Free Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid

threat.
    The bounty on my head was withdrawn, and I cameout of hiding a hero to rickshaw drivers and a feared but respected former adversary to yellow-cab men. All sorts of rumors were circulating: that I had killed six men with my bare hands and eaten their livers, that I could shoot the cap off a bottle of Pakola at twenty paces, that I had once caught a bullet in my teeth and spat it away unharmed. Truth be told, I had never killed anyone, was a fair shot at best, and had teeth so weak I avoided eating sugarcane, but I encouraged the rumors, because they deterred would-be aggressors and, to be frank, flattered my ego.
    Now, I was strutting about proudly in those days, and it goes without saying I should have been more careful. Some lad got it into his head that I had killed his father, a yellow-cab driver, and he swore to himself that truce or no truce, he would get revenge. The day before it happened, my sources later told me, he was heard boasting that he would not only kill the great Murad Badshah but would humiliate me besides. And he came after me with his father’s gun.
    There are three lessons to be learned from what followed, aside from my general point about death and killing. The first is that the gun of the father is always the undoing of the son. The second is that it is never wise to call someone something which he is not. And the third is that a man’s weakness can at times be his greatest strength.
    Gun in hand, the boy arrived at the little depot where I maintain my rickshaws. I was in the small, dimly lit backworkroom, tinkering about with a broken-down engine and holding a fancy Japanese wrench given me by a friend who retired from the rickshaw business when things first began to get rough, not because he was afraid, but because his wife said he was losing his hearing driving a noisy rickshaw all day and ought to be working a register in her brother’s store instead. A few children were playing in the street outside, and our would-be murderer, seeing this audience and rising to the role he fully expected to play, cried out theatrically as he entered my depot, ‘Your time is up, fat man!’
    If he had been silent I might well have breathed my last that day.
    Instead, I surged to my feet and would have roared, ‘What [obscenities] said that?’ but as so often happens in moments of intense excitement, my stutter locked onto my voice like a fearful lover and prevented me from uttering a sound. I was growing red, my mouth working desperately, when the boy strode purposefully into the workroom with a glint in his eye and the tip of his tongue between his lips. In the dimness, he did not see me beside the door. But I saw his gun, and without thinking, I swung my wrench in a mighty blow that caught him at the back of the head, where the spine meets the skull, and with a sound like stepping on a soft-shell turtle his life was over.
    I have many regrets about that day. Perhaps I could have disarmed him. Perhaps I could have struck him with lessforce. But life seeks to preserve itself, and I acted as any man who wants to live would have acted. I derived no pleasure from it, and of all the stories you may hear of the men who have died at my hands, only this one is true, and my career as a robber would have been more illustrious were it not.
    Perhaps you will now better understand why I, an infamous criminal, was so horrified by the events of that ill-fated robbery, when my friend and colleague Darashikoh revealed his capacity for cold-blooded murder.
    It was a dark and stormy night.
    Do you smile at this introduction? Allow me to submit for your consideration the saying that tales with unoriginal beginnings are those most likely later to surprise.
    So, the night was dark and stormy.
    Lightning flickered above the city, a crescent moon sneered through a gap in the clouds. The boutique huddled against the storm, a tiny island of light on an unlit street.
    I wore red, the darkest crimson, a color that blends into