The Naked Beggar: And Other Stories

By Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani

Ever since man started to create stories, there has existed a seemingly invisible yet eternal bond between fictional tales woven out of words and the actual truth. It is undeniable that the truth always reigns with magnificence and glory within any culture and its people. It is this very truth, seemingly shrouded in lies, that a writer attempts to capture and jail forever within intricate cages of letters and words. Doing this is an attempt, on his part, to relieve the heavy hearts of society from the burden of these lies.

Although the need for guile exists as the requirement of the times, it is nonetheless preferred to be kept anonymous and unidentifiable. Consequently, the writer too has to alter the identity of these lies. Hence, borrowing unknown shrouds and cloaking these fibs with torn, soiled, and beleaguered words, he is forced to present them as being true.

The Naked Beggar and Other Stories is also a similar attempt of a writer to go within the heart of truth and weave out tales that, though born of honesty, cannot be presented as anything else but falsehood. That is the need of the time, and it is the only way these truths will ever be accepted. These stories are strewn all about us but are visible only to the discerning eye and a sensitive heart.

Mans intellect can only attempt to capture the essence of these tales. It is ultimately up to the human heart to inject meaning and life into them. For this reason, this collection is not just stories but living beings that have the potential to touch our lives as potently as mortals do. Should the circumambulation of the world seem tedious and wearisome, and should you feel the need to slow down and look inside your heart for peace rather than search for it in the meaningless rowdiness around you, then the stories in this collection will not disappoint you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781532004209

Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani

Dr. Usmani is a Fulbright scholar and Eisenhower fellow. He holds a PhD and MS in computer science from the Florida Institute of Technology. His PhD work focused on simulation and modeling of blast waves in open and confined spaces. His work has been mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, AOL News, Wired Magazine, NPR, MIT’s Technology Review, Florida Today, the Economist, Brown Journal of World Affairs, and the Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation. He has authored dozens of research papers, articles, and several books. His research strengths include real-world simulation, programming human emergent behaviors, and modeling of catastrophic events. He was a visiting scholar at Brown University and an industrial professor at Coventry University. Currently, he is the CTO at Cosmic Insights. He divides his time between Cary, North Carolina, and Islamabad, Pakistan.

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1.   Incomplete Men; Complete Women

There should be tagline attached to the name of our country; ‘A Country of Incomplete People’. This is because the majority of people we see around us, perhaps ourselves included, are incomplete. We lead incomplete lives, juggle with incomplete relationships, boast of incomplete romances, engage in incomplete tasks, dream incomplete dreams for which we achieve incomplete realizations, remain mired in incomplete sins, and finally, after all is said and done, die, wailing and lamenting, a sorrowful, incomplete death.

Of all the people in our society, it is the man who can singularly be labeled as being incomplete. It is the man who remains the fearful, nervous, spineless being paranoid of shadows, fettered to unknown fears, tethered to imaginary chains; a traveler of sorrowful roads who never gives up mistaking mirages for oases.

Despite his incompleteness, it is this same wretched, incomplete man who bears the brunt of physical and psychological abuses, entirely and completely, who takes the brunt of indictments completely upon himself, and then responsibly and completely suffers the sentencings to the end. Therefore, it is unfathomable that unless a woman responded to his hello, he could have had the guts or the nerve to grab her hand. That is indeed an incomprehensible thought because the man of our society is, at core, an utter weakling. A coward being, he is not afraid of sin itself; he is afraid of the accusation of sin. But when push comes to shove and matters transgress further, it is the man who is piled with the abominable culpability of the act. As for the daughter of Eve, she is solaced as a mute, mindless, wax doll devoid of intellect and emotion that melted into a puddle by no doing of her own. The state of the matter is, however, much to the contrary.

Much to the contrary, opposed to the man, the woman is not only wholly complete, she is also supremely well versed in both the arts of either completing a man or leaving him, deliberately and malignly, incomplete. In our society, Adam’s better half is not half but complete with full intellect and a complete razor-sharp intuition. She loves completely with passion, trusts blindly with conviction, stands on unshakeable grounds of belief, and loathes with a savage brutality. For her, there is no distinction between love and life. In juxtaposition, the man prefers to keep love, life, career, vocation, and faith in neat little unconnected cubicles in his mind. He fails to realize that it takes two hands to clap; the only way one hand could clap is by beating the chest in mourning. However, this doesn’t stop the incomplete man from beating the drum of his incomplete masculinity. Even though, in his heart of hearts, he is well aware that it will take nothing but a woman to make him whole and complete him.

A society that has no objection to the jeans and t-shirt attired husband of a veiled woman has no right to pass judgment on the hijab-less wife of a man with a beard.

If the humanity in this beloved nation was judged on the scale of tolerance, perseverance, and tenacity, then incontrovertibly all the men would be declared women and all the women would be deemed men. Despite this, the heavens groan when the ‘complete’ honor of this incomplete man decides to take a turn.

‘I saw your daughter at the bus stop talking to a young man,’ ‘Your sister is not wearing a hijab,’ ‘Why is your wife’s picture on Facebook?, Have you no sense of right and wrong and religious honor? I would never allow such blatant immorality to continue in my own house’ etc. etc. etc.

The Lord alone possibly knows what people gain from or what purpose they have when they engage in such uncalled for judgmental and condemnatory analysis of other people’s affairs. The proverbial noses of incomplete men seem to work with heightened completeness when they go poking into other people’s lives and businesses. Perhaps they resent the happiness and the tranquility of others’ home and hence maliciously finds ways to disrupt this serenity by playing the role of the serpent, beating the drum of their own incomplete and, often entirely, misplaced sense of morality. They have neither the desire nor the inclination to consider the age of people they are maligning, the compassion to understand the trials they may be going through, the formidable wars they may be engaged in, or the enormous problems that they are toiling to surmount.

There is no empathy for any of these issues, but there is a long line of ‘suggestions’ on how to fix the ‘issue’ at hand. The title of this document of suggestions is ‘If you wish to control women, keep them forever the slipper on your feet’. One question, if that really is where they wished to see the hapless souls, why did they even bother bringing them into their lives and their homes?

If the man earns money, does it make him the sovereign, the lord, the uncrowned master of body, mind, soul, emotions, aspirations, desires, wishes, and actions?

Man earns money, but children neither eat money nor do they sleep on it.

Man earns money, but these pieces of paper and round disks of metal neither bring peace nor joy, happiness or profound repose.

It is the woman who translates this paper and metal into a home, happiness, peace, and joy.

The so called man of our society spends his day at work, at labor, and out in the ‘honorably masculine’ world all day to get his fill of curses, biases, discriminations, prejudices, lies, resentments, jealousies, and unfairness. At the end of his ‘valor’ filled day, when he returns home in hundred pieces it is the woman who consoles him, soothes him, feeds him, and puts him lovingly back together again and sends him out a ‘complete’ man in the morning into the same vicious jungle of life.

Still the man never remembers that it was Islam that abolished the exploitation and abuse of women by providing for them the protection, emotional security, and human dignity in the form of Nikah. But the man of today, the incomplete man, is so bygone that he prefers to give the measly creatures no more respect than an animal he keeps tied in his backyard.

Shame on such masculinity!

In reality, women are like punctuations of life. Some are commas, some semi- colons, some question marks, and some an endless line of ellipses.

Lucky are the men who get full stops in their lives. It is these full stops that bring their incomplete lives to a halt, to fullness, to completion.

Hats off to the complete women of an incomplete nation. May they persevere and survive in the midst of incomplete men.

2.   The Naked Beggar

Jamshed was absolutely ecstatic. He felt like he was walking on air. Today was the day he was reaping the results of his three years of tireless, backbreaking work in the form of the magnificently awe-inspiring shopping plaza in a prime location of the city. Built at the cost of 20 crore rupees and with the collaboration of the leading architects and construction gurus he could find, the shopping plaza was indeed no less than a classic work of art.

This evening was the opening of the shopping plaza. Just as he had meticulously poured his energies into the design and construction phases of the building, he had selected his guests for the ribbon cutting ceremony just as scrupulously. His close friend Abdullah was also among the guests at the grand affair. However, he had made Abdullah’s invitation and possible presence at the event contingent upon one condition; Abdullah would not speak unless he was spoken to nor would he ask any questions from anyone. Abdullah had amusedly agreed. He acknowledged the fact that his tongue had the tendency to run away with him often at the most inopportune moment for the other person.

Jamshed and Abdullah had known each other for the past twenty five years. They had grown up together, gone to school together, and had shared not only each other’s joys but also their trials and tribulations. But despite all the commonalities they shared, they were worlds apart when it came to the question of human nature and their socio-economic statuses. Where Jamshed was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, Abdullah was an entirely self-made person who had overcome ruthlessly insurmountable odds to make a place for himself in the world.

After all the guests had left, Jamshed turned to Abdullah, pride spilling from his eyes and euphoric exultation on his face.

So Mr. Opinion, he jokingly addressed Abdullah, since you have a logical and ironclad conclusion for everything in life, tell me what you think of my grand endeavor? This plaza will give this city a new identity. People will recognize the city by its very name. It will provide jobs to hundreds of people. There is nothing I haven’t included in it; from shopping malls and food courts to all sorts of entertainment like banquet halls, dancing arenas, and cinemas.

Abdullah was seemingly listening to him, but there was a far away lost expression on his face. Jamshed was in no hurry either. He watched his friend’s face with interest, enjoying watching him being at a loss for words. Abdullah finally spoke, choosing his words carefully.

If you really want my honest opinion, he solemnly told Jamshed, all this seems supremely artificial, to me. So…so…contrived. He waved his arm around to express his point and then continued. On one side of this feigned oasis you have created, there are millions of people who are dying of hunger and poverty. Young children do not even have a piece of bread to last them through the day. Entire families are living in shabby huts alongside the banks of stinking, trash-filled gutters, and practically dried up water holes. And right across this hideously real picture of life, you have created this oasis. Do you really feel you have altered the nature of the vicious, unforgiving desert around this plaza by creating this tiny escape from the actual truth?

Jamshed’s expression changed to indignation and irritation. He squinted his eyes and glared at Abdullah who was now turning into the proverbial rain that threatened to ruin a parade. Jamshed was well aware of how the millions in the country were suffering; he just didn’t like to be reminded of it. He was happy in his content life which was more than just good. He opened his mouth to cut Abdullah’s little speech short. But Abdullah wasn’t done.

Tell me Jamshed, Abdullah started again seriously, if you die today, which particular brick from this plaza will come and become your savior in the grave? The one from the cinema? Or perhaps the one from the banquet hall or the bars that you have also created in there?

By now Jamshed had had enough. He raised his hand to stop Abdullah’s torrent of harsh words.

Stop Molvi sahib, stop! his voice was seething with sarcasm. Keep your fatwas to yourself. These fatwas do not provide any financial support to anyone in need nor are they helpful in improving anyone’s status in life. They don’t put bread in starving mouths or clothes on bare bodies. I, on the other hand, am providing all these things and hence am completing my entire share of religious obligations.

Abdullah simply smiled at him, not at all ruffled by his friend’s reactionary flare-up.

I see that you have indeed done all those things. However, all these are things that Allah (swt) has already promised to provide. Man cannot claim to be the provider above Allah (swt). Abdullah set the record straight.

You mean my accomplishment accounts for nothing? Jamshed glared at him. Abdullah smiled and shook his head.

You are not getting my point Jamshed, he started to explain. Why don’t people, yourself included, think about establishing institutes that would nurture the minds of generations through education and skills? Why don’t people like yourself ponder new ways to lend a hand to those who have been rejected by society? Or make them so stable that they would rise out of their current rejection, and rejected status in this country?

By now Jamshed had had enough of Abdullah’s ‘conscientious sermons’ as he called them.

Oh! Forget it Abdullah, he shooed away Abdullah’s solemn talk with another wave of his hand. Let’s just go home and enjoy the rest of the day. I’ll drop you later. You can give me this lecture of yours some other day. I’m too euphoric with success right now and too tired to suffer through your talk.

Abdullah sighed and let Jamshed lead him the way to his brand new, imported sports car. Jamshed’s neck was stiff with pride as he maneuvered the car out of the garage to the street.

As soon as the car pulled out into the street, Abdullah saw a naked beggar standing on the other side of the street. The man must have been about fifty years old. Standing completely naked on the street, he was loudly begging for food from every passerby and also from those in slow passing cars. People were staring at him as if he was a novel, never before seen an exhibit from a historical museum.

A spew of curses flew out of Jamshed’s mouth.

The bloody junkie, druggie, he exploded. "Couldn’t the miserable wretch find any other place to stand except in front of my building today? If