Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay: Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali

By Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay

Is virtue what is compromised in an arranged (coerced/’forced’) marriage? Is that every girl’s horror movie dream? For Little Kankabaty, however, it is a quickly impending reality even while the love of her life promises enlightenment but is a mama’s boy leading his life constantly circumspect and carefully. Yet now she is tasked with rescuing him from the clutches of scorned ghostwoman Nakeshwari, of the beautiful nose and broken marriage alliance with Ghyanghon Bhoot, belonging to a community of cutesy spirits from which Lullu has spirited the comely but crafty wife of Aameer away. Will Aameer reunite with his wife either?
These, and other pressing concerns (who invented porcelain? Who was the king of Iran’s Nishapur and how was the monster of Sumiyoshi slain? What exactly is the politics of Neelambar babu’s kitchen?), are suitably addressed in Trailokyanath’s zany tales, which do not disappoint the reader, grip their attention and always, always, entertain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Niyogi
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9789389136975

Book preview

Foreword

Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay (1847–1919), or T.N. Mukharji, as the British Raj knew him, is an exemplar of that curious nineteenth-century invention: the Victorian Bengali. He was a contemporary of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Jagdish Chandra Bose, Toru Dutt, the Tagore brothers. Woven out of the twin strands of Bengali and English, these individuals reworked the contents of the national consciousness, first, in their own Bengal, and later, through myriad translation projects, the rest of the colonised subcontinent. First, that is, the Bengal Renaissance, and parallelly, the great Swadeshi project that spread to every part of the country.

These individuals possessed that dual consciousness so often found in an oppressed people who are resigned to the rationale of their oppression. As Trailokyanath wrote in an account of his travels, A Visit To Europe (1902): ‘We could scarcely realise our own individuality when on that chilly evening of the 7th of April (1886), we looked down from this magnificent bridge into the silvery water of the Thames beneath.’ He was simply describing his reflection in the water, but perhaps it pointed to a deeper truth. Trailokyanath’s account of his travels indicate that he identified most closely with his Bengali self while he was in England and most closely with his British self while in India.

Such dual selves are the norm, not the exception, in literature. When we read a story or poem by such an individual, to whom should we give authorial credit? When W.B. Yeats wrote an English poem, what was the colonised part of him, the one which had said, ‘No people hate as we do in whom that past [the English oppression of the Irish] is always alive, and there are moments when hatred poisons my life’, what was this W.B. Yeats doing?

One way to think of such works is to see them as inherently acts of translation. Of course, all authors are translators in the sense that they turn experience into expression. But when the experiential self is rooted in a world with a fundamentally different aesthetic from the expressing self, then we get a truly hybrid work that cannot be reduced to either aesthetic.

However, I do not believe Trailokyanath was wracked with such conflicts. The ability to compartmentalise and contextualise is necessary for survival in a pluralist world, and as A.K. Ramanujan has persuasively argued, it comes ‘naturally’ to Indians. We have one rule for Peter and another for Parveen and quite another for Parminder. By and large, Trailokyanath was a loyal British subject at work and a progressive traditionalist elsewhere. He was comfortable, I suspect, with both his British as well as Bengali self. A reflection in the water was simply a reflection in the water.

In his stories, therefore, I find little of the complexity or psychological subtlety we find in the works of, say, Bankimchandra, or a little later, Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das. When Trailokyanath sets out to write a ghost story, he writes it, and what we are left with is exactly what he set out to write. We get an honest-to-Durgamata ghost story filtered through the consciousness of a writer who has grown up in a native lamp-lit world with storytelling elders, banyans with their hag hair, and still bodies of water embanked by moss-covered walls. When Trailokyanath wrote, he was keenly aware of English fiction—indeed short fiction itself was something of a foreign import—but unlike the case with Urdu writers in the opening decades of the twentieth century, his style remained closely tied to the traditional oral tale.

In other words, Trailokyanath wrote for the entertainment of his living, breathing readers and not to provide fodder for critics or future academic groupies. I don’t think he ever imagined, as Toru Dutt did, that his work would interest professional critics like George Gissing, or that their didactic value would extend to all people and not just his people.

These are all speculations of course. But then again, his very able translator Sucheta Dasgupta believes his works fits within the category of speculative fiction. I am less persuaded this is so. The context of a story matters just as much as its content. Take the category of magic realism. This category, I submit, makes sense only in its twentieth-century context. It is less justifiable, at least for me, to extend it to works from the twelfth century or in Vedic times. This is not because these early works don’t have all the elements we associate with magic realism. What they don’t have is the context. The twentieth-century context is completely different from the Vedic one. Thus, the Mahabharata performed for a post-classical Vedic society would be an entirely different story if it were performed in Carnegie Hall, even if it is replicated word for word, gesture for gesture. The Carnegie Hall audience might file it under epic fantasy; for the Vedic society, it would be a living reality. What we can say is that there is a magic realist reading of such-and-such work. The classification refers to the relationship between the reader and text, and not to some essence in the text itself.

Admittedly, this is a rather punctilious stance. Ultimately, what matters is not the classification, but the object itself. And we owe it to Sucheta Dasgupta that we have Trailokyanath’s stories available in a new incarnation. Her introduction amply resolves the difficult task of having to do justice to the content and contextualisation of these stories. Borges remarked that a translation can only serve as its own apology. I do not think so. A translation is one of the greatest gifts a writer can offer to the world. If an apology is due, it is from the reader that they have left this burden of bridging worlds to a few brave individuals. We are in Sucheta Dasgupta’s debt.

Anil Menon

Author, The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun: Stories

Translator’s Note

I am indebted to my editor, Dr Nirmal Bhattacharjee, redoubtable literary scholar and the finest mind, for asking me to explain what spurred me to take up this project.

It was my husband, erstwhile Bengali writer and documentary filmmaker Siddhartha Samaddar, who reintroduced my adult self to Trailokyanath. As my senior author, Siddhartha was keen to bring to my notice that, being a fantasy writer myself, I ought to read the work of my more illustrious predecessor in the same genre. He also shared with me folklore about Trailokyanath’s love for marijuana and chandu, citing their frequent mentions in his prose. Was substance part of Trailokyanath’s process? Was it at the core of his visions about what it meant to be a ghost and how to be one, which he went on to relate to the reader by means of fantastical tales of love, adventure and laughter that never failed to somehow galvanise?

Up until that point, which was in the early noughties, I, who wrote what I self-identified as speculative fiction, was familiar with Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay or Mr T., as I liked to dub him mentally, exclusively as a Bengali satirist from the texts I had read and been marked on during my school days. And it would not be before 2011, when back from Kolkata’s storied Collegepara, Siddhartha would bring me my first copy of Trailokyanath Rachanabali (Collected Works of Trailakyonath), the first of which, Kankabaty, had been published in 1892. The name of the current publisher (2006) is Sri Shyamapada Sarkar, Nabin Chandra Pal Lane, Kolkata. There were at least three editions of the republished work until 2011, which happen to vouchsafe its extant popularity. The pages of this last volume are the space where I discovered, to my immense intrigue and wonderment, one of the world’s first magic realists, nay, authors of speculative fiction, Trailokyanath. With the weight of the 850-page omnibus of stories behind him, was it he then who invented this genre?

The form of original, and not derivative, fiction writing can be broadly divided into two genres: realist and speculative. Speculative fiction is characterised, uniquely so, by the building of imaginary worlds. Subgenres of speculative fiction include magic realism (‘Lullu’, Kankabaty), surrealism (‘Beerbala’), fantasy (Kankabaty), fable (‘Shambhu Ghosh’s Baby Girl’), science (Domrucharit), myth (‘The Legend of Raikou: A Japanese Folktale’) and supernatural (‘Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining; Behold the Honest Woman That Is Smiling’); the last literary style referring, in plainer terms, to the good old Bengali tradition of the ghost story.

As illustrated by the examples of his works above, cited genre-wise within each pair of parentheses, with the exception of possibly hard science—because his science-fantasy leaned strongly towards fabulism—Trailokyanath’s oeuvre cuts across all these subgenres. The thrilling aspect of this is, while the actual definitions of many of these genres and subgenres (magical realism, speculative fiction, and so on) would be coined only decades later in English literature, our man was already creating these genres and bending them in Bengali, in nineteenth-century United Bengal! When I came to discern it, it was a revelation. It inspired me in 2015 to write an essay titled ‘Rereading Trailokyanath’, in Contrarywise, my Times Of India blog, positing these facts.¹ It was not before many more years had gone by, however, that I would be pleasantly surprised and vindicated to find my theory echoed by scholar Boddhisattva Chattopadhyay (University of Oslo) in an essay and read another piece by him in an old favourite ezine, the highly reputed Strange Horizons, that argued for a non-Anglocentric vision of the world of speculative fiction.

It is no one’s postulate, however, that Trailokyanath completely stayed away from straight-up realist narrative fiction. His novel, Fokla Digambar (Gumsy Digambar), for example, is a lovestory but also a ‘serious’ comedy of manners. Paaper Porinaam (Sin and Consequence) is a social drama and short story ‘Lalit O Labanya’ (‘Lalit and Labanya’) an intimate study of hardship in the Bengali countryside.

Even the ghosts that pepper Trailokyanath’s writing are of two kinds—‘real’ and metaphysical. The realist ghosts are spirits of dead men, women and children. They edit newspapers (in ‘Lullu’) and have magical powers (also in ‘Lullu’). They haunt the houses of humans in Kolkata (‘Chinese Spooks on Pous Sankranti’), a city which appears as a character in this and some of his other works (like Kankabaty, ‘One-Shanked Chhoku’, ‘The Mysterious Ring’ and ‘When Vidyadhari Lost Her Appetite’). This is even as a majority of his pieces are set in the northern (Kankabaty), eastern (‘Nidhiram Bengali’, Gumsy Digambar), western (‘Shambhu Ghosh’s Baby Girl’) and southern (‘The Invaluable Tobacco and the Learned Snakes’) Bengali countryside. The metaphysical ghosts of Trailokyanath appear in ‘Lullu’ and Domrucharit as subaltern characters living a marginal existence on the fringes of genteel Bengali society. They look and act like the wraiths that they are. Wraith-like, too, they fall in the ambit of the curious rules of ghostship that govern the ghostly lives of ‘real’ ghosts.

My egalitarian (and personally speaking, feminist) reading of his works has made it incumbent upon me to use the singular they as the third-person generic pronoun for many of Trailokyanath’s characters as well as for the Great Unknown, personified by him as God. In its 14th edition (1993) of The Chicago Manual of Style, the University of Chicago Press explicitly recommends using the singular they and their, noting a ‘revival’ of this usage and citing ‘its venerable use by such writers as Addison, Austen, Chesterfield, Fielding, Ruskin, Scott, and Shakespeare’. By 2020, most style guides have accepted the singular they as a personal pronoun.

The style of Trailokyanath’s prose is weighty and formal while its tone is wry and irreverent. Hence, I have consciously adopted a Victorian style while rendering it in English and, at the same time, tried to be as exact as I can so as to not miss the many cultural facts peppering it, which is another attraction of his works, as well as efficaciously capture the subtleties of his humour.

Why is reading Trailokyanath still important in today’s climes and times? Here are five reasons.

Trailokyanath was a classical liberal thinker. His works show what it is to be a civil servant (a bilingual, well-travelled rationalist) as well as a socially invested libertarian in British India. He inhabited a unique, non-activist yet extremely clear-eyed, perspective. It lends a certain fineness to his works that makes them aesthetically timeless.

Trailokyanath is relatively unsung and underrated because his legacy fell on the wrong side of the post-Independence political establishment. But as a short story writer, his talent considerably exceeds that of even Rabindranath Tagore (whose aesthetic has become old-fashioned but whose sensibilities as expressed in the short story form still have the power to appeal and provoke thought) or Saratchandra Chattopadhyay. It is both a joy and comfort to read Trailokyanath’s stories a century and more after they were written. Perhaps due to professional rivalry, Tagore is known to have played him down as a children’s writer.

At a time when the rest of India was rooted in mind-numbing dogma that stank of soul-killing illiberalism, irrationality and inhumanity, Trailokyanath wrote magic realism, speculative fiction and science fiction, and was among the first in the world to write, masterfully, in these genres. It can be said that in India it was he who invented these genres.

Trailokyanath is also unique in that he, himself, was a nineteenth-century bilingual writer. His first works were travelogues in English. He was well-travelled and toured all of Europe as a curator for the world-famous Indian Museum, Kolkata.

We need more authentic Bengali icons in the mainstream, going beyond political certitudes and clichés. Fortunately, we have little dearth of them in our history. But we need to spread the word lest and before their legacy is diluted, or worse, erased and overwritten.

While selecting the pieces, my editor and I have taken special care to pick out a diverse palette to showcase the author’s marvellous versatility and offer the reader a mind-expanding experience. Purposefully, we stayed away from the quirky but too overly known Domrucharit, which is a part of every college and school syllabus. Instead, our selection communicates a richer mixture of the many human moods.

Kankabaty is a magic realist lovestory of an adolescent girl and a tiger. ‘When Vidyadhari Lost Her Appetite’ is a look inside a high-caste kitchen, which doubles as a funny story about a get-rich-quick scheme and conspiracy. ‘The Alchemist’ is historical non-fiction. Not so, ‘A Japanese Folktale’ and ‘Rostam and Bhanumati’ which are folklore collected in the course of his travels by Trailokyanath. Lullu is a gently humorous tale following the general theme of how the maiden was won or the ghost conquered. Together, these stories cover 202 pages of the 850-page original Collected Works.

The author passed away in 1919 and the work is not copyrighted. The challenge for me, therefore, was to be accurate in my translation so that I could communicate as much of the Bengali idiom and history of the language to the reader while preserving the thrust of the dialogue and the thought process of the author. I fully intend my work to be the ‘same text in a different language’ and not a transcreation. It is for this reason that I have included a glossary at the end of each of the works to elucidate upon the idioms, customs, sayings and indigenous terminology used by the author.

Still, the process of translation involves the subjective exercise of preference and discretion. It also leads to the refinement of one’s own understanding of people and their worldview. Better to say I am Bengali, rather than I am a Bengali, my father had once said when I was in school, preferring the adjective to the noun, as I bullishly cross-questioned the mickey out of the nuance. But is it wrong to say the latter? It is not incorrect, he had conceded, in one of his first exact and hence less absolute responses, which I failed to fully receive as a schoolchild.

I had completed over 200 pages of initial translations when I encountered, in ‘A Japanese Folktale’, the first of my political differences with Trailokyanath. Therein, he advances, diffidently but without the benefit of evidence, the possibility of ancient seafaring Hindus from Bengal having reached Japan, thus betraying the teeniest sentiment of Bengali exceptionalism that was not inappropriate in his time. In the same story, he is also vociferous about the ills of saké, the Japanese national drink. Perhaps, he had retained, notwithstanding his reputed affinity for chandu, a brahminical abhorrence of liquor. Hindus and Rastafarians are known to keep their senses virgin by avoiding all forms of intoxicants, including the theine (found in tea), with the sole exception of tetrahydrocannabinol. If as a personal habit, it is an unassailable choice.

Glib and convenient virtue-signalling by taking a high moral ground just because it is now to do so is a bane of our own times. Minds far greater than its combined self have been brought down to the dust by the cancel culture brigade using ideas gatekeeping and social media amplifications. Indeed, one can wonder, legitimately so, if those who persecuted the Renaissance men and women from the Right are now doing the same from the Global Left by deleting them from syllabi. But quick and dirty judgementalism in order to signal virtue is not the same as thinking and exercising one’s judgement while doing a close reading of the works of an author.

As I have disclosed before, this translation is a feminist reading of Trailokyanath. Female readers are particularly sensitive to how women are portrayed in literature, directly impacted as they are by the world history of misogyny. Trailokyonath’s women are often idealised; they don’t have the anger and meanness, jealousies and worries that are intrinsic parts of the psyche of an ordinary woman. Trailokyanath fails to see through the helpless mother stereotype. In Kankabaty, for instance, the character Khetu’s maw is only in her early twenties but shown as frail and having failing eyesight. Like an old woman, too, she never ceases complaining, but this last behaviour is cultural. A common adage every Bengali girl grows up hearing is ‘meyera kuditei budi (by the time she is twenty, a woman’s youth is all but over)’.

Yet Trailokyanath does such a superlative job in capturing the inner child of women. Indeed, it is so good that identification is spontaneous. Many of the protagonists of his stories are female. Unerring, he lays his finger right on what proves to be the undoing of many Bengali girls and the foolish Kankabaty, the propensity to be an overconfident hero in order to save the day and impress the beloved, a tendency not entirely out of line with the urge to please others.

That said, my own concept of womanhood is incongruent with Trailokyanath’s. This, I learnt, however, only when I came up against his descriptor of tthunto (cripple) for the ‘overeducated’ bhadramohila (well-born woman) who reads novels and gets het up over talking points and lies in bed in a blue funk, neglecting housework and lacking in gravitas. Such a characterisation of the turn-of-the-century Renaissance Woman appears twice in his body of work, once in the story ‘The Mysterious Ring’ and the second time in Gumsy Digambar. For me, those are his only lines that rankle. Clearly, Mr T. does not have a public role for women in mind. They are, to him, only servants of the men as muse and helpmeet or agents of procreation. In any other setting, they are rendered crippled and pointless.

If he is uninterested in the woman as provider, Trailokyanath is also not altogether comfortable with women protecting themselves against danger and even walking at night. Notably, this habit among well-born women was not unheard of a century ago in rural Bengal and in freedom fighter circles in Kolkata. Jyotirmoyee Devi, a member of the Surya Sen–Ananta Singh–Pritilata Waddedar circle of revolutionaries who played a small but risky role in the Chittagong armoury raid, had, for instance, reminisced in 2008 that, on a regular basis, she would ‘sneak out of home in the dead of night and ride her bicycle to the meetings of freedom fighters’. It was her mother-in-law who covered for her. But even though he creates Kankabaty, and Beerbala, who in the eponymous short fiction conquers hearts in Arabia as a young tomboy, and, in Gumsy Digambar, his narrative voice Yadav Daktar is quite enamoured of Kusee for finding his house in the night time in order to call him to take care of her husband, Trailokyanath goes on to reveal that the cause of the injury of said husband is a shot from the gun that he had illegally acquired to guard his young wife from rape during tourism. This fact is kept a secret from Kusee but she is never really shown as being prepared to question it.

Despite being endowed with a fertile geography, for centuries together, the Bengali community witnessed terrible hardship, perhaps more than any other group of people in India. Recurrent cyclones, famines and malaria epidemics frequently wiped out entire populations while the average life expectancy of an Indian in 1910 was a little over 22 years. It is a premise of a hypothesis that I would now like to forward about the Bengali personality. From a nagging suspicion, it first crystallised into concrete form when I read ‘Nidhiram Bengali’. The premonition arose: Do Bengalis, like Kashmiris who, too, have witnessed long decades of strife, suffer from CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder)? Exhilaratingly, Trailokyanath himself seems to have been quite free of the anxiety neurosis, personally. He was hardly a worrywart Nidhiram. One can take heart from his example.

The prospect of reading and the experience of translating Trailokyanath had been so mesmerising that when I first got the go-ahead from Prof. Bhattacharjee, I jumped into the project with a huge appetite. I ended up furnishing him with so many pieces that their combined dimensions became unmanageable. Depending on how well you enjoy this volume and the publisher’s discretion, there will, perhaps, be a second edition of the immortal stories of Trailokyanath.

1 Dasgupta, Sucheta, ‘Rereading Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’, The Times Of India, 21 April 2015, https://bit.ly/3Ebn7Sa. Accessed on 16 February 2023.

Lullu

Taken

‘Le Lullu.’ Little inkling did he have at the moment these words passed Aameer Sheikh’s lips what disagreement they were just about to unleash upon his world. The words landed on Aameer’s destiny in the way of a thunderbolt. Aameer’s homestead was in Old Delhi; Aameer was a Muslim by caste. One dark evening, Aameer’s wife had stepped unaccompanied out of doors. To pull her leg, with the sole purpose of scaring her and getting a laugh out of that outcome, Aameer piped up, proffering from indoors, ‘Le Lullu.’ Meaning, ‘Lullu! Come, catch my wife and spirit her away.’ Lullu is not the name of any fierce tiger, nor is it the name of a knife-brandishing miscreant with a missing ear. ‘Lullu’ has no meaning other than the sound it makes; you would not find it in any dictionary, purely in jest had Aameer put the sounds of its syllables together and uttered that word.

But when trouble comes, it arrives without notice. The surprising news is this that Lullu was the name of a ghost. At that moment, on that same night, Lullu was sitting on the terrace of Aameer’s house, swinging his cheerful feet from the parapet. Suddenly, someone called him by name. He started and listened: someone was asking him to take something; he looked and found a beautiful woman before him. She was whom he was being requested to take and leave. If you are set to get hold of such gorgeous goods, even the gods would go about performing the nikah in a minute, so you can leave aside thoughts of how a ghost is wont to behave. In the blink of an eye, the unfortunate woman was whisked through the air and flown away to such a place as to no one could say wherefore.

From inside the house, Aameer was of a mind that his wife would walk in anytime. He waited and then fidgeted, as time stretched forth, but she did not turn up. He began to feel afraid, called out to her; there was silence. The darkness was deep and impenetrable. Here, there, everywhere he looked, but he could not find her. Still, he hoped—that his wife was pulling a prank on him by hiding herself. He returned to the house and searched it thoroughly—no trace or whiff of her ladyship. What was a bit strange; the gates of the house were still locked. Just as the wife had locked them at dusk, so they remained. Then where did she go? An honest wife, faithful to her husband, would not step out of the gates. And even if such an ill-advised plan had come to possess her mind, she could not have passed through them without having opened them first. Greatly distressed, Aameer began analysing these odd bits of information. Tears flowed continuously from his eyes and down his bosom. Not seeing the angel of his hearth made him sensible to a huge emptiness in his hearth, heart and world—his bosom burned like sand in a desert in summer. ‘I gave away the jewel among womankind with my own hands. Harkening my words, whether a djinn or a ghost or Satan himself took her, I cannot understand. Alas, and alack,’ he cried. Finally, he wiped his eyes, opened the gates and called over his neighbours. They came in haste and searched the house once again. Then they searched all the houses in the neighbourhood. Lanes, bylanes and alleys, no spot in the locality was overlooked. But they still did not find Aameer’s wife. Whispers started going around—Aameer’s wife has certainly left with a man. How long can a young and beautiful woman like her live with an opium-eater? Aameer was an aficionado of clarified opium; that was the only weakness in his character. Lost as his wife was, being a user notwithstanding, hearing word of this scandal hurt his feelings. He thought, ‘Enough. I have no use of this society anymore. Won’t show my face to anyone, will become a faqir and travel the world. If ever I get back my dearest Layla, I will return, or else I would give up my life like Majnu once had.’

So thinking and donning the faqir’s colourful garb, Aameer left home. He did not take with him any possession save a small tin container, a bamboo pipe and an iron scalpel. Aameer was somewhat of a dandy. The tin container had glass atop its lid, and he could see his face in it as in a mirror. Sometimes, he would actually do it, especially after eating a betel leaf stuffed with condiments, just to see if it had reddened his lip. The bamboo pipe was his favourite thing. He once accompanied a British sahib as a chef to the hills; it was there that he bought this dainty object. It had several black markings etched on it. Aameer liked to think that those weren’t mere adornments, that they were letters in the Chinese language. The words said, ‘Close to the Great Wall of China, lies the City of Lingty where lives a craftsman by the name of Moping who has fashioned this pipe. In fashioning pipes, Moping has no peer, worldwide this pipe would cost 25 anna. Whoever requires a pipe may contact him for procuring one and not waste his hard-earned money by approaching poor makers. If anyone is unsatisfied with Moping’s pipe and returns it, Moping will give him back its worth immediately.’ For all you know, it had been fortuitous that Aameer had liked the pipe. Else, he would have had to get back its worth. Taking the road that Yudhistthira had travelled to enter heaven, crossing over the snow-clad mountains and the plateau of Tibet, walking through the Tartars’ cold desert, Aameer would have had to reach Lingty on China’s northern frontier. Once he reached there, he would have met Moping; only then would Moping have given him back his coin. Hence I say it was fortuitous that Aameer liked his pipe. With a great deal of care, he would oil it every day. Having soaked in so much oil, the pipe had turned a reddish hue. In the container, lay Aameer’s beloved opium, which is referred to as chandu in the common man’s language. Aameer would inhale the chandu’s smoke through the pipe. With the scalpel, he would pick the opium from the container and place it on the end of his pipe.

The Exorcist

With all these articles, Aameer left home. He passed the borders of Delhi and crossed many rivers, villages and meadows. A mendicant by day, he would spend his nights under a tree or in the moors, praying to the Almighty so harm may not befall him past twilight. Hope of reuniting with the wife had slowly begun exiting from his heart. Soon he became distraught at the thought of the two options lying before him—marry an elderly woman or be a faqir for the remainder of his life. One day, he came upon a village where a sizeable number of people were gathered in front of a large house. Enquiring, he learned that the village was a frontier settlement to the west. The house in question belonged to a jaan. The head of the house was an eminent occult reader. Future, present and past, nothing was unknown to him; no news of the world was a secret and the writing on people’s destinies he would read as easily as one could see their own reflection in water. In nautical studies, he was more proficient than no other than Hanuman. Forehead or the palm, wherever the Fates had left their scratches, whatever be their native tongue, English, French or Devbhasa, or the demons’ patois, all would be rendered fluently by Jaan, thievery or scam nothing would escape his notice. While it was true that the ignorant government had never given him title nor penny, people would cross great distances to be in his company, in exchange of five paise or five ounces of atta flour, they would gain an insight into what lay in store for them and what had taken place in the times gone by. Aameer said, ‘Let me go to Jaan’s house, inshallatalah. He will make his calculations and tell me who has taken my wife.’ Aameer took his place in front of Jaan’s house. When everyone had left, very humbly he went before the astrologer and told him his tale. The astrologer reflected for a moment. Then he took four pot shards in his hands, chanted a prayer as he blew into them severally, and then cast them about in the four directions—north, west, east and