Khushwant Singh Best Indian Short Stories Volume 2 by Khushwant Singh

Author:Khushwant Singh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2012-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Mozelle

SAADAT HASAN MANTO

For the first time in four years, Trilochan looked at the night sky. He was terribly disturbed and had decided to come out onto the terrace of Advani Chambers to relax and think in the fresh air.

The sky was spotless, with not a cloud in sight; it hung over the sprawling city of Bombay like a huge, dark-grey canopy. For miles around, scattered lights were still burning. It seemed to Trilochan as if thousands of stars had dropped from the sky and got stuck in the dark limbs of those towering black trees of skyscrapers, their tiny glimmer showing like so many fireflies.

It was an unfamiliar experience for Trilochan – his coming out suddenly under the open sky – and it gave him a strange feeling. He felt as if he had been a prisoner in his own flat for four years, shut off from all the wonderful gifts of nature. It was now close to three, and the morning air felt keen and fresh. For four years he had felt only the heavy breeze of his electric fan; and it had turned his existence into an insufferable burden. Every morning he woke up feeling sore as if he had been soundly thrashed in the night. But, from this morning air, every fibre in his body sucked in new life, made him feel a new man. Coming up to the terrace, his mind was wracked with anxiety, but a more half hour in the fresh air had calmed him. He now felt himself capable of concentrating and thinking.

Trilochan’s friend, Kalwant Kaur, and her family were in that part of the city where Moslems were in the majority. Many a house had already been set on fire, and several persons had been killed. Trilochan would have brought them away, but the difficulty was that in the meantime a curfew had been enforced in the city, and nobody knew just how long it was going to last. Maybe forty-eight hours, maybe longer.

Kalwant’s mother was blind and her father a paralytic. There was a brother, but he was away from Bombay taking care of his construction contract at Deolali.

Trilochan’s anger was really directed at this brother, Niranjan. Now he, Trilochan, used to read the newspapers regularly; he had watched the tension rising, and had warned them – a week before anything happened in the city – about the uncontrolled frenzy of communal riots. He had said it in so many words, too.

‘Look, Niranjan, forget that contract. Let it ride for the time being. It’s going to get pretty bad here, and very soon. Not only shouldn’t you leave town now, but you should also bring all your family over to my place. I don’t have too much space, but in such troubled days, it doesn’t matter.’

But Niranjan never listened to him. After Trilochan’s long discourse he smiled under his bushy moustache and said, ‘Look, pal, you’re worried for no reason. I’ve been through lots of such riots. This isn’t Amritsar, it isn’t Lahore.

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