FICTION

I’ve been running through the desert of darkness, and the wolves of frights are behind me. My room is shrouded in an eerie gloom and silence, and the stench of sweat hangs heavy in the air. I feel like I’m trapped in a grave, and suffocation of my breath by the minute agonizing me. I want to open the door of my room to escape, but the hissing of snakes in the terrifying pitch dark and starkness outside erects my bristles like prickles of thorny bush and sinks down my heart.

The echo of thudding of my heart in my chest like ticking of the clock is making the room even scarier. And this electricity fall — damn it!

I’ve been drowning in the gloomy ocean of night at this moment like a race defeated panting person, and my eyes — grown on my hands — are searching for help on the shore. I yearn for a glimmer of light, and — and a gust of fresh air….

I want to yell someone from neighborhood for help, but I can’t. I live in the last house in a blind alley that feet stagger and sound muffled somewhere back approaching there. My fellow travelers in this room are oblivious to my plight, and I’m left to my own devices. It is out of question that my neighbors will take care of me who even do not bother to help to the plight of one sitting by them in the same room.

I’m wondering when I stumbled into my room after walking in the sweltering sun, the fan still spun slowly. I don’t know how I fell on my bed and when the gentle river of sleep swept me away. But when my eyes opened with the pricking of sweat, I realized me that the fan had stopped and the darkness inside and outside of the room was undifferentiated.

The craving for smoking led me to fumble the cigarette box under the pillow. And then as I trundled towards the kitchen for match’s box, a serpent’s hissing and slithering reverberated in the ghastly stillness and glinting darkness outside. I nippily slammed the door shut and tried to calm my racing heart. But now, the room is suffocating me, and the snake’s presence outside is palpable. I yearn for a glimmer of light, and — and a gust of fresh….

But I don’t muster up the courage to slightly ajar the door to peep out. The darkness is falling from walls of the room like sand particles, filling the room. The encircling suffocation started strangling me. The scream stuck with my uvula looks like the fly sitting on a wound. Sweat kneaded grime of the body is emitting reek. I’m experiencing nuisance and abhorrence of self-putridity because I have just saturated my dry tongue by licking black beads from the palms of my hands.

This hissing might be a watchman’s whistle. May this be light and I have lost my vision. Might I have been buried erroneously considering dead and now my breath has restored.

But my consciousness is aware that a corpse is not buried on a cot in two yard space. So, now this cot is the only testimonial that I am still alive. I feel a wave of great relief. I feel it my cowardice…. or idiocy…. or stratagem that I have been keeping myself in undue self-sequestration. Why don’t I, who live in the settlement of snakes, break shackles of this death? Why don’t I fill my lungs with the fresh air by opening the door?

Whirls of weird illusions and bizarre muddles in eddy and dilute in the arena of the mind. When my hand suddenly touched the taut rope of the cot, it startled me because I took it a snake. My heart collided with my ribs like a bird strikes its wings and head with cage.

Suddenly, I feel that I’m in a jungle where trees have pitched black bark and leaves. The branches are entwined like mistletoe. I’ve been carefully stepping forward by moving aside the branches, trying to search my way out of the forest. I’m seeing a burning lamp far away in a hut. But the distance is not being covered. A twisted branch touched my hand and my legs started to tremble. Suddenly I listened sound of cats fighting. The earth engulfed the jungle.

Now I am again in my room… and… the stinging mosquitoes of suffocation.

The darkness settled on my eyelids and the ominous evil that cannibal the helplessness. There is hissing of the snakes and wheezing of the cats outside. When a compromise with fear was attained, the desire for smoking a cigarette surged again.

The rustling of leaves stirred up cicadae to hum monotonously outside in the courtyard, which soon turned into tune of the snake charmer’s flute. It seemed snake had started dancing. When rustling’s shadows slithered I yelled. “Is anyone there?” A snake waved like saying, “yes please… It’s me. Come…come out…and look, how charming this darkness is! How peaceful this silence is. This loveliness of night is not less than Legendary Leila. These are my eyes or the charisma of stars. Come…come out…and have a look.”

My hand reaches out the door but it touches the wall. Like a blind man I grope the door in all four walls. What’s this….? Where is the door….? I’m looking for the door like the mother of a lost child. May be the snake has gone and sun has risen….But here is the eternal darkness…. Now I’m running through the desert of darkness and the wolves of frights are behind me. I can’t find the door….

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(Translated from URDU by Muhammad Ahmad)

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