| HQ's profileHAIDER QURESHIPhotosBlogLists |  Tools  Help |
|
March 14 Short Story: The ConfessionBy: Haider Qureshi
THE CONFESSION
When I saw the frost bound;
City of my life; I began to set afire. All my wishes! ***** Today I am not going to tell you any story. Instead, I want to tell you about a personal problem. The problem, in itself is not very complicated, on the other hand, it is a plain understandable problem. I am afraid of flies since childhood. When I try to analyze it, I think, I could have been stung by a bee when I was quite young and due to a great similarity between a bee and a house fly I might have developed this phobia towards them. When I reached boy hood I noticed that my mates. Both boys and girls easily killed a fly that became a nuisance. They knew that I was allergic to them and the, in a friendly manner, tried many times to encourage me but I couldn’t bring myself to that. I don’t know whether I am afraid of them or disgusted or there is any other reason. But my refusal to kill a fly earned me a sobriquet and my mates started calling me a coward. Although I tried many times, when alone, to have a go at it but failed miserably. My friends have also coined an insulting sentence. He? He can’t even kill a fly! It implied that I was not made for anything great. I too started retaliating in defense by saying that they were only made to kill flies and allotted them a collective sobriquet, fly swatters; But getting called a coward always hurt me badly and it always fell like a lash on my ego. As a result I began to look for the alternative courageous acts to save my face. You will be surprised to know that In the field of sex I had drown my first blood at the age of 13. Hence forward I began to feel a beau! My boyhood bounded with such trifling victories. My mates too got wind of it but they didn’t stop saying, “he, he can’t even kill a fly.” But the way of their saying so had begun to sound more envious than demeaning. And it had their hidden envy that emboldened me further and by the time I attained full puberty I has succeeded in picking many a cherry. It made me feel Alexander the greater of my new found world and when I looked back I saw that my mates were left far behind. Except two friends, there was none who could boast about his manly conquests. and out of the two one was a poet who settled in London after marrying a ‘mem’ (a British national) and the other, whose name was Hameed, though a companion, was like a jackal who sits in wait to feast later upon the left-over by the tiger. The tiger in his case didn’t believe in encouraging the parasites, however. hence Hameed too left me disappointed. But the expression on his face while departing clearly conveyed his inner feeling. It said”, what kind of an Alexander you are? You can’t even kill a fly. I put many a youths to shame even when I was in my middle age. But when the old age crept up I handed over my leash to my wife. The sex, in my view should be glossed over, if both the parties are enjoying it. “Jab miyan beevi raazi to kya karega quazi? (when the bride and the groom to be are in agreement then what would the poor priest do?) if the Quazi is in disagreement then the couple would have to swear by Bhagwan to have its way and it would further make the couple unanswerable to “Quaziji’ ! I always made it a point to have such relationship on mutual consent. I never deceived anybody or kept anybody under false impression to catch her unawares later. Deception, lying and making false promises is a forte of modern day politicians and ethical professors. You can gauge my forthright behaviour, or stupidity if you call it that, by the fact, that my wife knows every detail of my past and present life. where as the trend today is to keep the spouse not posted with such developments that are already known to the world inside out. But I extremely repent on two miscalculations in this regard. Once it so happened that one of my two childhood friends who is a poet and is now settled in London himself became a problem for me. His English wife one day openly told me in his absence that her husband had sexually dried up for her or rather for women in general, and was more interested in adolescent boys. It was perhaps in deference to our childhood friendship that I didn’t rise to the bait and ignored it altogether. Later I thought it was my folly, I shouldn’t have disappointed my friend’s wife, the memsab! I still repent my gentility. The second act I repent the most is not disappointing a bad woman who hailed from Lahore. Her face, whenever I imagine it today, reminds me of a fly. And that adds a disgusting dimension to my imagination. My wife knows about this too. Talking of wife, I remember my maternal grandpa and my grand uncle were very keen on bringing in a new wife in their old age. Though they, the said poor fellows, couldn’t fulfil their last wish, my elder maternal uncle succeeded in it at the age of seventy. People talked a lot of rubbish over it and went to the extent of saying that the son of the follow, who was a divorcee, couldn’t get married twice but the oldie got himself a wife half his age under the pretexts of religious precedents. They said that the fellow’s daughter, who was a widow herself, was biding her time alone. The fuddy-duddy should have married her off before getting married himself, they said disdainfully and called him a dandy cleric. But in my opinion he was not wrong. It was the only thing, in my assessment, that he did valiantly. “Long live my uncle” I had cried out in appreciation. Dear audience! I am over eighty today. How long I can go on lying? I want to be truthful now. And if you really want to be told a truth then let me negate my earlier things that I told. There was never such person as Hameed who was my friend. And although the tank of my sexuality remained tumultuous till the age of sixty it never spilled over. The band of my cowardice had turned it into a huge tanker. All my verbosity regarding my sexual campaigns was a figment of my imagination which always stood me in a good stead against the onslaught of my enemies who used to say ‘he, who can’t even kill a fly’! But nearly all of them have joined the ‘Majority’ and I, too, am on the verge of it. So what is the use of lying now? I am now over eighty and the sexual upheaval has subsided for a long time now. I feel snow bound from within and without (I wonder though, why the flame of ‘desire’ hasn’t died down yet!) A very strange thing has just happened. Two conjoined flies have fallen on my table with a soft ‘thud’. The fact of their being conjoined has convinced me that they are a pair, a male and a female. I watched them with interest for sometime without abhorrence and fear. If only the friends of my childhood were alive. If only they could see me sitting and watching the pair of flies on my table, calmly! I did it for some times and then, picking up a newspaper and folding it, killed both ‘the flies-in the act’ with one swat! ****** TrackbacksThe trackback URL for this entry is: http://haiderqureshi.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!48196B362A439054!222.trak Weblogs that reference this entry
|
|
|
