Free Two Short Novels by Mulk Raj Anand

mother with a flourish of his hand.
    Nur just lay bewildered on the bed, dazed by his father’s outburst, incapable of realising the full force of the Chaudhri’s anger, as if all his nervous energy were exhausted and he were completely unaffected by, indifferent to, things, except that his legs were shaking.
    ‘Why don’t you speak?’ the Chaudhri, rushing to the bed of his son, said, now tenderly.
    ‘Oh! forgive me, father, forgive me,’ Nur hissed, sinking farther and farther away from the reach of his father’s hand trembling and shaking and with the light of an abject terror in his eyes. ‘Oh, forgive me, forgive me . . . ’
    ‘Is this the fruit of all my labour for you?’ the Chaudhri said alternately glistening with rage and patting Nur’s forehead.
    For the slightest moment, everything was still. Then the old woman began to soothe her son’s form with her wrinkled fingers, saying, ‘Calm, yourself, child, calm yourself, he is ill.’
    ‘What has he done for the money I spent on his education?’ the Chaudhri shouted, his face twisting with impatience. ‘What has he done, except spoil my izzat ! Is this the reward I get for bringing him into the world, for looking after him, educating him! Why can’t God give me death and rid me of the affliction?’
    As he stood there, however, his eyes fell on his son’s frightened bent head, and he ground his teeth with a revulsion against himself, and wished he could take the boy in his arms, but he felt the slightest gesture on his part would send the boy away from him and he had been too hardened since the day when Nur was a child to bend his body and touch his son to communicate the remorse he now felt. ‘Give him some food, mother,’ he with a heavy heart and extricating himself from his mother’s grasp rushed down the stairs, saying, ‘Give him some essence of chicken . . . ’
    ‘Wait my son, wait child,’ said the old woman hobbling after him. ‘Son, you haven’t eaten anything yourself.’
    But the Chaudhri had gone stamping down the stairs and was out of reach of her entreaties and prayers.
    ‘And now, now,’ the old woman wailed. ‘He hasn’t even eaten a crust of bread, and he went to work at dawn on an empty stomach
. . . . Hai , what shall I do?’ And she waited near the door of the stairs, torn between following him and coming to Nur. Then she returned towards Nur, who was slipping back into bed, pale and hushed, and stretching her arms said: ‘Don’t take any notice of what he says, my son; he is worried on account of you and overwrought, and he loses his temper. I am sure he is sorry at heart, and he loves you. And now he will be hungry. But never mind, I shall get you your soup and take his meal to the shop for him.’
    She shambled and shuffled and hurried upstairs.
    Nur lay still, petrified, and looking on through misty eyes at the broad naked heat of the sun. His mind seemed to be closed. Only, there was a dry taste at the base of his tongue, a parched feeling in his throat, mixed with a vague sense of betrayal. His face which had changed colour so often since the visit of the Doctor was set in a livid mould as if it were plastered with a mud mask. His brain wheeled dizzily, and he moved his head this side and that, as if he wanted to stir it into thought. But his eyes just stared hard into the air and he could not notice a thing in the crowded room.
    Then, after a moment, he felt a weight rise from his belly to his chest, and stand there pressing down on his ribs. He breathed hard and turned on his side and, twisting his body, moaned as if to summon all the fragile cells of his body to come and look at the new wound that his father’s hard words had inflicted on him. But he felt an increasing weakness in his legs and thought he was fainting. His limbs seemed like loose streamers falling away from his leaden trunk. The drowsy shade of the room in which he lay seemed to exaggerate his contours, and he felt as if he were breaking.