Free The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

across her shoulders and arms, she bends forward 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 were told, came from India—unknown oils from a land of mystery, of ancient civilisation. 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 wasborn my uncle returned to Benares from one of his trips. Apparently, in the matter of women as in all others, his reactions were identical with 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 learned 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 thedark 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.
    In accordance with the terms of the contract Bugam Dasi belonged henceforth to my uncle. The frightful thing was that it was not certain that the survivor actually was my uncle. The ‘trial’ had deranged his mind and he had completely lost his memory. He did not recognise the infant and it was this that made them decide he must be my uncle. May it not be that this story has some strange bearing upon my personal history and that that gooseflesh-raising peal of laughter and the horror of the ‘trial by cobra’ have left their imprint upon me and are somehow pertinent to my destiny?
    From this time on I was nothing more than an intruder, an extra mouth to feed. In the end my uncle (or my father, whichever it was), accompanied by Bugam Dasi, returned to the city of Rey on business. They brought me with them and left me with his sister, my aunt.
    My nurse told me that