part of the sun is the same size as the bright part of it. The black part of the sun is in my view. There is someone beneath the earth like the lonely water. He is approaching me.

My father catches hold of my mother and pulls her towards the bed. No, no more of it now — my mother’s voice quivers with anxiety. But my father fells her on the bed. ‘No, do not do so. It can’t be done so’ — my mother’s trembling voice emanates. But my father bends on her like the shadow of a dagger befitting man’s stature. The dagger cruelly rips her cloth, leaving her in a state of undress. My mother looks plump with her stomach swollen in a beautiful and sacred way. There is no trace of any bones in her body. Her plump, heavy and beautiful body smells of milk.

‘No…no. For God’s sake. Think about your child. I am an eight months’ pregnant mother. It is a sin. It is a sin.’ My mother’s voice seems to have issued as if buried under some heavy heap of rubble.

There was some mysterious stirring in the area plunged into kind and peaceful darkness. A patch of darkness near my head is hit by a seismic wave. It quakes miserably — its foundation falls in a state of dilapidation. I am gripped by an obscure restlessness.

Who am I? Where am I? On the cusp of non-existence and universe, I feel a ruthless augmentation in my stream of consciousness much before my time. My latent and sleeping five senses are awakened by something painful. In the trembling darkness I smell the stench of dead fish on my head. Quite fidgety, I am nauseated by the stench. I feel as if I am wrapped in an icy and silent towel. Then my weak head is hit hard by a heavy, obscene and awfully black jolt. A prey to pain beyond endurance, I begin to cry bitter tears. It is bespattered with mud, blood and semen. I am stunned by the stench and pain. I am feeling giddy. Owing to the shooting pain I can’t even move. Now I am not able to weep. I am losing my senses and dying. No, I am regaining my senses and wit from this blind place. I discover the Suicide, my shadow forever, on dark wall and incorporate it in my senses. I want to die now, breathe my last in this kind dark heaven. I am sweating profusely, the sweat mixed with blood. Every bead of the sweat spurting from my bosom reeks of blood. I am going to abandon the hope of living any longer. I want to discard my age-old wish because of which I was hurled in this darkness. In fact, I do not want to go beyond its bound. I want to go back to non-existence. A black shade enters my eyes and sits there. I have surrendered the details of my life to both god and devil for them to include in the Death Book.

(Chapter Eighteen)

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(Translated from Urdu by A. Naseeb Khan)

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