Free The Weary Generations by Abdullah Hussein

poured on melted butter which quickly got absorbed by the fluffed rice. The four men, including the young boy, started eating around the large tray, gathering up rice in their fingers. After a couple of mouthfuls, Naim got tired of having to bend down each time he wanted to scoop up the rice. He knocked away the stool and joined the others on the ground. Hungry after a full day’s journey, he ate heartily the delicious sweet rice fragrant with flavours of white buffalo butter and reddish-yellow shakkar. He hadn’t eaten these things for years, and before he knew it the top of the arch he made in front of him in the heap of rice was approaching the centre of the tray. Naim pulled himself up. His mother took his hand and carefully cleaned the grease off his fingers with the hem of her muslin kurta. Then she poked the young boy in the ribs with the wooden handle of her fan.
    â€˜Stop eating,’ she admonished him. ‘Your bottom will start running again.’
    â€˜Who is he?’ asked Naim.
    â€˜The old woman’s nephew,’ Niaz Beg answered.
    â€˜He is your uncle’s son,’ the woman gently told Naim. ‘The low woman my brother married put a spell on him.’
    â€˜Don’t tell lies,’ Niaz Beg said to his wife. He turned to Naim. ‘Pay no attention. She was the best-looking woman for ten villages around. Why would she let herself die if she had magic in her hand? Lies. They both died in the cholera epidemic.’
    The old woman quietly gathered up part of the rice left in the tray in a little heap in front of her husband, upended the melted butter cup and,wiping the bottom of the vessel with her fingers, let the last drops of liquid fall over the rice. Niaz Beg began picking up great big dollops of rice to his mouth. Smoke from the slow-burning dung cakes was spreading in the still air, obscuring the little light that came from the single lantern. The dark circles around Niaz Beg’s eyes touched his cheekbones, and below them the flesh on his jaws had dried up like parched earth. He ate with concentration, the bones of his face, from temple to neck, rising and falling prominently like a starving bullock’s. It vaguely disturbed Naim to notice how much his own features resembled his father’s. A baby began to cry next door. The younger woman stood up to go inside the other room.
    â€˜She was weeping just for show,’ the older woman said to her husband, ‘only to appear as if she was happy at my son’s coming home.’
    â€˜Hunh?’ Niaz Beg grunted.
    â€˜She will put a spell on us during the night.’
    â€˜What spell, hunh? Hunh? You are taking out of the heels of your feet where your sense is.’
    â€˜Who is she?’ Naim asked diffidently.
    â€˜The other woman,’ answered his mother. ‘No need for you to have anything to do with her. She is a proper witch.’
    â€˜Stop barking like a mad bitch,’ Niaz Beg said, bent over the rice, as if admonishing not his wife but the food in front of him.
    By the time Niaz Beg was finished not a lot was left in the tray. He pushed it towards the two women, who began to pick at it. Niaz Beg wiped his greasy fingers on his beard and the few hairs that were still left on his head, burping loudly.
    â€˜When did you come back?’ Naim asked him.
    â€˜In the sixth month of the last year,’ Niaz Beg replied in a matter-of-fact way.
    Although it was a hot night and the air was teeming with mosquitoes grown fat on the waste matter and dung of cattle tethered in the same courtyard where they all slept, Naim slept as soundly as he had ever done. He was surprised at how quickly the night had gone when he was woken by a shrill noise close to where he slept. The two women were fighting. The sudden shock of the clamour made Naim leap out of bed, putting his foot straight into a small pat of warm dung freshly deposited by an untethered buffalo wandering about his cot. Pulling