An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma

Author:Akhil Sharma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

The alley Mr. Maurya lives in is perhaps five feet wide, with a narrow half-meter-deep ditch running along one side. Chickens were wandering about and many of the doors to the houses were open for air. I passed one door, which led into a dark windowless room where an old woman sat on a cot stringing firecrackers. Several years ago Mr. Maurya moved out of Old Delhi to one of the posh colonies, but his wife had found it too lonesome there and forced him to return.

Beside Mr. Maurya’s door was a metal plaque that had MAURYA ENTERPRISES etched on it in Hindi, Gujarati, and English. This was the only distinguishing mark on the gray concrete wall behind which he lived. I rang the doorbell. I wondered if Mr. Gupta would be angry at me for how I had acted at the party. A young girl let me in.

The wall facing the alley goes up three stories and has windows with curtains that make it look like the face of an ordinary house. Then I stepped through the wall into a wide courtyard that was open to the sun. The house itself was two stories and painted a pale yellow. It had a broad veranda with large potted money plants. Five or six men were sitting on the veranda reading newspapers and drinking tea. The girl led me to them and I sat at their edge.

Some of the men appeared to know one another and were talking. The others kept to themselves. Tea arrived for me. As I sipped it, I realized that even in the short time since I had left the office, the clear precise fear Mr. Gupta had created had become muddled with the confused unhappy terrors that had been with me for days. I was like a man in the Arctic who is dying of cold and feels any increase in wind only momentarily. I wanted the responsibility of feeling out Mr. Maurya removed from me. I thought of putting my tea on the ground, standing, casually taking off all my clothes, and then sitting down to finish the cup. I smiled at the idea that Mr. Gupta had trusted an almost insane person with an important mission to a gangster. I sang God Hanumanji’s song silently.

Occasionally a man came out and one of the men sitting with me followed him into the house. I saw one of Mr. Maurya’s sons and waved to him, and he nodded back. Everyone appeared so serious that I wanted to shout, “This is nothing to laugh at.”

About forty minutes after I arrived, the man came for me. The rooms close to the veranda were given over to business and everybody in them was typing or working through files. Mr. Maurya could not tolerate laziness. When I was last here, several years ago, it was the middle of a particularly slow afternoon. That time, as I talked to Mr. Maurya, we walked through his offices so he could oversee his employees scrubbing the house clean.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.