The Blind Owl and Other Stories Read online

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  When i awoke in a new world everything that I found there was perfectly familiar and near to me, so much so that I felt more at home in it than in my previous surroundings and manner of life, which, so it seemed to me, had been only the reflection of my real life. It was a different world but one in such perfect harmony with me that I felt as though I had returned to my natural surroundings. I had been born again in a world which was ancient but which at the same time was closer and more natural to me than the other.

  It was still twilight. An oil lamp was burning on a shelf. There was a bed unrolled* in the corner of the room, but I was awake. My body felt burning hot. There were bloodstains on my cloak and scarf and my hands were covered with blood. But in spite of fever and giddiness I experienced a peculiar animation and restlessness which were stronger than any thought I might have had of removing the traces of blood, more powerful than the thought that the police would come and arrest me. In any case I had been expecting for some time to be arrested and had made up my mind, should they come, to gulp down a glass of the poisoned wine which I kept on the top shelf. The source of my excitement was the need to write, which I felt as a kind of obligation imposed on me. I hoped by this means to expel the demon which had long been lacerating my vitals, to vent onto paper the horrors of my mind. Finally, after some hesitation, I drew the oil lamp towards me and began as follows:

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  It was always my opinion that the best course a man could take in life was to remain silent; that one could not do better than withdraw into solitude like the bittern which spreads its wings beside some lonely lake. But now, since that which should not have happened has happened, I cannot help myself. Who knows? Perhaps in the course of the next few moments, perhaps in an hour’s time, a band of drunken policemen will come to arrest me. I have not the least desire to save my carcass, and in any case it would be quite impossible for me to deny the crime, even supposing that I could remove the bloodstains. But before I fall into their hands I shall swallow a glass from the bottle of wine, my heirloom, which I keep on the top shelf.

  I wish now to squeeze out every drop of juice from my life as from a cluster of grapes and to pour the juice – the wine, rather – drop by drop, like water of Karbala,* down the parched throat of my shadow. All that I hope to do is record on paper before I go the torments which have slowly wasted me away like gangrene or cancer here in my little room. This is the best means I have of bringing order and regularity into my thoughts. Is it my intention to draw up a last will and testament? By no means. I have no property for the State to devour, I have no faith for the Devil to take. Moreover, what is there on the face of the earth that could have the slightest value for me? What life I had I have allowed to slip away – I permitted it, I even wanted it, to go – and after I have gone what do I care what happens? It is all the same to me whether anyone reads the scraps of paper I leave behind or whether they remain unread for ever and a day. The only thing that makes me write is the need, the overmastering need, at this moment more urgent than ever it was in the past, to create a channel between my thoughts and my unsubstantial self, my shadow, that sinister shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the light of the oil lamp in the attitude of one studying attentively and devouring each word I write. This shadow surely understands better than I do. It is only to him that I can talk properly. It is he who compels me to talk. Only he is capable of knowing me. He surely understands… It is my wish, when I have poured the juice – rather, the bitter wine – of my life down the parched throat of my shadow, to say to him, “This is my life.”

  Whoever saw me yesterday saw a wasted, sickly young man. Today he would see a bent old man with white hair, burnt-out eyes and a harelip. I am afraid to look out of the window of my room or to look at myself in the mirror, for everywhere I see my own shadow multiplied indefinitely.

  However, in order to explain my life to my stooping shadow, I am obliged to tell a story. Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing!

  I shall try to squeeze out the juice from this cluster of grapes, but whether or not the result will contain the slightest particle of truth I do not yet know. I do not know where I am at this moment, whether the patch of sky above my head and these few spans of ground on which I am sitting belong to Nishapur or to Balkh* or to Benares. I feel sure of nothing in the world.

  I have seen so many contradictory things and have heard so many words of different sorts, my eyes have seen so much of the worn-out surface of various objects – the thin, tough rind behind which the spirit is hidden – that now I believe nothing. At this very moment I doubt the existence of tangible, solid things, I doubt clear, manifest truths. If I were to strike my hand against the stone mortar that stands in the corner of our courtyard and were to ask it, “Are you real and solid?” and the mortar were to reply, “Yes,” I do not know whether I should take its word or not.

  Am I a being separate and apart from the rest of creation? I do not know. But when I looked into the mirror a moment ago I did not recognize myself. No, the old ‘I’ has died and rotted away, but no barrier, no gulf, exists between it and the new one.

  I must tell my story, but I am not sure at what point to start. Life is nothing but a fiction, a mere story. I must squeeze out the juice from the cluster of grapes and pour it spoonful by spoonful down the parched throat of this aged shadow. At what point should I start? All the thoughts which are bubbling in my brain at this moment belong to this passing instant and know nothing of hours, minutes and dates. An incident of yesterday may for me be less significant, less recent, than something that happened a thousand years ago.

  Perhaps for the very reason that all the bonds which held me to the world of living people have been broken, the memories of the past take shape before my eyes. Past, future, hour, day, month, year – these things are all the same to me. The various phases of childhood and maturity are to me nothing but futile words. They mean something only to ordinary people, to the rabble – yes, that is the word I was looking for – the rabble, whose lives, like the year, have their definite periods and seasons and are cast in the temperate zone of existence. But my life has always known only one season and one state of being. It is as though it had been spent in some frigid zone and in eternal darkness while all the time within me burned a flame which consumed me as the flame consumes the candle.

  Within the four walls that form my room, this fortress which I have erected around my life and thoughts, my life has been slowly wasting away like a candle. No, I am wrong. It is like a green log which has rolled to one side of the fireplace and which has been scorched and charred by the flames from the other logs; it has neither burnt away nor remained fresh and green; it has been choked by the smoke and steam from the others.

  My room, like all rooms, is built of baked and sun-dried bricks and stands upon the ruins of thousands of ancient houses. Its walls are whitewashed and it has a frieze around it. It is exactly like a tomb. I am capable of occupying my thoughts for hours at a stretch with the slightest details of the life of the room – for example, with a little spider in a crevice of the wall. Ever since I have been confined to my bed people have paid little attention to me.

  In the wall there is a horseshoe nail which at one time supported the swinging cradle where my wife and I used to sleep and which since then may have supported the weight of other children. Just below the nail there is a patch where the plaster has swelled and fallen away, and from that patch one can detect the odours from the things and the people which have been in the room in the past. No draught or breeze has ever been able to dispel these dense, clinging, stagnant odours: the smell of sweat, the smell of bygone illnesses, the smell of people’s mouths, the smell of feet, the acrid smell of urine, the smell of rancid oil, the smell of decayed straw matting, the smell of burnt omelettes, the smell of f
ried onions, the smell of medicines, the smell of mallow, the smell of dirty napkins, the smell which you find in the rooms of boys lately arrived at puberty, the vapours which have seeped in from the street and the smells of the dead and dying. All of these odours are still alive and have kept their individuality. There are, besides, many other smells of unknown origins which have left their traces there.

  Opening off my room is a dark closet. The room itself has two windows facing out onto the world of the rabble. One of them looks onto our own courtyard, the other onto the street, forming thereby a link between me and the city of Rey, the city which they call the “Bride of the World”, with its thousandfold web of winding streets, its host of squat houses, its schools and its caravanserais. The city which is accounted the greatest city in the world is breathing and living its life there beyond my room. When I close my eyes here in my little room the vague, blurred shadows of the city (of which my mind is at all times aware, whether consciously or not) all take substantial form and rise before me in the shape of pavilions, mosques and gardens.

  These two windows are my links with the outside world, the world of the rabble. But on the wall inside my room hangs a mirror in which I look at my face, and in my circumscribed existence that mirror is a more important thing than the world of the rabble men which has nothing to do with me.

  The central feature of the city landscape as seen from my window is a wretched little butcher’s shop directly opposite our house. It gets through a total of two sheep per day. I can see the butcher every time I look out of the window. Early each morning a pair of gaunt, consumptive-looking horses are led up to the shop. They have a deep, hollow cough and their emaciated legs terminated by blunt hoofs give one the feeling that their fingers have been cut off in accordance with some barbarous law and the stumps plunged into boiling oil. Each of them has a pair of sheep carcasses slung across its back. The butcher raises his greasy hand to his henna-dyed beard and begins by appraising the carcasses with a buyer’s eye. He selects two of them and feels the weight of their tails with his hand. Finally he lugs them across and hangs them from a hook at the entrance to the shop. The horses set off, breathing hard. The butcher stands by the two bloodstained corpses with their gashed throats and their staring bloody-lidded eyes bulging from the bluish skulls. He pats them and feels the flesh with his fingers. Then he takes a long bone-handled knife and cuts up their bodies with great care, after which he smilingly dispenses the meat to his customers. How much pleasure he derives from all these operations! I am convinced that they give him the most exquisite pleasure, even delight. Every morning at this time the thick-necked yellow dog which has made our district his preserve is there outside the butcher’s shop. His head on one side, he gazes regretfully with his innocent eyes at the butcher’s hand. That dog also understands. He also knows that the butcher enjoys his work.

  A little further away under an archway a strange old man is sitting with an assortment of wares spread out in front of him on a canvas sheet. They include a sickle, two horseshoes, assorted coloured beads, a long-bladed knife, a rat trap, a rusty pair of tongs, part of a writing set, a gap-toothed comb, a spade, and a glazed jar over which he has thrown a dirty handkerchief.

  I have watched him from behind my window for days, hours and months. He always wears a dirty scarf, a Shuster cloak and an open shirt from which protrude the white hairs on his chest. He has inflamed eyelids which are apparently being eaten away by some stubborn, obtrusive disease. He wears a talisman tied to his arm and he always sits in the same posture. On Thursday evenings he reads aloud from the Koran, revealing his yellow, gappy teeth as he does so. One might suppose that he earned his living by this Koran-reading, for I have never seen anyone buy anything from him. It seems to me that this man’s face has figured in most of my nightmares. What crass, obstinate ideas have grown up, weed-like, inside that shaven greenish skull under its embroidered turban, behind that low forehead? One feels that the canvas sheet in front of the old man, with its assortment of odds and ends, has some curious affinity to the life of the old man himself. More than once I have made up my mind to go up and exchange a word with him or buy something from his collection, but I have not found the courage to do so.

  According to my nurse, the old man was a potter in his younger days. After giving up that trade he kept only this one jar for himself and now he earned his living by peddling.

  These were my links with the outside world. Of my private world all that was left to me were my nurse and my bitch of a wife. But nanny was her nurse too; she was nurse to both of us. My wife and I were not only closely related but were suckled together by Nanny. Her mother was to all intents and purposes mine too because I never saw my parents but was brought up by her mother, a tall, grey-haired woman. I loved her as much as if she had been my real mother, and that was the reason why I married her daughter.

  I have heard several different accounts of my father and mother. Only one of them, the one Nanny gave me, can, I imagine, be true. This is what Nanny told me:

  My father and my uncle were twins. They resembled each other exactly in figure, face and disposition, and even their voices were identical. So it was no easy matter to tell them apart. Moreover, there existed between them a mental bond or sympathy as a result of which, to take an example, if one of them fell ill the other would fall ill also. In the common phrase, they were like two halves of the one apple.

  In due course the both decided to go into commerce and, when they reached the age of twenty, they went off to India, where they opened up a business in Rey wares, including textiles of various kinds – shot silk, flowered stuffs, cotton piece goods, jubbahs, shawls, needles, earthenware, fuller’s earth, and pen-case covers. My father settled in Benares and used to send my uncle on business trips to the other cities of India. After some time, my father fell in love with a girl called Bugam Dasi, a dancer in a lingam temple. Besides performing ritual dances before the great lingam idol she served as a temple attendant. She was a hot-blooded, olive-skinned girl, with lemon-shaped breasts, great, slanting eyes and slender eyebrows which met in the middle. On her forehead she wore a streak of red paint.

  At this moment I can picture Bugam Dasi, my mother, wearing a gold-embroidered sari of coloured silk and around her head a fillet of brocade, her bosom bare, her heavy tresses, black as the dark night of eternity, gathered in a knot behind her head, bracelets on her wrists and ankles and a gold ring in her nostril, with great, dark, languid, slanting eyes and brilliantly white teeth, dancing with slow, measured movements to the music of the sitar, the drum, the lute, the cymbal and the horn, a soft, monotonous music played by bare-bodied men in turbans, a music of mysterious significance, concentrating in itself all the secrets of wizardry, the legends, the passion and the sorrow of the men of India; and, as she performs her rhythmic evolutions, her voluptuous gestures, the consecrated movements of the temple dance, Bugam Dasi unfolds like the petals of a flower. A tremor passes across her shoulders and arms, she bends forwards and again shrinks back. Each movement has its own precise meaning and speaks a language that is not of words. What an effect must all this have had upon my father! Above all, the voluptuous significance of the spectacle was intensified by the acrid, peppery smell of her sweat mingling with the perfume of champac and sandalwood oil, perfumes redolent of the essences of exotic trees and arousing sensations that slumbered hitherto in the depths of the consciousness. I imagine these perfumes as resembling the smell of the drug box, of the drugs which used to be kept in the nursery and which, we are told, came from India – unknown oils from a land of mystery, of ancient civilization. I feel sure that the medicines I used to take had that smell.

  All these things revived distant, dead memories in my father’s mind. He fell in love with Bugam Dasi, so deeply in love that he embraced the dancing girl’s religion, the lingam cult.

  After some time the girl became pregnant and was discharged from the service of the temple. Shortly after I was bor
n my uncle returned to Benares from one of his trips. Apparently, in the matter of women as in all others, his reactions were identical to my father’s. He fell passionately in love with my mother and in the end he satisfied his desire, which, because of his physical and mental resemblance to my father, was not difficult for him to do. As soon as she learnt the truth, my mother said that she would never again have anything to do with either of them unless they agreed to undergo “trial by cobra”. In that case she would belong to whichever of the two came through alive.

  The “trial” consisted of the following. My father and my uncle would be enclosed together in a dark room like a dungeon in which a cobra had been let loose. The first of them to be bitten by the serpent would, naturally, cry out. Immediately a snake-charmer would open the door of the room and bring the other out into safety. Bugam Dasi would belong to the survivor.

  Before the two were shut up in the dark room my father asked Bugam Dasi if she would perform the sacred temple dance before him once more. She agreed to do so and, by torchlight, to the music of the snake-charmer’s pipe, she danced, with her significant, measured, gliding movements, bending and twisting like a cobra. Then my father and uncle were shut up in the room with the serpent. Instead of a shriek of horror, what the listeners heard was a groan blended with a wild, gooseflesh-raising peal of laughter. When the door was opened my uncle walked out of the dark room. His face was ravaged and old, and his hair – the terror aroused by the sound of the cobra’s body as it slid across the floor, by its furious hissing, by its glittering eyes, by the thought of its poisonous fangs and of its loathsome body shaped like a long neck terminating in a spoon-shaped protuberance and a tiny head, the horror of all this had changed my uncle, by the time he walked out of the room, into a white-haired old man.