Excerpt from Novel 𝒃𝒚 Saleem Shahzad

It is said, the curse flared-up from its mouth with a wailing scream. What was the curse? Who had casted it? Nobody knew anything about it.

….

Froth was seeping out of his mouth with rage and dismay. Today he would have written the whole thing, if he could. The life of a helpless man is always worthless. A man could be so much helpless that he couldn’t write down what he wanted? How could be no control over the pen when everything is in mind? But, he could not write even a single word after returning from there. When he came out of the home he was staggering miserably, but he continued…..continued until he came across the Chaulistan, where sand spread all around. A camel appeared from the desert in front of him, raising his head and staring at the sky. It looked like he was praying to Allah for rainfall.

Rain of the sun was heavily falling from the sky. Its every drop was piercing in the body like thorns. He looked up at the sky where clouds over casted. “Then…..this volley of the sun?” he thought.

He cared for nothing, though, the fuzziness spread before his eyes but he kept dragging along. The camel’s face was still upwards to the sky. It looked as if someone had grabbed the air.

“Where has the air departed? Though hot, but it were always here. Where has it moved out to rest? In prison or…!”

He keeps tottering with his fist clenched. In that field of sand, he and sand are alone.

“Can the sand be snatched?”

“Not can be snatched, been snatched.”

“Then, how am I walking over the sand?”

“I can, too, be taken to, …..this….. you have been since long ago….. your thoughts…..” The sand started to slip from his fist and he opens his tightly clasped hand.

Sand slid from the fist…..in the sand!

….

“I’ll continue writing until I put down the truth, if I have to throw out all of my inscribed papers, though.”

“I am gritty to write it down today.”

“Everyone has his own truth.”

“All writers put in their writing the truth.”

“They would, but I have to record the truth that I have been carrying like a burden on my soul…. I could not sleep since I knew that truth — the trust of that truth — I have been schlepping with me, which is my liability to convey to the people…. He won’t forgive me and my descendants if I could not jotted it down. While handing me over this trust, he warned me to bring it forth at all costs, otherwise….. Otherwise the lie shall forever be measured as truth…!”

“The truth is too hard to tolerate.”

“It is not the matter of facileness or toughness. The crux is related to that historical truth to which my generation…..!”

“Whatsoever, if I couldn’t then no one would ever write it down but the life would end on earth….”

….

Today he coveted neither to ponder over and nor to write anything, but still he had feeling that he must write the truth today. He picked up his pen dejectedly and stared vacuously at the front wall. He heard the sound of something falling down. He was so absorbed in his contemplation that he mistook it for his illusion.

“I must write something today.” He thought, but, nothing struck his mind that he could scribble, so the pen didn’t move. Only his eyes were fixed on the front wall, which was also as void as his mind. He began to saunter into the room unpremeditatedly, hoping striking a marvelously unique idea to write down the truth he had told him in a style that profoundly leave an impact on the people’s hearts and minds. People should not take his writing as boloney. Rather, they believe the truth that he had told him. Although he found this task hard yet it had to be finished. After all, he was warned. While moseying, he heard again the sound of something falling down. The voice was so faint that he did not notice it. He left the room lost in his thoughts. The outdoor view was the same as before. But a crumpled ball of paper, he had thrown into the belly of wastebasket, laid on the ground. He picked up the ball absentmindedly and threw it back without reading it and walked into the room.

He picked up the pen and started writing on the paper in hand. He finished the paper and picked up another.

“This… this… I didn’t write it. The writing looks like mine tough, but I always write in blue ink. Who has put this paper, written in red ink, here?” He shuddered.

“Has he started writing down the truth himself he told me and sending it to me? Or I have written it during my asleep? But this writing.…? It looks mine…” He confounded. “And not mine either… Then who wrote it?” Or he wrote by holding my hand when I was asleep? Or might he hex my body to have control over it? Or might he capture my mind and got written all this from me?

His chest filled with rue. He had only casted a glance over the paper but didn’t read it. He had Goosebumps. After thinking for a while he solaced himself, “If he could write all this himself or have someone to write it, he needed not to tell me.  He had asked me to write it down. Then who wrote these papers? Who could it be? Is it me myself?” His mind fell into the haze of thoughts.

….

“Everyone fights a war to the extent of his share.” He wrote and put the pen on the table.

“I am fighting your share.” The ink of the words on the paper said with a smile.

He did not notice the feeble voice of the ink. He was lost in his thoughts, “Why wars waged in the world, and why the arms are taken still? Can’t we stop the wars?” His thoughts drifted to his words.

“First of all, stop the war you are on amongst you. There is always a war going on among you. You have never thought about it.”

“That is another sort of war — an existential one.”

“War is always just a war, nothing else. When this war turns outside, it changes into a great war. Finish it first. If it ends, all wars will end.”

“I was talking about that war which destroys.”

“I am at war with my existence?”

“I have never fought with my existence.”

“Existence continues to battle. This war will continue.”

“Then that war will also continue.”

“We cannot win that war.”

“Which war?” he asked.

“No war.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“I didn’t say anything. I am sitting quietly, thinking. You have written that everyone takes part in a war to the extent of his share.

“Yes, I have written it, but after that I haven’t written anything.”

Finally, he clenched the pen in his fist, getting afflicted.

….

He was sitting and writing:

“We have never attempted to subjugate anyone’s land, yet people come from outside and quell ours.”

“We are not as enervated as people consider we are. If we attempted to subdue their land, they won’t be able to fight back.”

“Then why did you let them conquer your land?”

“We didn’t allow it. Our forefathers had given them this land.”

“They were dominant, that’s why they subjugated.”

He had no answer. He always wondered: Why they came from another place and made this land their abode. Neither our language nor our customs are the same. Then the land is ours but chattels to them and we are their slaves?

“You’ll remain a slave. The limit of your intellect ends here. You can’t think beyond it.”

“We may be slaves, but we have never left our land even under any bellicosity.” Anyway, why should we quit our homeland?”

“No one quits the mother and the homeland!”

“Yes, if the situation becomes like this, sometimes you have to quit.”

“If you want to save your life by quitting your land, you should evacuate it.”

“Land can be found again, but life can’t.”

“Life is not important than country. If you save your land by giving your life, there is nothing more than it.”

….

He continued writing:

The ant’s silence is seen in the thunderbolt.

I want to call out for silence but my voice has clogged. I struggled to speak. The thunder of the cloud penetrates straight into my expression and roars on my tongue.

“It’s the thunder of silence,” someone tells me.

My tongue starts to burn like an ember. I feel my tongue clung against my palate. My palate and tongue are stuck to each other like a tich button.

The silence of roar started dancing in front of my eyes. I look with eyes wide open. Lightning thunders and clouds roar. My eyes are still fixed on the sky.

Cloudiness is moving at the pace of an ant… moving… moving…

“It is unidentified whether the cloudiness is moving at this pace or the ant? Or both are moving at the same pace…?”

….

He wanted to talk to himself, placing the paper aside. But he loses voice in his throat. He struggles to speak forcefully. But nothing comes out of his mouth except whining sounds. He wants to say something with all his might, he feels dizzy and falls down on the bed.

“Have I forgotten to speak?”

“If I can’t speak, won’t I be able to write?”

“What will become of me?”

……………

It was also a convention that the casted curse would ineludibly be fulfilled. 

But…

… But how and when?

….

He had been seeing the tree in his dream for many nights. He rarely dreamed and paid no attention to them. But no one had ever seen such kind of dreams.

The first night he saw as if he were swinging with a rope tied to a tree. He saw this dream twice in one night.

When he woke up in the morning, he didn’t care for the last night dream. He would have forgotten this dream like the other dreams, if he hadn’t seen another dream of a tree the next night.

The next night he saw the tree calling him by his name. He had reached the tree that his eyes opened. He again shut his eyes tightly and tried to sleep again, but it seemed as if the dream had taken away the sleep had left along it. He didn’t know when he got his eye went soporific but he didn’t see any dream. However, it realized him that the tree had reminded him of his promise.

The fourth night dream made him perplexed a lot that caused pouring a sweat, wetting him from head to toe, and he had to keep his eyes open for fear that even if he fell asleep, the dream might carry him away.

He thought that he had been fulfilling his promise, but perhaps he was not doing it fully or there was some deficiency in it. Then, he dreamed that a rope-like flexible branch was wrapped around his neck, suffocating him and causing his eyes to bulge out of their sockets. Terror disturbed his sleep, but he was afraid to open his eyes and his breathing continued like a bellows.

….

Someone else was writing. What he wanted to write was not being written by him. But it never occurred to him that he tried to write but another one wrote instead. He had just picked up the pen to write that he saw written sheets in front of him.

“It can’t be, it can’t be.” He mumbled, perplexed.

He forgot to breathe for quite some time. Then he picked up the written paper in front of him, plucking up his courage. As he continued to read, his dread grew more and more. He had read only a single page that he again forgot breathing. 

As he read, his heart began to race. It… it… has the situation worsened so much? The daily life of the people here… is it mine too?.… No… yes.… mine too. But.… for what? They still want to destroy the town? The things people talked to one another were also jotted down. Whether am I being realized…. I…. diary…. Why must it be written on accounts of here? Who has been writing these things? There would be some reason of it? ….. If someone has been old history has been groping around the ancient history? Who can? Who? A spy here too… A spy spying the people of the town? Attack.… history.… history.… his.… A war history? Or the war forced by the history? Someone might told the five millinery….! May be.… But why? Because.… they.… theirs.… not.… so whether the foreigners.… No.… How they can dare!.… Real residents too!.… What can’t happen?.… Although it seems not.… but.… it can happen. They have been to us from the very beginning…. So, is that the reason that the five millenary asked me?

He picked up another paper. Now he was reading carefully. What is this?.… It is about the inhabitants of all over the earth….? This is…. conspiracy… But who conspired it….?

He continued thinking. Darkness began to cover his eyes….

I didn’t write. How did it happen? This is a white lie. This lie is being written. I didn’t write it…. I didn’t.

He quickly picked up all the papers without reading them and started tearing them one by one. His eyes were shedding tears continually.

“Why is he crying?” she spoke to herself when she saw him coming from the front. He was about to throw away the torn paper when an idea occurred to him.

He starts looking for matches. He doesn’t get matches. He starts chewing and throwing small pieces of paper into her stomach. It takes him half an hour to do this. He turns around and sits in his chair. As soon as he sits down, he begins to feel nauseous.

His perplexities do not stop and the paper in front of him is covered in white foam.

….

He was a writer — a curio writer. He always wrote stories having novelties and all the truths. He wandered here and there to hunt out the truth, and whenever he found a unique true story he put pen to paper, shutting up himself in a room. When finished, he again left home for another queer story, and he roamed until stumbled on an odd story, which was the sole objective of his life.

Once he reached to a settlement, after roving from one village to another and after rambling from one habitation to the other, where he saw a strange tree about which neither he had neither heard from any one nor had read in any writing. The tree was so huge that frozen him. He wondered that the tree was mysterious and it had some profound detectable secret.

When he started to get knowledge about the tree from the dwellers of the settlement, its legends stunned him and enhanced his curiosity.

The people called him the five millenary and had view that it was five thousand years old. Their statements looked to him uncanny. It seemed him bizarre that the tree had been standing for the five thousand years. Much the people told was less for him. They had only legends, which they had listened from their forefathers. But he had to find the absolute truth. Half-truths or mere legends made nothing. No true story could be intertwined when more is in clandestine. But there was not even one person who could tell him without any faux pas. The covertness had increased a lot, and he didn’t want to return with the anguish of half-truth as it had suffered him with new agonies of solicitudes.

He had always hunted down a perfect substance — an entire story. He never left things unfinished. While absorbed in his thoughts, he heard a voice coming from his inside, “The secret will untangle itself.   The covert truth will be before his eyes, but it will take some time.” How? How will it be? Who’ll tell me about the five millenary? Anyone who himself has an age of five thousand years? He asked to himself. Meeting up of the five thousand years old person is inconceivable. Then? Then, how can the truth be scanned? The villagers have already told what they knew. Is there no other way to find it out?” Someone’s voice assured him from inside. “Surely, there will be a way.”

Inadvertently, he reached to the five millenary and sat under it absolutely lost in his thoughts.

He remained there sitting absent mindedly, utterly preoccupied. Finally, there was an advent of a new idea in his mind.

“He had only dissected the matter with the people of only this settlement or those of the some very nearby villages to sort out the reality. The people of other somewhat far flung villages may also have their own knowledge, information and story about the actuality of the tree. After all, it is an ancient tree. Something new, another thing veiled or out of sight may come forth.” He thought himself.

After giving a deep thought to the suggestion, he started to leave to a nearby, where he hadn’t visited earlier, or a far flung village at the dawn and returned gloomy at the evening or late night. He sat down under the tree, without a ray of hope on his face. He trekked to many villages and settlements but he could not fetch any supplementary information. Finally, he reached to the conclusion that what he wanted he would get from nowhere but from there, he needed not wandering and struggling miserably any more.

Many a days passed when he had left home, now he was in abject circumstances. His hair and beard grew long enough that he looked like an ascetic. Musing about wholly and entirely, his eyes started to give a void look, and the rings around the eyes deepened, where the crow paw’s like wizened became conspicuous. All the appearance made him to seem like a spiritually elevated person. The villagers believed it the divine blessing of the five millenary which brought a holy person to stay there. Now, people often came to see him. They told him their problems and asked him for pray. He just looked at them, listened to them but kept quiet. They always brought with them dishes of various curries, bread, rice, and other edibles — whatsoever they could arrange and manage. He didn’t eat anything in their presence and filled his stomach when they had gone.

One night, he remembered that he had heard the people talking about fulfilling of prays if pleaded very under the tree at its root but it had hardened its Old Mans Beard so that the people had no approach up to there. I must also see how the people reach there and pray. This thought led him to the question: “Can I go, too?” First, this task seemed to him tough and queer but the truth was to be revealed. “How can the beard be separated apart?” He thought and reached out his hand but to his surprise the beard estranged apart itself as the tree itself was giving him way, as it itself wanted the same which he desired.

At the last quarter of the night he put his thumb behind his ear and straightened his hand to listen a faint voice. Someone was muttering in his ear. He got perplexed as to who was whispering in his ear. And what was he saying? He listened but couldn’t find anything intelligible. He took a round around the five millenary. But he found none there. He circled again but no one was there. He routed several times, though there was a crooning but nobody was visible. He got terrified and walked out briskly. He felt that terror was causing stoppage to his breath and heart. When he felt himself a little better, he looked outside where he found nobody in the dim light of the stars. He thought to himself: Perhaps, it can be an ancient man, sitting on a branch of the five millenary. But he found his idea no more than an illusion. Although he was frightened, he had an inner curiosity that led him again to enter the five millenary. Once again murmuring started. He looked around but there was nothing but darkness and once again the darkness overwhelmed his senses. He was just watching all this when the voice rose a little louder. He listened carefully again, but he couldn’t comprehend anything. He was about to run away horrified when the voice arose in his heart: Truth will prevail. If you don’t get it now, you will never get it.

This reinvigorated him. He listened carefully and felt as if someone was speaking in his own dialect.

“People call me the five millenary. Heed my words. Don’t be afraid. I am your friend, not a foe.” He said, finding him terrified. “I want to talk to you about something that I have never talked before to anyone,” he said.

“What things?” he asked, trembling fearfully.

“The things no one knows till today — all things from the beginning of the world to the present day. All those truths the writers could not write until this day.” He said and kept quiet for a while, “You’re an author and writing is your job. Today I’ll tell you a truth to write you down. You’ll tell people what nobody ever knows and people are taking lies as truth. You’ll write it anyway. This is my trust.”

The writer kept quiet.

He spoke again. “It’s a long, gloomy story — thousands of years old.”

His fear vanished. He fixed his ears to his words and eyes on him.

“When I was born, there was forest everywhere here. Giant trees — gigantic animals and very few humans. A stream flowed nearby and there was a dense forest on the other side of the stream. Between them — at the place of present settlement — was then a small populace. Its people were very innocent and simple. They rarely covered their bodies with leaves. They used to bear hot and cold with a smile on their faces and had true love and caring for their land. You know how weather shakes humans. Sometimes it seemed people borne like the seasons. However, it is a different thing that the seasons greatly affected their natures. Well….one day….”

The writer kept listening intently and as the story progressed his mouth would sometimes open in wonder, sometimes his eyes would close in grief and tears would roll down his cheeks. But he kept listening quietly.

It’s morning. People kept passing by, but he kept looked at the ground, bowing his head. Sometimes he would draw lines with his fingers on the ground and sometimes he would erase those lines. That day — after many days — despair and gloom were clearly visible on his face. He felt as if he has lost his sanities.

Could it be like this? Like this…? He mumbled.

He remained there under the round of the five millenary’s beard and listened to his story for a long period. When he felt hungry, he would come out and sit leaning against the trunk and eat the porridge and curry placed there by the people. The story continued and continued. Finally, one day it ended.

“This truth is a trust. Beware, don’t tell anyone until you write it down.”

He took permission from the five millenary and departed.

….

What the curse was?

Who casted it?

No one was aware of it.

….

 It was a terrible war that even a thought of it brings tears to the eyes, erecting the bristles and making the whole body tingle. People did not know what they should do to save their lives because no place on the earth was safe. That’s why they could neither leave their place nor wanted to live there. If the battle had been at some specific place, migration and displacement could be thought of. War was raging everywhere — all over the world. When the traditional battles reached their climax, the things became uncontrolled. By that time, half of the population of the earth was gone and the rest were worried about where to go? This panic was also attached to the soul that there would be only a push of a finger and everything would collapse.

Everyone was petrified and devastated. An inner terror had horrified everyone that some disaster was going to happen. But, they had no idea what was going to happen.

On the one hand, there was war and the un-splitting cloudiness on the other hand, surrounding the earth in a way that it was completely cut off from the universe.

A terror walked fear instead of people. They had confined themselves to their homes out of dread. Nobody knew when clouds thundered and a shaft of lightning rushed towards the earth. As soon as they heard the sound, the people hurried out of their homes and started running away wherever they headed. There was no peace, no amenity for them. People ragged like cotton.

Finally, the fright became true. Suddenly that occurred what was feared. A loud and terrible scream arose from the earth and reached the sky through the space, piercing the thick clouds. Along the scream, suddenly it started raining. Red drops…

He ran in the pouring rain as if he had gone mad. He had a paper in his hand and he was shouting loudly, raising that paper above his head.

“Look at this, you dastardly people!” I had been telling you through my writings but you kept me calling crazy…! I had been writing and telling you that now you won’t be safe….”

The paper went wet and heavy in the rain, but it could still be seen in his right hand.

“Look at this…. look at this! Whenever the blood spills on the earth then it — the earth…. How is it possible the curse casted at the time of the first blood spilled on the earth’s body…. not…. be…. fulfilled!!!”

All voices were drowned in the thunderbolt.

Then, as if the shafts of the lightning found its way to the earth.

….

(Translated from Saraiki by Najam-uddin Ahmad)

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